Kink shaming

[Pota2]

www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/the-porn-you-watch-shouldnt-be-kink-shamed/11453254

The danger with this is, if anything goes in terms of fantasies, how can we legitimately separate this from e.g. fantasies about children? If it’s cool to fantasise about rape and abuse, how can it not be cool to fantasise about a 9 year old child being abused or an animal being abused? I know that those who defend the ‘anything goes’ attitude will say ‘of course there is a difference’ but I can’t really see one, unless you are suggesting that rape is not as morally reprehensible or something (in which case, why isn’t it?).

This won’t end well. Sexual fantasies should be held to the same level of scrutiny as other fantasies or thoughts. If you get off on being violent to another person, you’re still a violent person. You don’t get a get out of jail free card because you say it gives you a hard-on.

ZOMG mn feminists are literally doing the work of PIE!!!

Total sadface.

It's totally true that women on mn are really cool with paedophilia.

Fucking [women /terfs /swerfs/bitches]

Meh, just some young man, pissed at being requested to accept his sex as being male, and that lesbians don't want his lady penis near them....they get snippy when reality is thrown at them.

It's ridiculous, can't make the homophobic slur stick, so tries throwing some nastier shit.

I'm too old, too hurt, too marginalized to really give a fuck.

And for the record, I think that pushing the boundaries of kink is trying to push society to normalize and accept criminal behavior towards wimin and children.

Not convinced that poster's a man, Detroit, based on their earlier posts on this thread.

But they do worry that nefarious types wish to

Damage our credibility by making out that MN is full of “sex negative” prudes who are against anything that’s not vanilla heterosexual sex.

Which is a fair point, except that it unquestioningly accepts the premise that "sex positivity" is a good and healthy thing with no negative social consequences for women.

Fuck "sex positivity". Trying to embrace it contributed to me being retraumatised and trying to rationalise and minimise the rapes I experienced. It's a fucking irresponsible narrative to push in a context that includes a sizeable proportion of women and girls being traumatised by sexual violence.

And if that poster would like to scroll up and pay more attention to my posts, they'll note that they've accused a survivor of child sexual abuse of being a paedophile apologist.

Tyrotoxicity, I'm sorry that you had to deal with the psychological fallout of such vile, baseless and slanderous accusations, from someone performing mental gymnastics to point score.

As usual, the only people's feelings that matter are the men with kinks that are damaging to vulnerable individuals and their brainwashed handmaidens.

They were pretty extreme mental gymnastics, weren't they? I'm still not quite sure how she managed to make that leap.

It's just shit throwing. You said nothing to apologize for pedophile behavior, in fact you and I were both counselling against normalizing kink, because that leads to normalizing criminal sexual behaviors.

It was nothing you did.

Fucking people. Justifying their orgasm comes before other people's needs and rights, every time.

Fuck "sex positivity". Trying to embrace it contributed to me being retraumatised and trying to rationalise and minimise the rapes I experienced. It's a fucking irresponsible narrative to push in a context that includes a sizeable proportion of women and girls being traumatised by sexual violence.

I agree Tyro. I grew up around 'sex positivity' or what I think should be called Hypersexual Culture as it's a more accurate description and it was such a relief to find radical feminism. So much about Hypersexual Culture had never sat right with me, had made me feel confused, uncomfortable and put me in some dangerous situations but nobody around me had pointed out how the whole concept of it was flawed and dangerous for most people. It also had a toxic affect on my own life and contributed to my own trauma. It encourages promiscuity and unsafe sexual practices - unsafe both in a literal sense but also unsafe in terms of causing psychological trauma. I remember at university feeling like a weirdo because I didn't want to have multiple partners, I just wanted a boyfriend, and apparently that made me a boring prude. I'm now very happy to be a boring prude if that's what people want to label me because to them a prude = a woman who has boundaries.

What a relief not to be around those messages anymore, apart from when posters turn up here and accuse us all of being kink shamers.

The other issue with the label 'sex positivity' is that it implies people who parade their kinks in public have better sex lives than those who don't. This is assuming that people who keep their sex lives private are somehow having rubbish sex or no sex at all.

I'd rephrase.

Fucking people. Refusing to entertain the possibility that the ideology they're wedded to has negative real-world consequences for women, because the primacy of male orgasm is both fundamental to the ideology yet also unnameable within it.

Bravo, Tyrotoxicity and another human female! Much better than I could say it.

I remember at university feeling like a weirdo because I didn't want to have multiple partners, I just wanted a boyfriend, and apparently that made me a boring prude.

The question one must always ask is: cui bono? The answer is always illuminating, and always the same.

Who benefits from your being taught to view yourself as abnormal for not wanting to engage in sexual activity with multiple partners?

Who benefits from our being shamed into abandoning our attempts to analyse whether what we're being taught is harmless is truly so?

The answer is never us.

As for who's having a better sex life - mine is entirely solo through choice at the moment, but as it is relevant to the thread I will mention that a conscious attempt to strip porn tropes from my masturbatory mindset has improved the overall quality of the experience immeasurably.

The phrase 'vanilla sex' implies non-kink sex is somehow dull, and inferior to kink. The phrase became mainstream and is now a subtle jibe at nasty kink shamers. You like vanilla sex? You're a prude.

Someone upthread mentioned stepfather porn. My stepfather loved porn. He abused me. I don't buy the harmlessness of incest porn.

Men must be laughing at how good they have it with the new liberal sex-positive feminism. Reminds me of Phoebe in Friends where she is dating a guy who won’t sleep with her so she begs him to have sex and promises that she wants nothing in return and that he doesn’t even have to call her again and Joey is like ‘that guy is my god’.

I will mention that a conscious attempt to strip porn tropes from my masturbatory mindset has improved the overall quality of the experience immeasurably.

There are support groups and websites for people attempting this: NoFap and Your Brain On Porn. Many members are male because men are also finally waking up to what porn does to their brains, the "porn death grip" etc.

Surely being sex positive means you think sex is a good thing. To be more specific sex between freely consenting adults which makes them feel good mentally and physically.

This absolutely does not include any kind of payment or coercion or mental or physical pain. So to my mind pretty much all porn and definitely all "sex work" is harmful.

I don't care in the slightest if that makes me a prude in some people's eyes.

If

bd67th it's lovely of you to suggest support groups for me, I do appreciate it - but I can't think of anything less appealing than talking to a bunch of blokes about this!

Perfectly happy to not really talk to anyone about it, to be honest - it's a personal thing and the world doesn't need a detailed account of the process.

I only mentioned it because we're on a thread in which some people are of the view that it doesn't matter what you're wanking to, so long as it's all in your own head and no-one's getting hurt. I used to agree with this; now I see it's not as simple as that.

Surely being sex positive means you think sex is a good thing.

I dare say that's where it started.

The list of Good Ideas Utterly Perverted by the Patriarchal Context is getting rather long.

"Sex positive" is one of those weasel Orwellian phrases that means the precise opposite of what it should, like "Freedom is Slavery."

It should mean "mutually consensual, mutually desired, mutually enjoyable sex with respect for each other is a good thing, and no-one should try to guilt-trip you about this. And if, in the privacy of your own bedroom, you both get off on smearing each other with nutella then licking it off while swinging from the light fitting in a superman costume, well, whatever floats your boat. So long as it genuinely is the case that you both get off on it, and you don't demand to re-enact the scenario on a Saturday afternoon in the high street in the name of Kink Pride."

In the mouths of most people who utter it, however, it means "Give up your sexual boundaries, they're just so uncool, watch me and my partner parade our kink in public regardless of how the people inadvertently forced to watch feel about it, let me go on at great length about my kink boring you stupid and attempting to 'prude shame' you, and always remember what the almighty peen wants, the almighty peen gets, even if that's being able to rape financially desperate women while we cheer them on under the guise of 'well, we're just supporting a woman's right to choose to be raped for pay when there's no other way she could feed herself.'"

A very insightful transsexual[1] wrote "sex, as it is typically experienced, is often not nice". This thread brought that article to mind.

[1] Board monitors: that's the author's own self description, so don't bother hitting the report button.

And today I have learned that square brackets within links break the link. radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/the-ethical-prude-imagining-an-authentic-sex-negative-feminism/

Thanks for posting that, bd67th. I'm only halfway through part one but I can see it's going to help me articulate my thoughts. And prompt me to add Audre Lorde to my reading list.

I've just been reading the Mhairi Black thread, and there's mention of a t-shirt saying "you can pee next to me!"

Since we're discussing the merits or otherwise of kink-shaming, I'd like it noted (for the benefit of those lurkers still on the fence) that my agp ex, who has been honing his fetish collection since he discovered the underwear section of his mother's catalogue at the age of ten, started developing an arousal-response to me urinating some years into our relationship.

I raised an eyebrow at this - though I was still trying to be open and accepting and tolerant - and asked him how long that'd been going on.

He shrugged, and said "It's a creeper."

Shame maintains the taboo. If you take away the shame, the taboo weakens, and breaking the taboo becomes less arousing, less sexually appealing. And so one must move on to the next taboo, something a little more extreme, a little more out there, a little more likely to make other people pull a cat's bum face if they get wind of it.

I am actually quite disturbed by the sudden realisation that he's on the same flavour of agp scale as JY; the difference is a matter of degree; and movement along this scale only ever goes in one direction.

And I feel I've inadvertently contributed to his progression along this fucked-up scale by not realising that my indifference to his presence when I needed a wee might have been neutral or even a sign that I trusted him, but for him it was a risk factor for pushing his fetishistic sexuality to further extremes.

Further to my last post - and bear in mind I'm thinking this through for the first time as I go along - this is hypothetical speculation, a thought exercise.

What happens if my agp ex is in a toilet cubicle in the ladies', and someone goes into the cubicle next door?

It's not specifically me having a piss that's lodged itself into his psyche. The sound alone triggers an automatic sexual response in him, and this response is getting stronger. This is largely not within his conscious control (though he can of course take steps to stop or slow this progression if he recognises a reason to do so).

When the person in the next cubicle has a wee, he's going to be aroused whether he actively wants to be or not.

He could attempt to fortify his mind against this response, but if there is no shame attached to his presence and no one is allowed to call him on the fact that he's getting sexual gratification at the expense of unwitting and unconsenting others, he's unlikely to bother telling himself this is weird. He's just going to roll with it, because there are no consequences for not indulging.

But it's all cool, yeah, 'cause no one's getting hurt, right?

What happens when he exits the cubicle at the same time as the occupant next door, and realises she's ten years old?

He's then got to deal with the cognitive dissonance of knowing he's just been sexually aroused by the bodily functions of a child. He knows damned well that's sick, and he knows he can't be sick because everyone's so open-minded and tolerant that no one will tell him the truth.

What does he do with that cognitive dissonance? How does he resolve it?

This scenario does not end well for him.

Careful. The blog posted is a 'radical transfeminist'. Ild caution any woman to read the FAQs of their blog before you drink the koolaid. I'm being careful here, but there is a reason to be warey.

A wolf in Andrea Dworkin's clothes imo.

A wolf in Andrea Dworkin's clothes imo.

Other articles had me rolling my eyes into the back of my head. That specific one hits the nail on the head.

A stopped clock is right twice per day.

I did clock the address and wonder. But just because someone's trans doesn't mean they're automatically wrong about everything. And the quotes in there are useful. Eg

For Daly, a fetish is a sexual connection to a thing which is unable to relate back.

That's surely about 99% of male sexuality, isn't it? Even vanilla stuff. Because men's sexuality develops in a context in which men are people and women are bodies.

I know we're not supposed to say "all men" because people swoop in with a derailing namalt. But are there actually any men who don't treat women, in the heat of the moment, on some level, as bodies rather than people?

So Gyn/ecology is getting a boost to the top of my Books to Buy pile. Because it will help me articulate my thoughts.

I don't need a trans to reiterate what Dworkin, Firestone, Daly, Jeffries et al have already said. I don't need those thoughts ordered and soundbited by someone who is not a woman. A trans who says themselves they refuse to forgive these feminists but yet uses and quotes them.

A trans out feministing us women, huh, opting into our oppression!

We can find our voice without resorting to trans or men writers, surely!