/nsfw/ - xxx

This sounds awfully similar to those people who say they "just appreciate the furry aesthetic" and "it's not about sex".
>Everyone else is a "diagnosably mentally ill pervert", except me

It's not all bad though: I don't think a weird obsession or attraction is a mental illness unless it's actively harming your life. Thinking otherwise is tradfem sex negative backwardsness that will just cause self loathing. Don't punish yourself for liking weird art.

How do you define aesthetic?

>>1714
I guess I'm using that word to cover a little too much ground. One sense is for a fascination that can connect with sexuality, but does not require it, and which is almost as present when the sexual urge is absent. IIRC there was a male comedian who once said he thought he could define pornography as "anything you lose interest in when you're finished masturbating." A lot of not-male smut doesn't work like that, but if you think you can discuss those works with men you find that there's just nothing going on inside their heads, because their interest is purely as an access way to arousal and release. It's not just that they're lame smut writers, they are also lame smut readers. Maybe this is just a sexual function thing related to men becoming touch-avoidant at some point during or after sex, but there might be some social conditioning there, I read a long article once about male sexual complexes that came to the conclusion that hetero porn teaches hetero men that it's not okay to be flaccid and naked at the same time.

The second is a sense of a divide between, for lack of better terms, 2d and 3d. There are lesbians with an interest in yaoi, but I don't think I've heard about any homosexual men with any parallel interest in yuri. I only realized I'd been using the words that way when I read your question and tried to answer it, so the words don't fit properly. John Stuart Mill defined the term "self-regarding action" to refer to any action or behavior that does not affect others, and only affects the agent; the agent does not act upon anyone, and so the self-regarding action is immune to any question of morality. That seems like a slightly better fit. It seems like there's a difference between the self-regarding and the outwardly manifested sexual behaviors. A woman's ravishment fantasies and a male's rape fantasies seem completely different, even if the male is imagining himself as victim rather than perpetrator, and it doesn't just seem like a difference in genitals. I don't think men have the right kind of compartmentalization. There does seem to be a relationship between this and the fascination mentioned earlier; fantasies are often baroque in detail, so long as there is only a distant relationship with reality.

>>1715
>anything you lose interest in when you're finished masturbating
This still sounds like furry fandom stuff… "It's not sexual because it's a community" "I'm really here to support the artists" "Look we have SFW sections at our conventions!" "Fursuits are just the same as any other cosplay hobby"

My belief is that having a weird paraphilic obsession after you're done in bed is…
1. Weirder, not superior
2. Not compartmentalized at all

>>1716
>This still sounds like furry fandom stuff…
You're right, it does. I guess I kind of wonder if the furries have a point in some cases? I was on /tg/ long enough to have seen 4chan fur haters make excuses for how all sorts of things "aren't furry," like the Albedo RPG.

>1. Weirder, not superior.
Probably true. Sorry if I come off as snotty, there are extremely skewed male:female demographics in the interest and it starts feeling like there's a need to separate yourself from the men.
>2. Not compartmentalized at all
I think there are kinds of compartmentalization. Jitensha (the woman who ran a couple of real life conventions for size material) got made fun of a lot on 4chan for talking about "size dysphoria." It's very pervasive for her, but not consuming. She has normal relations with her husband, and I've seen men on 4chan admit to being unable to find their own wives attractive outside of the fantasy. Some of those men have to be the same as the ones who made fun of her.

>>1717
>She has normal relations with her husband
This line is confusing to me, because in your first post you said
>This would also explain why the men and women in those circles seem just fundamentally incompatible
Or maybe what you're saying is "don't base your relationship on a fetish, base it on strong, fundamental values you both share, and hopefully your partner will love you enough to embrace your quirks"? Because that's a message I can support and it's not exactly a revelation.

Just look at your Jitensha. I looked up that name and she's pretty public about her feelings. She describes her fetish as "debilitating" but that she found a supportive boyfriend who loves her anyway.

>>1700
Macrophilia isn’t exclusive to big women/small-men dynamic. There’s also the obvious big-men/small-women stuff; that content is quite common on tumblr/twit. From my past years on tumblr I remember that the M/f stuff would often be sfw while the F/m stuff would devolve to feet/vore stuff (even if they were made by “female content creators” though I suspect 90% of those were trans). I’m not into macro stuff; i’m only basing my limited knowledge from a few crossover stuff in some fandoms I was in.

>>1730
That's all true from my POV too. But to a certain extent there were and are social, rather than personal, factors involved. This post by Jitensha explains a bit:
https://desuarchive.org/d/thread/6788477/#6830220
>It's something I kept private mostly because the community gave me hell when I posted this stuff in the past. And while I was pretty open with the humiliating stuff I like with my husband, death isn't something we talked about often because it made him feel sad. I feel like the community is slowly opening up, especially in the M/f community, being more open minded like the GTS community - as if it's that weird to expect that the SWs wouldn't want the same type of treatment as the SMs lol?
Maybe there are some things that males don't really worry about, like non-nude sensual imagery, that women worry about a lot. Even the most oblivious scrot understands that naked=nsfw, but I don't think they're taught much if anything about dressing to look sexy as something opposed to dressing to look sharp or competent, nor will they be bombarded with signals to that effect by society, nor subject to judgment based on signalling their own sexuality. They might, on some vague, primitive level, understand that taking their shirts off signals sexual intent, but even that's questionable. Action hero shirts get torn up to signal danger and power, not sexual access. It seems like men see acceptable sensuality as an absolute, rather than a male, feet are more or less mentally stamped as "safe for work" even if they're clearly being used for sexual gratification of the viewer/reader. But women always have to worry about clothed sensuality, and the sexual signals, interests, and intentions of others are matters of personal and social safety and comfort for women. These things might have some side effects, when comparing a female and a counterpart male community. Even if a lot of people internally experience the same degree of eroticism and morbidity as their male counterparts, it would be difficult to communicate that, as one would take a disproportionate social risk.

Social risk is very much a part of the macrophile mental landscape, even if it often doesn't seem like that when judging from anonymous online behavior.
https://www.deviantart.com/molotav/art/Philiac-Page-3-317889564
^ Not porn (on that specific page at least), just an autobiographical snippet from a male macrophile. I've never seen a macrophile who didn't immediately relate to the last panel of that page.

Let's say that women like Jitensha really can only expect to catch hell even from a community that is supposedly made up of similar people with similar interests. When something is completely individual and personal like that, it becomes incredibly isolating. Detached and silenced even in a crowd of similar people. One is left with a few mental coping mechanisms. Attempt to become acceptable to others, attempt to find others who accept you as-is, or accept separation from all others. I assume that options 1 and 3 are the reasons Jitensha has scheduled psychiatrists in an official capacity at every SizeCon.

So, maybe it really is all just sexual after all, just a less healthy, repressive sexuality that has to convince itself that it is more than "just" sexual, in order for the person to feel self-acceptance.

But that's all just me playing armchair psychiatrist with my own post, and a couple of convenient snippets of community drama. There are actual psychiatrists who've talked about these things before.
https://www.salon.com/1999/05/22/macrophilia/
>"They're playing out some old, unresolved psychological issue," says Dr. Helen Friedman, a clinical psychologist in St. Louis. "Maybe as a child they felt overwhelmed by a dominant mother, or a sadistic mother. Maybe they were abused. This [macrophilia] is not so much a fetish as a disassociation from reality. It's part of an internal world." The macro's submersion in fantasy, she says, serves as a substitute for a more normalized approach to sex. "Healthy sexuality is about personal intimacy," Friedman says. "It's about feeling good about yourself in a way that expresses caring, and feeling a connection to another person."
So, not a fetish as the psychiatrists use the term, but actually, probably something a lot worse. Something that prohibits intimacy, positivity, caring, and connection to another person.