Kink shaming

I've got into reading and writing fanfic over the past couple of years and have found that the people who write the worst kind (all of which I avoid like the plague) are generally very young and either very woke (there's always something about them being trans or non-binary) or non-neurotypical. And they have no idea about nuance or context and just set out to write the most shocking thing they can think of.

There are people within my particular fandom who I just refuse to read anything by because they think they're being bold and edgy and in fact they're just being incredibly sad and desperate.

ABO leaves me cold. I do write het smut, but I'm very careful about it and take a lot of time over it. I think age and experience has given me a good grasp on writing the dynamics of it.

Tyro, yes, your kink is not my kink has a totally different meaning in a context where people have already agreed sexual content will be present!

It doesn’t work in wider society because wider society works on the premise that everyday life should be kept pg.

Barbara, what I mean is that ABO writers are not particularly young or disturbed.

I don’t think it is a failure of imagination. The writers often seem to know full well what they are doing, and the purpose of the B is that there’s a whole segment of society that aren’t following traditional gender roles.

Tyrotoxicity - alpha-beta-omega dynamics! archiveofourown.org/works/403644/chapters/665489 (Very funny, but NSFW, and may be disturbing if it cuts too close to the bone of what you've been through yourself).

I get you on slash. When I first came upon fandom, I rapidly came to the conclusion that a lot of what was driving women to write slash was the desire to take the sexual politics out of relationships and use it as a short-cut to a relationship of equals. (Plus I think it's linked to the failure of the Bechdel test in much popular culture: most movies, the meaningful emotional relationship is between the male hero and his male sidekick, or the male protagonist and male antagonist - the female love interest, if there is one, is a two-d cardboard cutout, hence fanficcers come along wanting to write sex with meaningful emotional relationship - the meaningful emotional relationship already there in the source material lends itself much more readily to gay relationships than straight ones.)

It's one of the things that prompted me to write fanfic myself - I wanted to see whether you could write half-way decent fan fic about het couples that stripped away the power imbalance.

I dunno, Endof. It could be an epic failure of imagination. But most of it reads to me as bad slash meets "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." In that the writers have internalised the message of patriarchal attitudes to heterosexual relationships, viz. that relationships can only take place between a dominant man and a submissive woman, that they apply that model to all relationships.

I also think your pregnancy suspicion may be onto something - but I think it's also down to a way of intoducing a metaphor for biology in a culture (fanfiction) which for the most part embraces the concept of the female penis. ABO dynamics enables people to have metaphors for the relationship between biological reality and personality/behaviours without actually having to admit that biological reality is a thing. Of course, it all goes off the rails, IMO, and rapidly becomes the genuine article "determinism" in that this imaginary biology then determines people's personalities in a lot of fics (there are a few which use it to explore break-downs in this linkage, which is rather better).

Personally I prefer to deal in real world biology (including how women feel about pregnancy/possibility of pregnancy).

(Not sure what ABO is and I'm scared to google...)

the "your kink is not my kink and that's okay" meme was bullshit

Actually I think it's a brilliant example of how reasonable and tolerant attitudes get perverted by the sociocultural context.

The underlying idea, as I understood it at the time, was: different people want to read different things, and that's okay. I'm not wrong or morally deficient for wanting to read about the tragic doomed love between Remus and Sirius, and you're not wrong or morally deficient for wanting to read about McGonagall and Snape making wild monkey love in the Room of Requirement.

But then you send that idea out into the wild, and it gets absorbed by people who've internalised all sorts of damaging and fucked up ideas about what constitutes healthy sexual behaviour - because they've been saturated in a culture that normalises damaging and fucked up ideas about what constitutes healthy sexual behaviour.

Back then it was also a handy way of saying "don't ask me to concrit your hetfic; I'm a slasher and I can't do it and I don't feel like being judged for that right now." Nowadays I look back and think "I was a slasher because I couldn't handle the inherent power imbalances in het relationships."

Are there disturbed young women who think ABO is what gay relationships should be like?

The popularity of ABO probably comes from many places, but one is the taboo of talking about pregnancy and the potential of a pregnancy as being an important part of what makes sex enjoyable and erotic.

Tyrotoxicity. I count myself as very lucky that I've experienced the real deal when it comes to "overwhelming, mutually desired passion" - so I'm in a place to tell the difference. But far too many women aren't that lucky. Because of men who are rapists.

I'd be interested in a discussion of fanfiction some time. Yes, there are a lot of very very damaged women drawn into fanfiction as a support mechanism. And a lot of non-neurotypical women. And a lot of women with mental health issues. Sometimes the community can be wonderfully supportive, but sometimes it can be very unhealthy. Again - I was lucky to come to it when I was much older and "set in my ways", and knew the "your kink is not my kink and that's okay" meme was bullshit, and that rape fantasies/incest fantasies/a lot of BDSM were not coming from a healthy place. (Hell, in my opinion a lot of the more vanilla sex writing is not coming from a healthy place. The number of oral sex descriptions I've read which have left me thinking "but where was your pleasure in this supposedly female-centred fantasy?")

It does vary a bit from fandom to fandom. Some seem to draw in many more people with "issues" than others. And some subgenres are particularly disturbing. (ABO dynamics just seems like taking the worst misogynist tropes of the patriarchy and bolting it onto a disturbed young woman's fantasy version of what gay male relationships should look like, then adding a bucket load of rape apologism. Hardly surprising there's a big cross over between this and young women who identify as non-binary/trans... it's coming from a very screwed up place.)

rape fantasies are either a metaphor for overwhelming passion

This makes me want to cry.

We're conditioned to blur the distinction between overwhelming passion and rape. Society does it, the judicial system does it, far too often the people we disclose our traumas to do it. The fact that this conditioning is so effective that we even do it to ourselves in our masturbatory fantasies is horrifying.

What's missing from the libfem analysis is an exploration of how this conditioning of our mindsets functions to reinforce the societal context that caused this conditioning in the first place.

(I suspect a large part of why this is missing is because it's fucking painful to acknowledge.)

It's like the date rape victim who then has a one or two week attempt at a "relationship" with her rapist (not an uncommon response) in a desperate attempt to normalise what's been done to her and pretend it was just "bad sex" rather than rape.

Been there, done that! Result: years of cognitive dissonance.

I think you're right, Barbara - both analyses have merits. But I would add that the libfem analysis alone merely serves to reinforce and recreate the conditions of sexual terrorism, by failing to acknowledge how these fantasies function within the patriarchal context and instead categorising them as harmless, morally neutral, and no one else's business.

And one of these days we really need to have a thread about our experiences with fanfiction. It seemed so benign at the time, and the sense of freedom and community was wonderful - and yet I look at the people I knew back then, in those communities, and I can see now that so many of us were so very damaged.

And I think to ignore that is to ignore the huge rewards women get from society for punishing other women.

So when ‘Sarah’ in that article talks about liking seeing young girls raped by strangers, it’s young girls who get raped because Sarah wants to see that. Sarah isn’t those young girls and Sarah doesn’t get raped.

There’s also an assumption being made that when a woman watches a pornographic film of someone being raped or reading about someone being raped that she is somehow in the shoes of the person being raped, and that’s not the case.

She’s an audience for rape. She’s enjoying a rape fantasy about someone else’s victimisation. She’s part of the perpetration of the rape, not the person being raped.

That's a brilliant post, Tyrotoxicity.

I've been involved in the fanfic scene for some years now (more from a perspective of wanting to write and explore the fictional worlds and characters that grab me perspective rather than indulging kink - I do, however, write vanilla sex scenes on occasion). This has led me to give a lot of thought to why a quite substantial proportion of women genuinely like (however much that liking may be socially conditioned) rape fantasies, given that I cannot get my head round why any woman would.

There's what I call the Libfem analysis: rape fantasies are either a metaphor for overwhelming passion, or they stem from women's internalised suppression of their sexual urges in a society that divides women into "virgins" and "whores" (on this analysis, rape fantasies are the only way "nice girls" can have guilt-free fantasies, because the choice to engage in sex has been taken away from them). I've talked to enough American women shaking off the chains of Evangelical Protestantism and an abstinence only upbringing to know that there's some truth in this as an analysis of the "why", for at least some women. I still don't think it makes it healthy.

Then there's what I think of as the Radfem analysis: rape and sexual assault are ubiquitous in our culture, and pretty much decriminalised (rape convictions are now in the low single digit percentages for reported rapes - and when you consider that most rapes are unreported, this effectively means men can rape with impunity). This leads to a sort of society wide form of Stockholm syndrome: if you can't do anything about the chances of being raped, then (cognitive dissonance as coping strategy) you might as well accept the male gaze and the way male writers/film makers/pornographers eroticise rape. It's like the date rape victim who then has a one or two week attempt at a "relationship" with her rapist (not an uncommon response) in a desperate attempt to normalise what's been done to her and pretend it was just "bad sex" rather than rape. For me, this analysis holds more water (I don't think the two explanations are mutually exclusive - both could explain different parts of what's going on).

(There's also the issue of rape victims using narrative to reframe their experiences and take back control of the narrative.)

What I have no time for is the shitty patriarchal analysis (often dressed up in the pseudo scientific terms of evolutionary psychology/sociobiology) which says "What rape fantasies show us is that rape is natural and even women like it really." And the whole crap about "don't kink shame me" comes dangerously close to this - that enacting any fantasy is okay if you find someone who supposedly consents.

For every woman re-enacting a 50 shades fantasy of rape in the bedroom, there's a man in that bedroom role-playing being a rapist. And for me, the line between role-playing being a rapist and actually being a rapist is so wafer thin it might as well not be there.

In a fantasy, the fantasiser is in control.

Sometimes I just want a like button on here.

Our tastes are not formed in isolation and our actions affect more than just ourselves.

And the rape fantasies mentioned upthread are an excellent example of this.

I'll confess to having had fantasies that are generally categorised as rape fantasies - and I use the word 'confess' because I do feel shame connected to this. I've been raped in real life, multiple times, by multiple men. The fantasy and the reality are worlds apart, obviously.

But I was never fantasising about actually being raped.

My fantasies were informed by two things: tropes picked up from exposure to pornography; and the eroticisation of power imbalances that is so rampant in our society.

I've been conditioned by my society, my culture, and my personal experiences to get off on men having sexual power over me.

This, obviously, has serious real-life implications: for my psychological welfare; for my sex life; for my interpersonal relations with both men and women.

I feel shame about 'rape fantasies' because I know damned well that if I indulge them, I'm eroticising my own oppression and training myself to have a positive sexual response to men acting on their impulses regardless of my wants or needs.

This is not a neutral thing. This is not a harmless thing. This is not a thing to be celebrated or accepted or tolerated on the grounds that it's just a fantasy and isn't hurting anyone.

The imperative "don't kink shame!" is an attempt to distract me from this analysis. Functionally, it encourages me to rationalise and indulge in sexual fantasies and responses that are actively detrimental to me. It is one of many mechanisms by which I, as a traumatised survivor of repeated sexual violence going back to early childhood, am encouraged to submit to yet more of the same.

Well, fuck that shizzle.

I can't help but see this in terms of the distinction between liberal feminism and radical feminism.

Me also. Our tastes are not formed in isolation and our actions affect more than just ourselves. When a person makes a choice that hurts women as a class, that choice is not a feminist choice.

I'll porn and kink shame as much as I please, because I am allowed both an opinion and boundaries. I also don't give 2 fucks who points out that I'm doing it.

Cinematic films don't show actual sexual penetration. Porn does. Porn shows a woman being penetrated with all the risks to her that thag entails.There's your key difference between porn and cinema Bespin.

Nowhere in that article does it explain why it is bad to shame people.

So this thread was started by someone called joss (who are they) to get screen shots to show that women (meany feminists?) are not on board with stuff like Map (not a problem if you don't act on it!), women whose circs could be anything being hit, strangled, raped on screen (it's just pretend! Only the violence is real... And it's not always pretend), etc...

Gosh yes women are awful.

Step sibling porn - will, I'm sure, relate to the fantasy of fucking your step sister who you live with as a teen.

Of course in real life there is plenty of rape in these circs.

Hence the taboo.

Also, I can't spell taboo!

I was just replying to the person who said we have some of the most stringent laws yes we do, but they don't all make sense

@fraggling

I was confused about the quoted step-sibling porn ? And it's illegal for step siblings to marry if they've lived with each other under the age of 18, so there is one of say you are step-siblings who lived together at 15/16 etc. And I wouldn't know about the porn because I don't watch it, never been a thing I've felt the need to watch.

?

Derail.

Nothing to do with incest porn.