The Cautious Kinkster

…The fact that these men felt they were doing nothing wrong is precisely the problem. The fact that for generations, men of all ages have felt able to use and abuse the bodies of women and children for their own entertainment is the problem, and the fact that our culture legitimises this approach is a bigger problem. 

For centuries, men in positions of power were untouchable, while women and children were anything but. One simply could not call a man like Jimmy Savile or Stuart Hall to account for his actions and expect to be taken seriously. One could not accuse a popular football player of rape and expect justice.  These things went on, but they went on in silence, with the complicity and of quiet armies of flunkies and facilitators.

The reason that these “old men” are being prosecuted – sorry, “persecuted” – right now is simple. They are being prosecuted because their victims are finally coming forward, and their victims are finally coming forward because society has reached a tipping point when it comes to rape culture. 

Rape culture, for those who still require an explanation, is the cultural tolerance of rape and sexual assault. It’s the idea that people who are raped must have in some way provoked it, and I know from experience that it can take years for victims to understand that it is men’s responsibility not to rape. It’s an old prejudice, embedded in our institutions, in our police forces and judiciary systems, in political parties and in public organisations like the BBC. It also infects the tabloid and broadsheet press, who have changed their tune in recent weeks only because the process of consciousness-raising is panic-inducing, and there’s nothing the media loves more than a good panic. 

Right now, though, things are changing, and men and boys and those who love and respect men and boys are going to have to shift the way they think about rape, abuse and harrassment – fast. The most important attitude change is going to take place not among abusers, but among the far larger contingent who simply stand by and let it happen. Among the people who have been taught, or learned from hard experience, that these things are simply part of the tissue of power in this society, perhaps not strictly moral, but not worth taking the risk of speaking out about. They’re only women, after all, and they were probably asking for it.

For many, many generations, women and children were told: don’t let yourself get raped, and if you do, for god’s sake don’t whinge about it. Don’t act like a slut. Don’t let your guard down. Don’t ever assume for a second that you have the same right as a man to exist in public or private space without fear of assault and humiliation. That message is slowly, finally, starting to change, so that instead, we’re telling men and boys: do not rape. Do not grope, assault, bully or hurt women, children or anyone over whom you have temporary power. Doing so will no longer increase your social status. If you do it anyway, you will find yourself publicly shamed and possibly up on criminal charges. This is the age of the internet, and nobody forgets….

navigatethestream:

TW: Discussion of racism

i’ve probably opened, written, and then closed the tab a thousand times. 

do i really want my email address attached to this site?- i kept asking myself

its a small small world out there- an excuse as to why it didn’t seem like a good idea

but finally, out of curiosity, i caved and hit the submit button on fetlife’s sign up page. 

i immediately hit the groups tab, hoping to find groups that catered toward people of color. sadly, one of the first things i found was a group made by an obvious white supremacist troll. somebody who had taken the liberty of intersecting submissive/BDSM rhetoric into blatant violent racism via the creation of troll groups with deeply fucked up names, someone who’s page reminded me of the kink version of the jim crow museum except not for educational purposes. 

in seeing that i actively threw up my hands and thought “i aint about that life”. i went to the account settings and de-activated my page.  

but my next thought was “why is this shit acceptable? why aren’t their stipulations in the terms and conditions that prevent this kind of shit from happening?” 

granted, this is true of a lot of websites. as i live, breathe, and write i choose to do it on a blog website that upholds “freedom of speech” {or freedom to be fucked up and not accountable} over the safety of others using that site. i know as a black woman blogger i am not protected in the same way as a white girl who wears a native american headdress, gets called out on it, and goes crying to tumblr staff. 

so in theory i shoudn’t expect fetlife to be any different. it caters to a mainstream BDSM community that i’m willing to bet my yearly tuition payments is not all that concerned with radical anti-oppression praxis unless it relates to the sexualities and genders of the white audience that its geared toward. and even on that level i am sure there are ways to slip through the cracks and evade detection as you poison the internet kink world with your bigotry. where there is a will, there is a person with too much time on their hands looking to find a way. 

the problem is that it needs to be different. 

you cannot have truly “safe” communities of any kind until people are doing the same kind of critical work done in social justice communities. you can’t expect to build these kind of intimate and albeit complicated dynamics between human beings if the same problematic isms play out in ways they aren’t intended to.

i mean lets be real, desiring to be a submissive, bottom, or even a “slave” behind closed doors doesn’t mean you want society shitting on your whole life once you leave that designated space. brown people can engage with alternative lifestyles and their communities without bringing the generational trauma of our histories into the fold. and as much as i resist doing this in my own personal life, inter-racial kink relationships can happen so long as white people are being actively anti-racist in those relationships. 

so if you’re a white person who wants to dominate a person of color and has some desire to bring a caricature of that person’s race into the fold, you need to do some long and hard learning and unlearning. you need to ask yourself why this aspect of their history not only entices you on several internal levels, but why you have a need to bring it to life and reinforce that narrative.  

to put it bluntly: white person, why does paddling aunt jemima while she’s bound and gagged make you hot and bothered? why do you get off saying the n-word during a play session? or any of the derogatory slurs levied against black woman past and present for that matter. and even if your partner is comfortable with that sort of thing, better yet tells you to do it, if you don’t immediately get uncomfortable as a white person why is that? are you the type to go along with it or actually sit down and have a critical conversation about what it means to put those dynamics into motion. what does it mean when you as a white person are comfortable engaging in that sort of specific behaviour for satisfaction. does your desire to raceplay reflect patterns of behaviour outside of the kink community? do you tell racist jokes? do you silence the voices of POCs when in conversations about race? do you assert dominance and authority on the sole basis of being white in those conversational spaces? do you make excuses as to why you’re allowed to do X,Y and Z behaviour even after POC tell you its not okay? do you believe in “reverse racism” or “the race card”? 

bottom line: are you the person who says “i’m not a racist” or are you the person who says “i am learning how to be actively anti-racist”. because i’m not going to be the race-play police and say “don’t do it”. but if you’ve never taken any of the above into consideration, you are not what many would call an ally in the making let alone somebody who should be perpetuating race play. you’re the kind of person who would benefit from taking a raceplay time out and starting that learning and unlearning process. 

at the same time it begins on the individual level, it can’t end at the majority white BDSM community “slowly but surely” adopting anti-racist praxis. websites such as fetlife have to be pro-active in making sure it is a safe internet space for people of colour, just as it should be pro-active in making sure its a safe space for all marginalized and oppressed identities. they cannot default to the bylines of “freedom of speech”, “anti-censorship” or “there are brown people on our site who are perfectly fine with white supremacist trolls and people perpetuating racism so why are you complaining?” because all of those things demonstrate a blatant unwillingness to treat us as equal human beings with our need to feel safe upheld in the same way white kinksters’ needs are. it reinforces the same problematic dynamics of race many people of colour work to dismantle, try to escape from when the work day is done, and try very hard not to blend with the arena of themselves reserved for sexual actualization. 

and if this isn’t the case, the kinky POC separatism needs to stop being on the amazon wish list of dreams deferred and become a reality. we need our own fet life where people understand that just as consent is not always sexy, neither is hammering out the dynamics of a kink relationship to ensure mutual respect and safety both physically and emotionally. but it has to be done regardless of how “sexy” it is. we need an anti-oppression internet kink space that recognizes intersectionality as much as it recognises our distinctness as being many under the umbrella term “people of color”. we need books which give us the good word on kinky brown living, and encourage us to never back down in our convictions to want anti-oppression praxis integrated in our kink lives. because we shouldn’t be stopped from crossing the bridge into our growing communities, making connections, and making the sexual magic happen that we want to see in our lives simply because one out of many websites on the internet fails to come correct.