who wants all the kinksters to stop promoting BDSM on the UU poly feed. Best of British luck with that, darlin’.
letter begins…
I guess it all depends on whether you consider the uu-poly group to be a place to talk about kink. I do, but it’s for the moderators to decide, if we aren’t a democracy.
I used to take what I thought was a moral stance on the subject of other people’s wacky sex practices, in line with how I was raised, of course, but once I figured out that what ‘paraphilias’ are, is a normal human response to various kinds of stress, plus wiring, plus repetition, I quit thinking it was necessarily a bad thing. The moral issue is not whether it’s healthy by a narrow definition, but whether there is genuine consent. Human beings of their nature have long childhoods and are incredibly social, and so experimentation with hierarchy in terms of dominance and submission is not just normal, it’s inevitable. And along with inevitable, we will get extreme.
Paraphilias have been defined as a trifecta of sexuality that is extreme and dangerous and abnormal. Funny thing; I think of rape the same way and yet we have a large constituency of people, both men and women, who think rape is part of the normal course of events – and a desirable one too, as it allows rapists to provide tools of social control for the society at large.
If we want to travel down the path of having our sexuality defined by those who will profit by othering us, then we’re getting off the UU train entirely.
In that regard the kink community has been leading the way for a number of years with an emphasis on consent for scenes. Humans contain a multitude of sexual possibilities and as long as all parties are able to give and obtain agreement for activities my opinion on whether those activities are harmful is just wind.
Paraphilias concerning those who cannot by nature give consent (children, animals, unconscious and disabled, as examples) need a better class of scientists and therapists to figure out what’s going on so it can be controlled for the benefit of all, because the people who came up with the DSM have harmed our culture almost irreparably; each successive iteration has been an object lesson in legitimized othering. I could start raving about the drug companies too and how long it took to get queerness out of the DSM but that rant’s been done better elsewhere.
Paraphilias involving consenting adults who play in safe spaces and in a fashion that isn’t a menace to public health are not my concern. Which is why I choose to call THOSE paraphilias kink, and will use the freighted medical term for people who get off forcing their violent imaginations and lust on those weaker than themselves. Solitary paraphiliacs I just feel sorry for but I always was a softie.
I don’t want to other people. Draw the circle wide, friends. We all need love and acceptance, and we have to model it, whether we feel like punching each other out occasionally or not, or want the (pick a minority group) – oops, I meant kinksters – to leave the room while we’re talking about our serious matters.
Letter ends
At least I didn’t say tone troll, evoke Hitler or tell her to go fuck herself, so there’s that. I didn’t have permission to quote her letter, which was a masterpiece of liberal uptightness, srsly.
