Kink and Nazi Uniforms

If you’re a member of the online gay fetish community, there’s a good chance you’re aware of a recent dust-up about Nazi images. If you’re not, let me briefly summarize it (as far as I understand what happened). A well-known British kinkster with something in the vicinity of 60k followers on Twitter recently had photos of him wearing a uniform with Nazi details posted online. I’m not identifying him here because I don’t think there’s much value to it. In the photos, he is dressed in a reasonable approximation of a Nazi uniform and his sub is wearing a gimp suit with a swastika on it as well as armbands with a swastika and the double SS symbol. They were posted on his Twitter account, apparently by him. I don’t know this kinkster, but I did have a brief conversation with him online about a year ago.

(And before I go any further, let me say that this post explores some very challenging hot button issues that require a lot of maturity to think about. Some people may reasonably find this discussion triggering, so if you think you’re going to be triggered by a discussion of Nazism and kink or if you think you’re not mature enough to read a discussion of the nuances of kink, please don’t read this essay. Nothing in this post is meant to in any way defend Nazism, racism, or similar forms of violent bigotry.)

The kinkster in question did what, so far as I can see, is the right thing in the wake of the uproar. He immediately posted an apology video explaining that the images were taken several years ago and represent a session with a client who paid him to wear the outfit as part of a fantasy the client had. He asserted that these images did not reflect his personal views, but he acknowledged that the existence of the images has caused harm regardless of his intentions or beliefs. He acknowledged that as a leader of the kink community (by virtue of his sizable following), the images caused many people distress. He indicated that he intends to make a sizable donation to a Holocaust memorial organization as a way to demonstrate the sincerity of his apology while still admitting that such a gesture doesn’t actually address the damage done. (I don’t have enough information about the incident to know how accurate or truthful his apology is. So I am assuming he is being truthful. If he’s not, obviously that changes things.) However, his apology also looks like backpedaling in an attempt to prevent damage to his career as a fetish model.

But this issue raises a couple issues around kink that I think are worth discussing. And before we get to those issues, let’s just take a moment to refresh our memories of why the Nazis were evil fucking scum. Adolf Hitler and his followers engaged in some of the worst atrocities in human history. He orchestrated the deaths of more than 6 million innocent Jews and thousands of LGBT people, as well as Romani, communists, and political dissidents in concentration and extermination camps. The Nazis triggered the worst war in human history, with an estimated casualty count of more than 53 million soldiers and civilians. They spewed toxic propaganda that continues to poison political discourse today. Hitler helped inspire Donald Trump, whom multiple sources have indicated keeps a copy of Hitler’s speeches on his nightstand (or at least used to). The Nazis are irredeemably scum.

Now that we’ve made that clear, let’s talk about the ethical issues this incident raises.

First, it’s reasonable to wonder why this kinkster ever consented to wear a Nazi uniform. Lots of young kinksters engage in sex work to make a living (and even if he wasn’t actually having sex with the client, what he was doing certainly falls into the penumbra of sex work), and they sometimes do so without reflecting on the ethical issues around their activities. (This is especially true of young findoms.) If he was doing this work to put food on the table, he may well have felt that he had little choice but to take the job regardless of his personal feelings about the matter (although he did not say that was the case).

Taking those pictures in the past was a poor moral choice, but he can reasonably plead foolishness. In his apology video he says that the people he surrounds himself with today are not the people he surrounded himself with in the past, which might be his way of admitting that he was associating with Nazi sympathizers at some point in the past. We can perhaps reasonably excuse him participating in that scene as a bad choice made by a young kinkster.

However, he apparently chose to repost those two pictures of himself on his Twitter account. That means that very recently, he failed to see that posting images of himself dressed as a Nazi was a very bad choice. Regardless of what he thought when he took the pictures, reposting them suggests that as recently as a few days ago, he still didn’t see anything wrong about presenting himself as a Nazi, presumably because he thought those pictures would attract Likes and Follows or perhaps additional work as a fetish performer. That means that he still hasn’t thought very deeply about kink ethics and the problem with posting images of Nazi cosplay (an issue I’ll get to below). This furor over the pictures is therefore a well-deserved lesson in why we don’t do that. If he’s not ready to think about the ethics of Nazi role-play, he probably doesn’t deserve his status as a leader in the community (again, ‘leader’ in the sense of being a prominent fetish model).

Regardless of what he thought he was doing, this also raises the question of the ethical status of doing Nazi roleplaying. Even if he carries little blame, what about the client who paid him to indulge his Nazi fantasy? Surely we can condemn him for orchestrating such a fantasy?

The kinkster in question has not, to my knowledge, said anything about the original scene he was involved in. So we don’t know what it entailed or what the client wanted, but it’s clear he was domming the client and presumably dehumanizing him in various ways. The sub was wearing what is clearly a purpose-made Nazi gimp suit–the swastika on the hood is an integral part of the rubber. The fact that someone out there is making Nazi fetish gear is appalling to me.

It seems clear the client has a fetish for Nazi role-play, and it is likely that he doesn’t actively subscribe to Nazi racial ideology and simply thinks that Nazi uniforms are crazy sexy and very dominant. It seems unlikely (thought not impossible) that a sub would actively embrace an ideology that declares the desirability of killing him.

The awkward fact about kink is that we don’t get to choose what makes our dicks hard. We don’t wake up one morning and think “I think I want to be aroused by guys in tight leather clothing today!” It just happens to us. And sometimes what gets our dicks hard turns out to be things that society says, either rightly or wrongly, are immoral. In fact, one of the underlying characteristics of kink is that it violates social rules. When people get turned on shapely asses or breasts/pecs in tight clothing, that’s not really a kink, because society says it’s ok to find that stuff sexy. Kink, as I see it, involves the eroticization of things that society says are bad or weird to be aroused by: hurting people, tying them up, pissing on them, and so on.

This is why so many conservatives get outed as closet kinksters–their worldview forbids piss play (Donald Trump), cucking (Jerry Falwell Jr.), diaper play (Sen. David Vitter), and so on, so when they try to repress their unacceptable social desires, those desires start popping out as fetishes.

And sometimes our kinks take us to really, really dark areas, things that can cause us profound shame or conflict. If we enjoy something society says is wrong, doesn’t that make us a monster? A few years ago, I was contacted by a guy who had a fetish he refused to identify that he absolutely hated having. He’d been in therapy for it for years and was so ashamed of it that he’d never been able to tell his therapist what the fetish in question was, for fear that he’d be rejected and lose the therapist. He was hoping I knew some way of erasing his kink. After some chatting, I asked him if he was a scat fetishist. He was absolutely horrified that I’d guessed his dark secret, but after a lot of talking about it, I think I helped him understand that it wasn’t his fault that his brain had decided to eroticize shit, that he did not bear any moral weight for being aroused by crap because it wasn’t a choice he had made; it was just something that had happened to him. I hope that guy is doing better now, that maybe he doesn’t hate himself so much for his kink.

I’ve talked to a fair number of boys who are into race-play: Black men who get off being called the N-word, Middle Easterners who enjoy being degraded for being Arabs or Muslims, Latinos who crave being called ‘beaners’, white boys who believe in Black supremacy, and yes, Jews who enjoy Nazi role-play. While these kinks touch on the third rail of contemporary racial and religious politics, the men who enjoy these kinks find them absolutely as arousing as subs who like being pissed on. They didn’t ask to be hit with the kink stick in this way; it just happened, and they have to live with the fact that they get an erotic charge out of having their personal identity degraded and dehumanized.

And, full disclosure, when boys have asked me to indulge those kinks during a scene, I have sometimes done so after a lot of discussion about why they wanted those scenes, what they understood those kinks to mean in their lives, what forms of verbal abuse were and weren’t acceptable to them in the scene and so on. I’ve never done that form of play with a Jewish sub, and I doubt I would ever consent to do so if one asked, because taking on the role of a person who wants to exterminate my own group would probably fuck with me in a big way. But I have done other forms of race-play.

It is not a form of play that I seek out or fantasize about; doing it makes me uncomfortable. But I also understand that these subs deserve a chance to live out their sexual fantasies the same way I deserve a chance to live out mine. And I’d rather give them an opportunity to explore those kinks in a safe and ethical way with someone who won’t kink-shame them than to make them feel like they had to seek out actual racists, white supremacists, and other unethical people who might not worry very much about harming their subs. These boys are, in my experience, often relieved to find a dom who will allow them to indulge their kinks while still treating them like human beings when the scene is done.

One Black sub told me doing race-play scenes allows him to process the trauma of the racism he encounters regularly by creating an environment where he can stop the play-racism the moment it becomes unpleasant, thereby allowing him to feel a sense of agency over the racism he lives with. In doing this, that sub is doing something that thousands of subs who are victims of domestic abuse also do–rewriting a traumatic experience in a way that feels both arousing and emotionally meaningful for them.

So I have never done Nazi role-play (and probably wouldn’t ever do it), but I understand why a kinkster might agree to play the dom in such a scene, and I understand why someone might want to play the sub in such a scene. As long as both people are consenting adults who have discussed the ethical elements of the scene and recognize its implications, I don’t see such a scene as being drastically different from other hardcore power exchange scenes.

Kink pushes us into areas vanilla society finds appalling. Each kinkster has to decide for him or herself where their ethics allow them to go and where they don’t. My ethics are rooted in informed consent and the obligation of the dom to be responsible for any fallout from a scene, and I have to be willing to go into spaces society says are immoral simply to be able to do my kinks at all. So I won’t judge this kinkster or his client for choosing to explore that particularly dark corner of the fetish scene.

However, having said all that, this kinkster is still responsible for the fact that he dressed up in some sort of Nazi outfit, let himself be photographed in that outfit, and now has those photos circulating online where people might reasonably imagine that he himself is a Nazi or at least a Nazi sympathizer. He’s still responsible for the fallout from that scene that he did years ago, especially given that he courted that fallout by reposting the pictures.

And this gets us to another side of this issue. If it’s ethically acceptable to do Nazi play with a consenting partner, what is the problem with photos of that scene circulating online? Isn’t that ethically acceptable as well?

Absolutely not, because the internet changes the ethical calculus around Nazi role-play, race play, and other forms of hardcore play, because it’s not just the dom and sub involved. Once those images get on the internet, they involve every person on the planet who sees them, which vastly magnifies the impact of those images.

The internet inherently strips out the context of images and videos. That means that there is no functional difference between posting an image of that kinkster playing a Nazi and posting an image of that kinkster actually being a Nazi. There is no way for some random person online who sees those pictures to know whether or not this kinkster is an actual Nazi or Nazi sympathizer. And that means that those pictures actively support the growth of online fascism by making it appear that this kinkster is a willing member of the neo-Nazi movement that threatens to overthrow contemporary society and bring about a return of the extermination camps. It gives comfort to actual Neo-Nazis and encourages them to think what they are doing is morally acceptable.

This stripping out of context is an inherent part of the internet. There is no functional difference between pretending to be a Nazi online and actually being one. Similarly, there is no functional difference between pretending to be a homophobe online and actually being one, which is something that lots of findoms don’t realize when they openly post about ‘faggots’.

And that means that when you get into really dark forms of kink like race-play and Nazi play and alpha/fag dynamics, you have a huge responsibility to keep that play in spaces where the only people who ever see it understand its proper context and won’t be traumatized by it. If you take photos or videos of yourself wearing a Nazi uniform, you better damn well keep control of those images so they don’t escape out onto the internet the way this kinkster’s photos did. And that means DON’T TAKE PICTURES OF YOURSELF AS A NAZI! No matter how hot you think those pictures are, eventually they’re going to escape onto the internet. Your right to your kink stops the moment it begins to harm another person who didn’t consent to participate in it. And taking pictures of yourself dressed as a Nazi will INEVITABLY harm people who didn’t consent to it.

There is also another, more practical reason that I think dark kinks like race play need to have an acceptable place. Once we establish that some forms of play are inherently unacceptable between consenting adults, it becomes impossible to find a clear line between what should and shouldn’t be permitted, because there will always be someone who thinks a particular kink is bad and shouldn’t be allowed. If we start by banning race play, someone will argue that age play is too close to pedophilia to be permissible. Erotic torture and verbal abuse are too close to domestic violence. Master/slave play isn’t acceptable to some. There are lots of young gays who think seeing pup hoods at Pride is somehow a violation of their rights. Kink itself isn’t acceptable to many conservatives.

The vague, slippery standard of ‘socially acceptable’ quickly becomes a backdoor to banning kink in general. Kink, by its very nature is not socially acceptable. Many kinks even make other kinksters who don’t share that kink uncomfortable. I personally find female submission somewhat disconcerting because of my commitment to women’s equality, but I have to accept that female submissives have the same right to express their inferiority as male subs do. Toleration is a mutual non-aggression pact–the moment you declare someone’s kink intolerable, you have no grounds to insist they tolerate yours. We have to root our kink in the ethics of mutual consent, not the notion of social acceptability.

I want to close this by repeating, once again, that this is a messy issue that requires maturity to really talk about. And perhaps I’m asking for trouble by arguing for nuance online, where nuance goes to be murdered. I’m very comfortable with readers disagreeing with me, either because my stance doesn’t work for them personally, or because they think I’ve done the ethical calculus wrong. If that’s the case, feel free to disagree and explain what you see as the flaw in my analysis. My understanding of kink ethics evolves and I occasionally change my mind when I think I’ve gotten something wrong. Just don’t come at me claiming I’m defending Nazism, because I absolutely abhor the Nazis, and I think I’ve made that clear elsewhere on this blog. Please do me the courtesy of treating me as an intelligent person of good will who is seeking to make sense of an issue that looks deceptively black and white on the surface but which gets grey when you start looking at the wider issues around it.

UPDATE: In an earlier version of this essay, I made a couple of statements I have chosen to change. When I wrote the essay, I hadn’t seen the photos; I have now seen a screen-cap of them, and so I have added a description of the outfits. I also was under the mistaken impression that the kinkster had not posted the images himself–I was under the impression that the client had posted them without his consent. The screen-cap however clearly shows the kinkster posted them on his page, and therefore is responsible for their release onto the internet. That means he bears more current responsibility for this than I had previous understood, and I have updated my comments to reflect his greater culpability. I apologize for the error about who posted the pictures.

UPDATE 2: A consensus has emerged that the kinkster in question owns the gear he was photographed in and is therefore a Nazi sympathizer. His Sir posted a long message that seems to support this interpretation and saying he was unaware of his boy’s interests and has severed ties with him. The kinkster in question has deleted his Twitter account.

I have unanswered questions. Is this claim that the kinkster owned this gear true, or is it merely a false consensus that has emerged around supposed facts? How did the photos get posted online? He denied posting them and the only evidence I’ve seen that they were on his account looks photoshopped. Is his Sir telling the truth or just offering a story intended to save his own career as a fetish performer? His Sir was photographed twice in brownshirt gear (but with no Nazi insignia) and claims he borrowed the gear from his boy without understanding the historical context of that style.

Without those answers, it’s hard to fully assess this incident. How culpable this kinkster is remains murky to me. But my core conclusions remain largely unchanged. If he wishes to do consensual Nazi roleplay with a willing partner, I don’t think that automatically brands him a neo-Nazi or Nazi sympathizer, although it does raise the question of exactly why he likes Nazi fetish play and if his interest stops with the fetish element. But by posting the images online (if he did), he did clear harm to many by promoting Nazi sympathizer material, and it was a fucking dumb thing to do. If his original story is true (he was paid to do it, he didn’t post the images), his shunning seems excessive to me. If he is a Nazi sympathizer, he absolutely deserves to be shunned. Nazis are scum.