the intimacy of steel

Violence threaded through with Pearls is Violence all the same ~

Pride month begins with gay knights

Goosebumps crawl up my neck when the lord spins me around and I catch a glimpse of my beloved knight. His hand grips the hilt of his sword tightly but his strong body is completely still.

I wonder who would feel the consequences his jealousy tonight.

I feel like you are asking me this knowing that I’m going to sound like an insane asshole but that is ok and I thank you for that opportunity fr I don’t mean that in a snippy way. This was fun to write but it may be a whole lot of nothing.

1) in my mind and in my amateur and largely meaningless opinion there is a difference between having a fetish/kink for ‘knights’ versus ‘armor’. And to be clear, I would consider myself of both leanings, and don’t think one is ‘better’ or more ‘sophisticated’ than the other LMAO

Armor kink: (let’s assume we’re talking about some form of medieval/gothic plate armor and not more modern military uniforms) to me is the eroticism of the armor on the body, where the actual traits of person inside is notably playing second fiddle. I would compare it to latex and leather kinksters. The way that plate armor feels, the intimidation aspect, the physical process of putting it on and taking it off, the tiring effect it has on the wearer, the empowering effect it has on the wearer, the vulnerability that they are sometimes placed in, the sound. Obviously an armor fetishist might say that they are attracted to knights because knights wear plate armor, but to me this is still just armor kink, because the thing that likely makes the knights attractive to this person is the armor. A bold assumption: a knight with no armor is not much to fantasize over for an amor fetishist, therefore, they’re not really into knights … right? Well, no, and also yes. It is hard to separate plate armor from its knightly body within, and an armor fetishist owes their arousal to knights in that sense, but the outer layer comes first.

Knight kink: to me is at its core a fetish for servitude and the psychological turmoil of maintaining servitude - be that submissive servitude, protective and romantically chivalrous servitude, religious servitude, or self servitude. There is something in the historical or fictional understanding of a knight to be a person who swears themself to violence, combat, war, and protection that one may find erotic. Dogma is an attractive trait, regardless of what that dogmatic person may be wearing…but they are probably wearing armor.

More on knight kink though, I see this type of kink as being linked to historical European romanticism, not historical accuracy as I’ve seen many claim. Here’s a short, sweet summary of what I’m referencing.

Medieval romances were usually about knights, and those knights were usually battling with internal and external relationships to servitude. It was romantic and erotic to readers in the medieval era in many of the same ways it is now. It’s also a HUGE abstraction of what a knight historically was.

I’m not going to go on a historical knight diatribe but I will highlight that this romantic, lustfully virginal, emotionally complex archetype usually does not want to deal with the reality that a great deal of real knighted men were not good people. The crusades, the early colonization of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales by the English, the knightly classes associations with sexual violence and abuse of women, the horrific violence of what a tourney often entailed. I could go on, and that is a sort of an England/France/Germany centric list but you get my point. There are people who fetishize the violence, brutality, and fascistic aspects of real knights - I’ve met them! They’re all over the reenactment scene! - and they are best labeled as neo-facists and incel types. (Which is not to say that they are worshiping the REAL knights, a lot of them idolize crusaders in particular and lmao. Try telling your average tradcath chud that the crusades were a failure and a repeated attempt at genocide, not a ‘just, holy, godly war’)

Anyway my over-explained point is that the average “knight kink” enjoyer is also not really into knights, we are into the eroticism and contradiction of undying servitude and the fictionalized archetype of the Knight that was in vogue even when knights were still roaming the streets. So ok NO ONE is a REAL knight fetishist we’re just suckers who are still getting tricked by Malory hundreds of years later.

2) So there’s the armor fetishists and there’s the chivalric romance fetishist who call ourselves knight fetishists. And there is the internet and there is me.

What I am not doing is insisting that these two parties segregate themselves perfectly and leave each other alone because the ven diagram is overlapping. I’m not going to lie to you it is overlapping. And we’re all getting along and making out and it doesn’t really matter.

BUT! When I am on my high horse and in the #knightkink tag on tumblr, I sometimes get the sense that in some posts out there …. The OP is from neither party.

Because I don’t actually think that a suit of armor is the same as latex and leather. Medieval plate armor has been a staple of fashion since it was used at war. It’s on the runway and red carpet, it’s in music videos, it’s in museums, its in one billion blockbusters, it’s at party city, it’s truly not associated with kink in the way even fur suits are. It’s sexy in the way cowboys and corsets are. It’s a good look, it’s not kink. Neither is taking pleasure in the idea of someone swearing service to you or something greater in a way that makes their own sexuality taboo. bodyguards and nuns and ‘soulmates’ and doctors and modern soldiers and maids are right in there with knights as widely accepted, somewhat ‘vanilla’ service roles for a romantic lead to fill. I don’t think of myself as a chainsaw fetishist because I feel sorta hot when I use one, Im just appreciating the existing and accessible tropes of power tools being read as sexy sometimes.

But I am an armor and chivalry fetishist. And so are the people who are perverting these normalized concepts past convention. Ex: Amor doesn’t just look good on the body, it actually feels bad and heavy and suffocating, and that is the erotic part. It’s not just arousing for a knight to protect you, it’s arousing for them to lose a tournament and never speak to you again out of shame. These things are not ‘sexy’ they are fetishized. In my very personal and unprofessional opinion. Of course.

So to answer your question: posting about how hot someone looks in armor or on their knees before you is not a fetishistic thing to do on its own, and a lot of people are doing that. It’s correct and awesome to want to fuck some person who looks good in armor and will die to protect you. But the kinksters I relate to more are pushing the issue into the specific, all-emcompasing erotic effects that metal armor and chainmail can have on a body, or the sexually charged concept of servitude and performative chivalry through a literary medieval romantic lens. So ok maybe they DO want to fuck a knight. But not in the #knightkink way I’ve invented in my mind.

A personal piece I created earlier this year.