Read on Twitter
This take is not good for a variety of reasons, but not necessarily because it is “kink shaming” or other dismissive reasons that most people easily brush aside. Instead, it has fundamental and disturbing implications for consent that are harmful in myriad ways.
As a leatherdyke, I don’t think kink shaming is a systemic oppression in the way that transphobia or racism are, and it bothers me when annoying kinky cishet people complain about being oppressed. The majority of prejudice I face is bc I’m a trans woman.
That being said, this type of rhetoric in particular hurts many oppressed people—for instance, as articulated below, it provides a pipeline to anti-sex work ideology bc it as base questions a women’s ability to have autonomy and consent. https://twitter.com/dodorimoo/status/1351243475086401543?s=21
The idea that (especially cis white) women are innocents incapable of true autonomy is the entire framework SWERFs use to argue sex workers must be “protected” from their own choices and what TERFs use to argue transfems are a “threat to women and girls”.
Undermining the idea that a women can meaningfully consent, you set up a system that undermines victims of sexual violence—for instance, sex workers who are not believed when they are raped bc the underlying belief is that all the consensual work they do is not any different.
This is not at all to undermine critiques of patriarchy and cisheteronormativity—like yeah, cishet relationships especially can be a hotbed for abuse and we should be able to talk about that structurally, but that doesn’t require fundamentally condescending and sexist attitudes.
Abuse and lack of consent can exist anywhere, and it definitely happens in kink spaces and relationships. That said, the conversations and language around informed consent are often more robust and developed around kink bc it’s even more necessary.
I’m not saying we should not examine and critique our own desires—we certainly should! But a scene being played out in a consensual negotiated dynamic is not the thing in and of itself, and acting like they might as well be one and the same is dangerous.
Anyway, I probably won’t ever get married, but for the time being I would like to make it clear that when my (non-men) partners “pretend to abuse me”, it is usually because I was very good or asked very nicely first.
