Let's talk about sex.
So, over the past few years or so, a lot of the internet — social media, primarily, amidst other things — has had a pretty big nebulous back-and-forth on NSFW stuff, primarily sex and kink. A big part of that comes down to ideas of consent, the necessity of sex & kink, so on, and so forth. Kink at pride was perhaps one of the biggest mainstream arguments about it.
Sitting where I am, today, after going through all that for the past so many years, I can say for certain:
Fuck you. Make it hornier. Make it kinkier. Nobody should ever feel ashamed of what gets them off unless they're actively causing harm without the consent of the harmed party. Period.
The natural response to that is always "well, what does consenting to it mean, can you...?"
I like to think most if not all of the folks actually reading this will understand what's meant. Consent can only exist between two adult parties over the age of 18 who are of sound mind and body when they are performing the act, or have made preemptive measures to establish consent, with the knowledge that it can be revoked at any point for any reason, ideally with safeguards in place to ensure safety. Some folks will remove some safeguards and engage in riskier play, and that's something I think is fine, as long as everyone's aware that they can get burned by it. But the main point is the key ones that get plastered as The Big Arguments are not included here under the 'able to consent' blanket. Minors, animals, people without a sound mind, people unaware of what's happening without prior explanation and understanding, so on and so forth — they can't consent.
Okay? Cool.
I bring this up because I am so fucking sick of 'normal people' getting all up in arms when someone has an Out There kink or engages in weird play or gets off on some weird shit that isn't actually harming anyone.
And like, look, I'm not going to sit here and say people should necessarily be out here puffing their chests out and going full-throated shouting about hard raceplay and political play and so forth in a public mixed space of varying interests; but I also think people shouldn't be crucified and treated as filth because they got into one of those kinks privately or in a space purpose-built for it or whatever. Again, consenting, all that.
Tangentally, it is kind of infuriating though how people twist and manipulate the concepts of consent to shut down things — by which I am talking about people who are arguing that there should be no kink at pride, people who are arguing that you shouldn't be allowed to post anything NSFW on social media at all, etc. — basically the difference between "please don't engage in that with me" versus "isn't there someone you forgot to ask?"
One of the things I champion often is the idea of curating your space, and taking an active role in making sure that what you see on a day-to-day basis and who you interact with are good for you. If you don't want to see NSFW, don't follow NSFW creators, don't search it, don't push yourself into those spaces. If you don't want to engage in politics on a platform, don't follow people who make a big scene about it on their page. If you don't want X, Y, or Z, then stop putting yourself in a place where X, Y, and Z are commonplace.
That's a huge crux of my issue with "normal people." The average person who is on the internet in some way dictating what can and can't be done in a general, mixed, public space because "normal people don't want to see that." Because that rhetoric is the same stuff that lead to the criminalization of trans identities — mostly trans feminine identities, but I'd never say trans masculine identities don't also get hit — and stuff that is made more and more puritanical by the day. It's the reason why people say stupid shit like "unalived" and "graped" and other things that are built to skirt automated censorship for the Almighty Algorithm.
It's why sex in movies and on TV and all that dried up so hard, and why it's not considered weird that when it does show up that people bitch about it.
