Why Your Fetish Is Just Fine

Apparently, Eva Longoria is a fan of using silk scarves as bondage apparatus. Ricky Martin loves urination in his bedroom antics. And Jack Black likes feet. A lot. 

The kinks listed above were written in their arguable order of ‘acceptability’; bondage is basically passé in a world choked with E. L. James novels, while Martin and Black's obsessions are thought of as icky and hilarious respectively. Why?

It seems we’ve applied a hierarchy to our pleasure-seeking habits. The mainstream is increasingly comfortable with the idea of BDSM. We allow ourselves a chuckle at the person on the bus reading Fifty Shades, but it's no longer shocking. Year after year, thousands of dissertations are pumped out on the symbolism of the ripped bodice or the secret passions of Ron Weasley, but they fail to raise eyebrows in the academic world. Even when Oprah enthuses about submissive fantasies, the public barely giggles. Other kinds of fetish, however, are still derided or banished to conventions or online worlds, lingering on the outskirts of mainstream imagination.

Gay culture, or, at least, the gay culture straight people see on TV, happily fetishises roleplay and fantasies. It is not unusual to see hordes of puppies and their owners at Pride parades, where the ‘puppies’ are young, muscled men, not spaniels or terriers, and their owners are older guys with a penchant for shiny leather. Those in the parade don't question this display of man's best friend becoming man's best boyfriend, but passers-by on the street stare on agog. It is this kind of tension between niche cultures that leads to bursts of moral panic when the mainstream realises what LGBT have been up to: look at the deluge of thinkpieces that emerged surrounding chemsex (drug-fuelled sexual parties) and poppers when journalists caught onto what gay people were up to.

Even within gay culture, though, there are still structures which enforce taboos and deride the sexual behaviours of others. Heterosexual porn sites list increasingly niche interests further down the page, with College porn at the top of the list, and Woman Laughs Alone With Salad porn hidden a few scrolls below. Sites aimed at gay men do the same, playing into our internalised cultural biases. This kind of tension contributes to what is called homonationalism, where gay communities thrive around regurgitating neoliberal ideas.

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More from Deviance:

 Clubbing conduct: What we can learn from fetish clubs

 You ain't zine nothing yet – feminism and DIY publishing

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In the mainstream gay community, what is seen as kinky and rebellious is acceptable as long as one looks a certain way; like a muscled, Aryan and frat-guy in leather and spandex. A schlubby guy or person of colour exploring their sexual fantasies is derided, just as straight people finally exploring their taboos are.

This is not surprising in a capitalistic and heteronormative patriarchal society. Much of what makes fetishes seem acceptable is how they play into existing structures and narratives of power, or how well they can be monetised. It’s easier to advertise leather corsets than it is to market stain-repellent shower curtains. One can argue that bondage (or pup-play or age-play in gay culture, which explore similar taboos) feeds into games of consent and strength which may subvert patriarchal norms, but still rely on acknowledging them, and recognising that, post-coitus, one must slink back into the mainstream world.

We piss ourselves laughing at the idea of Ricky Martin awkwardly inviting his loved one into the bathroom, but we live in a world where he’s forced to awkwardly retract those claims in interviews, when he shouldn’t have to. We judge people for their expression, particularly when it can't easily be stuck on a billboard.

I need to teach myself to not chuckle at the idea of Jack Black sniffing a foot. The arguments gay men like myself use to defend ourselves from homophobes can be re-tooled to deflect mockery away from people healthily exploring their sexual pleasure and romantic desire. Just because we haven't found out if we have a fetish for something deemed strange yet – that doesn't give us the right to snort at those who have.