Apologies if you’ve one of the tiny handful of people who follow me on twitter, as this post is going to be a rehash of a twitter rant I posted there recently. The tweets were an experiment to see if I could use twitter threads for thoughts longer than 280 characters, and if I’d get better engagement with them. The answers were respectively ‘not easily’ and ‘no’, so I think blog posts will remain my primary form of expression.
The rant in question was brought about by multiple social media arguments I’d seen on controversial kinky activities. Topics like race play, extreme age play, incest porn/roleplay and nazi outfits. All these arguments ultimately boiled down to two basic viewpoints. On one side was ‘as long as its consensual, adults can fantasize about anything’, on the other was ‘this activity has serious implications and you’re selfish/evil for treating it as way to get off’. I think both of those can be defensible opinions. What struck me as crazy was people flipping between the two depending how they felt about the topic in question.
The ‘as long as its consensual’ view is basically a get of jail free card. It’s a perspective that puts kinky play in its own little bubble, with no obvious relationship between what happens in the bubble and the outside world. If you believe it, then you can do a non-con sex roleplay, and not think you’re encouraging rape. Or beat someone and not spend any time wondering if you’re encouraging violence. That’s a valid viewpoint in my opinion, but it’s important to realize, it’s activity agnostic. You can’t logically claim your kinks live in a bubble where consent is all that matters, but arbitrary other kinks don’t.
On the other side, I think it’s also reasonable to argue that kinks very much interact with a broader social context. For example, one could discuss the intersection of race play and racism. However, if you’re going to do that, it means all kinks have to be considered in that context. That means a lot of kinks become potentially problematic, and require deeper analysis and justification. I typically don’t see anyone out there wanting to do that work for their personal favorite kinks.
In actuality, what consistently happens is that people play the ‘as long as its consensual’ card for their favorite kinks, and then try to withhold it when the activity in question gives them yucky feelings. Which seems broken to me. Either play the card consistently and let others do the same, or don’t play it at all.
In the femdom realm the combination of cross-dressing and humiliation is one of those controversial topics that can trigger a similar ‘consensual adults’ versus ‘this is wrong’ debate. The artwork here is by Voloh.
I have to disagree. Somewhat.
While I hate double standards, I simply do not see these fetishes on the same level.
Age- and incest-play for example are okay with me. They do not offend or discriminate brothers, sisters, grandmas or kids. Or whatever roles are played.
On the other hand I find myself repulsed by race-play. It sexualizes racism. And there is no thing as positive racism. I´ve seen groups about race-play on FetLife, where members posted their RANKING of different races.
For example:
1. Asian
2. Black
3. Kaukasian
and so on.
I just find it disturbing to rank races. You know what I mean?
That brings me to my next point: nazi-play. I, as a german can not help but to feel sick, when I see pictures of nazi-roleplayers on FetLife. If it only were the uniforms. But there are groups called KZ so and so, where people who “play” nazis and people, who “play” jews come together.
They wear the nazi-swastika or even have it as their profile pic. They write “sieg heil” on each other profiles to greet one another. I believe something like the holocaust, A GENOCIDE, should not be used as a fetish. And using nazi-symbolism, uniform and slang, which are by the way forbidden in germany with good reason, is glorifying the perpetrators of this time. And I just can stand that.
PS: Excuse my rusty english. First time commentator after years of just reading. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for stopping by to comment. I always appreciate it when a long time reader shares their thoughts.
This is a really big and complex area, so I think it really deserves another post. Hopefully, I can address some of the issues you’ve raised in that. Look out for that in the next day or so.
I would just say about the examples you gave: If you’re indiscriminately ranking races on a forum like fetlife, that’s not raceplay, it’s just racism. Similarly, if you’re giving out Nazi salutes and sticking swastika’s in your profile, that’s not a playing with a kink, that’s just being a Nazi. People like that are simply using a kink as a cover for their hateful beliefs in life.
When I think about play with a dangerous or edgy kink, I’m primarily thinking about a specific private scene that has a well defined start and end point. It’s a service a pro-domme might offer in a private playspace, or something a couple might do in the bedroom. Much like someone might do a humiliation scene, and then revert to normal adult interaction. They don’t continue it in public or drag others into it.
Now one can still say that raceplay or wearing a Nazi uniform in that narrow situation is wrong. I think that’s a valid but debatable viewpoint :-). But I think its different discussion to people simply being racist in public forums and then claiming cover of kink.
Thanks again for the comment. I haven’t really addressed it fully, but hopefully it’s a topic I can return to.
-paltego
It seems to me that a lot depends on intent, and how people approach the scene.
There’s a lot of racism in America. On one hand, that means that it’s a charged topic, and people have stuff that’s tangled up in it, stuff that has to be worked out. On the other hand, it means that there are lots of racists. If a professional woman offers racial humiliation as a kind of session, is she helping people wrestle with their demons, or is she just calling someone the n-word?
The whole thing revolves around how the people involved in the scene view it, what their intentions toward one another are. So it might be OK in one instance and not so OK in another.
And that context could vary from fetish to fetish. Someone might have one attitude when they do a feminization scene and another attitude when they do a racial scene. So respectfully, I don’t think your core argument — that we have to pick one side or another, for all situations and all contexts and stick with it — is correct.
I don’t think that many women who do feminization scenes hate women, or feel that being a woman is inherently humiliating. That doesn’t mean the fantasy might not be offensive to many people, but it does say something about the woman’s likely mindset when she participates in such a scene. A certain percentage of white people, on the other hand, have weird racial stuff going on, and do think of people of other races in negative terms. So the mindset might reflect that.
Also, can we stop bringing race into cuckolding fantasies? But that is a different topic.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Thought provoking comment. I just put up a new post to continue this topic, which was triggered in part at least by what you put here.
I’m not sure I share your analysis of the situation however. Or possible we’re talking about different things.
I think its absolutely true that individual scenes depends on circumstances, intentions, motivations, the people involved, etc. But I think that’s always true whatever the activity. You could do a simple corporal scene and have bad intentions (to hurt your partner in an undesirable way). So I think talking about specific instances isn’t a useful discrimination, because it’s always true that it depends. That’s just a generally true statement.
What I was trying to get at (probably not entirely successfully) was the case where someone says activity X is morally wrong, but activity Y is just fine because its consensual adults. i.e. They’re making a broad sweeping statement about X that casts it as bad in all circumstances, and a similar broad statement about Y that says its OK. My point was you either have to broadly and generally accept the general case of both as valid or analyze and critique everything individually. Not chop and change depending on the activity.
I actually think from your comment – if you think that any activity can be valid in specific circumstances – then you’re in the ‘as long as its consensual adults, it’s OK’ camp. I think there’s always a rider to any activity that says ‘when do properly and with the right intentions’.
And yes, I absolutely agree with the unfortunate conflation of race and cuckolding. If people are into both race play and cuckolding combined, then call that out. Not just talk about cuckolding with some sort of unspoken assumption it can always include an element of race play. I think that’s basically people wanting to do race play but wanting to deal with the label.
Thanks again for the comment.
-paltego