I dare say there are some for whom this theory hangs makes sense. But evidence is mounting that it’s prone to the same pitfalls as many other efforts to replace normative rules with individual choice. That is, it may work if you’re a highly educated, well-adjusted adult with plenty of social capital. But it leaves those who are impulsive, emotionally needy or otherwise vulnerable at risk of abuse.
A poll conducted last year by BBC Scotland reported that two-thirds of men under 40 have slapped, spat at, gagged or choked a partner during sex. Maybe some of the women enjoyed it, but all of them? I doubt it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a growing chorus (mostly of young women) is complaining that for them, “kink” turned out to be less a mutually pleasurable exchange than a vector for abuse.
The question of “consent” is further complicated by the fact that normalising “alternative experiences of sexualty and expression” creates perverse social pressure not to be “vanilla”. Even Women’s Health magazine has suggested its readership try choking if blindfolds and roleplay “have veered into vanilla territory”.
And here we get to the core difficulty with trying to liberate human sexual expression from social norms: it doesn’t work. Young women now feel the need to say “It’s okay not to want violent sex”. The fact that it’s now cringe to have “vanilla” tastes suggests normalising “kink” has not created an open space for free, tolerant self-expression at all, but a surreal inversion of “respectability politics” in which you’ll be shamed if you aren’t depraved enough.
Worse yet, this upside-down respectability isn’t even the promised nirvana of pleasure. De Sade summed up the problem in 120 Days of Sodom (1785): “If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.” So what happens when “dirty” proclivities are so normalised people are OK with their kids seeing them?
The most likely outcome is they will stop feeling “naughty”. This helps to explain the aura of naffness which clings to the kind of people who like to be “open” about their “BDSM lifestyle”. But it also points to a structural problem with the idea of normalising “kink”: it is (as someone once said of Brexit) less an event than a process.
The opponents of cisheteronormativity argue that the whole point of Pride is broadening what’s acceptable in the mainstream, which in turn means rejecting “respectability politics”. As Vox puts it: “Queerness, at its core, is a rejection of that respectability.”
But if you reject respectability politics, you’re rejecting the whole structure of social stigma that surrounds forbidden practices, and as such endows them with frisson. What, then, is even the point of such practices, when the campaign to destigmatise them has rendered previously dark and thrilling scenarios as exotic and forbidden as a trip to Asda?
We may have embraced wholesale the idea that “anything goes” provided it’s “safe, sane and consensual”. But if the excitement of sexual taboos is precisely their forbidden-ness, then sooner or later someone will come for the taboo of consent itself — and especially on violating the consent of those who aren’t deemed able to consent in the first place: children and animals.
A steady tap-tap-tap on that door can be heard today. When Tom Chivers mused in these pages about why we’re disgusted by people having sex with animals recently, the ensuing brouhaha illustrates the extent to which this remains, thankfully, a no-go area; but earlier this year Joanna Bourke wrote a whole book seeking to question the taboos around bestiality.
Elsewhere, the internet is full of edgelords seeking to “complicate” the boundaries of underage sexual consent. This also extends into academia: Allyn Walker recently published a sympathetic study of non-offending paedophiles.
In other words, the “slippery slope” is not a conservative bogeyman. It’s a structural inevitability. Kink without “respectability politics” has no endpoint; or rather, its endpoint is well beyond the tolerance of even your average whips-and-chains hobbyist.
History suggests it’s not realistic to imagine sexual depravity can ever be eliminated. Humans are simply too perverse for that. But if we’re not to chase the high of sexual transgression even further into the terrain of sexual abuse, or perhaps trigger a puritanical backlash so monumental it sweeps away even moderate gains in sexual tolerance such as the acceptance of normal gay and lesbian couples, we need to reclaim ‘respectability politics’.
This should be a win all round. After all, it’s in the interests of those who enjoy transgression to restore the thrill of the forbidden. This means, in effect, a pro-pervert defence of bourgeois hypocrisy; a kind of degenerate’s Fight Club, where the first and second rules are: you don’t talk about it.
Those who are ineluctably drawn to the dark side will find their way there anyway, in due course. And those who would not otherwise be tempted are well out of it. But no one who is incapable of discretion is mentally equipped to enjoy depravity – and besides, proper enjoyment of the forbidden means something must be forbidden in the first place.
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