#wasn't quinn tired of men who were with her because it was an achievement??

[caracalliope]

AND it happened specifically on Beta Colony, which is fascinating.

Beta is factually way less ableist than Barrayar

Beta is ALSO a weird conflictedly mystical place of origin for Cordelia, and nobody is exactly straightforward about it (I wonder if at some point, child Miles heard about the never-realized possibility of Cordelia and Aral separating and Cordelia taking baby Miles to Beta)

15-year-old Miles is like "if I can't make it there, I can't make it anywhere"

15-year-old Miles has a relatively limited scope of experience with Beta's more cloying, more sickly-sweet kind of ableism, Betan therapy jokes notwithstanding

15-year old Miles is 15, and a boy, and most importantly he's from Barrayar, thus having heterosexual sex is the litmus test for being a successful man|human being, and he preemptively imagines Beta to be sexually liberated in the specific way that 15-year-old Barrayaran boys dream about (lots of willing horny straight girls, and everything else is just exotic seasoning)

his first time messes him up so badly not just because he failed at it but because he failed on Beta, the planet of sex and no infanticide! Where milk and honey flow through the streets!

Like yessss absolutely this reads like bi repression to me:

He had been fifteen on his year-long school visit to Beta Colony, and he'd found himself for the first time in his life with what looked like unlimited possibilities for sexual intimacy. This illusion had crashed and burned very quickly, as he found the most fascinating girls already taken. The rest seemed about equally divided among good Samaritans, the kinky/curious, hermaphrodites, and boys. He did not care to be an object of charity, and he found himself too Barrayaran for the last two categories, although Betan enough not to mind them for others. A short affair with a girl from the kinky/curious category was enough. Her fascination with the peculiarities of his body made him, in the end, more selfconscious than the most open revulsion he had experienced on Barrayar, with its fierce prejudice against deformity. Anyway, after finding his sexual parts disappointingly normal, the girl had drifted off.

but frankly it also reads like a more general separation of sex and desire. He wants his cherry popped the right way. Failing at that has put him off the kinky, the curious, but possibly also everyone else.

(I love though that fascinating & already taken is his Type when it comes to Ekaterin, and hilariously, he's also only fully interested in Bel after Bel is taken.)

I think the author was trying to convey to me that Miles is straight in this flashback, but the wording reads to me more as mildly repressed bi than anything

also... god, poor Miles. fifteen isn't a very good year for anyone, it's okay.

it's so cool to see competence porn that addresses this kind of thing, though...