Where do those kinks come from?
On the one hand, our society's fucked-up perspective on fucking really pisses me off: It's an essential function of life, without which none of us would be here, and is as natural as eating, sleeping or breathing. It feels good, it's good for us, and it's a supremely pleasant way to spend time, especially if you include the foreplay and the post-fuck makeout session in the equation. So why did all the uptight folks who think things that feel good are automatically bad have to get their nasty little knickers in a twist over it?
Thanks to their making sex a taboo topic, marketing firms can use sex to sell everything from beverages to cars to toothpaste but schools can't teach teenagers how to have safe sex and prevent unwanted pregnancies. Does this make sense? Not at all.
But I'll tell you what it does do: It makes for some really fucking hot fetishes. By making all sorts of bits and pieces and aspects of sex forbidden, we all have quirky and unexpected buttons and turnons. Do you think all those cultures where women run around bare-breasted and nursing their babies at every turn get the same thrill at a glimpse of nipple that Americans do? It seems pretty unlikely, doesn't it?
By bringing more issues into sex, we provide for more twists and turns on what gets people off. I'm sure I'd still love the curve of my lover's lower back, the dimples at the top of his ass, even if I got to see naked people all the time, but the fact that I don't gives it an extra thrill. If we didn't bring power into sexual dynamics, I probably wouldn't get off as much on exchanging it with a partner.
Still, I'd trade a couple of kinks for a saner society. Since I don't get to make that trade, though, I might as well take advantage of the silver lining. Or whatever they're calling it these days.
Comments
The lubed lining? But I'm a guy, so my mind automatically goes there.
I would really like to get some kind of cold, hard numbers on the fetishes of a place like, say, Brazil. Granted, anti-sex Catholicism is seriously dominant there, but all the nude beaches in the big coastal cities must have some effect on at least men's fetishes.
Historically, complex societies without the body taboos we have (such as ancient Rome and Greece) seem to have had a good deal of differing tastes. And I figure what our society would call a "kink" or "perversion" would just be a "taste" or "preference" in a society without hangups.
So I wonder if social repression makes for more intense "kinks" or if it just makes us all a bit easier to shock.
Posted by: Rob | August 14, 2006 12:26 AM
I agree with CC, I think there are some "kinks" that simply wouldn't exist in a truly healthy society -- and that includes kinks that *I* have. How many kinks, for example, tap right into the gender power divide? In an egalitarian society, where would a fetish for amazonian women with whips and steel bras and painfully high heels come from?
Posted by: sapiophile | August 14, 2006 10:19 AM
Filmmaker John Waters once said (not an exact quote but close to it): I'm so glad I was raised Catholic, because for me sex will always be dirty.
Posted by: Bascomb | August 14, 2006 11:42 PM
Sapiophile: First I think we'd have to find out where it comes from now. In my personal experience, my kinks were formed young, and they are directly at odds with how I was raised to be. I was raised in a strongly feminist household, and I don't disagree with it, yet my evil kinks are for dominating and humiliating women. While someone else who grew up in the same situation might have wanted women to dominate them.
The sources of kinks and fetishes are muddy to say the least.
Posted by: Rob | August 15, 2006 1:59 AM
Yes, they are muddy, but I still say that they are all tied up with this twisted society.
I too was raised in a feminist household, and my fantasies complement yours. There's no doubt in my mind that it's all tied up together in complex ways that would take a lifetime to untangle.
Having come to be at peace with my own proclivities, I don't need to do that untangling on an individual basis for you or me or anyone else. But I do think at a social level, the existence of such kinks are tied it with our social ills.
Posted by: sapiophile | August 15, 2006 8:28 AM