What To Do With The Under 18 Kinky People?

TL;DR: redirect to age appropriate kink positive sex ed resources

I’m going to talk about an elephant in the room, or precisely speaking an elephant that, while left out of the room, still requires addressing. This particular piece, I think will also distress and disturb people, not because it talks about abuse in a standard trigger warning fashion, but because it requires me to say something flat out: minors need kink as part of a rigorous and inclusive sex ed, but how things are structured fails them. 

I also drop a disclaimer:

Adults should not have sex with children or teens, and good sex ed, is not a participatory mentorship. It pains me we need to say that, but lest you think this is coming from any sort of gross mid-century style overextension of the sexual revolution, I believe sex ed should be age appropriate, and a whole life process that talks not just about STIs and birth control, but also consent. That latter belief is not controversial. I also believe that sex ed for grown ups cannot happen simultaneous to sex ed for those under 18.

Are we good? Then let’s talk about the problem!

While I do not claim to be a sex educator, I care enough about peer to peer support that I feel comfortable talking about this problem from that perspective. Many of you may know I am a volunteer moderator at r/femdomcommunity. I’m pretty proud of what we accomplished, over a decade of support focused discussion, advice and resource sharing. We make a space for everyone, from folks in multi decade elaborate power exchange dynamics to newbies still questioning what this all even means. We cover pretty much anyone who can string together enough English to navigate Reddit, and clearly are a lot of people’s first introduction to the reality of kink outside of fantasy. As a result we tackle everything from avoiding scammers and sextortion to self acceptance and busting stereotypes.

There’s one group r/femdomcommunity can’t help, however: teenagers. Or, specifically, we can’t help those below the threshold to access adult spaces. Like most spaces that touch on sexuality and intimacy, we are strictly 18+. That doesn’t make us unique, that makes us the default. Nonetheless, just based on the fact that we have to actively screen and ban people, it’s pretty clear that there is a sizeable population of teens who are trying to explore to get more information. We aren’t making these people interested in the topic or advertising to entice them, and they aren’t coming to us accidentally while trying to write a book report on Lord of the Flies or something. But, we want them safe, so out they go.

Thus, it’s a challenge that kink communities do not have the resources or structure for the 14-17 year old cohort, but a vast number of folks start exploring before 18. This is a taboo topic, with sites like fetlife and many online communities within places like Reddit cracking down on people describing anything about even their earlier attraction to their kinks. There’s a good reason, as unfortunately opening the door to true, non-horny anecdotes about one’s self discovery takes scrupulous moderation not to devolve to penthouse forum style tales. Unfortunately the side effect of this is to give the false impression kinks just suddenly pop out of the aether the minute you hit your area’s age of adulthood. 

At the same time, even other kinky people tend to treat what we do as advanced and more dangerous. Unfortunately there’s a bad habit of treating this as the bonus DLC you only get to do once you have tried and mastered vanilla sex. And, the population at large struggles to grapple with a violent debate over how adults are permitted to explore and experience their sexuality, much less what those under 18 should be permitted to know. Implying that people have sexual feelings and or even curiosity before 18 will immediately get you labeled a groomer, regardless of your actual intent. The political will is pretty sure that even seeing a whiff of sexuality or even queer love is akin to violating someone, and age gating online already informally provides a significant barrier to minors getting even carefully tailored to them resources.  

Where educational information is available for anyone below 18, it’s still a mess. Most sex ed barely tolerates vanilla and the abstinence only/shamey education folks are getting is doing a lot of damage. It ironically fails in the other direction, not only generally defaulting to generic heterosexuality, but compulsory sexuality, usually centering penis in vagina as the be all and end all of sex. There are more positive approaches, but even people who should know better sound identical to conservative puritanical weirdos, talking about how looking at a picture of bare breasts is an addictive substance, or if called on how silly this is, explaining they imagine there is some sort of turbo super sexier than regular porn-porn, that will psychologically warp anyone exposed to it. Pair this with a pop culture that even free of ostensible porn, immerses anyone who doesn’t live in a cave in ambiguous potentially horny randomness (even at least through trying to enforce the sort of prude that draws more attention to potential lewdness than if you didn’t do anything at all) nobody is actually materializing at age 18 with not preconceived notions or ideas.

As a result, we are knee deep in 18-26 year olds who use pathological language to describe their interest in kink, as an addiction or something they caught off porn. To someone paying attention to patterns in history, they sound like queer people escaping very religious households- deeply ashamed or at best ambivalent about an unavoidable part of their desires. That’s real harm. The problem is that you can block porn all you want, but there’s no age gate on sex negative garbage. While you can’t tell even a 16 year old sex is a potentially good, optional part of being human without significant and even violent political push back, you absolutely can tell them sex is dirty, dangerous and whatever they want, if it isn’t a squeaky clean monogamous relationship embarked on as late in life as possible, is wrong.

But, adult oriented spaces can’t just help by letting teens in

Unfortunately, 18+ spaces usually aren’t safe because we can’t vet to prevent people trying to have sex with the under 18s. This, by the way, is the bare minimum of special best practices in place you need to use, if your volunteer with minors, alongside other things like formal criminal background checks. Thus, if someone’s under 18 and you run a kink group we have a duty of care to exclude, but “bye, fuck off” is only pushing them to unscrupulous places or furthering the idea this is a morally reprehensible extra lewd vice.

Right now, the solution is to remove anyone under 18 from your adult kink space, but I don’t think you should just do that. You can do one more step. I think that a person who is curious enough to find there way to you shouldn’t just be released to the wilds, because they will probably just look for somewhere less restricted, for example a kink oriented discord that doesn’t check ID. It will also affirm the false impression of what we are doing being worse than vanilla, a dirty secret they need to be protected from because of the inherent content, not because random adults mingling with vulnerable teens even if we were say, a novel writing club, is high risk for the teens.

The two resources I suggest are the website Bish, and the long standing non-profit Scarleteen

Specifically you can use these links:
www.bishuk.com/sex/kink/ to redirect to a more static resource about vocabulary and norms that takes a harm reduction approach, and Scarleteen, which offers community interaction tailored help. The latter is particularly important because they use things like forums and a help line, in addition to just educational articles. One thing my long standing work with the kink community has taught to me is being able to talk to other people is much more effective than just passive piece of writing or a video for encouraging someone to feel welcomed. Both operate in the space of being non-profits, and unlike your 18+ forum or discord server or whatever are resourced and designed specifically to keep minors trying to get information away from random unvetted adults.

So, I am deeply grateful for Bish and Scarleteen to be doing the work to cover where we can’t. And if you use an age gate/warning,  or a ban message for your community, I really advocate for linking those who are too young to be there to resources like this instead of just bouncing them. It can and will make all the difference to the next generation.

Also, please do feel free to share other teen appropriate, but sex positive resources in the comments. Those two sites I mentioned probably aren’t the only ones out there, but they are the ones to which I am most familiar.


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