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Fetishes and Nuance
2 years ago
I think about the nature of fetishes and how they interact with a community of people, no matter how loosely connected, and the ways people handle these interactions and fetishes. It grips my soul, having spent more than a decade online drawing fetish art. So here's this string of thoughts I just shared to Twitter.
I want folks to be able to find others and mutually enjoy the weirdness of their kinks and interests within a healthy environment. But I fear I've developed the equivalent mentality of a sex shamer, but for kinks. That makes me unhappy and this year I'll be working to rectify it.
How to encourage a healthier kink culture, while also encouraging better controls and boundaries around fetishes that aren't oppressive to people's ability to connect and express themselves? The only answer I've found is trying to set an example and talk about things like this.
While kinks and fetish have a deep, intimacy intrinsic to their nature because it is so proximal/adjacent to the instinctual impulse of sex, I still believe, that just like sex, there are forms of expression that do fall within the realms of SFW/appropriate for all ages despite containing themes for fetishes and kinks. Similar to how a toon in a speedo on the beach is SFW, despite the element of a sexuality becoming part of the picture, no matter how small, simply due to attire and setting.
I hope that as time marches forward, people give more thought to the nuance of fetishistic themes in their work, and how they rate them. Not every fetish picture is immediately NSFW, but it is admittedly extraordinarily difficult to keep track of that nuance.
If you have thoughts and feelings about this kind of thing I'd like to hear them.
I want folks to be able to find others and mutually enjoy the weirdness of their kinks and interests within a healthy environment. But I fear I've developed the equivalent mentality of a sex shamer, but for kinks. That makes me unhappy and this year I'll be working to rectify it.
How to encourage a healthier kink culture, while also encouraging better controls and boundaries around fetishes that aren't oppressive to people's ability to connect and express themselves? The only answer I've found is trying to set an example and talk about things like this.
While kinks and fetish have a deep, intimacy intrinsic to their nature because it is so proximal/adjacent to the instinctual impulse of sex, I still believe, that just like sex, there are forms of expression that do fall within the realms of SFW/appropriate for all ages despite containing themes for fetishes and kinks. Similar to how a toon in a speedo on the beach is SFW, despite the element of a sexuality becoming part of the picture, no matter how small, simply due to attire and setting.
I hope that as time marches forward, people give more thought to the nuance of fetishistic themes in their work, and how they rate them. Not every fetish picture is immediately NSFW, but it is admittedly extraordinarily difficult to keep track of that nuance.
If you have thoughts and feelings about this kind of thing I'd like to hear them.
There's a difference between being into toony stuff because it's a neat concept, and being into it because it's your fetish. I fall into the former group on pretty much all counts.
It's a very interesting focus on the nature around viewing stuff from work. But it also makes me wonder if choosing to focus specifically on the aspect of viewing things from work encourages looking over or neglecting ethics in the workplace. Like, why even look up fetish stuff while working? but of course, it's unrealistic to not expect people to look at Twitter while working nowadays, so they're going to encounter weird stuff in their feed anyway, or whatever social media they use. So if it unrealistic to expect folks to not look at things while working, then trying to focus on the aspect of Work sounds right to me.
But I also sure as hell would never want corporations or my employers to start dictating how content shared publicly should be rated and filtered, so I also feel wary of choosing to emphasize and focus on the aspect of "Work" in NSFW/SFW.