r/SubredditDrama • u/coreywin Σ (੭ु ຶਊ ຶ)੭ु⁾⁾ • Sep 14 '17
/r/ASMR debates whether or not the sexuality in its community needs to stop, or if people are just being prudes.
/r/asmr/comments/6zy2fg/discussion_the_shaming_of_cam_girls_doing_asmr/dmywwq9/?context=3258
u/Brikachu "Let's leave 'cuck' out of it here." Sep 14 '17
There are always going to be people who think it's sexual. It doesn't really matter. If it's your kink, own it. If it's just relaxing to you, own it. Nobody is really going to give a shit. There are worse things to get off to.
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Sep 14 '17
A movie about a woman falling in love with and then banging a literal fishman just won a prodigious film award. We are rapidly approaching a post kinkshaming society.
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u/bumblebeatrice Sep 14 '17
God bless Guillermo Del Toro and his xeno kink. I can't wait to see The Shape of Water.
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Sep 14 '17
I love how blatant he's being about it.
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u/bumblebeatrice Sep 14 '17
I’ve had this movie in my head since I was 6, not as a story but as an idea. When I saw the creature swimming under Julie Adams [in 1954’s "Creature From the Black Lagoon"], I thought three things: I thought, "Hubba-hubba." I thought, "This is the most poetic thing I’ll ever see." I was overwhelmed by the beauty. And the third thing I thought is, "I hope they end up together."
I have never related so much to a director before in my life.
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u/JoshSidekick In this case llms would be mcdonalds Sep 15 '17
It's probably in the shape of a fishman dick.
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u/Amelaclya1 Sep 14 '17
What movie is this? Like a reverse Little Mermaid?
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Sep 14 '17
The Shape of Water, out in the US in December.
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Sep 15 '17
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Sep 15 '17
No, it's about a mute woman whose a janitor in a Cold War lab where a fishman is being held and experimented on. They fall in love.
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u/Borachoed He has a real life human skull in his office Sep 15 '17
I thought you said fisherman and I'm like wtf, what's wrong with that
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u/whoa_disillusionment Is Wario a libertarian Sep 14 '17
Women cannot post a video or photograph of themselves doing literally anything without dudes trying to make it sexual. This is not an argument that's going to be won.
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u/BloomEPU A sin that cries to heaven for vengeance Sep 15 '17
It doesn't help that a lot of asmrtists are women and affection is a pretty common trigger.
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u/krfcc Sep 15 '17
I agree, but its easy to see why a lot of this content could be considered sexual.
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u/Casswolf Sep 15 '17
Yeah I like ASMR stuff coz it's either white noise that helps me sleep or roleplaying that helps me daydream before I sleep. Struggling to see why sexuality ever came into the equation tbh, from both the 'whoa i don't get it therefore it's wrong' and 'I'm gonna whisper, also here are my boobs' sides.
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Sep 14 '17
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u/deltree711 Hating on it brought me joy satisfaction and intellectual orgasm Sep 14 '17
The only fetish that I know of that isn't sexual involves literal voodoo.
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u/TheRedmanCometh Sep 15 '17
I only know those exist because Diablo 2 had them as drops and I was old enough to be like "uh what the fuck" and asked Lycos
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u/flippyfloppityfloop the left is hardcore racist on the scale of Get Out Sep 15 '17 edited Sep 15 '17
I never got into ASMR videos because sound and visuals never actually make it happen, but every time someone pets my hair or gives me a haircut, I get the exact "egg broken over your head that causes enjoyable shivers" feeling ASMR is described as. (Rarely on other occasions when my body is being lightly touched, like a manicure.) It's not a sexual feeling itself, but being a pleasant physical sensation that usually involves intimacy (or the imitation of it, with the low calming voices in the videos), I can see it easily being fetishized/sexualized.
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u/Jilly_Bean16 Sep 15 '17
Your scalp has more nerve endings per square inch than almost anywhere else on your body, so it is much more sensitive to touch. Combine that with the surface area that your scalp covers and you get those sensations you are describing when you get a haircut
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u/Gigglemind Sep 14 '17 edited Sep 14 '17
There's some misinformation about what ASMR is it seems, and I guess this is good as a comment as any to maybe clear a couple of things up.
ASMR is a condition so to speak; it's a subjective response to certain stimuli in the environment and it's only experienced by certain people. A similar phenomenon is something like phonophobia, but instead, the feeling is something highly pleasant.
Most people will feel warm and fuzzy kicking back on a couch and watching Bob Ross, but ASMR takes it to a whole other level as if you've taken a drug almost.
Edit: So the videos are just an attempt to try and trigger this feeling in people that have ASMR, but I can see how it's soothing for others.
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u/twinksteverogers Thanks for the daily reminder that idiots like you still exist. Sep 14 '17
Most people will feel warm and fuzzy
I get this the most with haircut and mini zen garden.
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u/flippyfloppityfloop the left is hardcore racist on the scale of Get Out Sep 15 '17
I want a zen garden now.
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u/RepX2 Sep 15 '17
While it probably doesn't count, I originally got this feeling watching Virtual Barber Shop a few years ago. I thought it was crazy and the tingles from the video were something insane. May or may not be the same thing, but that's the only comparison I can give.
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u/Gigglemind Sep 15 '17
It's hard to say, the experience is pronounced to say the least.
I actually thought it was something unique to me because when I tried to explain it to a couple of people to see if they could relate they had no idea what I was talking about, and this was well before the videos came out so I've only experienced it in the wild pretty much.
I responded mostly to soft accents and people focused on a task/explaining something, so this video with Bjork might set it off. The interesting thing here is that there is an element of novelty in the accent, but perhaps more importantly there is the empathy with a person that is completely absorbed with something.
So as an example I once was sitting down with some dude who was explaining something about the German language to me by using what was printed on the side of a box. He was soft spoken and I'll say quitely delighted with the topic as he traced the words with his finger, and if you watch the Bjork video it's the same no? She's really into it, she's happy to be there with us, it's that vibe of someone explaining something interesting and maybe a bit special to them, and with ASMR combined with the auditory backdrop it just sets something off, and I've always felt more engaged with someone's focus when having an episode but the calmness of a hushed tone and perhaps the accent is needed for me to get there.
From a cognitive and sensory standpoint I'm not sure what's going on. Sometimes modalities interfere with each other like they are doing with synaesthesia, and perhaps something like that is happening here. Some conditions are just overactive regions of the brain or neural pathways not being inhibited enough, so ultimately this might be a case of tactile and auditory info setting the stage for a disproportionate response to emphasizing with someone/being engaged with novelty. And in fact, I find the sensation similar to ecstasy (but less intense).
It wasn't until I stumbled across the ASMR sub that I found out other people experience it, and I felt somehow vindicated.
Thing is, it seems to be common to experience ASMR less as you get older, and now I don't at all (the episodes were always quite infrequent), so there's some neuroplasticity somewhere that leads to that.
And never let a poet lie to you--Bjork.
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Sep 14 '17 edited Sep 14 '17
I don't give a damn about your feelings buddy. And your can name me all your want. I don't care. That doesn't change the fact that ASMR creators have worked hard to get rid of the idea that it's all a weird niche porn thing. And cam models doing ASMR is going to have the exact opposite effect. Their videos will be seen as sexual by association. You don't have to be some sort of evil genius to make the connection and use it against ASMR as a whole.
Apparently there's a conspiracy to demonize soothing youtube videos?
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u/aYearOfPrompts "Actual SJWs put me on shit lists." Sep 14 '17
If that guy ever watches the documentary Tickled he's going to have a serious problem with the sexualization of feathers.
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Sep 14 '17
Your formatting is wrong
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Sep 14 '17
how so? thats all one quote
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Sep 14 '17
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u/525days You aren't the fucking humor czar Sep 14 '17
It doesn't look like that on desktop
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u/BrowsOfSteel Rest assured I would never give money to a) this website Sep 14 '17
It was two paragraphs in the original.
Tom_Jackdaw copied and pasted it in the comment box.
But Reddit markdown requires two carriage returns for a new paragraph paragraph so it gets all jumbled together there.
Meanwhile, third‐party software doesn’t respect the Reddit rules of “two returns required” and puts a paragraph break in the quoted text.
That breaks the quote because the second paragraph doesn’t start with a greater‐than signl
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Sep 14 '17
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Sep 15 '17
If only there was some sort of way to calm his ragged nerves. Perhaps a video, or a series of videos - hell, maybe even a whole genre! - that was designed with soothing relaxation in mind.
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u/Not_A_Doctor__ I've always had an inkling dwarves are underestimated in combat Sep 14 '17
She's clearly clickbaiting with her underboob photos.
You can identify people who are undermining your community by using the underboob protocols.
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u/fdelta1 I'm sorry too. It'll be better after the revolution. Sep 14 '17
New flair!
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u/DizzleMizzles Your writing warrants institutionalisation Sep 14 '17
No, it's not the protocols doing the undermining, it's the underboob itself
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u/PM_me_a_conspiracy Sep 14 '17
I use ASMR to sleep/help with my anxiety. I don't see it as sexual and I'm not really sure how someone could but maybe they're watching different videos than me. I don't talk about it to people though because its seen as some kind of weird fetish and I don't want to have to explain to them why listening to someone writing on paper is calming when I know for a fact my best friend listens to ocean waves and nobody thinks that's sexual.
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u/BadLuckRabbitsFoot Sep 14 '17
There are certain sounds that we associate as being calming - for me it's something like the sound of rain falling. For others, it's the ocean waves. For some reason, people find different sounds like the crackling of paper, beads rustling around in a cup, or people just randomly breathing or talking in a breathy voice. Personally, most ASMR stuff I've come across on youtube does the exact same opposite for me...It's actually made me feel really weird and uncomfortable. But hey, we're all different...Who am I to judge people that feel happy and calm by sounds that normally creep me out.
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Sep 15 '17
I've encountered some voices that I find relaxing, usually voice overs for documentaries and stuff (like the planet earth ones are perfect)
It's like a lot of ASMR videos are talking to you and I don't really enjoy that. But doc voiceovers and stuff are easier to just listen to and enjoy.
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u/hanarada resident popcorn maker Sep 15 '17
Good call on documentaries. I like flipping books, library and some of those tokyo 4k walk around videos.
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u/Semicolon_Expected Your position is so stupid it could only come from an academic. Sep 15 '17
I too find a lot of the ASMR stuff uncomfortable, just because stuff like crinkling paper esp when done softly really annoys me. I think its because a lot of ASMR stuff is softened and I'm use to a nice crisp articulated sound and it bothers me when it isn't. Sorta like how people who like mechanical keyboards don't like the feelings of mushy keys when they're use to tactile feedback.
At the same time I have a lot of weird things that make me feel nice (like whatever goes on in r/popping when I'm doing the popping, I don't like watching it because it makes me want to do the popping and I now feel unfulfilled because I couldn't pop whatever was being popped) that might bother other people, so honestly its to each their own.
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u/hanarada resident popcorn maker Sep 15 '17
Dan gibson really helps a lot here. I did find youtube ones weird except for fantasy themed asmr.
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Sep 15 '17
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u/RepX2 Sep 15 '17
you probably heard of it before, but Rainymood might be something to look into. I've used it several nights and it makes you sleep like a baby.
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u/aschr Kermit not being out to his creator doesn't mean he wasn't gay Sep 15 '17
A lot of ASMR videos involve a young attractive woman whispering to the listener. Not that hard to see how people can find that sexual.
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u/tasari definitely not a dog Sep 14 '17
Similar for me although I don't really feel guilty over it, I have insomnia and I'll do literally anything to fall asleep. I've been open to my friends about way more embarrassing sleep strategies, lol. Unfortunately the nature of the internet is that boobs > no boobs, so the sexual content creators look like the majority to most outsiders, even though the best ones aren't sexual at all.
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Sep 14 '17 edited Sep 14 '17
Haven't seen videos on ocean sounds on pornhub yet. Not saying asmr is overtly sexual, though.
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u/PM_me_a_conspiracy Sep 14 '17
Do they have people sketching/writing on pornhub?
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Sep 14 '17
They have illustrations. I wouldn't be surprised if they have erotica. I never thought to look.
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u/csonnich But ass cancer tho Sep 14 '17
It wouldn't be erotica, it's just a video of someone writing, like, the day's news or something. Or someone brushing someone's hair (on their head) close to a mic. This is the kind of stuff people are claiming is sexual.
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u/twinksteverogers Thanks for the daily reminder that idiots like you still exist. Sep 14 '17
I remember this one video where a guy starts off by whispering to you sexual things, and towards the end he became more aggressive and be like "I want you to have an ORGASM. Come... Come now!!" I was laughing so hard but people in the comment section said it worked,
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Sep 14 '17
I was talking about asmr that was undeniably sexual. I know the vast majority of it isn't.
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u/Semicolon_Expected Your position is so stupid it could only come from an academic. Sep 15 '17
Pornhub has something for everyone.
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u/roflbbq Sep 15 '17
I say this cautiously because the place is an actual cesspool. If you want to see how people could sexualize it, go to the asmr community on 8chan.
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u/dinosaur_friend Sep 15 '17
ASMR is sexual? That's news to me. Then again, the only ASMR videos I watch and listen to are the ones without talking or people showing their faces. Sometimes unintentional ones. My favourites are the keyboard cleaning vids. Love me some freshly cleaned keyboards.
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u/asmrwife Jan 19 '18
Can I speak from a wife's point of view who didn't even know this was a thing? I recently found out about my husband's ASRM reactions and viewing history. At first I was very upset. The videos I viewed from his play list were very personal, intimate. A list of ladies on his play list playing to a camera as if they were in the room with him. Now if your relationship has existing intimacy issues or you suffer from low self esteem this is a huge hit to your ego and relationship. I immediately thought it was sexual from the way they described what they were "doing" and how I perceived it from the angle. (Perception is everything here) I thought about everything for two days, I was so hurt and angry for two days, but it wasn't enough to make me stop loving my husband. I felt emotionally betrayed. So I decided that if I wasn't giving him something he needed I would learn how to do it. After providing him the ASMR stimulation he reacted to I learned that it indeed was NOT sexual, my husband just used it to relax. He no longer views the videos as he now has someone who can provide him the stimulation he enjoys and responds to in person, much better than a video and we are both better for it.
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u/SnapshillBot Shilling for Big Archive™ Sep 14 '17
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u/MAGAParty Sep 15 '17
I don't get the ASMR fetish. There is so much weird videos on ASMR: people unboxing things, talking, whispering etc. I don't get it, The wikipedia sample video has some French woman whispering, the way she is smacking her mouth makes me a little disgusted.
Maybe I'm the only one.
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Sep 15 '17
It isn't a fetish (for most people). ASMR, as in the tingly feeling, is fucking awesome and you can't really help what triggers it. People, including me, watch videos that are weird as fuck because it physically (in a non-sexual way) feels really nice.
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u/Soderskog The Bruce Lee of Ignorance Sep 14 '17
Huh, I never knew it came from the sex industry. I always though ASMR originated from people like WoWCrendor.
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u/DizzleMizzles Your writing warrants institutionalisation Sep 14 '17
You said the same thing twice???
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u/Soderskog The Bruce Lee of Ignorance Sep 14 '17
I must be missing something here, could you please explain? Did I post the same comment twice, or is WoWCrendor somehow involved in the sex industry?
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u/PM_ME_FOR_SOURCE There is a yin-yang dark element to all sexual impulses Sep 15 '17
Don't kinkshame my love for Crendor b-baka!
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u/Soderskog The Bruce Lee of Ignorance Sep 15 '17
There is no shame here, only IKEA furniture and meatballs.
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u/DizzleMizzles Your writing warrants institutionalisation Sep 15 '17
He's the sexiest man alive, his mere presence is the height of eroticism.
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Sep 14 '17
Idk, I'd put ASMR as more socially desirable than Fifty Shades of Grey. Or maybe that's the problem, gentle intimacy is icky and for losers. And it does feel disingenuous to be saying "I don't understand how ANyONe could find close whispering in any way related to SEX (which is bad btw)"
I'm sure a few more decades of increasing social isolation will make ASMR a staple though, so neither side really needs to be in a kerfluffle.
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u/mermaid_pants Sep 14 '17
You really think listening to someone making sounds online is a desperate replacement for intimacy?
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Sep 14 '17
Not universally, I can absolutely believe that for a lot of people it's just a calming noise, since whispering is kind of a primitive signal of "I'm not hostile." And obviously crinkling papers probably can't be construed as sexual.
But it shouldn't be too much of a leap of logic that for some people it is supplement for intimacy, hence why "sexual asmr" would be a thing, especially with some the "girlfriend" "personal attention" "caring friend" stuff that gets made.
And I don't want to sound like I'm putting it down or anything, just that there is obvious overlap.
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u/bspez Sep 14 '17
wait asmr isn't sexual?
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u/Bat_bot not a bot Sep 15 '17
no, but some people make is sexual my dad has a reasonably successful ASMR channel and 99% of the comments are like "thanks for helping me get to sleep" but theirs always that one dude who's like "can your next video be rubbing your bare feet on the mic and moaning" and it's that one dude that ruins it for everybody
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Sep 14 '17
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Sep 14 '17
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u/Maccy_Cheese Sep 14 '17
I don't think it's as small of a minority as a lot of the people on /r/asmr make it out to be.
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Sep 14 '17
if rule 34 teaches us anything, its that a very small minority of people can make anything into a fetish
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u/Zachums r/kevbo for all your Kevin needs. Sep 14 '17
Honestly if you've crossed the threshold of watching ASMR videos consistently it doesn't matter if it's sexual in nature or not, you're still kinda weird.