Content Notice for What It Says on the Tin. NSFW.
Inspired in no small part by the grand tradition of Captain Awkward, and written back in August 2015, when I was still at Freethought Blogs.
Other Round Ups:
Continue reading “Search Term Round-Up #5: Polyamory & Kink”
This past weekend was FtB Con. On Saturday, I was on a panel about kink for those who were beginning to explore it. I brought up issues of racism that I have faced online and off in the scene and specifically described a situation where I was nonconsensually fetishized for my skin tone at a kink event. Another panelist compared the situation to being followed and harassed at a mall and advised that people ought to firmly say “Stop!” to anyone who was doing such a thing.
As the panel wasn’t about exclusively my experiences and I felt a little flustered, I didn’t cover all the reasons why the situation hadn’t been that simple for me. The idea that it would have been easy for me to halt what had been happening is based on the assumption that the only power dynamics at play in kink spaces are pre-negotiated ones between consenting adults. Continue reading “FtB Con Postmortem: Racism in the Kink Scene”
This is post 1/4 of an October Friday uncouth rant series leading up to Halloween. Content notice for horror movie GIFs. A version of this appeared on my Facebook page.
There are days when I do my darndest to be full of subtlety and nuance. This is not one of those days. Since today is National Coming Out Day, let’s talk about closets.
I’m out about a lot of things, things some might say I ought to be a bit less shameless about.
Continue reading “National Coming Out Day: I Don’t Want to Hang Out in Your Poly Closet”
[Content Notice for Consent Violation, BDSM, kink. Some links and discussion NSFW. If you don’t understand a term, click the links or access the whole glossary.]
BDSM and kink do not exist in a bubble isolated from the influences of a sex-hating, sexist society. As such, there often is replication of extant societal norms within alt-sex contexts — the disproportionately-high number of BDSM households where one man has many female partners who are supposed to be faithful to him, for example. When said replication occurs with the enthusiastic consent of all involved, non-participant personal discomfort with it, even discomfort stemming from a legitimate place, isn’t necessarily a legitimate reason to criticize it. At the same time, marginalized people’s discomfort with their oppression being replicated by kinksters is not something to be dismissed out of hand.
Continue reading “When Straight Male Submissive Desires Muck Up Feminism”
