Go hopefully and resist kink-shame in 2023
A new year is upon us. We greet 2023 with a mixture of optimism and dread. Republicans and right-wing forces increasingly try to push our nation into fascism. These same people continue to ban books that affirm the humanity of LGBTQ+ people and books that acknowledge the existence of racism. A political-agenda-driven Supreme Court has ruled that women have no rights over their own bodies and seeks to strip American citizens of still more rights. In a time when hunger and homelessness are rampant, some Republicans act as if drag shows that raise money for charities are Public Enemy #1. Yet, gas prices are going down, no “red wave” materialized in the midterm elections, legislation is in the process to enshrine interracial and same-sex marriages, and many movies and TV shows now have the most inclusive and diverse characters and casts ever in the history of the mediums.
Of course fascists are worried. Of course they’re fighting like mad to preserve their dying way of life. Because they know they’re losing the so-called “culture war.” In their minds, the only people truly human and deserving of fundamental rights are those who check all the boxes on their narrowly-defined checklist of what a legitimate person is: male/female, straight, white, fully abled, Christian, and American-born. But what becomes more apparent every day is that more people do not check all or any of their boxes. Humans do not fit into boxes. There are more choices than they offer. We are not binary. We are a spectrum of infinite variation. And each of us is entitled to the basic human rights of dignity, education, healthcare, being treated with respect, and the opportunities to create happy and successful lives for ourselves and our families.
Are you thinking this is pretty heady stuff for a column about kink? Stay with me. What did Jedi Master Yoda say? “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” The root of all the right-wing’s ferocious attacks on LGBTQ+ people, racial minorities, Jewish people, the neurodiverse, and everyone else that doesn’t fit their image of what a person could/should be, whether the attacks are verbal, physical, political, or legislative…is fear. Marginalized people are standing up, demanding their rights, and taking them. That terrifies the fascists. Because the old ways are dying. The world the fascists live in, the one they want eternally, where straight white “Christian” males rule with absolute authority, is crumbling.
The way humans respond to the unknown is through fear. We’re animals, after all. Anyone who thinks we’re a civilized species need only look at the events in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021, or the fact that Republican politicians continue to put children’s lives in jeopardy for the chance to secure votes from their base to realize that we’re savages — all of us. The unknown is scary. We fear it, and the easiest way to deal with it is to externalize it into hostility toward whatever we don’t understand or is not familiar.
A straight friend told me once, “I just don’t understand how you could be attracted to a dude.” Instead of answering the obvious way by saying, “I don’t understand how you could be attracted to a woman,” I answered this way: “You not understanding my experience gives you no right to invalidate it.” Over-reaction? Probably. But true. Because many Republican politicians do not believe that transgender is real, they have proposed and passed more anti-trans laws in the past few years than in the entire previous history of our country. They don’t understand what being trans is, so they’re afraid of those who do, so they feel entitled and empowered to punish trans people with despicable laws that dehumanize them, demonize them, and seek to strip them of the small amount of societal progress they’ve made in the last few decades.
Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t empower us to dismiss or attack it. This brings us to kink-shaming. Kink-shaming is when someone who doesn’t share or approve of someone’s fetish or kink ridicules, mocks, diminishes, or otherwise attempts to shame the person for having that fetish or kink. Some people even try to kink-shame the entire kink and fetish community, saying that kink and fetish in its entirety is sick, perverted, unhealthy, immoral, and unnatural. Sound familiar? The fact that these charges are identical to those historically (and currently) being made against LGBTQ+ people in general, and the hypocrisy of that, doesn’t seem to register with people in our own community who level them at the kinky members of our community.
Internalized kink-shaming, which has the same strangling effect on a person that internalized homophobia, transphobia, or any other emotional self-harm has, is rampant within the kink community. And like internalized homophobia and transphobia, internalized kink-shaming doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It occurs in an environment where people receive constant messaging that parts of themselves, details of their core identity, are somehow bad, wrong, shameful, and must be hidden.
But here are the facts. Everyone has kinks and fetishes, and most of them are harmless. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you and themselves. And no one’s kinks and fetishes are more legitimate than any others. Any kinky activity that happens safely between consenting adults — or alone — is no more shameful than the good old-fashioned missionary position. So lighten up, people! Don’t try to shame someone for their kink. What if they find out about yours? As one of my favorite authors, Roger Ebert, once wrote: “…there is nothing quite so ridiculous as someone else’s sexual fantasies, and nothing as fascinating as our own.”
So as you greet the new year, look to the future with hope and resolve. We will get through this. Things are getting better. However much some people want to freeze time and turn it backward, it continues forward. The future happens. And with the future hopefully comes empathy, understanding, and either realization and acceptance of, or resignation to the fact that we’re all human and all deserve the same rights, dignities, and opportunities. And that we’re all kinky.
Happy New Year!
In Kink We Trust.
Have thoughts, questions, or comments about this column or anything to do with Kink? Write to me at kink@qsaltlake.com, and I’ll print them and answer them in an upcoming column. Be safe, and have fun out there!
Alpha Mercury has been an out and proud member of the Kink/Leather/Fetish/BDSM community his entire adult life. He has a degree in film production from the University of Southern California and is an author of erotic fiction. Alpha Mercury lives with his Leather family in Salt Lake City.
