Consent (The Ticket)
This piece is about eating disorders and body image—the corners of the internet that romanticize restriction, the way thinness gets sexualized, and how “compliments” can land on top of something that’s already hurting.
If restriction, recovery, scale-brain, or the feeling of being valued for disappearing is tender for you right now, read this only if it feels steadying, not punishing.
If it starts to feel activating or too close to your own patterns, it’s okay to skim it, save it, or walk away halfway through if your body starts tightening up more than it opens.
— Zan
Scene (The Ride)
I’m lustful for a dangerous body type.
One that used to be called “hot” before we started admitting what it could cost people.
That’s the problem.
Not you specifically—
but that slender, small-frame, eighteen-plus body that looks soft and light at the same time.
Not bones and hospital gowns.
Just… narrow. Delicate without looking unwell. Compact enough that my brain files you under want before I even learn your name.
That’s one of the shapes my teenage idea of “hot” never shook loose, no matter how many other kinds of bodies I’ve loved since.
I’ve also cared about people, slept with people, and built real dynamics with bodies that don’t match that outline at all—different builds, different genders, different abilities, different textures and histories than anything the internet could neatly label.
My wiring has patterns, not a single approved mold.
Now that we’re on the same page—this outline isn’t a gold standard everyone else is failing. I’ve wanted, loved, and built real dynamics with softer bodies, thicker bodies, “average” bodies, trans bodies, disabled bodies. The spark just lands on different parts of them. One shape hitting my autopilot first doesn’t rank anybody else below it.
Slender is a spark for me, not a requirement—and never a request.
I’m not proud of that. I’m not ashamed, either. It’s just the truth of what excites the lizard part of my brain.
This wiring is indiscriminate—which is why I’m explicit: adults only.
Meanwhile, my own body doesn’t match the standard my kink-brain still holds up as “ideal.” I’ve been carrying certain flaws most of my life — some I had zero say in, and some that settled in during years when depression and other things quietly sandbagged my ability to take care of myself the way I wish I had.
They’re not cute, quirky insecurities. They’re the kind of things you learn to work around in mirrors and camera angles; the kind of realities that aren’t a quick “glow-up” away, but reconstruction-level fixes most people never see the internal price tag on.
Some days, it’s easier to show up as a voice, a presence, a carefully chosen photo, than it is to hand the internet a 360° scan and trust strangers who only see the surface. The irony is, it’s never actually been a problem for anyone close to me — no dynamic, relationship, or sex life of mine has fallen apart over it.
That part is mostly my own brain, not their verdict.
Most of the time, the harshest critic in the room isn’t the person seeing you — it’s the one living behind your eyes.
So when I say, “This is my wiring,” I’m not saying it from the safety of a flawless body. I know what it feels like to walk around convinced you’re already “less than” before anyone even looks at you.
I know the feeling of matters over mind all too well — when the body is the headline no matter what your head knows is true.
I also know there’s a hypocrisy baked into wanting near-perfection from the people I hyperfixate on, while making peace with a body that doesn’t come anywhere near that standard. That’s on me to keep unpacking — not on others to starve themselves into matching whatever my teenage idea of “ideal” still clings to.
There’s an entire religion built around one specific version of ‘hot’.
We don’t call it that.
We call it:
- goals
- “being disciplined”
- “I’m just trying to be healthy”
There are corners of the internet where restriction gets treated like holiness—
where “discipline” is just a prettier word for disappearing.
I call it the Cult of Body.
Shrine and morgue at the same time.
Call it an eating disorder, call it addiction, call it whatever your therapist would write down — it’s not an aesthetic, it’s something that chews through real people.
Girls and femmes (and some boys and non-binary people who never say it out loud) trading rituals, trading numbers, trading pictures that look like beauty to some people and hospital charts to others.
And just to be explicit: I’m keeping the sexual talk here 18+, but this thing itself doesn’t have an age limit. It’ll sink its teeth into teenagers, thirty-somethings, parents, grandparents — anyone the culture has taught to hate their own reflection.
For a lot of people, those spaces don’t feel like a horror movie. They feel like the only place anyone “gets it.” You’re surrounded by people who speak your numbers, your rituals, your fears. It can feel like family — right up until you try to leave, or even think about changing, and realize staying doesn’t just cost you comfort—it costs you years.
If you’re in it, I’m not here to shame you—I’m here to name the trap with the lights on.
It’s the only self-destruction where people still feel weird calling it self-harm, because:
“Isn’t it just… dieting?”
No.
Sometimes it’s wanting your hips gone more than you want your next birthday.
Sometimes it’s wanting to take up less space so badly you start erasing yourself in pieces.
Sometimes it’s wanting to be wanted so intensely you’re willing to disappear to get there.
And this is the part that might make people nervous:
Slender body types, in a romantic, dynamic, or sexual setting, turn me on.
Those figures can hit my second brain like a dopamine rush.
I could lie and pretend I only like “strong, healthy, thick, realistic” because that plays better in comment sections.
But that wouldn’t be honest to who I am or how attraction actually lands in me.
None of this is a recruitment poster for starvation chic. The culture already does enough to sell you on disappearing. I’m not asking for that, and I don’t need it to want you. The hyper-thin, half-dead look doesn’t flip some secret “more attractive” switch in me; that’s where the alarm bells start, not the fantasy.
So here’s the split:
My arousal map is my problem.
Your survival is not negotiable.
If the way you look puts a charge through me?
That’s on me.
That does not make it worth you wrecking your organs, your hormones, your teeth, your heart, your future, to stay there.
My kink is not a treatment plan.
My attraction is not an instruction manual.
The part of me that lights up at that outline doesn’t get a vote on whether you live.
A lot of people have a phase with their body image.
A period where:
- hunger feels like virtue
- space feels like a moral achievement
- sharpness feels like proof you did something right
Later — if you’re lucky — you realize:
You can’t live in that phase forever.
Work, grief, bills, illness, age, genetics — all of it comes for the illusion that you can freeze your body at nineteen because a stranger on the internet once said, “god, you’re so tiny.”
You start to understand that the body you live in at forty is going to need different things than the one you live in at twenty, whether you like it or not.
But some of you never get that clean break.
Some of you are still stuck in the phase everyone else treated like a moment and then quietly grew out of.
And while the world throws sympathy and resources at certain self-destructions —
addiction, reckless sex, obvious violence —
this one still gets framed as:
“This dummy just won’t eat, lol.”
It’s not lol.
It’s often lethal.
And even when it doesn’t kill you, it can steal entire decades of your life. Not just weight — time. Memories. Joy. Sex. Friendships. Whole relationships you can’t really be present for because half your brain is counting.
And it doesn’t only live in the thinnest body in the room. There are people in larger bodies who get praised for “willpower” while they’re quietly destroying themselves. People who never get taken seriously by doctors because they don’t “look sick enough” to match the stereotype. The Cult of Body will punish you for being big, then punish you again for doing anything desperate to get small. There’s no winning on its terms.
This isn’t “you’re broken for wanting to be small.”
This is “look what a sick culture will reward you for until it kills you.”
A lot of people on the outside still think this is a “mirror problem.” It almost never is. It’s a nervous system problem that picked food and numbers as its language. Control, trauma, genetics, family scripts, straight-up brain chemistry — all of that sits under the scale. The body is just where it shows. If anyone’s ever told you you’re “shallow” or “vain” for ending up here, they either don’t understand it or they’re too scared to look at how deep it goes.
And then on top of that, we build a whole second religion around bodies in general:
- “she really let herself go”
- “you look so good, did you lose weight?”
- “you’d be so hot if you just…”
Bodies get treated like resumes.
Thinner gets framed as “disciplined,” thicker gets framed as “lazy,” and somehow everybody is supposed to land in the same narrow band of “fuckable but not too much.”
You can be doing boring, responsible, adult stuff:
- going to work
- paying bills
- handling family shit
and still feel like none of it counts if the first thing people see is a body that doesn’t match whatever the current algorithm is pushing.
That’s part of what the Cult of Body feeds on:
not just the disorder-glorifying corners,
but the constant low-level pressure to be visually “worth” wanting.
Here’s the line I refuse to cross:
I will never ask you to hurt yourself so I can stay turned on.
I will not praise you for skipping meals.
I will not quietly enjoy you fading and pretend I don’t see it because the outline still fits my fantasy.
If anything, when someone I’m with is skimming that edge, my responsibility is to pull them back toward eating, sleeping, and actually staying alive — not to keep getting off while they vanish in front of me.
I would rather lose access to a look that fits my kink than stand there and watch you bleed years off your life to maintain it.
If my arousal and your survival ever get into a fight, I know which one I’m throwing my weight behind.
And it’s not my cock.
If staying with me ever depends on you staying unwell, I’m the problem, not you.
If you’re living in that headspace where food is math, “fine” means dizzy-but-functional, and being the smallest still feels like a win — I get the pull.
The rest of me refuses to treat your pulse like a prop.
You’re not obligated to keep shrinking because some part of you, or some stranger, decided “smallest” meant “best” and forgot you’re a person, not a proof of concept.
You don’t owe your pulse to anyone — not to strangers, not to lovers, and not to the part of you that only feels worthy when you’re disappearing.
There is more to you than whether you match the default template in somebody else’s “private folder.”
If your first reaction to all this is, “Cool, so I’m not his body type,” I want you to hear this part twice: my teenage wiring is not a verdict on your desirability. Your worth and desirability are not capped by my default outline.
If you want to change your body because you feel better with more muscle, less pain, easier movement, cool.
If you want to eat a certain way because your brain and bloodwork are calmer when you do, cool.
If you’re killing yourself — slowly, politely, with calorie math and “just one more pound” — to fit into a shape that gets you attention?
That’s not empowerment.
That’s worshipping at an altar that will never love you back.
It will use you.
It will praise you.
And if you step even one inch outside its rules, it will turn on you and call you a failure.
You deserve better gods than that.
I’m not saying this from a distance. I’ve been with people—real people—who lived in that world, close enough that it wasn’t a topic. It was our life.
They weren’t a stigma to hold up or a problem to debate. They were a person.
And in our kind of dynamic, you don’t “feed the thing”—you protect the human underneath it. You feed them. You praise them. You anchor them to being alive.
I don’t claim credit for a life—but I know I bought time.
I positioned myself as the voice—the sober monster in their head.
And sometimes, even if you do everything right, it gets past you.
Sometimes, after you’ve both parted ways, they still walk right up to the edge before they even realize they’re standing on it.
Sometimes nobody is chasing death—
but the road still leads there—for them, and for the people left holding their memory.
This is the part where you probably expect a phone number or a neat little resource link. “If you or a loved one is struggling…”
Those things matter. If a hotline, a clinic, a group, a website helps you? Use it. Grab every tool you can.
But I’m not going to slap a random link here just so I can sleep at night and pretend I “did my part.” That would be more shallow than my body preferences.
If you know this is killing you — inside, outside, or both — I’m going to challenge you to do something harder than scrolling: start looking for real information and real support that fits you. Fact-based, boring, not-aesthetic help. Where you look and who you talk to about it is your call.
If this ever reads like I’m more excited about your outline than your existence, throw the whole piece out. Full stop. You’re not a kink blueprint or some unattainable object of desire; you’re a person.
Companion track: “Cool for the Summer” – Demi Lovato
Aftercare (The Comedown)
If this piece hit a tender place—food as an equation, “discipline” as camouflage, thinness getting treated like proof—take that seriously. This wasn’t written to glamorize disappearing or to make sickness sexy; it was written to name the trap and refuse it. Attraction in this piece is described as wiring, not a standard you’re supposed to chase.
I’m also not asking you for your story. No confessions, no “before/after,” no details, no private performance for anyone’s comfort—including mine. If anything in here ever sounded like “stay unwell so you’ll be wanted,” read it again: I reject that completely. Your body is not a price of admission to be desired.
You don’t have to earn love by shrinking, and you don’t have to prove recovery by being perfect. Keep yourself on the side of life, even if your head is loud about it. You’re allowed to be wanted without being consumed.
Cycle II – Coming of Age (The Hidden Life) · 03 (v1.00)
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