Woven Threads: Your Anti-Kink Discourse Is More Anti-Queer Than You Think

Woven Threads is a series of blog posts where I compile and expand on tweets and threads I’ve posted on Twitter. They may cover a number of topics that I often ruminate on.

June is Pride Month and you know what that means: Discourse.

And every Pride we always have to talk about kink and its place in queer community. Is kink queer? Is it appropriate for queer children to be exposed? Is it….

Before I get into my opinions, I should probably lay out some general disclaimers for the folks who like to form opinions before they finish reading: 

• Like queerness, not every kinky person has the same relationship to kink or has the same intentions

• Cishet people do engage with kink, just like they also engage with clubbing, art-making, activism and questioning colonial constructs; queer people also engage in activities that are typically associated with cisheteronormativity

•  Kink is an umbrella term that includes a spectrum of activities, both sexual and non-sexual

• Somebody else’s identity isn’t any of your business, actually. 

My big problem with the discourse—aside from the fact that it’s been going on longer than I’ve been going to Pride—is that its loudest participants are often people who have very little knowledge or engagement with queer community (not just other queer people), with queer history, with kink, or even the language they use to assign moral judgements to other people’s actions. 

So let’s talk about it. 

First: what is queerness and queer community?

Queerness isn’t a monolithic identity (no identity is, it’s not a hard rule to follow). Not everyone defines it the same way. Some base it on who they fuck, some base it on who they love, and some base it on their philosophical praxis. 

I personally fall into that last category. A lot of queers like to cite the Greeks for their open appreciation of homosexuality. Letting slide that the Greeks were far from the first culture to assert homosexual behaviour as not only acceptable but a higher form of love (but then we’d have to admit that we can trace queerness back to non-White people), and the fact that they still had some skeezy attitudes towards women and non-White people (hmm… weird coincidence it’s a culture white cis gay men connect to, I’m sure), they also didn’t believe in homosexuality as an identity. 

What’s interesting is that identity is actually a colonial concept. Greek philosophers didn’t believe in identity being innate or biological. Your identity was based on actions. Now this isn’t exclusive to the Greeks, if you look into non-Romantic language families, there’s hundreds of languages that use action as an identifier. Like Justin Manyfingers once described about the Blackfoot language that’s been used in Treaty 7. 

Queerness, to me, is about the actions we take to defy the pressure to conform, to question and interrogate normalcy and social norms, to rebuke the nuclear family and the individualist colonial myths it’s rooted in. 

That’s why HIV/AIDS activism was spearheaded by queer community (among other highly impacted groups), as they not only demanded institutional support and care, but developed their own systems and strategies to care for each other when abandoned by powerful organizations. Even the riots incited by police raids like the ones at Stonewall or Toronto’s own Operation Soap, were about protecting and supporting the most marginalized in the community who experienced the most violence and oppression for their queer identity. 

If I lost you already, there’s very little chance we’ll agree on much. 

But if you’re still with me, let’s move onto the next point: what is kink?

As I said before, kink is an umbrella term that encompasses a lot, including (but not limited to) power play, impact play, roleplay, and bondage. Its defining trait is being a non-normative way to give or receive pleasure. In a deeper philosophical sense (which not everyone in the kink community ascribes to), it’s embracing and finding joy in all the parts that once made us feel shame.

To me, that sounds a lot like how we define queerness too. It’s the grounding foundation of turning political riots into a celebratory parade. It’s also why I wouldn’t know how to practice my queerness in a way that’s rooted in pleasure without kink; I’d only know how to define it through shame. 

Kink has been a healing practice for me. It offers me a safe space to explore parts of me that I’ve locked away. It offers me a way to redefine my trauma and assert my own agency with the ability to end the scene whenever I choose. It offers me a space where I can explore my gender and identity and sexuality while feeling desirable. It offers me the ability to take the things used to threaten me into complacency and use them to bring myself to orgasmic pleasure. It’s also taught me about the practice of aftercare. 

But I bet if we made a Venn diagram of people who think kink shouldn’t be associated with queerness and people who assign inherent negative connotations to therapy and healing language, it’d look awfully close to just a circle. 

Which brings me to my larger issue: A lot of you don’t understand trauma or healing. 

A lot of individual therapy is based in narrative psychology. It’s the theory that the stories we tell ourselves impact how we interpret and interact with the world around us as well as how we understand ourselves. And kink can be a powerful tool in rewriting those narratives in a way that we believe on a physical level as well as intellectual. But here’s the thing: A lot of people imbue an inherent negativity onto a lot of coping mechanisms they learn about through therapy social media. 

Take intellectualizing for example. Doing it isn't wrong in and of itself. It's when we forget that feelings, emotions, are our physical knowledges (See Lesson 9 of the Emergency Sads Manual). What I mean by that is that our feelings are physical reactions to patterns in our environment, whether we’re intellectually aware of them or not. Sometimes trauma associates innocuous patterns with danger or aggression.

Intellectualizing becomes a problem when we try to use logic to control our feelings. It's good to understand why you're feeling what you're feeling, but you also can’t analyze emotions that you’re not letting yourself feel. Because intellectualizing is also how we develop strategies to cope with our feelings in a way that still honours them. When we tell ourselves that we shouldn't feel something, we are hurting our relationships with our own bodies. And I think that’s a little bit of a misconception from colonial emotional repression: Feeling something is not the same as acting on it.

This is what I believe differentiates revenge fantasies from plain torture fantasies. We can fantasize about acting on our feelings while understanding that we'd never act on them because while our feelings might be valid, we know those actions aren’t.

What does that have to do with kink? Isn’t kink about acting on those feelings? 

Well, what do you do with all those feelings if you can't act on them? In some scenarios, you might scream into a pillow or vent to a friend. Essentially, you create a controlled environment where you can release those emotions in a way that doesn’t endanger yourself or others, with mutually agreed upon boundaries with anyone else involved. 

But what about the intense emotions we often experience after traumatic experiences of abuse or assault? Many survivors of trauma experience intense feelings of vengeance and repressing them can have detrimental impacts, both physically and socially. But kink is a way that we can not only act on those emotions, but even give someone pleasure out of it instead of trauma. 

As a multiple trauma survivor, there’s something magical in being able to honour your feelings in a way that creates intimacy and connection instead of rupture and hate. And kink community allows you to be in spaces that celebrate and cherish you for doing it instead of seeing you as deplorable and disgusting

That's not to say that's how it is for everyone in the kink community and there are definitely people in it who just want to act out their control fantasies without consequences. But shaming people just compounds the problem. 

Anyways, my point is: stop being jerks about kink if no one is asking you to participate against your consent. And no, seeing leather daddies exist doesn’t take away your agency.