Twink is a genre of desire metonymic for age-play.

this is not a value judgement because if I wanted to say pedophilia I would’ve said that.

what I desire above all else is for more honesty about that register of desire. it is the secrecy, codes of silence, cultural repressions of naming that renders it violent and indistinguishable from a culture of sexual terror that feeds off of the duplicity of “age of consent”.

the duplicity of an “age of consent” is its reliance on a set of assumptions about sexual violability that perpetuates rape culture, whereby one’s capacity to (revoke) consent is predicated entirely on age as opposed to relations of power, or complex scenes of powerlessness.

this (legico-juridical) grammar shifts the onus of violation to the maturity of the violated; away from specific scenes of violence that often slide in and out of ethico-epistemic clarity—scenes of violence where the violated is always already imagined violable/capable of consent

this is not say that an age of consent is something that communities need not come to a consensus about—they have been, under different names (see: rites of passage) for millennia, in fact.

rather, it’s to say that seduction is built into the grammar of an “age of consent”.

this is not to take the twink kink away from the queer community. age-play—believe it or not—does *not* have to rehearse rape culture. HOWEVER, rape culture is most upheld in the queer community through age-play/twink kink and it’s time we stop ignoring it.

the “Daddy” discourse.
the “Damn, bae, you so little, but you be really takin' that pipe" talk.
all of this is twink kink, age-play and unless we discuss how sex is about the desire to be powerful over/against/with the powerless we will never begin divesting from rape culture.

as a young college-going butchqueen, I thought I was the shit dating older men, who, although weren’t 30+, were going to College/finishing HS when I left middle school.

it took me later to realize that it was about me being the shit *and* about*, let’s say, how small I was.