The Conflation Game

it's a pie chart! kink is the red. just 'cause.

I get pretty excited when kinky articles or posts pop up in non-kinky settings. Feminist blogs, or blogs of my friends, will occasionally feature kinky subject matter, and it puts my worlds together in a really great way. It's both that my sexuality feels less relegated to a dark corner of the internet, but also that it's somehow less pigeonholed, less quarantined (because even when kink isn't judged worse than... other aspects of being human, it's often very insular: people talk about kink in kink spaces, with kink people, and that's the only place it happens). Coming across it this way, it feels like part of a whole, an integrated whole, as opposed to a separate space.

I had a moment like this with a post by sex geek on feministing; the post is long, really long, but it does a good job of breaking down how the mainstream media talks about kink, and tackles a couple of recent and particularly egregious examples. One of my favorite of sex geek's points, and a thread throughout the post, is the conflation of kink and violence; or rather, the mainstream's choice to ignore how pivotal, and how essential, and what a cornerstone, and what-other-language-can-I-look-for-to-reinforce-this-point, consent is to the kink community (I've also written about this conflation before, from a more personal context, so I'm excited to see it getting discussed other places).

It's like the flour in bread, dudes; if you leave it out, you don't have "sorta kinda something like bread." You have water and yeast and sugar. Which is both gross, and very, very far from bread.