hey like just so you know, like forty percent of kink discourse online becomes completely nonsensical if you have attended kink spaces in person. keep in mind I'm American and white and live in a city
"there's no such thing as non-sexual kink >:(" I get that you're probably at least ALLEGING online grooming here, where that's probably a salient point at least in the abstract, but like when kinksters talk about "non-sexual kink" they are trying to communicate a preference meeting some combo of 1) no genital or areola touch and 2) sexual arousal is not a major intended affect. if you've actually done kink in person it becomes super obvious that kink targets multiple diverse affects and sexual arousal or orgasm may be completely unrelated to the goals of a kink act. unless someone is covering for explicit DMs with a minor or whatever, this is simply not a reasonable objection to make
"does SEX have to center genital or areola touch or sexual arousal as an intended affect?"
"that's kind of a vague definition of 'sexual' kink that could run into some problems!"
all great and valid points! kinksters using the term "non-sexual kink" are using it as a starting point for communication
"people use kink as an excuse to get away with abuse and consent violation >:(" hey. look me in the eyes. thousands if not MILLIONS of times more people use cisgender heterosexual vanilla marriage where they NEVER talk about what they want from love or sex to get away with SO MUCH MORE abuse and consent violation. when you fearmonger about kink — the practice of talking about what you want from sex with lessened judgment and a broader horizon for what is possible — covering for abuse or sexual assault, you are de facto pathologizing talking about what you want from love and sex. which is bad for healthy relationships, bad for sexual health, and bad for women. see next point
"kink reproduces misogynistic sex roles >:(" hey. look me in the eyes. this is a MUCH worse problem with cisgender heterosexual vanilla marriages where they never talk about what they want from love or sex. if a heterosexual couple talk about what they want from love or sex, which is a good thing to do for its own sake, some of them are going to bring in M/f bondage, discipline, dominance/submission, and sadomasochism, in a way that playacts at misogynistic sexual violence, because that was already implicit in the heterosexual, misogynistic sex roles they were already embedded in. talking about it and tailoring it to their personal tastes (which, again, are shaped by heterosexual society!) is better and gives women MORE agency in love and sex than not talking about it and 'just having the expected kinds of sex', even if it leads to explicitly (rather than implicitly) dramatizing and eroticizing the violence of heterosexual society (because they were already doing that implicitly).
"straight kinksters have no place in the LGBT+ community >:(" this one is complicated and subtle and sounds crazy if you've never done kink in person but like, legitimately, you are often going to see more trans people at kink events that are predominantly heterosexual than you are at kink events that are predominantly gay. you are maybe especially going to see more trans WOMEN at 'straighter' kink events. this isn't even really a value judgment, the reasons for this are complex and point to some inherent points of difference within the political coalition "LGBT+." sociosexual spaces built for homosexual social contacts tend towards gender segregation, for instance, the more so as the 'sexual' element dials up — it's a little unusual for lesbians and gay men to cruise in the same room! and trans people aren't always comfortable in gender segregated spaces, because, like, some of us are genderqueer or nonbinary or operating in multiple gendered modalities at once. bare minimum, be it nudism or BDSM, any space where you can expect both cisgender women and cisgender men to get naked in order to do something 'weird' or 'freaky' is perhaps counterintuitively one of the safest places to be visibly trans that isn't explicitly designed around trans people. also, 'straight' kink spaces are in practice more like bisexual or pansexual kink spaces! even if most of the people there are straight; the categories of "straight space" and "bisexual space" are DISTINCTLY blurred in kink. that doesn't make sense until you've been there, and then if you have been you're like "oh, yeah, I know what you mean." suffice it to say, I'm not even saying we should include cishet kinksters in LGBT+, I'm saying this is a bizarre line in the sand to draw that has nothing to do with real life. case by case, sometimes kinksters are going to de facto or de jure have common cause with LGBT+ people, and frequently the different demographics within LGBT+ are going to have distinctly different patterns of engagement and points of friction or connection with cishet people in kink social scenes.
"the presence of kink signifiers in public is harmful to ace people >:(" so, I'm not even gonna focus on the fact that sexualizing people's leather or PVC or whatever in this way is sexual harassment of the person wearing the leather or PVC, and the leather/PVC do not constitute sexual harassment of the person complaining. let's zoom in on ace people and kink. your whole life you've had it drilled into you by rote that sex is very important and happens in one particular way and you're gonna know it when it happens because it's going to be the most significant and weighty thing that ever happens to you, and you are sexy without your knowledge or intent, your voice is sexual, your naked body is sexual, or at least you are supposed to WANT to be sexy and put massive amounts of work into being sexy, and whatever is sexual is intensely private and yet constantly under discussion and must be tightly regulated but also joyful because YOU find the right feelings and desires in YOUR body that will finally make you Normal and Correct and An Adult.
and then you go to a room where people are casually in various states of undress, doing some things that seem obviously related to sex and other things that seem like interesting sensory experiences but NOT obviously sexual and some things that are straight up just playing toys, and nobody is paying very much attention to you and you can watch if you want or walk away if you want, there are no expectations of you, if anybody else wants something from you it is socially mandated that they ask you first and accept 'no' as an answer, and you can be ARBITRARILY specific about what you do and do not want to engage in, and sometimes the kink stuff going on is the kind of thing where it doesn't even matter if you personally are into it, like there's a guy in his underwear letting anyone who wants to draw on him with markers and that can just be a fun little activity for you that doesn't have to elicit any particular response to participate in, and also people are just making light social chit-chat as if they aren't half-naked and the room isn't about half-full of other people doing things that are ¿probably? sex acts of some kind
this is the most profoundly demysticizing, de-pedestalizing, de-pathologizing, lowest-pressure experience of sexuality and nudity possible
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
germansingergirl
dededos
janainaart
titsay
vaporwave
jacobvanloon
theartofmadeline
