painfully guilty feelings about fetishes and fantasies

[River]

i tried to make this fit the guidelines but cw a lot of negativity and anxiety

i have several very socially unacceptable fetishes (there is usually no arousal without thinking about one of them) and i hate myself for it. it's nothing i would ever act on, but i just feel dirty all the time and i think that if i told anyone about it they would hate me. i don't want to make this too dark for this site but yeah. i used to actually look at drawn porn of it (not illegal but very bad probably), now i try to keep it fully in my brain but i feel awful about it still.

i feel like i could have healthier fantasies, there are people that i find extremely attractive but my brain gets too realistic and i think about how they would hate me and then i get sad. is it okay to fantasize about people without their consent? is it okay to fantasize about fictional people? because the reality of fictional people is only what you think of them and i don't want them to actually be sexual. can you tell that i'm autistic lol

[River]

additionally i often think about how unattractive i must look while masturbating, which doesn't help

[Sam W]

Hi River,

I'm sorry that all of this is causing you so much distress. To answer your question about fantasy, the short answer is that you get to fantasize about anything you want. The only time our fantasies can be harmful to others is if they change how we interact with them. For instance, if someone were fantasizing about a certain friend over and over again and that lead them to treat that friend like they were only there for that persons sexual pleasure, that wouldn't be okay. But just fantasizing about people, real or fictional, isn't harmful (I really like how this article discusses all that: https://www.scarleteen.com/article/advi ... t_my_crush). Does that make sense?

Something else I want to touch on is the fact that there seems to be a lot of negative self image tied up in your exploration of your sexuality. The assumption that the people you're fantasizing about would hate you, for example, or getting caught up in how ugly you must look while masturbating (there isn't really an ugly or a not ugly way to masturbate, there's just the way(s) that feel good to you). Do you have a sense of where those feelings come from? And does that same pattern of feeling bad about yourself turn up in other places in your life?