One of my favorite cards to play in "Cards Against Humanity" is “sexual peeing.” Many people consider “sexual peeing” to be a complete oxymoron. There are couples who have been married for 50 years and still would never even consider peeing with the bathroom door open. It’s funny to listen to people say “ew” and “yuck” as that card is read laughingly, never considering that that card exists because some people out there are really into watersports.
Humanity has spent thousands of years finding and practicing all the possible things we can do to and with our bodies. A person’s sexual preferences can be as unique as a fingerprint. This has led to an endless array of kinks — unusual sexual preferences. In America, where sex is simultaneously everywhere you look and somehow still taboo to discuss, a lot of the things that turn people on are excluded from the established norm. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist and aren’t valid — being sexually attracted to statues, wearing a tail and acting like a sexy kitten, even staging their own murder (autoassassinophilia).
As our society “progresses” and people feel comfortable being more open with what they like in bed, lots of new, uncommon kinks are being brought to the table. And with talking about kinks, there is "kinkshaming." Kinkshaming is the act of ridiculing, judging or excluding someone because of their sexual preferences. A person’s kinks should never be a point of judgment or critique, because it is no one else’s business and reflects very little on who they are as a person outside the bedroom.
This goes beyond homophobia or queerphobia, as it is not just who someone has sex with, but how they have sex and what they like about sex. If everyone is entitled to their own opinion, then so too would everyone be entitled to their own set of kinks. It’s easy to say that what someone else does in bed is no one else’s business and should not be a basis of judgment when you don’t know what someone gets up to in the bedroom. But once you know that your friend Michael really likes being peed on, can you really look him in the eye again?
The answer is yes, you really should. Kinks shouldn’t be shamed, as they can be natural and healthy expressions of human sexuality. They are also intensely personal and, because they are often sexual in nature, require the consent of the people involved in them. It is when one individual’s kink is imposed on another, non-consenting individual that there is real damage being done.
Sites such as Tumblr have become a great platform for togetherness, where people from across the globe can come together in solidarity to build a community of like-minded individuals. This is absolutely true for kinksters. However, plenty of people have run into issues on Tumblr where kink or fetish blogs reblog their posts or pictures that weren’t intended to be sexualized. If a woman who chooses not to shave her underarms posts a picture of herself, and that picture is then reblogged to body hair fetish boards with graphic captions, that woman would feel violated, as she is now being aggressively sexualized by people to whom she did not give permission.
This is just the slightest, least invasive case of non-consensually involving another individual in a kink. Voyeurism and exhibitionism, getting off on watching people have sex and being watched respectively, are both kinks that can be punished by the law. You can’t arrest someone for wearing a fluffy tail and acting like a kitten, so why can you arrest someone who gets off on being watched? Because kinks like exhibitionism are often inherently non-consensual. The issue is that someone is inflicting their kink on the outside world, non-consensually involving other people in their personal pleasure. It’s not the kink being punished, it’s the nonconsensual expression of that kink that results in an arrest. There are places in which it is safe to exercise kinks like voyeurism and exhibitionism; sex dungeons or kink clubs in which everyone inside has consented to watching and being watched. In this way, those kinks can be expressed in a healthy and safe environment.
This details the critical difference between shaming a kink because you might find it disturbing and shaming the situation in which a person expresses a kink. You should not shame people for having kinks, but you should not tolerate the person who cares more about their kinks than about the autonomy of the other people involved.