In my previous post, I responded to a tweet I had seen that was essentially asserting that because All Cops Are Bad, it was wrong to fetishize cops by dressing up as them for erotic purposes. I argued that the OP had naively assumed that people who dress up as cops are automatically celebrating cops and approving of their role in American society. In my opinion, the cop fetish does not glorify cops but rather critiques them; by hyper-sexualizing them, cop fetishists are challenging the idea that cops are automatically mythical protectors with pure motives. Cop fetishists often play as ‘bad cops’, abusing their powers for their own sexual gratification, and they also often like to humiliate those dressed as cops, implicitly acting out fantasies of vengeance on police officers.
But I think the OP is wrong for other reasons that go beyond this misreading of the cop fetish. He’s also demonstrating an ignorance of gay history. Because the history of the cop fetish goes back several generations. The earliest gay cop fetishist that I know of is Tom of Finland, who was exploring the hyper-sexual, hyper-masculine cop already in the 1960s. Tom’s “dirty drawings”, as he called them, sought to depict gay men as figures of strength and power, in contrast to the conventional mid-century depictions of gay men as weak sissies and failed men. In that sense we might argue that he was positioning police as role models. But Tom’s cops were not simple positive role models. They very commonly abuse their authority, doing things like pulling over bikers and sodomizing them with truncheons after handcuffing them. His fantasies often depict cops as law-breakers as well as law-enforcers.
Nor are Tom’s cops always the tops. The men they apprehend often turn the tables on them and fuck them. In Tom’s world, gay sex is always about pleasure and bottoming is as pleasurable and as masculine as topping. Thus to the extent that topping is about aggression, Tom’s cops are the recipients of aggression as much as the perpetrators of it, showing that turning the tables on the cops has always been a part of this kink.
And it is important to remember that when Tom began drawing his cops and robbers, homosexuality was illegal in most parts of Western society. Gay men lived their lives in fear of police raids on bars, of being beaten up during raids on cruising spots late at night, of being hassled for not dressing properly, and so on. So the gay men who embraced those images of police sexuality were by no means ignorant of the ways police officers can abuse their authority. To fetishize cops in the 1960s was to reduce the psychic threat of police brutality and transform them into figures of pleasure and amusement. Thus it would be a mistake to assume that cop fetishism emerged out of the ignorance of the darker side of law enforcement. Arguably, it emerged because of that awareness.
The OP also makes another fundamental mistake about fetishes. He argues that firefighters are more deserving of fetishization, suggesting that a cop fetishist can stop being into cops and start being into firefighters just because it’s more moral to do so.
But that’s not how fetishes work. We don’t get to choose our fetishes. They choose us for reasons that are often hard to explain. Something about cops just turns some people’s cranks. Maybe it’s their hyper-masculine aura. But maybe it’s something about the snugness of the uniform and the way it reveals the wearer’s body. Maybe it’s the inherent power dynamics involved in policing, the way they are trained to subtly intimidate people. Maybe it’s because some cops abuse their power, thereby making the bad cop a type of dom, or a target for reprisal. Maybe it’s their boots that express authority or their phallic nightsticks and guns.
Regardless of why a particular person fetishizes cops, it’s not rational, it’s not voluntary, and it’s not something they can just turn off or redirect to some other object of desire. That’s just not how sexual attraction works. (That’s not to say that cop fetishists can’t choose to not dress as cops–just because you have a kink doesn’t mean you are helpless and forced to act it out. All kinksters have to think about the ethical dimensions of their particular kinks and act accordingly.)
And, as the title of my post says, what the OP is doing is kink shaming, declaring someone else’s kink beyond the pale and off-limits. But kink is a toleration pact. If you choose not to respect my rights to my kinks, there’s no reason I need to respect your rights to your kinks. I don’t know for sure that the OP is a kinkster, but his initial post was complaining about two men he saw at a leather bar, so I think it’s pretty likely he is. But of course leather fetishists have their own ethical issues, from the Nazi origins of a lot of leather fashion (thanks to Tom of Finland, actually) to the whole question of whether wearing leather is ethical at all. So if he wants to condemn the cop fetishists, he needs to accept shaming for his own kinks.
Leather-Bound Press 