Kink Shaming and Cop Uniforms, pt 1

Last night I ran across a post on social media calling out a couple of guys for wearing leather cop uniforms to a leather bar, arguing that since All Cops are Bad, police fetish gear was unacceptable. I thought about responding at the time, but decided I would rather write a blog post about the issue.

The objection, as I understand it, is that since police officers often misuse their power in ways that harm minority groups, particularly people of color, the gay community should not celebrate them. The person who made this argument (whom I’ll just call the OP) asserted that fire fighters were far more appropriate to fetishize as icons of masculinity, bravery, and self-sacrifice than police officers.

I entirely appreciate the point made here. I am in many ways anti-cop in my politics–I’m very aware of the problematic history of the entire concept of policing, I grew up and live in a city that has repeated problems with police officers killing people of color, and I support efforts to reform policing in a variety of ways (diverting resources to mental health professionals, ending the ‘warrior mentality’ system of police training, ending qualified immunity for law enforcement, and so on). Policing is not one of the most dangerous jobs in the country (garbage collectors and delivery people are at far more risk of dying on the job than police officers), and I dislike the whole ‘Back the Blue’ mentality, which is generally a cover for racism. So I sympathize with what the OP wanted to do.

But I think he’s completely wrong.

And the reason I think he’s completely wrong is that he misunderstands the entire nature of kink and the history of cop fetishizing.

Cop fetish is not, as the OP assumed, simply about celebrating the masculinity and bravery of police officers. For some men it definitely is. The idea of wearing an outfit that our culture codes with strength, bravery, authority, and masculinity is certainly an appeal for some guys. “If I’m wearing a uniform that powerful masculine men wear, I feel powerful and masculine.”

But the OP is seeing the surface layer of the fetish, the most obvious connotation it has, and assuming that anyone indulging in that fetish must be aligning themselves with the entire ideology that surrounds cops, consciously or unconsciously. His call to fetishize fire fighters instead is about trying to make the gay community aware that celebrating police officers as icons of masculinity must also inevitably involve approving of the political ideology of policing.

However, there’s a lot more going on in the cop fetish than just the celebration of masculinity and authority. Because police officers are figures of authority, they are one of the most obvious parallels to the authority of doms. Both groups are celebrated for strength, masculinity, power, and authority, and doms are law-givers and enforcers for their subs. So it’s pretty much inevitable that some doms will gravitate toward cop uniforms as expressions of their power.

Additionally, the cop fetish also taps into the idea that police officers misuse their power in ways that are or should be illegal. So when worn by a dom, it gives him an aura of aggression, harshness, cruelty, selfishness, and abuse of power that some men find incredibly erotic and appealing. The whole ‘cop/criminal’ fantasy tends to rely on the idea that a cop will ‘punish’ a criminal for something in ways that both sexy and illegal. The law enforcer becomes a law-breaker, imposing his own rules and system of punishment on the hapless criminal. So the cop fetish inherently explores the power dynamics around police officers, bring the dark subtext of police abuse to the surface during play, and transforming what is in a non-sexual context deeply immoral into a form of erotic play. Being a corrupt, abusive cop when I’m in my leather cop gear allows me to express a dark side of my personality with other kinksters who want to experience that.

Instead of simply celebrating police authority, as the OP assumes, the cop fetish draws out and highlights the problematic nature of policing. Leather cop uniforms (and also regular cop uniforms worn for fetish purposes) emphasize the sexual nature of the clothing (as most fetish gear does). And that means that when I wear my leather cop gear out to a bar, I’m highlighting the inherent relationship between power and sexuality. That’s a theme that goes back to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, which critiques US militarism during the Cold War as really being about fears of sexual inadequacy.

So while the OP assumes that the cop fetish is inherently about celebrating police power, for me it is as least as much about critiquing and subverting it. And indeed, when I wear it out to bars, other guys, even guys who don’t appear to be kinky, immediately take it as an invitation to play. “Officer, I’ve been naughty! I need you to arrest me!” So the uniform invites onlookers to view cops not as figures of authority that need to be obeyed, but as men enacting their power sexually. I have never once had a bar patron approach me and say “Yeah, man, back the blue!”

Additionally, while the cop fetish initially positions the cop as being a figure of power, in many cases that power is subverted during play. If the guy wearing the uniform is submissive, at some point during play, his power is going to be stripped away. He will be tied up, perhaps stripped of his uniform, and tortured or fucked. Instead of being the power figure, he becomes the victim of another man’s aggression. This is a common theme in cop fetish porn, and these scenes are often staged as some form of retribution of his abuse of his power.

Because cops are figures of power and authority in our society, many people fantasize about humiliating them. Consider for a moment the scene with the police officer in Thelma and Louise, in which the titular duo are stopped for speeding by an arrogant young police officer, only to turn the tables on him and imprison him in the trunk of his patrol car. By the end of the scene, he is on the verge of tears, begging to not be harmed. Thelma admonishes him to be good to his wife, because her husband was bad to her and “look how I turned out”. The scene highlights the various tricks the police officer uses to highlight his power (putting on his hat, wearing sunglasses so his eyes can’t be seen, leaning over Louise as she sits in the car), so it exposes the artificial nature of police authority and gratifies the desire of viewers to take revenge on cops for misusing their power. So while the cop fetish can be used to indulge power fantasies, it can also be used to indulge various forms of submission as a revenge scene.

Kink is not a one-size-fits-all system. Different kinks arouse people for different reasons. Kink generally operates by manipulating symbols, so a furry suit or pup hood can stand in for the entire being of an animal and allow the wearing to experience a transformation they can’t literally experience. But symbols are multivalent, capable of being read in more than one way. One man’s symbol of celebrated authority is another man’s expression of humiliation. So the OP is vastly over-simplifying the reasons why two guys might wear leather cop uniforms to a bar.

Additionally, the OP rather näively assumes that people can choose which kinks they have. He assumes that those two leather cops simply chose to find cops sexy and therefore they can be more virtuous by choosing to find fire fighters sexy instead. But of course sexual desire doesn’t actually work that way–we can’t just decide to find fire fighters sexy as an alternative to finding cops sexy.

I certainly agree that fire fighters can be sexy, and there is a fire fighter fetish that plays with their uniforms. But I’ve never seen leather fire fighter gear and I suspect it would be challenging to pull off well. Cop uniforms are tailored to convey power and authority and they easily translate to a body-hugging leather cop outfit. But fire fighting gear is tailored to protect the wearer, and I’m skeptical that a leather fire fighter’s outfit would hug the body in a sexy way. But I’m willing to be disproven on that.

(Years ago, I was IML and there was apparently a problem with one of the elevators. A fire truck was called and two fire fighters in full gear walked into the lobby of the hotel. And they looked not a bit out of place, surrounded as they were by all sorts of fetishists in various gear.)

There’s are a couple other issues that I see with the OP’s call to ban the cop fetish, but this post is getting pretty long, so I’ll save those issues for my next post.