Kink is Taboo

(NOTE: I’ve been informed that this post violates WordPress’ rules against explicit pornography, so I have to remove the image I’m going to be discussing. I’ll provide a description of it.)

Finally have time to write a post! Life has slowed down enough that I have an hour to devote to this blog. Hooray! Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to a slightly more regular posting schedule, and maybe even get back to writing some porn.

I want to talk about an erotic (pornographic, really) image I ran across recently.

[The cartoon depicts a shirtless black man handcuffed to two urinals in a graffiti-covered bathroom. Two police officers, one of them either Black or Latino, are pissing on him.]

This image hits on a number of different kinks. The fantasy of the human urinal is a pretty common one in gay porn, touching on piss play, service, and humiliation, and it’s fairly common to combine that with bondage. But this artist has gone further and incorporated a rather strong element of race play, which is quite taboo in our society, and taken it to one of the most extreme portions of race play, police brutality against Black people (and note that the cop’s shoulder patch identifies him as part of the LAPD, whose violence against Black people was already infamous even before they assaulted Rodney King in the 90s). The cop on the right is pretty obviously white, but the cop in the middle is a bit more racially ambiguous. Perhaps the artist is trying to pull back just a bit on the racial power imbalance here, or maybe he wants Black men to be able to imagine themselves in either the top or bottom role here.

Regardless of the artist’s intentions, the image touches on one of the hottest of hot-button issues in American culture right now. But instead of making it a literal statement of some sort, the image sexualizes it very explicitly. Perhaps part of the artist’s intention is to critique police violence by highlighting the idea of the police as sadists, to get us thinking about whether police violence might be driven in part by sexual desires for dominance.

But pretty clearly, the artist’s primary purpose is to offer you some wank fodder. And that brings us to the specific thing I wanted to look at in this post, the taboo nature of kink. Kink by its very nature violates social rules about socially-acceptable behavior. We are not supposed to hit our loved ones or tie them up or piss on them and so on. We’re not supposed to pretend to be dogs or infants or slaves or whatever our kinky fantasy involves.

And that’s precisely why kink is so powerful and attractive and sometimes disturbing–it draws out the grey area around socially-mandated behaviors and makes our violation of them moments of sexual pleasure rather than shame and guilt. Things that are completely mainstream and socially acceptable–missionary position sex between equals–aren’t kinky, except in a society in which egalitarian sex was off-limits (such as Graeco-Roman culture). So the fact that this cartoon is sexualizing a controversial and painful subject is a key part of what makes it kinky.

We don’t get to choose our kinks. They choose us. The origins of the desire for submission or dominance is a constantly-debated subject in the kink community, and it’s ultimately almost impossible to explain why one person wants to piss on someone and another wants to be pissed on. Our kinks emerge from the mists of our psyche for psycho-social reasons that are hard to explain, even when we can pinpoint a moment in our life that saw a kink emerge.

And the fact that we don’t get to choose them means that we shouldn’t be ashamed of them. We haven’t made a choice to want to humiliate or be humiliated; that desire is just there inside us. So I firmly believe that we should shed our fear and shame of our kinks and learn to enjoy them for what they are, sources of intense sexual pleasure.

And that means that people are allowed to want to play their desired role in a scene like the one depicted here. They are allowed to want to be the guy handcuffed to the urinal or to be the cop doing the pissing. Black men are allowed to crave humiliation and piss play from cops, and white guys are allowed to crave doing the pissing on and humiliating of Black men. Cops are allowed to fantasize about misusing their power, just as teachers, ministers, and politicians are. I’ve spoken to many Black men who fantasize about being in this sort of fantasy, and I’ve spoken to people in positions of authority who fantasize about it as well, so this isn’t just an abstract idea but a real part of real people’s lives. (I’ve talked to SEVERAL very kinky Catholic priests, who often gravitate to Satanism because of the taboo involved…)

However, although we don’t get to choose our kinks, we do get to choose how we express those kinks. It is crucial that our expression of our kinks happens only with those who desire to participate and who actively consent to doing so. There is a vast world of legal and moral difference between grabbing an unwilling Black man and subjecting him to violent humiliation and finding a kinky submissive Black man and playing out a scene in which he enjoys his humiliation. Without consent, much of kink play is a crime, and rightfully so. (And so, as Dan Savage just pointed out to me, is vanilla sex.)

It’s also important to keep in mind that some people who are outsiders or onlookers will find kink play disquieting. This image might be triggering to a Black man who has experienced police violence, for example. Race play scenes, harsh verbal abuse and humiliation scenes, and rape play scenes (and even less harsh age play or pup play scenes) are generally quite disquieting to people who don’t have those kinks, so those who engage in this sort of play have an obligation to only engage in them in private spaces where any onlookers can be assumed to have given consent to witness such things. We have the freedom to explore our kinks, and we have to use that freedom responsibly.