#kink criticism

[trustedcompanionship]

I don't like doing the "let's define Trusted Companionship explicitly in opposition to D/s" thing and I think I do it more than I'd like but sometimes you just gotta. Anyway I am currently having Some Thoughts on the whole symbolism of collars and leashes and why that's such a common thing in the visual lexicon of kinky power exchange, and why it feels so anathema to everything in Trusted Companionship theory

Like, visually the symbolism that comes to mind when I think of a wholeass person being led around on a leash is like. Those fucking child leashes. It's "This person is liable to run away unless there's something keeping them here." And even if that's not the literal belief of the people using that symbolism, it's still the visual language they're leaning on.

Trusted Companionship as a philosophy almost takes the absence of that sort of symbolism and turns it into a symbol of its own because it's like "okay lol, clearly you can't lead by your own merits if you think the only way people will reliably follow you is if they're chained to you." Which. I'm not saying every BDSM dom is a bad leader with a fragile ego. Sometimes you just enjoy certain tropes/symbols and it's not that deep. I can't stop you. But the visual language of psychosexual dominance is the visual language of ego-driven bad leadership, it's the visual language of insecurity, and choosing not to respect it as a signifier of authority did wonders for me.

[camomileapplesyrup]

one of my biggest gripes with bdsm & "taboo" kink discourse was the overused "coping mechanism" defense that i hear oh so much. especially on twitter, from women in heterosexual relationships.

i won't go into the "not all coping mechanisms are good coping mechanisms" argument, but i will propose this;

when you are allowing a man to engage in a non consensual fantasy, or incest fantasy, or otherwise violent and abusive fantasy, what trauma is he coping with and relieving?

is he getting off to helping you re-contextualise a situation where you lost all control, in a controlled and safe environment? or is he enjoying the power to hurt & abuse you that you are offering to him on a silver platter?

and do you think, that at the end of the day, your safety & healing is what turns him on? or the fact that he can freely abuse a traumatised woman, under the guise of "fantasy" and "sexual liberation"?

[merkredonn]

Call me a puritan idc cnc and ddlg are fucking disgusting. If you're into your partner acting like a child or get off to enacting rape, get help.

[theangryman]

One person was banned almost immediately.

The other person was not banned until they made another post revealing that they were posting videos of their partner.

One person was harassed and bullied and told that they were lying.

One person was given advice, told about how they could improve their situation.

This is why kink is not safe. There is more compassion and kindness for someone who admits to wanting to kick their partner in the face than there is for someone who has received that treatment.

[ghibliradfem]

Repost from my instagram @/ghibli_radfem 💜 (edit: I’ve been terminated on Incelgram 😔) Unedited version from @/softcore_trauma on insta ✨

[strongcori]

(reupload) Something that bothers me a lot about libfems

[happycattail]

Braius: little guy, are you single?

Orym: bro…you’re huge

pauses

Orym: that’s alright

[voyageroftheastralseas]

BDSM people really go about their life going “Yes, torture is how I express love”, and just don’t mind it? How?

I know part of it grooming/propaganda, but, these people have eyes connecting to a rational brain, right, right?

[trustedcompanionship]

Was thinking the other day about how when I was exploring the BDSM ecosystem, all the educators and resources and things I could find took it for granted that I wanted to be there.

And more than that, there was a pervasive attitude of, well, why WOULDN'T you want to be here? This is the only place that truly understands consent and communication and boundaries...

...they said while never bothering to point out the emergency exits, figuratively speaking.

No one ever told me that if you have pervasive, identity-shattering "sub drop" that does not get better or go away no matter how much aftercare you throw at it, that's probably a sign that what you're doing isn't good for you.

No one ever told me what to do if you can't pretend to be helpless and vulnerable without feeling those things for real. If you aren't doing it because it's fun, but because you literally can't stop yourself no matter how much it scares and hurts you to do so.

I'm not just making up a guy here. All of this is literally me. But also, it seems to only be me— every goddamn kink-positive blogger on this webbed site is like "lol why are you mad about kink? it's Pretend. it's just Games. you may as well be mad at LARPers or pro wrestlers" and I feel like I'm just screaming into the void when I say yeah, it's probably that for you but it's NOT that for me, it never WAS that for me, because I clearly have some kind of unacknowledged disorder that makes me only half of a person

it's my fault, okay? it's my fault. It's always been my fault. You're all fine. Go play with your whips and handcuffs or whatever. I'm sorry I brought it up at all.

[theangryman]

Remember, the most important thing when seeking help for your sexual assault is that people can’t *like* the way you were sexually assaulted.

[myopicry]

I can't stay away from tumblr because I like reading radfem and gender critical blogs (and also I live here unfortunately just by virtue of being a gay loser artist) and this is the most populated place for that kind of discussion, but holy shit it gets so bleak seeing just how easily radfems are strawmanned and how the most popular posts on this website are still so deeply entrenched in very cognitively dissonant thought built on misogyny and refuses to engage with any kind of opposition or critique.

I believe in healthy discourse and discussion! I want to hear people's arguments and insights and learn why people believe certain things! but one (very large, very popular) ideological side of this website is so fundamentally incurious and hostile towards changing their minds at all, and there's just such a lack of what could be a really productive public forum where feminist and progressive thought could be freely discussed, this being a women-dominated and same-sex attraction dominated website and all. especially because it's already so difficult to discuss those kinds of things in real life as the majority of people don't really care or relate to any of it.

I really wish I could just log off forever sometimes and never have to think about this again. alas, I quite like to think, and the internet is still the best way to find the community and the perspectives which I seek. born to participate in community and discussion of theory, forced to gaze upon a field of strawmen alone (⌣_⌣”)

[witsserviceablesubstitute]

The more I think about Anharion and Sarcean the more I'm convinced they are an allegory for queer trauma and Will will have to embrace, accept, and forgive himself in order change his narrative.

In which case I don't think the collar is compulsion but something else. James - once Anharion in a past life and a former novitiate in this one (he knows all the stories) - did say it wasn't. "All the stories are lies" and "the collar was working but he felt no compulsion", as well as his speculation the collar became tawdry wishful thinking by those who objectified him.

In many ways James has already accepted himself and embraced Anharion, and in so doing made himself a villain to the Light, polite society, and a self righteous religious order. Everything he does is repellent to them but they're also obsessed with him. He is unmentionable but always present. He is condemned for killing the Stewards but they're surprised when reminded they've been trying to kill him since he was 11. Of course he needed to die, he's an abomination. The Stewards were doing the Lor– Lady's work by killing such a corrupt creature.

If Sarcean and Anharion are queer allegory then there is definitely more to their relationship and perceived villainy than what we've been told.

I'm especially struck by how the Light always calls the Lady Sarcean's former love – using language that describes a tragic romance. All the while they dismiss Anharion as a perverse sexual fixation when it's clear in Sarcean's POV that it's Anharion who was the love of Sarcean's life. That Sarcean had loved him long before the Lady. That Sarcean chases pieces of Anharion throughout all his chosen lovers. That it's Anharion he bound to him across time and space. It mirrors how often queer relationships are belittled, the acceptable heteronormative relationship romanticized.

Will/James and Sarcean/Anharion's kinky preferences play into that too. There's a pressure for them to conform and never give into what they want to indulge.

[punkeropercyjackson]

'Incest is inherently complex and mature storytelling' always sends me and so does the historical significance of it as 'proof' it is.Ancient Greece is thee pedestary era because misogyny was so strong men would rather be incestous pedophiles than date women,incest as gay culture is almost ENTIERLY a white westerner thing and is frowned upon like everywhere due to the studies that proved it's familial abuse with no posibility of consent on both sides and sometimes even neither,'family members being ultra intimate/intense if they're the same gender is coded incest' is literal Gay Panic propaganda,m/f incest is always just dudebro fantasies that violently misogynizes the girl in it,a lot of incest shippers and incestplayers are simply only children and therefore don't really understand sibling dynamics OR middle/high schoolers who were exposed to incest shipping online through their fandoms and think they're smartypants edgelords that understand REAL drama only they're tragically just grooming victims and i could go on!It's not 'discrimination' to be anti-incest even in fiction and the bedroom,it's having a brain and care for other people!There's countless ways to tell a dark and even bleak story without involving positively potrayed incest,ESPECIALLY if it's just for porn and it's no longer just a private bedroom thing when you blog about it in PUBLIC tags that ANYONE can find and the social media account creation age is 13,NOT 18+ so watch yourselves.Curation of your experience applies to you too and ageism applies to the minors you bully for being triggered over incest more than it does you seeing as you actually have power over them,online AND systematically.Kill the cop in your head-They don't think incest is actually bad either and that's why black people invented acab

[trustedcompanionship]

Please be careful how you respond to other people's distressing sexual thoughts: A personal story

This is going to be a heavy one, so strap in. Content warnings for mentions of corrective rape, internalized aphobia, unwanted sexual thoughts, and *gasp* me suggesting, once again, that the ways the kink community suggested I deal with said unwanted thoughts might not have been helpful. Sorry.

I am an asexual person who regularly has... ruminations, I guess you could say, on the subject of corrective rape. This has been going on for about as long as I've known I was asexual. These ruminations are not enjoyable. They are not pleasurable. The physical responses that sometimes come along with these thoughts are not pleasurable. They are a manifestation of my own internalized sense that I need to be allosexual in order to be lovable, and that someone fixing the "mistake" of my asexuality by violating me would be the best thing for me. I have done the whole "try to explore it in a kinky way" thing and it only made me feel worse. These are not fantasies. I cannot stress enough how much these aren't fantasies.

But I am also a person who has always, even before I separated from the kink community and began laying out the groundwork for what would become Trusted Companionship, had a genuine interest in submission. And as I've discussed a few times, there was a time when I did genuinely identify as a sub in the BDSM sense.

So, back when I was still identifying as such, I sent a concerned anon to a fellow submissive on Tumblr who I admired (I don't remember the blog or if they're even still around post titty ban) with some basic info about my situation and that I was looking for advice on dealing with sexual intrusive thoughts. (I don't actually know if intrusive thoughts are the right word for this, I generally use the term "unwanted thoughts" these days, but 20 year old me was less scrupulous with my language.) The answer I got was along the lines of "Intrusive thoughts? Honey, those are your fantasies. I suggest you learn to accept them, and explore them a little in a safe space."

My esteemed colleague, I cannot express to you how much I DON'T want to ~explore this in a safe space.~ The solution to my deep-seated fear that not being allo makes me unlovable is not to eroticize that fear. It's to work on deconstructing it, and to find some way to be proud of who I am and the kind of relationships I have the capacity to form with others.

I have no say over what other people get pleasure from. I don't claim to have a say over that. But in my specific case, suggesting that I treat my unwanted thoughts like sexual fantasies is about as helpful as suggesting ageplay to someone with POCD. Not every sexual thought a person has is a super hot kinky fantasy that needs to be accepted and explored and played with. Sometimes people have sexual thoughts that distress them, and that repulse them, and trying to twist those thoughts around into a kink would be actively harmful. And if you are in a position where people look up to you enough to ask for advice about sex and kink, you need to be prepared for the possibility that someone might come to you with something that's less of a fantasy and more of a genuinely unwanted thought pattern.