What feminists get wrong about kink

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.

“As sex is ‘liberalised’, the scenarios we conjure up during intimacy are becoming more harrowingly patriarchal.”

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.

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Sex is the most political thing in the world; the idea of it being a space free from the power dynamics of gender, where being “submissive” and “dominant” is entirely disconnected from the fact of — in heterosexual arrangements — one partner generally being easily able to overpower the other, is pure fantasy. There is nothing wrong with finding those physical realities themselves erotic — and with discussion, and trust, people should do whatever the hell they like. But for the submission, even hurting, of every woman a man sleeps with to be so routine as to be unannounced suggests little to no interest in what women want. This is not the noble act of subversion which kink is so often breathlessly told to represent. Nor is the claim of sex as a politics-free zone — chill, babe, all the other girls do it! — evenly meted out; in one rattling breath, young women are told not to take unconsensual slapping, choking or spitting as a sign of a troubling thirst for sexual violence — so judgemental! — but also to respect a partner’s proclivity for those things as a sainted feature of their identity. It is this mindset which has fostered a culture in which a middle-aged bloke feels comfortable standing at a bus stop on Battersea Rise with a furry tail and gimp mask — a recent sighting in the wild to which not only I, but an entire busload of Year 7s, was recently treated.

The thing about sex is that precisely because it is so swamped in political factionalism, it is the subject, perhaps aside from death, most prone to the airiest theoretical concoctions, the most pretentious, hopeful bullshit. Take Audre Lorde’s vision: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” That such a lofty take has avoided outright ridicule — and has, I suspect, worked its way into the notebooks of nose-ringed undergraduates since Uses of the Erotic was first published in 1978, goes some way to explaining the aesthetic problem that “prudish” feminists have when saying that maybe not every woman should be choked. “Sex-positive” feminists insist that to question kink or to avoid degrading acts is to live within “negativity” and to be joyless. How different is this from the million times we’re told we’re “no fun” for refusing things — that the last girlfriend did it, why can’t you?

While there is a place for dreamy empowerment narratives about sex, a feminist needn’t assert it in every avenue of her life, least of all the office. In reclaiming female sexuality in this way, Lorde connects it to the general virtues of women, women who dance, love, work. What about the off-duty feminist, prone and alone in her bed as I am now, who is currently doing none of those things? What about the vast stretches of time when, rather than ravenously exploring subversive sexualities and wresting eroticism from the clutches of our oppressors, we just want to scroll on Twitter instead? I am making the case for a more brutal vision of female sexuality, one which — alongside seeking no doubt world-shaking experiences — sometimes simply cannot be arsed, and is equally blunt about brushing off coercion to do things which are, frankly, grim. Let’s uncouple kink from virtue and bring it all back to basics: do I like this, do I like them? And if you don’t, get the hell out of there.
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