Some Kink Taboos are More Taboo Than Others

When It Comes to Fantasies Where Do We Draw the Line?

I spend entirely too much of my time on a kink website called Fetlife. There, I am able to find events near me, stay in touch with fellow kinksters, gain knowledge, see more dick pics than imaginable, and watch the culture wars rage like you wouldn’t believe. While it’s tempting to think that people who delight in stepping outside of the box with their sexual and romantic behaviors are likely to be more compassionate and accepting of variation in others and their desires, the fact is that kinksters are people and people aren’t always logical or consistent.

There is, quite rightly, a great deal of concern about racism and sexism by those within the kink community and the general populace. People of conscience want to engage in behaviors that are ethical and cause little if any, harm. This, however, can create quite a dichotomy when it comes to kinky play, especially of a psychological nature. How do we engage in interactions that require inequality for their power and still stay on the right side of our moral code? Are some kinds of inequality play more equal than others? What about those who genuinely believe that inequality is superior to equity or parity?

The majority of Dominant/submissive dynamics that I can think of offhand center around age, race, religion, or sex/gender. There are people who enjoy engaging in age regression and those who enjoy taking on the role of the stern or loving adult, for instance. There are rubber nuns and filthy priests who wield whips and rulers, take confessions, grant absolutions, and frolic in an unseemly way with parishioners, altar boys, and each other. There are female supremacists who demand tribute and subservience from men, and there are male supremacists who believe that women are good primarily for reproduction and housework. But when it comes to race play, even between people of the same not-white complexion, everything stops.

That the world, which includes the United States of America, has a history of horrifying acts of violence against humans based on nothing more than the shade of their skin is not in question. Whether it is appropriate to roleplay or verbalize in ways that incorporate these elements into a consensual power dynamic is.

There are any number of reasons to discourage race play, especially if done as a public scene that could easily upset others. But why the pass on scenes that explore and exploit sex-based power imbalances? Is using a slur for a woman or man less socially harmful than using a slur for a person of another race? Are women, gender minorities, and queer people not historically oppressed, especially if they are also members of ethnic minorities?

Before we move further into the minefield that is the exploration of the human psyche and its relationship with sexuality, I feel that I should make clear that I, as a white cis woman, am utterly disinterested in initiating race play that puts me in a position of power or authority. It’s not where I live emotionally, physically, intellectually, or spiritually. I don’t know if that makes me better than anyone who does indulge in those areas of their sexuality in a manner negotiated between all involved. I just know it’s not my bag. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been approached by POC and asked to participate in race-based power exchange, however. It also doesn’t mean I said no.

One of the most important aspects of kink for me is the ability to examine and experience a range of fantasies. Fantasies, whether they be acted out within a porn context or a BDSM context are just that, fantasies. I have never found fantasies compelled to conform to societal ideas about what is respectable, decent, or even practical. Just as I have swum through the air and watched the dead rise from their graves in my dreams, I have imagined being cut from my clothing and ravished sexually.

For those wondering, I can not swim through the air, the dead did not actually rise from graves in front of me, and I’m not particularly interested in some stranger taking sexual advantage of me. That happened plenty when I was too young to know what was going on. I feel no need to live the reality without handrails or safeguards again. That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate and enjoy the erotic aspects of radical seduction, though.

Likewise, whereas I would throw a fit, if not a fist, if someone used words commonly used to address women within porn and kink in my mundane life, I can luxuriate in them within a more controlled kink scenario based on communication, mutual trust, and shared respect. In other words, I can handle sexism directed toward me if I know we’re having a good time, getting our soul-scouring rocks off, have both agreed to the rules of engagement and will return to our regularly scheduled personas upon completion.

The same thing will happen if I kneel in a confessional that doubles as a glory hole and allow the clergy member to baptize me in his cum. This is seen as irreverent, daring, boundary-pushingly blasphemous. We acknowledge that it is possible to both enjoy such deviance as a purely sexual experience as well as employ it as a form of catharsis.

But when it comes to race-based power imbalance scenes, we recoil. Oh, we post about the big black cock that white women supposedly crave and its alleged superiority to all other cocks, and we giggle and stroke it when a black bull cuckolds a white new age sensitive guy in a porn scene, but when a POC craves a visceral dance through their dark side, things change. Perhaps this is as it should be.

When you’re skating the edge of propriety it can be challenging to know when enough is enough. But it feels more like white people being uncomfortable with their history and wanting to protect POC from even reenacting it and reminding them of something we’d prefer to forget or ignore. Yet we are, as I’ve mentioned, nowhere near as discomforted by one sex dominating the other, even in sometimes brutal and extreme ways.

Perhaps this relates to the kind of oppression majority populations have enacted against minority populations over the centuries. Nearly every culture has ordained women’s place within it, usually with some justification associated with fertility. But there have been few if any, actual wars against one sex or the other.

We’ve kept our sexism comfortably tucked within our social, religious, and legislative structures; much of it made into the bedrock that we rest our view of civilization upon. The recently invented nuclear family, for instance. We’re used to seeing women treated as less and women have, out of a sense of self-preservation or indoctrination, largely accepted this status. But ethnic uprisings are an entirely different matter.

Tribes and nations have launched coordinated and sanctioned pogroms and military actions against other tribes and nations based upon nothing more relevant than how much melanin is possessed by each. And each of those tribes and nations has its own collective sense of identity which they wish to defend and continue. Racism destroys not merely the individual but the entire existence of a race.

And perhaps this is why, at the very least in private between knowledgeable and consenting adults, we act out so many scenarios that our ethical, vanilla-world selves never want to see running around free in the wild. The difference between “real” sexism, racism, religious bigotry, and other forms of oppression and eroticizing it within a controlled and respectful fantasy kink setting that allows for cathartic release and exploration is consent.

We have our own reasons for doing what we do and it’s wise to have trustworthy mentors and advisors, but it is ultimately up to each of us to decide what turns us on, invigorates our libido, activates our mind, gives us purpose, and stirs our soul. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also look at why those things result from indulging in the darker corners of our sexuality and/or sense of identity and what, if anything, they do to make our lives, our kink scene partner’s lives, and the lives of those around us better and more self-aware.

The more we understand what it is that we do, why we do it, and the larger context within which our personal kink exists, the better we can understand ourselves and the world we live in. As to whether kinky race play is better or worse than play that involves gender-based humiliation, service, or impact, I don’t think there’s a clear answer. In their raw forms, all of these -isms are unacceptable. But when their powers are harnessed and employed consciously, there’s no knowing what insights are available to us.

Ultimately, answering the question of why one kind of  -ism play is more tolerated than others may be less important than the discussion the question inspires. After all, for many of us, the unexamined life is not worth living.