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the thing about gay bdsm dynamics is they will make explicit what is implicit in normative cisheterosexual dynamics and then those complicit in cisheterosexuality will act all scandalized about seeing themselves in the funhouse mirror
in kink as in gender, a choice instead of an invisible pressure is reprehensible. If you put on the big clanky chain, you necessarily have the big shiny key to it, and you show it to be merely a thing, not a natural force.
I think the thing that’s even scarier about kink, to the wrong sort of person, is that… it’s a game. It’s meant to be fun. You are not meant to take it too seriously, and if you start taking it too seriously, you will have to stop.
The kind of person who thinks that the big clanky chain is a natural force is also the kind of person who thinks that you should take that force SERIOUSLY AS DEATH. you shouldn’t treat it like, say, the weather, like a nuisance to be planned around- no, you should let it rule everything that goes into and out of you. (Pun fully intended.) Every thought, every word, every relationship dynamic, even the food you eat is supposed to be constrained by Your Social Role As An Hetero Man/Woman. You’re supposed to CONSTANTLY project dominance or submission with everything you do.
….And then kinksters, gay OR straight, come in with the big clanky chain and big shiny key and fluffy pink handcuffs and goofy-ass Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain outfits and say, “actually, social roles are a costume you can put on or take off, and we’re having a costume party.” It’s not just that they’re showing the natural force isn’t all that natural- it’s that they’re making it into a big, campy joke.
And for someone who’s spent their entire life abusing themself in the name of patriarchy? Turning that constant coercion into a thing you can laugh at and put away when you’re done? It’s unthinkable.
I am as I often am suggesting you all read some Baudrillard because “kink is the simulation that reveals gender to be a third order sign” is a hell of a take (complimentary)
This is also why drag terrifies them. If gender is a fun costume that you can exaggerate to your whim, put on and take off, be silly or sexy or both, be camp and beautiful or handsome or both in turns? If it isn’t all written in permanent ink from before you’re born, not just gender itself but gender roles and presentations?
If you can name yourself Otto von Titzling and paint on stubble or call yourself Ruby D. Wrightway and sing Liza covers and then just take it off and go to your desk job, then what the fuck are they letting their lives get dictated by those gender roles for?
I’m not saying everyone who objects to drag is secretly gay or trans or whatever – though some surely are, just statistically speaking – but that a lot of them are made miserable by their gendered expectations of themselves and others, or rely upon the gendered expectations they have of others to control those other people. (And I don’t just mean men, don’t get it twisted – people of all genders enforce patriarchal gender roles as a tool of control all the time.)
The idea that you don’t have to be constrained by gender, but could instead be freed by it, scares the shit out of a lot of people. So they get real, real scared of anything that shows them that gender is just another performance. You make up your own rules, and that scares them.
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