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If Oxford’s needlessly infamous sex-party scene (think the Piers Gav, or termly ketamine-fuelled fumblings in someone’s Cowley living room) is anything to go by, it’s a wonder anyone at all takes kink culture seriously. My sources assure me that spending 10 minutes in a tent full of sweaty, pawing undergraduates struggling to get an erection, catching an unwelcome glimpse of one’s old head boy letting out tepid whimpers strapped to a giant crucifix, teaches you that there is literally nothing appealing about such places. For there is something deeply corny, deeply staged about kink — about the back rooms of Ann Summers and the furry handcuffs secreted in an accountant’s bedside table. The word “fetish” comes from the Latin facticius, meaning “artificial”, and this is no coincidence. This aesthetic objection is unlikely to be quelled by high-minded arguments about sex: your right to be spanked by someone dressed as a cartoon wolf should, I hope, be matched by mine not to have to hear about it.
For women, this problem is sharpened by the twin pressures of sexual violence and pornography. Last week, the Edinburgh sexual crisis centre Beira’s Place reported that growing numbers of young women were seeking counselling after having been choked during sex. The Times responded with harrowing testimony from the mother of Emily Drouet, a fresher at Aberdeen University who killed herself in 2016 after being physically and mentally abused by her ex. In court this ex, who was known as the “alpha male” on campus, admitted to seizing her by the neck. Elsewhere in the story, a sex worker blacks out after being strangled by a trusted regular, who then rapes her unconscious body. “She thought she was in control,” says a sexual crisis worker. How many of us have said the same?
Women are now rarely shamed for sexual desire; on the contrary, they are shamed for not having appetites for acts which, not too long ago, were quite fairly viewed as degrading or disgusting, or both. As sex is “liberalised”, the scenarios we conjure up during intimacy are becoming more harrowingly patriarchal. It would seem that sex-positive feminists are, on this issue, becoming strange bedfellows with pornographers and the ever-escalating super-stimuli they concoct. These feminists have also taught us, among other harmful falsehoods such as “you can buy a woman’s consent, and she’ll happily sell it to you like the liberated businesswoman she is!”, that it is perfectly normal for men to desire to inflict physical harm on the women they sleep with. This in itself should remain, as it was not too long ago, extremely controversial. After all, if feminism is all about choice, then we must be absolutely sure that the choice to be brutally choked by a boyfriend is one we make out of genuine desire, and not ambient pressure and shame about being called frigid.
What, exactly, is so empowering about being choked? And why is it that the most radical, liberating acts of the modern sexual repertoire are those which rehearse the most oppressive, shackling truths about being a young woman in a modern city — that at least one of the men a few paces behind you at night might want to strangle you, to debase you? It might be that our male partners simply don’t notice the endless news stories that underlie these fears: most recently, the trial over the 37-year-old NHS worker Natalie Shotter, who was orally raped to death on a park bench. Having seen such stories, a woman’s instinct when feeling a hand creep up her neck and tighten out of nowhere might reasonably be to slap it away in rage. If feminism cannot stop women being made to do things that disgust, hurt and frighten them, what is it for?
Once, sex itself was transgressive — so much so that Anne Boleyn succeeded in changing the national religion by withholding it. Now, we are in an arms-race of sexual extremity, propelled by the internet and an ever-more-casual dating culture. Most of the young women I speak to say they’ve been choked without permission. Many of them chirp, “but I don’t mind, of course!” with a coquettish glance. Then, upon further questioning, they begin to ask themselves whether they do actually like it — or whether they’ve simply been going through the motions. It’s an uncomfortable realisation.
Here, the Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray has something to say. In a more convincing echo of John Berger’s theory that “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”, Irigaray writes that women derive “vicarious pleasure” from pleasing men — though indifferent, or even repulsed, themselves. Sex is a “masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own… she does not know, or no longer knows, what she wants”. When Irigaray was writing in the Eighties, modern kink culture was still contained — it was born in the gay leather bars of the Fifties, working its way into top-shelf magazines such as Bizarre and the mainstream via The Rocky Horror Picture Show before becoming a routine, even perfunctory, part of internet pornography. Today, Irigaray’s once radical take seems depressingly conventional and hard to argue against. Young, inexperienced women, made to feel prudish or illiberal for not wanting to feel scared or unsafe during sex, go through the motions of ever more extreme acts; the validation they receive, apart from those — I suspect, a minority — who genuinely enjoy “breath play”, is the “vicarious pleasure” Irigaray envisioned.
My father is terminally ill and wants to die at home. He received a visit from the local hospice to prepare. Subsequently, he was sent forms to fill in. One of the questions was what is his sexual orientation. There was a list of at least 10 possibilities plus other. My father is 89. I had been intending to make a donation to the hospice but I cannot bear to think of my money paying for this woke nonsense. I want to write my father is dying, not going to an orgy.
My example is far more trivial than yours, but after recently renewing my passport HMG asked me to take part in a short survey about my ‘experience’. Three questions out of twelve were about my sexual orientation and gender identity. To improve customer service in the passport office… Just give me a little blue book with my photo in it and wind your necks in.
I hope your father has a peaceful and dignified end to his life, something not always guaranteed by the NHS. I know how hard this experience is for you, and send my best wishes at one of the worst times you’ll go through.
Thank you Stu, your kind words are very much appreciated. I guess you have been through it. It is incredibly hard to watch someone you love die and yet there is nowhere I would rather be than near my father right now. My father is fortunate in that given that the NHS is a postcode lottery, he is a winner – he has received incredible care. I am a loser.
Then do so. You would be doing most of us a service.
That form is outdated. The official number is 24 according to the civil servant in charge of official statistics in the UK. He privately believes there are only two sexes, male and female, but doesn’t think he should push his opinion on others, including the nutcases and degenerates and the people who make money off their sickness. When the center doesn’t hold all sorts of vileness creeps in.
Why read the article when the comments are sure to be top-tier and twice as good as anything this author has put out? Canceled my subscription. Unherd just isn’t what it used to be.
So its morphing from movement to business but is not yet a racket. I expect it will decline further. The subject of the article is serious but there is a funny side: The mainstream media indulges in gas lighting, emotional abuse and often threats against those that don’t tow the line. This behaviour is not safe, not sane and certainly not consensual.
Read this article (and it’s an excellent article) and finally understand the word “decadent.” That intelligent people spend so much time (and have so much free time) pondering this stuff is as good a marker of our society’s decay as any other.
Yo, unherd content team. Ya’ll need to change the password. Some chick keeps hacking onto your website and posting her high school diary entries.
Anyone who begins a comment with “Yo” obviously has trouble communicating. Ironic, though, how your comment sounds like a high school diary entry.
As I said before, I think Ms Sowerby is telling it like it is among the young folk today. She takes a deep dive into the zeitgeist and reports back. So we don’t have to. A decent service to the Unherd readership for sure.
She writes some interesting stories, but i’m not sure about a deep dive into the zeitgeist. She seems to be reporting from the surface, an observer of the internet. How prevalent is “breath play” for example? We don’t know. What’s it about? We don’t know. Who’s actually doing it? We don’t know. So it’s an observation about something in society and it’s meaning, but we don’t even know how real it is and consequently what it means about women, sex and society.
In other words, the article resembles a girl posting a diary entry on a public forum without considering that readers might have no idea what she’s talking about or why. Thanks for making up for your lack of self-awareness with, well, a prodigious lack of self-awareness.
I think we’ll have to meet halfway. Not quite a diary entry and not quite an in-depth piece.
That’s some scorched-earth, wickedly biting commentary there, little buddy. Let me sit down and gather myself.
Oh golly. What Poppy describes is nothing to do with kink. It’s abuse, pure and simple. There is a kink scene, which is rigidly policed, and where consent can be withdrawn at any time. It needs to be. If someone is looming over you with something that could do real damage, you don’t want to mess around.
I think it’s safe to say that the participants in the incidents described by Poppy, would not know a safe word if you presented it to them on a silver platter with the proverbial sprig of holly on top.
Abuse is abuse. Choking somebody without their consent is abuse.
In the kink ‘scene’ (awful word), submissives have all the power.
A very insightful and rather disturbing article. I guess I’ve been ignorant of how much casual, sexual violence young women are expected to deal with. Despite some grim subject matter, some very funny lines. “your right to be spanked by someone dressed as a cartoon wolf should, I hope, be matched by mine not to have to hear about it.” was my favorite.
“breath play”
Of course it’s just legitimising a violent act by calling it “play”. But in fact it’s playing with killing. One small extra step and it’s death by strangulation. This is not so much sex as playing with death/killing which as I mentioned in another comment, seems to be our current fixation in life. Maybe the question to be asked is why?
There are, and always have been, connotations between sex and death.
The French expression “le petit mort” is one example. In some species, especially for the male, death follows upon the act of fertilisation.
That doesn’t quite explain why males should desire to strangulate during sex, which seems to me to be about control rather than communion.
Though connotations aren’t the same as actions.
Though there is de Sade of course. So yes, nothing really new, just more common.
Any species in which death followed for the female upon the act of fertilization would have a very short fossil record.
My understanding of breath play is that its purpose is to intensify the pleasure felt by the woman. Why anyone would play such a high risk game is another question. Then again I don’t understand why people eat puffer fish, given the risk of death, but people do.
It feels like there are several factors at play that have led us this point where “anything goes” and selfish sexual appetites trump virtues like respect and kindness.
The first would be the failure to apply the principle of Chesterton’s Fence to the ideas of chastity and chivalry. Both of these were designed as social constraint mechanisms on human behaviour, which left unchecked, would lead to a gradual erosion of group cohesion and order. In “freeing” women from the “oppression” of chastity, there’s a good chance we’ve exposed them to the very dangers such mechanisms were out in place to protect them from.
The second might be the principle “It starts out as a movement, then it becomes a business, then it turns into a racket”. The sexual revolution began as a genuine movement in the 60’s aimed at liberating individuals from oppressive sexual norms, promoting autonomy, and encouraging open expression free from societal constraints. It was intertwined with broader social changes, advocating for equality and authentic self-expression. However, as it gained popularity, industries began to monetise the movement. Pornography, advertising, and entertainment capitalised on changing attitudes, commodifying sex as a product to stimulate consumption. The original ideals became secondary to the commercial interests driving these industries.
Over time, the movement morphed into a racket, with sex becoming increasingly fetishised and detached from its authentic human and relational aspects. To sustain profits, industries perpetuated an environment where sex is omnipresent, manipulating individuals through unrealistic standards and distorted narratives. The original liberation ideals were overshadowed by commercial motives, leading to a paradox where the system, rather than freeing people, often reinforced insecurities and control, making sex more commodified and performative than ever before.
In conclusion, the current sexual landscape is a stark reminder of how movements such as feminism, even with its genuine intentions, can become unrecognisable from their origins when principles and societal structures are disregarded.
The failure of feminism to preserve social constraints like chastity and chivalry, combined with the commercialisation of sexual freedom, has resulted in a culture where the pursuit of pleasure overshadows deeper virtues such as respect and kindness.
Without a re-examination of the values and systems that once aimed to protect the integrity of human relationships, society risks continuing down a path where connection and meaning are sacrificed for momentary gratification and profit.
Brilliant analysis, thank you- “It starts out as a movement, then it becomes a business, then it turns into a racket”, how profoundly true. I found the subtext of this article profoundly sad actually. When everything is permissible, nothing, absolutely nothing, is sacred or even just humane anymore. Worse actually, sex lacks any meaning at all apart from a ‘commodified’ moment. Grim as f…I wonder what we will realise in years to come what the impact of having sex everywhere-mobile phones, advertising, etc-has had on the human psyche. I think we are seeing the fracturing already we just don’t know what to call it yet. Perhaps we are seeing it now with so much loneliness, ennui, lack of purpose amongst so many, particularly young people.
“It starts out as a movement, then it becomes a business, then it turns into a racket” – Excellent point, isn’t it?
Paraphrased from Eric Hoffer, incidentally, whose work is well worth the investment of time (for anyone unacquainted).
Thanks, I’ll check him out.
I think all of what you accurately and persuasively lay out here became possible because, at bottom, feminists are just another species of utopian fantasist who put abstruse theories of what they’d like human nature to be like above empirical observations of what human nature actually is. Anyone who looked at the philosophical content of the manifestos from the liberation movements of the 1960s could have seen where this was all going to end up. Gutting all social restrictions on relations between the sexes on the theory that women want just as much no-strings-attached sex as men is like opening a sheep fold and chasing all the sheep out into a wolf-infested forest on the theory that the sheep have just as much of an appetite for wolf flesh as the wolves do for mutton.
Brilliant final sentence, Vito!
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No, I mean human nature, which is both male and female. One of the most fatuous conceits in feminism is the idea, which you allude to, that women can even theoretically have a nature independent of men; that female nature is not what it really is – an eternal dance with male nature, and vice versa. The time-tested ways that have worked for all of human history up until the last thirty years or so see human nature in these terms. If traditional social mores restricted some of the ways women could behave, it was because it was observed that a restraint on male sexual novelty-seeking, which was part-and-parcel with male aggression and risk-taking, was necessary if women were to be honored and kept safe and the orderly propagation of the species was to be ensured and perpetuated. It was known and accepted that men’s nature could not be fundamentally changed, nor was it desirable that it should be, since male aggression and risk-taking was useful to the progress of society in other ways. It’s easier, and more correct, to encourage young women to behave modestly than it is to encourage young men not to chase women. For one thing, since women don’t want a lot of no-strings-attached sex, this is conducive to their natures. For another, it’s good for everyone if a young man chases women and competes with other men for them; it’s good for no one if the young man gets what he’s after every time with no strings attached. In fact, it’s vital that he not be allowed to get what he wants all the time if his pursuit of women is to be socially beneficial and that’s where the social restraints that we’ve liberated ourselves from were necessary.
We have fables like Beauty and the Beast which illustrate eternal humans truths such as how the love of a woman transforms a young man from an animal into a human being. In so many words, male aggressiveness and risk-taking creates a boundary from outside threats, a safety within which the gentler arts of civilization can grow. Women nurture and perpetuate the civilization by joining with men to create homes conducive to raising the young and by teaching men the way to live within those homes and, by extension, civilization through love. Men can be men because of women. Women can be women because of men. If you reduce this beautiful, ancient, and complex relationship to power dynamics without love, you fundamentally misunderstand it. You breed mistrust and envy between men and women and you destroy the home and, by extension, the civilization that rests upon this fundamental foundation. That all of this has to take place within a framework of social restraints on the behaviors of both sexes, is something we seem to have lost the ability to recognize.
Outstanding
Very nice comment.
“The failure of feminism to preserve social constraints like chastity and chivalry, combined with the commercialisation of sexual freedom, has resulted in a culture where the pursuit of pleasure overshadows deeper virtues such as respect and kindness.”
Excellent writing!
Restricting breathing enhances sexual sensations for many people, not the few suggested by Poppy. If you don’t believe me, try French kissing while having sex. This is why many women agree to and practice it by choking men. Of course, just because ‘breath play’ is pleasurable, does not mean that it is not dangerous and it does not mean that very dangerous men do not use it as a cloak to seriously harm or even murder women.
The underlying problem is not just that of the potential for male violence. It is also the female desire to remain part of the female crowd. Too many women choose the sex they feel they ‘should’ want, because everyone else is supposedly enjoying it, over the sex they do want. Good for Poppy that she is prepared to stand alone.
Hardly alone. Wise women have always been confident of and guarded their sexuality and given it only to those they mutually desire even at the risk of the eye rolling ‘prude,’ ‘lesbian’ ‘ frigid’ taunts. As if such taunters were worth anything. Some things are more important than sex, like your self worth, dignity and reputation. Why throw it away to appease someone else?
I was first alerted to this problem by a Dutch friend of mine 25 years ago which has stuck in my mind incomprehensibly. She said that her fifteen year old daughter went to a cafe after school where it had become expected that they would give blow jobs in the toilets to boys they fancied. How utterly bizarre. So incredibly sad. That was a generation ago. Now it’s fuelling gender identity, a way for many young women to reject such humiliation in a ‘progressive‘ way.
I thought this was a good take on it, and helped to balance the article a bit. Otherwise it was a bit like someone trying to explain why people take drugs with no reference to the pleasure involved.
Choking? Really?
Call me old-fashioned, but that sounds incredibly shit.
You’re old-fashioned.
Me, too.
When I hear about this sort of thing I am always reminded of the Peep Show character Mark Corrigan’s reaction to the prospect of an orgy as “Just more people to disappoint.”
I like the French story of a young man trying to make a date with a young woman by asking her “what are you doing after the orgy?”
“Sex is the most political thing in the world…”
Well here’s the problem in a nutshell. Not everything is political, in fact most things are not political. Or at least, to be clear, they don’t have to be political.
We know, of course, that one of the most defining aspects of the left/right political divide is that the Left sees no natural limit to the reach of politics, while the Right sees both the reason for such limits and the fact that we’re well past the optimum point where those limits ought to be.
But really, what ought to be obvious by now is that if a thing is not presently political, and someone thinks it ought to be, that someone is almost certainly intending to do harm while using the system to insulate themselves from the consequences. You only have to look at what happened to sex and gender, which a decade ago was an unquestioned assumption upon which society happily rested, and which is now a colossal disaster simply as a result of a desire by a minority of political activists to overturn a social norm. Nobody has been helped by it except for the political activists who have gained political power from it – even transgender people aren’t any better off, and thousands of children have been mutilated, women have lost their right to men-free spaces, and men are standing on podiums having beaten women in sporting contests.
And in the context of this article, too, it would appear that feminism has played a blinder once again, subjecting women to an agenda that “empowers” them apparently, but which seemingly somehow at the same time confiscates from them the you’d-think-basic right to say, without having to give reasons: “I just don’t want to”.
Well played, feminism. Another spectacular own-goal.
This article is mis-titled. It is not about “kink” but about violence and control, nothing more. If a man requires to choke a woman to get sexual satisfaction, they are ill and need help.
Well said!
Deleuze did a study of Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus in Furs” to underline the philosophical distinction between sadism and sadomasochism in human behaviour.
That’s worth looking at here to understand the forces at play: “Coldness and Cruelty” (comparison of Sacher-Masoch with Sade amongst others).
I love the Bill Maher quote:
Spot on as usual – the first two obsolete and the third one going that way as well, if this article and the plummeting birth rate are anything to go by.
This “scene” would be familiar to students of German history. The 1920’s in Berlin would put modern day pornography to shame. And then came the solution. If women got some balls and refused to be abused the problem would go away. Young women these days, I am told by younger men, are patsies and need to be more assertive.
Do you mean in 1933?
Sorry, what are feminists getting wrong about kink exactly? Is the author suggesting that “feminists” are so quick to embrace the redemptive power of sexual transgression, that they are OK with men choking women without consent.
Is that it?
That seems a rather unlikely position for a feminist to take. And it is surely telling that no specific feminists seem to be quoted saying anything of the sort.
Moreover, as several others seem to have pointed out, what is described here is not actually kink.
Most of the article seems to be suggesting that it is bad for men to force women into dangerous sexual practices against their will.
And yes. that’s true but it has very little to do with feminists or kink. Nor does some sad sack in a gimp mask standing at a bus stop in the middle of the afternoon. Perhaps, thirty years ago, he’d have been flashing people instead. But, again, I think you’d struggle to find many feminists (or anyone else really) to defend either practice.
Then again, “what no-one actually gets wrong about a thing I have misdescribed” isn’t much of a headline I suppose. And you don’t get to post a pic of Phoebe Waller-Bridge in a corset.
Totally agree. Straw-manning from beginning to end. Unlike most people I found this to be a really weak article
Well, some will like it because it provides something else to blame feminists for despite providing no evidence of femists being involved.
The blatant commodification of lust over the last 50 years has ruined the experience for both women and men. Sex has become performative, comparative and increasingly bleak. It creates and emotional wreckage of coulda, shoulda, woulda in those who allows themselves to be swept along in the current unhinged cultural vacuousness of what passes for ‘liberation’ today. And the feminists have as much to blame for enabling this as the unredeemable patriarchal men for encouraging it.
I’m starting to think that the answer to “what do women want?” is unknown even to women. When every aspect of life becomes politicized – even the decidedly apolitical, like sex – no one is happy. Look at the results: a bunch of 30ish women with careers but no partners; a bunch of aimless men more interested in weed and video games than women; a plummeting birth rate; and mass confusion among people unfortunate enough to be in the dating scene.
Kink has historically always been part of human civilization, whether it was Babylon, Persia, the Greeks and the Romans, India (kama sutra), etc etc. Even the pretentious Christians had fun in their monasteries and their courts. Who cares what people do as long as it’s consensual, are there any unherd readers who are not judgemental and boring prudes? It would be nice to have some female opinions as well.
I found the article didn’t really distinguish very well between harmless roleplay and serious violence. Human desires are pretty varied and some people find safe and consensual ways to fulfill those desires. It was also portrayed as very male driven, which I don’t think is the case. Male arousal isn’t generally a problem. I’d always assumed a lot of these practices centred on achieving female arousal.
The stream of desire that flows into the nether regions carries with it quite a few very odd flotsam some of which have eager collectors. Whether any of these can be held to be objectionable on one ground or another cannot be established analytically with any degree of certainty. However we need to remind ourselves that the act of sexual intercourse itself, even when not being accompanied by weird and wonderful bells and whistles, have, for long, been considered a degrading act, particularly for the one cast in the feminine role, something that debased not just the individual involved, but the whole family or the clan. That is why the war over the rape of Sabine women took place. That’s why ‘f**k you’ or ‘screw you’ appear so satisfying as an invective. In India the equivalent expression to hurl at someone that is often used may be translated as ‘brother in law’ which artfully implies that the addressee’s sister has been given the genital treatment by the speaker.
However, degrading though the act may have been seen to be, it was also considered a necessary evil. Hence special arrangements have been made so that the act could be undertaken without attracting opprobrium as long as it was performed within a socially agreed framework. Hence we have, though not so much these days, the ritual that is the wedding ceremony.
I have to say, the picture accompanying this piece doesn’t look especially “harrowingly patriarchal”.
“What feminists get wrong about kink” is an interesting subtitle.
At one point in its history feminism did see kink, as well as practices now considered normal, as patriarchal – focussing on any acts which looked at all like male domination of any kind. Acts of female domination were subtly ignored. Healthy sex would be kind, gentle and sensitive. Non-heterosexual sex was assumed to be just that. Sex without the component of patriarchal domination.
Then the truth about lesbian sadomasochistic practices (not to mention gay male practices) started to come out, and the idea of kink as patriarchal domination of women by men started to crumble. It’s a bit late to try and resurrect it now.
I hope others are as revolted by this subject matter as I am. Why must we be continually reminded of how depraved as in Caligula’s time our own has become? The mild nausea the writer wittily expresses needs far more feeling to do justice to how far we’ve sunk. Get rid of Justin Welby and bring back Christianity.
“Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good” – Thomas Sowell, “Is Reality Optional?”
I have come to despise Sowerby’s articles.
Despite all her internet culture taint, Poppy at least knows what she wants. The performative component of kink makes it ridiculous. What she’s hitting on is culture-changers and society-breakers cause far more problems than they solve. The downsides of sexual liberalisation could have temporary, but were cemented by the rise of male-kinked homosexual and then LBGT rights, where pride meant asserting sexual fetishes as normal. The effect of letting male-to-male kink play out in public has been to confuse normal people, especially women, of the difference between tolerance and acceptance. Tolerating what people do is private, does not mean you have to agree with, or do, the things the weirdos do. I use that sentence construction deliberately – I have no problem with most consenting behaviour, but tolerating it doesn’t mean I have to like it.
I was disappointed that the article was so bland. I had hoped for some interesting ideas for kinkiness.
Trust students from the most elite universities to think of taking horse tranquilliser to an orgy. I know little about either but I can’t imagine how it could be helpful.
Perhaps it stops the horses joining in.
Pornography needs to go. Just be eliminated as human rights violations. We have generations of children watching the most hideously, dehumanizing videos, and they think it’s normal. So much of what is happening with teens now is a direct result of the “normalization” of pornography, and the cultural insistence that anything is normal if you want to do it.
Many heterosexual men don’t want any of this. They like women and they like genuine sexual connection… This business sounds nothing like sex, at least not the kind worth having for anyone…
What’s described is definitely true to some extent, but it is one sided to believe this is all in hock to patriarchal desires. It may surprise the author, but many Female fantasies can be just as dark and involve unpalatable desires to many. So let’s not just make this another oppression hand-wringing exercise if you really want to talk about the subject. I think the problem here is taboo subjects and the associated market which springs up around them, can then be pushed onto those as ‘normal’ or rather that to not want to participate is deemed abnormal. Both young men and women can fall prey to this, with men led to think ALL women have these desires and women pressured into thinking there is something wrong with them if they don’t acquiesce. Unfortunately society is to prim to admit these taboo fantasies exist, so there will not be any discussion to help young lovers navigate such entanglements.
It’s now a pillar of western thinking that one’s innermost self (I don’t really know what that is) is where true personal authenticity lies. We’ve concluded that it naturally, an obviously, follows that this “self” is, by its very nature, correct and just in all it’s desires. (The heart wants what the heart wants.) Pish posh! This is the mindset of a 3yr old. Woe is us.