FetLife Is A Hallowed Ground
I can’t wait until the long and harried (or shaven ;) ) history of kink is brought to light. It will be a good day when kinksters can arrive at adulthood and at partnered sex without a shred of shame for their desires. The sun will shine, ball gags will roll freely, and we will collectively throw ropes and butt plugs in the air in celebration.
In the march toward kink visibility, I consider myself a quiet voice. I am vanilla-ish - my kinks are relatively banal, a little dirty-talk here, a little blindfolding there, a little spanking everywhere. I consider myself somewhat of an ally analog to LGBTQ rights. I don’t deserve a letter in the acronym, if ever there becomes a kink acronym, just as the A has been removed from LGBTQA. In the heist of fighting for kink rights, I’m only the getaway driver.
Because, much like the fight for queer rights, in which the first and loudest-at-the-time voices were pioneers like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera - trans people, drag queens, gender deconstructionists - the loudest voices in the fight for kink visibility and acceptance should belong to those who have been silenced. The voices should belong to those with clothespins pinching their bellies. Those who walk around a world built for and completely infiltrated by vanillas. Those wearing invisible chains of alienation and freakdom, and who only shirk those heavy chains when they enter their dungeons and don their well-worn gags and ropes.
I have not been silenced and shamed the way BDSMers and furries have. They are consistently denied by society. They are both covertly and overtly told that their desires are freakish and they should hide them shamefully. Sometimes, and this is perhaps the saddest form of oppression, the shaming is perpetrated by the biggest kinkster of all. The person with the most internalized kinkphobia, the most socially abhorred sexual desires, the most self-hatred, becomes the biggest bully. Oppression is pervasive and divisive. It recruits its own victims as treacherous soldiers to fatten its ranks.
All this to say that there will come a glorious time when people will feel safe to discover themselves sexually without layers of shame distorting their desires and expressions. There will be safe dungeons in every city, and supportive communities of kinksters of all degrees. There will come a day when, in pursuing investigative creative writing for an online publication dedicated to strangeness, I will drop the alias and make a FetLife account for myself using my real name.