The SearchVoat Forum

When my own children caught glimpses of kink culture, they got to see that the queer community encompasses so many more nontraditional ways of being, living, and loving...

If we want our children to learn and grow from their experiences at Pride, we should hope that they’ll encounter kink when they attend. How else can they learn about the scope and vitality of queer life?

Including kink in Pride opens space for families to have necessary and powerful conversations with young people about health, safety, consent, and — most uniquely — pleasure. Kink visibility is a reminder that any person can and should shamelessly explore what brings joy and excitement. We don’t talk to our children enough about pursuing sex to fulfill carnal needs that delight and captivate us in the moment.

Pride celebrations (formerly "gay pride") are no longer about celebrating gay lives and love, but have somehow become a celebration of "queer" -- which, in my experience as a gay person, is mostly heterosexuals who define themselves as that because they think their own sexual expression is more daring than that of others.

We in the gay community fought for years to dissuade people of the notion that we were somehow dangerous to children. Articles like this put us back decades; we will have to deal with the fallout, while straight couples like this one can just identify their way out of it and go on their way.

Why on earth did the Post publish this trash?

Update - Matt in VA, the gay educational staffer from Virginia, is back! He left this in the comments section:

"The important thing to note is that this is a jobs program.

Supposedly we need to “crush” this whole phenomenon. But if it is crushed, it will be because ambitious liberals crush it. Right-wingers and conservatives will do nothing. Because the left understands that power flows from money and patronage, and has an actual relationship with its troops. The left has spent nearly three generations now creating massive jobs programs and installing its commissars in every institution in society, and making it basically illegal to fire its constituent groups. Meanwhile, the Right/Republicans eagerly throw its own members to the wolves at every opportunity, delight in destroying the industries they work in, tell them it’s their own fault if they lose their jobs or are fired, makes ZERO effort to protect them, and join with the Left in policing and penalizing its rightmost flank.

I suppose that isn’t quite fair — the Right loves armies of consultants and make-work jobs and skimming off the federal teat, but only in certain arenas, notably war/military/regime change/knocking over foreign governments. In THAT arena, the Republicans will make sure lots of $$$ gets rolled out in perpetuity–there can never be too much taxpayer money given to Fairfax County “national security” ghouls and former spooks.

In a post-industrial economy — that is, an *attention* economy — all attention is good attention, and there’s no such thing as bad publicity, provided you don’t get banned by the Silicon Valley overlords. As long as you stay inside *that* line — and the Left is very, very focused on making sure that the line gets drawn so that virtually everything left-wing is inside the line and virtually everything right-wing past, say, Ben Shapiro is outside the line — any eyeballs, any impressions, are Good no matter what. Huge portions of the media are based on hate-clicks, etc. Coming out as pansexual/queer/some kind of unappealing agender alien is good if it gets eyeballs; clicks and impressions are numbers on a spreadsheet and it doesn’t matter what the motivation is behind them. As sexuality gets more and more boutique, problematized, and more and more connected with one’s sense of self, as it becomes more important to plumb the depths, as it becomes more essential to focus on oneself and one’s one-of-a-kind sexual nature, each young American is socialized into the atomized isolated consumer-culture cog, perfectly set up for a lifetime of eagerly responding to corporate messaging about how one can be one’s most authentic and realized self (via the purchase or consumption of X or Y content, which is all we make these days). And, even better, all of this problematizing can produce new levels and layers of professionalized carers and change agents–more employment for more people who need to feel like they are making a difference in their careers. More email jobs, more PowerPoint presentations, more dialoguing and Zooms.

Being a “kink educator” is a hustle. I wouldn’t say it sounds like my dream job, but sure there’s a ton of people who’d love that kind of thing. It’s a job you basically cannot fail at, since there are no deliverables. It’s not like making cars or growing food. It’s an email/PowerPoint job. Reaganite Conservatives and Republicans love email/powerPoint jobs (that’s why they tell their kids to major in something practical in college like business) — Reagan conservative boomtowns like Plano and Mesa and Reston VA are full of email/PowerPoint Job People. The kink educator is just another iteration. Viewing it from the lens of “won’t somebody please think of the children!” is a trap that right-wingers have been walking into for much longer than I’ve been alive. This stuff is about jobs, and about what kinds of jobs mushroom out of all proportion when you worship consumer capitalism, vulgar middle-class ambition, respectability office politics (which never had anything serious or moral behind it, so of course it can turn into “kink education” in the blink of an eye — there was NEVER any there there) and exurban anomie and the abandonment of public-square stewardship.

We are already in the blasted landscape of globalization and atomization. What is happening with sexuality is, I think, going to drive fertility rates towards Eastern Asia levels. Given that, kids will be more valuable and precious, and we’ll see more overprotection and micromanagement on the part of the middle and upper middle classes. I don’t necessarily think ambitious liberals will go along with pedophilia normalization, though if things get precarious enough for enough of the middle class, or enough stop having kids altogether, who knows. There will still be a population of kids of the poor who are preyed on and abused, that’s for sure, but there may not be that much change from how it used to be for them — think of how the BY FAR and overwhelming danger for child sexual predation is biologically unrelated males having access to them in the house (mom’s boyfriend, etc) and the collapse in stable marriage among the poor already happened decades ago.

But this phenomenon, the whole “educator’-industrial complex, is related to the sacredness of “education” in our society. Around what is sacred there is a ring of willful blindness. Just as faithful working class Catholics would not believe what the priests were doing to the altar boys, or wouldn’t look at it, so we have a huge mass of middle class people in all Western societies who really believe in “education” and treat it, if anything, even more uncritically than those high-school-diploma working-class Catholics treated the Church. My own parents are a good example–they believe with five or six times the unshakeable certainty of the committed speaking in tongues Pentecostalist that “nice” people “of the right sort” are “educated” which means got a “degree” (it doesn’t matter if they majored in “business” or education” or any other fraudulent ideological enterprise that consists of nothing but regurgitating whatever the latest fad is) and are a “professional” of some sort. ...