What feminists get wrong about kink

If Oxford’s needlessly infamous sex party scene is anything to go by (think Piers Gav or the ketamine-fueled groping in someone’s Cowley living room), it’s a wonder anyone takes kink culture seriously at all. My sources assure me that spending 10 minutes in a tent full of sweaty, pawing students struggling to get an erection and the unwelcome glance at the old head boy strapped to a giant crucifix, letting out tepid whimpers, shows you that there is literally nothing attractive about such places. Because there’s something deeply cheesy, deeply staged about kink – about Ann Summers’ back rooms and the furry handcuffs hidden in an accountant’s bedside table. The word “fetish” comes from Latin facticiuswhich means “artificial,” and that’s no coincidence. It’s unlikely that this aesthetic objection can be suppressed by high-minded arguments about sex: your right to be beaten up by someone dressed as a cartoon wolf should, I hope, be equal to my right not to listen to any of it must.

For women, this problem is compounded by the dual pressures of sexual violence and pornography. Last week, Edinburgh’s Beira’s Place sexual crisis center reported that more young women were seeking counseling after being suffocated during sex. The times responded with a harrowing statement from the mother of Emily Drouet, a freshman at Aberdeen University who killed herself in 2016 after suffering physical and mental abuse from her ex. In court, this ex, known on campus as the “Alpha Male,” admitted to grabbing her by the neck. Elsewhere in the story, a sex worker loses consciousness after being strangled by a trusted patron, who then rapes her unconscious body. “She thought she was in control,” says a sexual crisis worker. How many of us have said the same thing?

Nowadays, women are rarely shamed for their sexual desires. on the contrary, they are ashamed that they have no appetite for acts that not so long ago were quite rightly viewed as degrading or disgusting or both. As sex becomes “liberalized,” the scenarios we conjure up during intimacy become more and more distressingly patriarchal. It seems that, on this issue, sex-positive feminists are becoming strange bedfellows with pornographers and the ever-increasing super-stimulants they concoct. These feminists, among other harmful falsehoods like “You can buy a woman’s consent and she will happily sell it to you, being the liberated businesswoman that she is!”, have also taught us that it is completely normal for men to commit crimes physical harm to the women they sleep with. This in itself is likely to remain extremely controversial, as it was not so long ago. Because if feminism is all about choice, we must be absolutely sure that the choice to be brutally strangled by a friend is a choice made out of genuine desire and not out of environmental pressure and shame about being called frigid.