gay people

gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.

SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:

diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.

non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.

the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.

now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.

if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.

if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.

this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.

it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.

Would you mind if I used them?

Idiotic. Really did not appreciate the authors bewildered sneering tone. The references to gooning as a political movement a la MAGA and the "gen z tea party" were frankly bizarre, and they betrayed some critical misunderstanding of the subject.

"healthy gooning, as any gooner can tell you, is an oxymoron" these are the words of someone who cannot see past normativity. This is, crucially, said in response to a popular gooner talking about a healthy relationship to said kink. The author repeatedly doesn't believe that people can have a non-harmful relationship to a their wacky meme hypno kink.

The central fantasy of gooning, and why I think it routinely evades "normie" understanding, is that it is a meta-kink. It is a fetishized, WWE fantasy version of the idea of being addicted to pornography. They literally get off on telling journalists they are addicted to porn.

The vast majority of people are perfectly capable of shutting down their goon cave and going to work like normal people. Naturally there are gooners with a maladaptive relationship to gooning, but any sufficiently popular hobby will contain those with a socially maladaptive relationship to said hobby. Go to literally any large video game subreddit and you will find people with a deeply maladaptive relationship to that game.

The other massive obvious, neon-sign point that the author glances off but ultimately does not investigate, is that Gooning is a fetishization of the commerical. Nobody goons to normal looking people, you goon to the idea of people as a product. The ultra-tailored, edited, artificial persona that some sex workers inhabit creates a heightened, exalted reality, which the gooner finds appealing. These are the oiled up bodybuilders of gay porn and advertisement, and the airbrushed slimthick baddies of both porn and commercials.

One of my friends also enjoys an asexual safari into the wonderful niche kink communities of the internet. He told me once that he found a gooner who just cut right to the heart of the matter, and only posted videos of himself fucking a McChicken sandwich, an idealized, constantly advertised commercial product. That is the core eros of Gooning. It is a libidinal response to a socially atomized world dominated by advertising.

This is also why gooners are obsessed with Egirls. Another thing the author touches on but does not investigate. The bicycle was both a moral panic and sex symbol. They allowed chaste young women a new degree of autonomy. Now they can travel further away to hold jobs, and by god they might even meet men unsupervised. How erotic! The Egirl is a similar figure to the female bicycle owner. It is a new class of young women with a degree of social, financial, and sexual mobility. Crucially, many of these young women are twitch streamers. They inhabit a character, and the performance of that character is a product. Many people loudly condemn these women as socially dangerous, and as we all know from reading Georges Battaille, anything forbidden becomes erotic.

Many gooners engage in the kink because of broader social anxieties. Sex is messy and effortful and people are busy. How many women do you know who would like to date, but just don't the time or energy to navigate the anxieties of their partner turning out to be some loser chud? How many trans women are afraid to go outside? History is happening outside! And history is a dangerous place! I can understand why people might want to turn their brain off and crank it into a meditative state for 45 minutes.

hi anon,

so, we've got some assumptions baked into this ask that I'd very much like to dispel.

so, first off, you've set up a worldview in which it seems to be widely agreed upon that 24/7 BDSM power exchange dynamics are good and acceptable. that's very much not the case; there are a great number of people who object not only to that type of BDSM dynamic but to the entire concept of BDSM, period, because they belief it's fundamentally the same as sexual abuse. saying "everyone agrees that age gaps are bad but BDSM is good" is factually wrong right out of the gate.

now, let's talk about why the types of relationships you described are considered objectionable, and why BDSM works on fundamentally different grounds.

so boss/employee, that's pretty straightforward. someone with financial power over another has the ability to exert pressure on a subordinate for sexual favors, and even if they're not being placed explicitly under duress, someone may be too nervous about facing retaliation to say no if approached by someone who outranks them at work. (additionally, there are concerns about the ability of a higher-ranking person to fire someone lower-ranking or otherwise endanger their livelihood if their relationship ends poorly.) in short, the ability to meaningfully consent is compromised in this situation.

with incest there are certainly discussions to be had about whether or not it should be permissible for two related adults, fully aware that they're related, to engage in consensual sex. context is also important there--historically, for instance, marriage between first cousins was quite normal and even desirable in many places, but it activates many people's yuck response now. moving beyond the culturally ingrained taboo, the best reason to object to incest is that many cases involve the sexual abuse of a child, which is obviously objectionable on the grounds that sexually abusing any child is wrong whether you're related to them or not. familial structures are also often rife with a similar level of power and control we'd see in the workplace scenario, with the added level of pressure that can come from a desire to remain part of a family unit whether out of fondness for the family, a reliance on the family for support, or both. again, the family structure creates a context in which it's easy for one person to pressure another into sex, eliminating the ability to give meaningful consent.

the instance of a relationship with an age gap is interesting, and my interesting I mean not nearly specific enough. if we're talking about two people of age to be recognized as adults then I actually think everyone really ought to sit down and shut the fuck up about age gaps. yes, sure, I think it's skeezy that DiCaprio won't date a woman older than 25, less than half his age, but I don't think that makes him a sex criminal unless someone can prove he's doing something to coerce those young women into having sex with him. a 23 year old may be young, but they're not an infant, and they're perfectly capable of weighing their options and deciding that they'd like to sleep with a 50 year old man. it's deeply infantilizing to act as if they're not!

now, if we're talking about someone who's of the age of legal majority having sex with someone under that age, that's a slightly different kettle of fish that I unpacked here a whole three days ago. in short: in America, at least, people under the age of are, in general, societally positioned to be at a disadvantaged position relative to people 18 and over, and lack the ability to legally give consent, even if they want to, to say nothing of the many cases of full-on child sexual abuse, which is, as previously noted, wrong to do.

so, crucially, the thing that's objectionable about the three scenarios described above is that they involve an individual whose consent is disregarded entirely or is given only under duress, which is not consent. a crucial distinction is that people in these situations cannot say no to their situation--someone being pressured into fucking their boss so they don't lose their job or being molested by a parent can't say "stop, please, I don't like what's happening" and realistically expect to have that request listened to.

conversely, BDSM is a game of make-believe sex LARPing that relies on having mutually agreed-upon and well-established rules, including a way for anyone involved to clearly indicate that they would like to stop and an expectation that a request to stop will be honored immediately. crucially, everyone participating has consented to the terms of play and is free to revoke their involvement and end the scene at any time. the difference between BDSM and abuse is that you can't safe word your way out of abuse.

your misunderstanding of what BDSM contracts do is a very dangerous one; it's crucial to understand that agreements made between individuals to set expectations are rarely, if ever, legally binding and absolutely do not give anyone the right to do anything they want without legal recourse. if person A and person B have an existing BDSM dynamic, but B decides to ignore A's requests to stop and beats them within an inch of their life, there's an extremely good chance that A will win a court case against B regardless of any previous agreements that existed between them--as they have every right to, since what B has done has surpassed consensual play and gone straight to assault. the scenario you described, in which medication and money is taken in order to hold someone hostage while their safe word is disregarded, is similarly a case of abuse, not a consensual sexual arrangement.