Kinky? You May Be On The Asexual Spectrum.

Kinky? You may be on the asexual spectrum.

This is not the first time I have written about this, nor do I expect it to be the last. This time the trigger was participating in a podcast about sexuality and realizing that though I had written about the kink/asexual spectrum connection a bunch, I haven’t really explained why the two are complimentary in a rigorous enough sense. I also wanted to do some sort of typed up summary of another phenomena, where after talking about asexuality or how it works I find a lot of folks, kinksters in particular, find the definition surprisingly resonates with them.

Needless to say, this got long.

Explaining asexuality always is posited on needing to explain how sex works in a broader, global sense. As I have written in other blog posts, most folks tend to define asexuality in a very rigid binary, imagining a person with no erotic desire or inclination. This can be part of being asexual, but it really isn’t the only part.

Attraction (that’s inspired erotic desire for another person) is not the same thing as arousal. The core of asexual identity presumes not so much whether or not you are capable of arousal, but how you experience attraction.

The problem with telling people this is that asexuality hides in plain sight. For example, homosexuality tends to stand out because the behavior associated: attempting to get into relationships or have sex with people in a way that breaks normative social barriers, not having sex is the baseline human state. Likewise, being immersed in stuff that could or could not be interpreted sexually (e.g. artistic nudes, music about really, really wanting someone else in a body responsive way) is the background radiation of human cultural existence. And, having sex with people you are in no way attracted to is so common as to not be considered remarkable. It’s generally regarded as unfortunate, but some of the most conservative societies can be very into compulsory sex done out of a sense of duty rather than inherent horniness.

So, if you go around not being into what your society (or subculture) generally identifies as ok to be sexy, as long as you are willing to perform the behaviors associated with your social role your internal thoughts on the matter are going to be treated as trivial or specific to you. The folks who absolutely won’t or can’t cooperate with the expected behaviours are treated like a pitiable minority, either eccentrics, shirkers or people with a medical issue, be it physical or psychological.

You, reader, who is probably a more sensitive soul, almost certainly adopts the position that nobody should be compelled to fuck anyone. You probably feel incredibly sympathetic – someone should help those poor people not do sex! And, you are generally able to accept these people fit the label of Asexual. Otherwise, if you think about this at all, you generally only do so in the context of biology, where some living things clone themselves.

Here’s the current assumptions around how the typical way people are sexually wired work: 

Humans are expected to default to being attracted to a fair number of whatever the gender(s) they are into. They are expected to be this way sans anything other than that person existing and them being aware of that fact, or maybe getting a good look at certain bits of them or the whole body. That’s being allosexual, the opposite of asexual

Then there’s anyone who fits the following: they experience attraction like this not at all, sporadically or require some additional factor. These people are all on the asexual spectrum.

AllosexualAttracted to people reliably without other modifiers other than being whatever gender(s) matter to you and some influence of taste.
AsexualAttraction to others is absent, sporadic, rare or requires some other factor, such as an intimate connection.

When you say that, a large number of people cross their eyes and look bewildered. 

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The Trauma Of Telling The Truth

As you know, health issues have been a core part of the sporadic hiatus, and emotional well being is part of them. It’s something I am a bit sad and sheepish about. In my happiest D/s relationship, most uncomplicated or “yes, but” tainted, I am also at a point where I am not giving the content here that probably would have helped me equivalent back when I founded things 10 years ago. But, maybe I should talk about the pain of how trying to bring change hurt me, within the community, too?

Content Note: transphobia, social criticism, bullying, burn out, mental health, and sexual assault.

Recently, after seven years in the role, I quit moderating r/femdom. I’d been basically checked out for more than a few years. This was, not in the least part, because ultimately the act of trying to curate porn that gives 0 space for my actual sexuality (while purporting to be about me) is about as inherently rewarding as watching the bailiffs auction your heirlooms to help settle the unpaid mortgage on the family farm they are also seizing. I had started, amusingly, because I got banned and publicly spoke out about how the environment was hostile to dommes, particularly lifestyle dommes and tried to seed a little foothold- not removing the fap but suggesting it could be otherwise. The trigger for quitting is betwixt the therapy I am faithfully doing and yet another DM attempting, in good faith on their part, to point out I was not doing enough.

This isn’t, by the way, an attack on this person. She pointed out, being trans, she was banned for content with her bio-dick, which the group gives a pass to with a strapon. Systemic unfairness is rampant- users flag trans people just for being trans, at the best of times. Since everyone is very, very off the rules, even if you could argue her post broke the letter of the law or spirit, she wasn’t without a solid point. But I was looking at her relatively polite appeal to me, pointing out the gatekeeping of the group, and something just came untied. It was that while someone COULD take on her crusade, I was so burned out and, tbh, socially burned by trying to help that I was the wrong person to do it. If I did, I would probably piss everyone else off, putting her hopes on me and then dashing them. This would also be no win for me, as excessive past experience shows that friendly fire is a pretty standard experience in progressive spaces, as well as fragging.

I wouldn’t be able to get the other moderators to be able to make a useful change, all they would be is more burned out and pissed off. I was the most approachable for her issue, but holy hell was I holding on by a thread. I knew that the team I worked with, however well meaning, were similarly ground down. Bot campaigns, hate mail, trashing and bad faith social justice flavoured appeals had all done a lot of damage, leaving a team that was doing the bare minimum to keep the lights on. Fragility, in its various forms has been called out as a barrier to change, but being what people call a “Geriatric Millennial”, I am old enough to see that while conflict might not be abuse, it is labour. It’s labour to sit with the discomfort of your own faults. The work doesn’t go away, even if it is important, no spoons magically materialize extra to make people more resilient because the work is important.

You can definitely power that gap on anger, or fear, but that is a quick way to cPTSD.

Oh, poor Pearl, making excuses! Nah, this is honesty, not an emotional appeal to you. The direct truth, here, is that me in the moderator role wasn’t going to help her with her problem. BUT. Me in the moderator role was probably standing in the way of someone who could. Not because I was actively blocking someone- like most load bearing, endless in scope volunteer roles, being present was leaving people comfortable enough not to do the work to fix things or let them fail.

I wanted to tell her that I already thought r/femdom being essentially r/grumpypegging and low effort spam killed my joy. I wanted to say that the standards we tried to determine who was/wasn’t a dom were nonesense, that they reflected a mindset that was fundamentally anti-sexworker, while still consuming almost exclusively commercial content. Femdom is subculture that, due to collective marginalization of lifestyle only and pro dommes alike, needed us to be allies. But the conceptual way reddit’s larger user base handles porn still has the pre-revenge porn laws mindeset. It’s a harassing, greedy and piracy first attitude that bred The Fappening. And, ultimately, it wasn’t my subreddit to decide to blow things up to turn into a feminist sex utopia. Nobody died and made me in change, and, nobody gave me a private army to accomplish some sort of coup-by-doing-the-work. But I didn’t, cuz she didn’t message me out of the blue to support me.

How about saying “I just work here, ma’am”?

I knew that wasn’t a good enough reply, either. Ultimately while the rewards of helping were minimal, a reputational boost translating to such a miniscule amount of privilege compared to say, working the same hours at McDonalds and using the money to self promote via ads- I was still there. Why was I doing this? Because I thought, in some small way I could push things to be a bit better for everyone.

I volunteer to feel safe, and foster a sense of belonging. I’m autistic, which doesn’t mean all autistics experience things this way, but like all humans I have people needs. My people needs were nurtured in socially abusive environments, while my head is full of boundless creative energy and vision. I unavoidably stand in the foreground, becoming a lead weight on a rubber sheet, warping the gravity of an environment I am in. Maybe this tendency to check out when I am not actively engaged is an ADHD thing too, but nevertheless, it is a thing. And this trying to be in motion, positively, has a history of harming me.

Then Perish.

My therapist asked me something a few weeks back. Why do I mention taking on an “11 victim serial rapist”, a fair bit, as an anchor in my life narrative? He’s a good therapist, so we have the rapport where the pillars of my self can be poked without hurting me. It was a good question. Taking on a series of missing stairs, culminating with that last one, and trying to emphasize the shit I dealt with, with Dunter, to get people to listen, did me irreparable harm, and alienated me from the Montreal kink community. Oh, and my relationship with my partner at the time fell apart- it needed to evolve because of core incompatibilities, but holy fuck, the timing.

Losing your social group to ostracism sucks. It’s actually potentially spectacularly fatal. I wish it hadn’t taken Lindsey Ellis having a second breakdown due to extended social abuse by mob to trip over: “Hot Allostatic Load“, but it helped understand what was going on.

Trying to understand my mental health can be put through a few lenses. One perspective is that things have never been ok- I was an anxious child, to begin with, who experienced ongoing abuse trauma. Another is that my early twenties to thirties were cyclical disasters: boom and bust, functional to non. Or, a person with existing vulnerabilities moved from an abusive family; to an abusive relationship; to an abusive situation in her community… to another even more abusive community, outside of kink.

Being accurate, when I took on Kommandant and Dunter, both sought to destroy my reputation, the latter by implying that I was abusive as well to change the subject. Then, because I had a reputation as the only person with a spine, when I didn’t deliver the results that people wanted on yet one more of many issues, fairly unpleasant humans decided to dox me. They did so because in social justice, any damage for progress is and ends justifies the means. Nothing like deleting a post using your real name on fetlife, and then being told you were silencing them. Guess that’s tone policing now, isn’t it? >_>

I am not just bitter, I’m traumatized. Also bitter. But, mostly trauma.

At the same time, by the way, my online life was picking up stalkers. Pretty gnarly ones, the kind where yeah, there’s clearly some mental health issues going on, but also someone you have never met or interacted with is hell bent on personally punishing you for a relationship they imagined you had with them. Most crazy people don’t do that, this was more the celebrity dehumanization effect.

So I quit, running away into a LARP club, and into Vancouver. And on the way, the LARP club ripped my spine out through my ass. Because it turns out vampire LARP’s poisoned history makes the sexual abuses of the Montreal BDSM scene look like a walk in the park.

Bleeding out various metaphorical injuries got round 2 of disordered eating, followed by covid’s impact just kicking what little stamina I had left. I have been cooling my heels on about 1.5 years now of long term disability. What can I say about that?

I am getting better. I am anxious I will never be fully “ok” to function, of tackling permanent disability to work full time. I am filled with so much guilt and anxiety around the Patreon thing falling by the wayside, I can’t even bring myself to open the site, even though I probably would go back to it much sooner if I did. But a lot of where I got so far in my recovery is heralded by abrogation of responsibilities. Quitting things.

I first noticed that in the larp side. Like most creative hobbies, it’s notorious for volunteer labour making even “for profit” endeavors possible. The pocket I enjoyed is even more shoe string, nourishing a community where even minimal membership fees are a hardship. Leaving aside stumbling from sexual abuse in kink to sexual and other abuse in LARP, there’s very much an over reliance on “hero” volunteers, running unopposed for elected positions of implied sort of leadership, but largely admin. And the people in those roles are a smaller pool than the member base, doing it at the expense of personal life, reputation and health. It continues, because if they stopped the event would stop.

And at some point I sad down and did the math- if it wasn’t important enough to people to support it, then they didn’t deserve to have it. Would this event, this idea or project die but for one person or team? Then perish.

When I left Montreal, the munch I hosted vanished.

Inheritance, alone in an era of missing stairs and #MeToo, became a mess. Events that didn’t act to make themselves safer, ironically, faced less damage. Not because they were better off doing so, but because the 18-35 community didn’t have its shit together not to turn into a ridiculous mud sling if said can of worms were opened. They grew too dependent on Pearl spending $40 a month on a drink she wouldn’t otherwise consume, and a taxi home so she could host a gathering that was slightly safer and curated than others. The fight over the amorphous cluster of folks that became attached to this group overshadowed the labour of keeping things safe.

Cliff, of Pervocracy, talked about this as well. They have one of the most influential theories on moral and social behaviour of groups, but their Missing Stair essay came at a cost I became familiar with. I became, much as they described their own experience, the holding place for the trauma of others.

You don’t get to one and done, to pick up that sword becomes a lifelong commitment, in the eyes of others. Which sounds noble and ideal for everyone, because, like, shouldn’t we all be unstintingly fighting against abuse? Most of the space we call social media is that sort of participatory effort, a push in all directions, so you would think there would be more people doing the work that needs doing.

Only we clearly aren’t. Because the larger world is a hostile place, the burdens disproportionately fall on these load bearing actors. and then the price of failure or imperfection is “we trusted you, the status of being trusted should have been enough”.

Just purely hosting that Munch was, shocking to me, revolutionary to most folks. One evening a month, emailing a bar and making a fetlife event. It spawned two direct (welcomed) copycats that filled needs my event didn’t. And yet at the time it was a remarkable act of will and inclusion even before I started taking whisper network warnings and shouting them. Acting on them, banning people.

I sort of wondered about those legendary wise people and oracles, with people seeking out some poor bronze age bastard to judge their legal dispute or tell them how to plan their personal lives and granary systems. I think also about the shock people forever have when they discover someone popular isn’t rich, works a regular job.

To help others or to speak is to barter your participation in a group

A pithy bit of writing I stumbled over recently observed that in spiritualist societies, when you started having personal occult revelations, your existing group or church would typically exile you. They might have even be founded by another exile with a vision, but yours would become a bridge too far.

I feel a lot of kinship with Contrapoints, just a girl talking, who lucked into being better at talking and entertaining at the right time. Hers was a monkey paw, trying to protect her community and understand the human condition, which arguably made her inevitable transition a bit smoother, but I can’t help thinking that she was smart/positioned enough to make the same income in a short sleeve polo as a software engineer. Then she could still have spent, as she put it “luxury car money” on the medical side of alleviating some of her dysphoria. There sure are a lot of Tesla orbiting every FANG hub I have been around, and a lot of folks participating in the resulting countercultural communities that spring up in such cities.

Instead, the poor woman became a living goddess style avatar in the way we modern people do it. If you were fanciful and biblically raised you could say the Eden breaking nakedness Adam and Eve traded for was an awareness others could see them and care. Sort of like people suggest the god of foresight, Prometheus, isn’t being punished for stealing fire, but giving humans the anxiety of being able to live outside the now. The maker of the monkey with anxiety, if you will.

Other people have written on the toxicity of the traumatized trapped in a marginalized space, retraumatizing each other endlessly. But, with my double helping of the usual monkey anxiety and being a freak among the freaks, now what?

I guess I do what I always do: process my feelings messily and publicly in a long form essay. But I think I will also suggest that we need to do a way better job on foundational shit. Missing stairs exploit being more effort and social complexity to address than to leave as a shared hazard. Believe the victim was a nice start, but it’s not making a tangible structure of next steps or what to do when you “believe the victim” but all the doctors in the hospital are gunshot victims too.

I need there to be a community that supports me without eating me alive in the process. And I need there to be a community with diffused labour-of-justice that is not done from a place of constant high amp. I don’t know what that is, but right now I won’t be trying to found it, as I am a bit occupied with trying to smelt a few more spoons out of the pile of scraps, swords and old razor blades I have been given to work with.

BDSM Belongs At Pride

kink belongs at pride BDSM belongs at pride we belong at pride

It’s smug kind of “I told you so” that this year the conversation has turned from an almost kink critical “they can’t consent to that” to a reminder that we very much belong. When I bashed out the ideas that formed the skeleton a few months ago, suggesting kink in public was actually ok was enough to get me blocked by people.

Don’t take my word for it, check out the ever insightful Kat Blaque or Watts the Safeword. They don’t necessarily agree with me on all points, but before you read me, it’s a good idea to arm yourself with some other perspectives to understand that in writing this I accept my take is probably the most radical, it’s coming from a larger nudge to the Overton Window from everyone. You don’t have to agree with everything I am going to say. You can take some of my arguments and discard others. I just ask that you assume I am arguing from a good faith place.

I believe BDSM belongs at Pride, and the arguments not include it are fundamentally against the spirit of the event.

But first, a caveat: If you don’t think kink belongs at Pride, or you disagree with me, you probably aren’t a bad person.

Sometimes these arguments against kink are trying to be protective, either of people at large or minors. The problem is that they rest on claiming any awareness of kink anyone could have is a comparative level of lewdness to reenactment of a Public Disgrace shoot. Another is to suggest that it’s a derail, that being kinkyed has nothing to do with any of the different identities we choose to address. Sometimes this attitude is because a ham handed kinkster tried to make a one-to-one comparison at some point in the past about how their marginalization was equivalent to a group with worse troubles. Sometimes the person perceives kink as a peculiar hobby that could also traumatize people, putting it in the same camp as the “no cops at pride” conversation.

Kink isn’t actually as lewd/filthy as people make it out to be in its totality. BDSM, as a subculture evolved so concurrently with the queer communities it weaves in and out of the fabric of the latter’s identities that separation of impossible. Additionally, the wholesale rejection of kink is explicitly ace-excluding, insisting on a very narrow definition of sexual and non-sexual.

My radical take: I think the whole enchilada should be there

Yes, the Leather folk. The people on leashes. The pup masks. They not only should be there, but not quarantined off in a special “after dark” space. And I push more progressively, that there’s even significant context in which a “scene” in public is also not a violation equivalent to vanilla genital fucking either.

This isn’t going to win me many friends to be the weird lady who actually thinks that say, the cherry tree shibari shoot that happened a few years ago in Toronto (not at Pride but in a public park) is fine. It’s not because I think I should be dragging everyone into being actors in my own personal fantasy re-enactment. I do feel that even just flying the leather pride flag and allowing a few sashes and corsets, or just carrying the paraphernalia of kink is still conceding unfair ground. And I do not personally put myself in the business of having elaborate public bondage scenes (etc…) in public not because I think they are morally wrong. I do so for the same reason I cover my breasts even though it is legal in my country. I decline to do certain things because of my own self protection against coercive harassment.

But Miss Pearl, you say, how can you force your sexuality onto people?

I dunno, I have a hard time taking that sort of pearl clutching (snerk) about kink when people wander around wearing special monogamy rings and inviting their whole family to watch them celebrate their monogamous commitment in a monogamy dress, with a monogamy cake, and two very sex themed optional monogamy imminent parties, in a monogamy ritual where they often make a big deal about exposing and tossing special underwear and showing how pair bonded they are in public.

Or walking past lingerie ads, or ads for dating services, or lovers lanes of steamy making out. The monogamous, ostensibly vanilla pair bond is seen as so wholesome that naval boats raffle the first kiss with your spouse at port as a ritual, and force everyone else to watch. At a certain point, the decision of what is and isn’t allowed is going to be pretty arbitrary to the culture it exists in. The concept of “private” grapples with the problem that relationships that are vanilla are interwoven with the culture and desires of others. People can be sincerely offended if they aren’t invited to a wedding of someone they care about. People WANT to gather to wear penis veils, or chained to a blow up doll, and run about the street collecting pre-wedding forfeits. 

Ok, you might argue, but BDSM is sex, that stuff is less sexy. It’s romantic.

So, if you mean to tell me a collar is a constant tool of overt arousal and ALL public play is the most vile of exhibitionism, prepare to be severely disappointed. Not only does the tokens we wear have a lot more on par with stealing your lover’s hoodie (or in Silver’s case me thiefing his white cotton t shirts), but usually they signify more of the romantic/belonging aspect of a BDSM relationship than the sexual one.

Not only that, but the bizarre pageantry of kink, precisely because things like leather are off the mainstream, aren’t particularly obviously sexual unless you have a subtext decoder.

Sure that guy might get aroused by being called “pup” as well as get emotional fuzzies, but the leather pup mask he is wearing is so much a fetish that it’s not even sexual unless you share his kink. And we allow plenty of sexy things as empowering- the wearing of revealing clothes and lingerie, padding, etc…

Ok, fine, you may argue, but non-consensual exhibitionism is bad. The world is not your free audience. Why did you need people to know about your private business?!

Sometimes I shouldn’t need to hide. Part of Pride challenges and pushes back on the norms that decide, say, my tits need to be in a top, but the same chest on a man can flop and wobble in the sun. This might be a feminism thing, but its an argument that pokes at what gender even means. Banning kink is part of collectively enforcing that the rituals of relationships and families that people take for granted have to be that way.

In the case of kink in Pride, it isn’t about flashing people, for the most part it is about freedom. I know that a fuck ton of frightened arguing pops out about how they totes saw triple fisting pony butt plug tails, but while I won’t bother telling you it NEVER happened ever in the history of humans being dumb, I can say it’s a fixation that indicates a complete lack of education about what kink and fetishes look like.

While people fret about the overt stuff they easily note, most fetishes pass. It’s sometimes the Pleasers on the Drag Queen. The day collars. The body parts and clothes that the average person would never never think you could find arousing (like wool knit!)

But what if it *IS* obviously sexual damn it!???

Yeah, you might see a vagina costume or a packer. But the lady on the float in the strapon probably isn’t particularly wet right now, she is enjoying feeling so safe about herself she can be open. She, or the big pink labial mascot, or any other permutation of this nature also may be making a transgressive point about gender. We live on a planet where multiple human cultures still explicitly display dicks on stuff, including things like the incredibly wholesome Japanese penis festival or Michelangeo’s David. 

Inversely, we tolerate loads of vanilla stuff that is in the borderline if you have plausible deniability. This is the unfairness to kinky folk- what we do doesn’t get this space. Have a wedding in a park and people may even cheer, hold a collaring ceremony and it’s uncomfortable stares.

And sometimes the sexual is important because it means more. The strapon scene in Sense8? Where you see a wet rainbow dildo bounce on the floor? That’s the sexual turned to convey a profound amount of meaning, of acceptance of one of the character’s core identities. 

Love is love is all very well and good, but we live in a world where the public regulates the private. Sex is also sex. Sex toy bans, porn censorship and even regulations around sodomy all make the intensely personal NOT have the right to that privacy. You cannot say that a dildo is a secret thing and then demand that you can only buy one for “novelty or educational” purposes in certain US states.

Nor would it be ok to tell queer folk they could love who they liked, just to abstain from sex all their lives. Again, all love is the same love until your “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” is actually in effect outside of the most superficial or sanitized expressions of what love might look like.

But, what about kids at pride? Pride is a family event now! And gay kids benefit from attending, if there’s anything sexy they might not go.

I am glad you have thought about the children. As minors with less rights they need protection… however!

We already went through a great deal of time insisting that people being gay or trans in public were requiring conversations kids just weren’t ready for. People tried to argue two guys together meant having to explain the mechanics of anal. And various other permutations of being ok, grudgingly, with kids figuring out a bit of hetero but being in Grave Danger if they had any inkling anything but Barbie and Ken dream wedding was afoot. This is nonsense, you can age appropriately scale the conversation to protect a minor- the same way you can simplify or go into detail as appropriate on subjects like pregnancy or why Aunt Jo uses they pronouns.

I get this is a fraught topic. Again, everyone is still iffy about things like (O.W.L.) Our Whole Lives and fighting over abstinence only education and how and when kids get to know things.

But, if you mean to tell me “some adults like dressing up, feeling different sensations or playing with who is in charge” is too hard for you to say, oh dear

And if you think there’s really anything at Pride that isn’t popping about in kids cartoons, as comedy or dramatic peril, you haven’t been doing a good enough job screening your kids media. If you are freaking out about pup masks while letting your kid grow up on paw patrol, yikes. Don’t like Bondage? Take Disney off the net blocker white list, and toss out superheros. If you think your kids aren’t integrating these “innocent” scenes into their fantasies as their sexuality develops, I have news for you.

Further, our habit of waiting until anyone is 18 before thinking they can acknowledge kink exists is not really a solution. There’s precious little sex ed, outside of Scarleteen that even acknowledges kink is a thing, outside of closed communties and the intentionally lewd. This is doing harm.

I will never advocate minor/adult kink relationships, but I wouldn’t advocate them as a vanilla thing, either. However! I explicitly believe you can have age appropriate awareness, the way we teach condoms, biology and consent as part of a healthy sex ed. I further feel that when someone who has sexuality but must be protected to discover it can only find one version, it will cause as much shame as abstinence only sex ed does. 

By shutting kink out of a public festival of Pride, you are projecting a simplified perception that this is exclusively a weird extra sexy sex thing that can’t be scaled up or down. You are not allowing minors to receive holistic sex ed in a context where they aren’t directly engaging with adults. Ultimately this goes back to my point that sometimes it’s just thematic resonance or romance, and if you don’t know that, it’s not fair to fail to let kink folks show otherwise.

Ok, but what if BDSM *is* sexual? You write a porn blog, god damn it!

Sex (in that larger sense) in public also already is a conversation that varies by culture. Who gets declared more or less lewd and what it means where you do things is variable not just by place of origin, body proportions and what we think about that role.

Thus we can have the most wildly erotic dancing in no kissing Bollywood films, or have cultures that consider someone more sexy in more coverage, not less. Generally most humans like full say in whose engorged and moistened genitalia they are exposed to, but even so, the codpiece, the merkin and the penis gourd exist. And none of these are anything other than ok, normal clothing, albeit generally formal.

Further, there is validity to exploring that edge of presumed acceptance, as well. As an intersectional thing, you are under extra scrutiny for being “sexual”. If you are fat, femme, or even just gifted with prodigious breasts or buttocks, for example, you are more policed than you are slim, masculine and so on. Just being seen by other people as being more lewd can, in fact, be a form of discrimination. This effects everyone Pride is meant for, and accusations of predation and more desire are a historical part of the violence such groups experience. It’s a very real double standard.

While flashing people for your jollies is not ok, being able to make people acknowledge that you have sexuality and it should be celebrated is extremely Pride, and so is declaring your sexuality is no less shameful than another person’s.

What was that about BDSM being Queer?

BDSM is, among many things, a loose collection of subcultural norms. Today and for all of its history, its place as part of alternative culture has made it not so much an ally as an active part of Queer cultural history.

Aspects like “Leather” are more Queer than not, with the adoption by straight people following after their popularization in gay communities. While today people may be more familiar with things that are profoundly heteronormative, like the popularization of 50shades, in practice, while BDSM communities may have explicitly Gay, Lesbian, etc… off shoots, and some pockets that are homophobic hot messes, for the most part it is a space built on norms that are some of the most accepting of being queer.

Further, BDSM’s parallel evolution interweaves with the same counter cultural pioneering that created space to be increasingly openly gay, trans, etc… TES, possibly the world’s oldest continuous BDSM group, was participating in Pride when it was still branded as Gay Liberation. The early community building of kink explicitly modeled itself after the same going on in feminism and gay rights.

Sanitizing this from display is selectively determining that some parts of being Queer and Queer history are not ok, and Queerness is ok as long as it’s only a gender swapped version of some sort of 1950s dream.

Right, great, we will let the queer kinksters in, leather daddies and dykes on bikes are go! But you F/ms and M/fs who aren’t containing one or more trans people can simmer down.

(Here is the point that the people tend to lose patience and get unfollowed. You can be mad if you like, but I ask only you bear with me, to my next point…)

For a significant part of the kinked population, the answer of what your sexuality is, is to say BDSM and/or fetish. Sure they might have a gendered preference for who they do that with, but something we don’t talk about is how common it is to be kink dependent for attraction to function. And this is where people get frustrated and tell me BDSM is not an orientation like gay or straight. True!

It is actually under the A for Asexual.

Although not everyone *needs* kink for a sexual or romantic response to work, if you do require BDSM to have functional sexuality, you meet precisely the criteria laid out for demisexuality or other parts of the spectrum of asexuality, aka Grey Ace or Aspec. A lot of kinksters, themselves, have their minds blown when they realize this is them. But yeah, you, reader, if kink is the only thing that makes your sexuality function, could identify as Asexual.

What is Demisexuality/ Grey Ace? 

A less understood part about being Asexual is that it is an umbrella term. It can include the obvious complete absence of a sexuality, but it also includes being Aromantic (where you can be sexual but simply not experience romantic love); and the so called grey or demisexuals, whose.sexual experience is pending a limiting factor. 

A common experience for demis is romantic love being the gateway to experiencing attraction. This means that until that bond is there, nothing can happen. People generally get this, and the modern branding of Pride, “Love is Love” make this incredibly accommodating. Another way one might be on the asexual spectrum is for it to be sporadic, say a libido that is very low or unpredicable.

But for an asexual person, another condition one might have to experience sexuality or attraction is having a paraphilia or fetish. 

In my case, if you tried to have me have a sexual and romantic relationship without kink, the answer is, I couldn’t. I mean, I could fake it and be utterly miserable, but my kinks are my kinks. And for me, love and kink are two factors that regulate my sexuality. Unfortunately this part of sexual knowledge is so removed from the conversation it took a lifetime to learn this was a hard truth.

As a result, I had years of painful, bad sex that was in no way coerced by my partners, with everyone telling me it was just a matter of time and practice. I can’t blame them, although one party was outright abusive, the rest were largely good, giving humans who tried to find the clitoris, etc…

The most giving, foreplay granting hot vanilla human will waste their time with me, and I them. In my case, I can experience some easier physical attraction if I fall in love (almost universally facilitated by a text based medium and kink) and my bits have the right nerve endings to use them conventionally, but subtract my fetishes and that relationship will die on the vine.

Further, my porn consumption follows that pattern- screw gender, I am just looking for a certain intensity and activity set. Gay, straight, agender… although the consumptive scope means I write what I like, I also consume a lot of romance and fast flip through perfectly well done sex scenes. This is my life.

I wanted to be “normal”. It would have made my life, including my dreams of sex work, much more feasible. But my body and heart needs something very specific. If I get that, fireworks. If not, it has all the erotic thrill and romance of looking through a 1960s wallpaper catalogue.

But what about Pride? You don’t mean to tell me all kinky folk are Ace do you?

Sure, for some people kink is a value add not the main event, but that’s not on you to decide from a distance. I wouldn’t say my experience is a one to one comparison with every other kinked person, and I definitely personally don’t go blundering into Pride declaring it needs to be all about me now. But! You cannot celebrate people being Ace with the same commitment to equality if you won’t actually acknowledge what Ace can and does look like.

I can understand when you are getting murdered for holding hands in public, this is not comparable to me lying on my back wondering why this is the bad kind of pain while a very considerate vanilla partner tries their best. I have amazing passing privilege, just like people tend to not notice my bisexuality or my gender fluidity.

I also acknowledge my fully radical position on kink inclusion is not going to win me any friends. But I do ask that you consider how much ground we give up by conceding to even a very sterile kink, and how arbitrary even our definition of scene/ not scene is. I do not think it’s fair to let people who are not even kinky have such a strong voice in defining what is both sexual and not actually means. And I have some concerns that our caution that we violate consent to even let people know we exist is a form of internalized shame.

Kinky folk are not a monolith, but neither are we benefiting from closeting and ignoring that a good part of what we built is actually a culture, not just a sex thing. In conclusion, BDSM belongs at Pride.

(There is a whole other argument that kink is morally reprehensible in it’s own right, which, well, I can’t help you there. Sure just because it turns someone on doesn’t make it ok. However  after a point, once we hammer out whatever SSC, RACK or PRICK system works best for me and my partners, what I do with consenting adults eventually falls into “fuck off, this is my thing, die mad about it”)

A Femdom Cuckolding Story

Sorry guys, Friday’s fiction is being put off on account of life reasons. Instead, here’s a little short story there’s no market to publish! Yaye, Femdom cuckolding

David looked at himself in the mirror. This was his bathroom, the condo, despite housing two people, was overly gifted in the subject thanks to the current fashion in interior design to build houses with more toilets than asses in residence, giving him the second largest of three. Laura had taken the master bath for herself with a little snort of amusement, and proceeded to fill it, floor to ceiling with all the vast arsenal of femininity, plug in appliances for torturing hair; bottles with chemical lists as long as they were incomprehensible; and things with the word “spa” in the branding. This was on top of her appropriation of most of the bedroom, for a lovely little vanity table with massive mirror and yet more chemical bottles, and a full closet that displaced most of his limited wardrobe.

David, by comparison, restrained himself to cheap cans of shaving cream and semi-disposable razors, though his lack of care meant that more often than not the shaving cream with nicked from Laura, bearing the soothing suggestion of sensitive skin friendly vitamin E and squirting out of the can in an alarmingly bright violet tinted gel. When they had first engaged in the business of making a couple, cocooned into the sticky, gooey months of first love, she’d bought him a full kit, badger hair brush, mug and soap, and a straight razor, but these sat in their box, used twice and disregarded as an idea nicer in theory than practice. Foofery, even the male kind, generally was beyond David’s patience.

If he had to think about his relative masculinity, which he generally tried not to, it was there in full presence in the mirror: Lantern jaw, big calves, bigger shoulders, just the touch of thinning hair. It wasn’t that he was ungrateful. Although the time in the gym was born more out of evasion of a genetic tendency to type II diabetes and the positive effect it had on his mental health, in the twenty-three hours of the day that was not devoted to his sexuality, being a big, healthy looking man was definitely preferable to not being able to shift his end of the couch, and Laura, with her time steeped in gender studies, was happy to point out the nice was the contractors working on their condo jumped when he said frog, and the clients and underlings at work expected and respected steady assertiveness from him.

For the hour a day life was about sex, more of an average than an exact description of his schedule, since he and Laura did the usual vacillations between six hour Saturday morning romps and ten minute self gratification sessions typical in any couple, David pushed a huge part of his self awareness out the window. Balls deep and knowing Laura was enjoying the sensation of fullness did not preclude bedroom talk that ran on the theme of “You piece of shit, why do you think a tootsie roll like that is going to make a woman happy? Don’t you fucking dare cum, you limp dicked fucking pansy!”

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