Thread by @eevee

one of the big unspoken issues underlying "kink at pride" discourse seems to be that a lot of people assume "kink" is an objective category, and anyone engaging in a "kink" is therefore horny at all times and basically fucking right in front of you

but this is incredibly weird to me because i immediately think of MOST OF WESTERN MEDIA and how it's built around male gaze and the women have to be sufficiently attractive to straight men and then we dress them in as little as possible

and i am not really clear on how this is different from "kink"?

media depiction of women is quite clearly meant to be sexually appealing to cishet men. that doesn't mean every dude pops an immediate boner upon witnessing catwoman

oh, and what is catwoman's skintight outfit made out of? well it's black and shiny, so you might almost think it's latex. you know, a Kink material. but it's not a gay dude doing it so it doesn't count as kink. mainstream kinks aren't kinks, they're background noise

the catwoman movie was rated pg-13, and mostly for violence. but how do you explain catwoman's attire to your kids?? oh, you don't, because sexualizing women doesn't even need explanation. that's just what you do

anyway

i don't think sex is this binary thing you are either Doing or Not Doing. it's a broad gradient entwined with all the other stuff our thinkmeat happens to like. if someone has a kink, it's going to be because they also just /like the thing/, beyond the context of sex

so if someone goes to pride wearing whatever leather harness getup, i am willing to bet their thought process is not "i am getting off to this right this moment", but rather "hell yeah this stuff is cool and i like wearing it and don't really get to do so outside the bedroom"

kind of frustrating that heteronormative nonsense is so pervasive that even fellow queer folks interpret references to queer sexuality as Objectionable but overt cishet sexuality as Just How The World Is

who the fuck cares if someone is wearing a pup hood. if you don't even know that's kink-related then it's meaningless, it's someone wearing a weird thing

this is a whole thing i keep grappling with — i'm working on a game based around kink-themed mechanics, but with nothing actually explicit in it. does that make it a "kink game"? what would that mean? it's inspired by a nintendo game; is the source material a kink game?

will the game be inappropriate for kids, or offputting to some adults? but then, tons of folks picked up kinks from tropes in saturday morning cartoons; were those inappropriate for kids? what determines any of this?

feels very "i'll know it when i see it", which is unhelpful

idk. i like rubber lexy. i think characters made of rubber are neat for lots of reasons. some of them are horny; some are not. i can't draw a clear line because i don't subscribe to the lie that sexuality is something you keep in a small box until you wish to procreate

this feels deeply related with the stuff i said about queer sexuality a couple weeks ago, about how it's often intertwined with regular life in a way that's difficult to convey to anyone who hasn't experienced it

thinking about, as a very rough approximation, how "she's hot" might mean anything from "i appreciate her aesthetically and am genuinely impressed by the effort she puts in etc" to "i am already envisioning having sex with her" and it's largely ambiguous or contextual

and there's some analogy to how i know folks with oddball kinks like soda or pooltoys or whatever, and if those come up then you can elbow them a bit to get a reaction, and that's not really a /sexual/ interaction so much as being Seen. but it is 4am and i can't quite bridge it

wait i got it, let me take another swing at this:

when people see 69 and say "nice", that isn't considered deeply inappropriate — because "69" is the /aesthetic/ of sexuality, without the sex. it is possible to do this with other things, too!