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Repressed Kink is Destroying the World

If you’re in the US reading this, you might remember the fall of 2024 shudders intensely.


Things have been… chaotic since then. In the buildup to the 2024 presidential election, I mostly avoided my phone if I’m being honest. I already knew who I was voting for and the election coverage was stressing me out.


But, being the 21st century, I was still aware of many things election related, even though I wasn’t actively seeking it out. 


I started to have this feeling if you will. This feeling of like “hmm, when Trump supporters talk about him, they really sound like they want a Daddy”.


Let’s pause a moment and make sure we’re all on the same page: what’s a Daddy in this context?


Daddy: noun: a word commonly used in kink or fetish practices to describe a Dominant role; affiliated with a Dominant (D), Domme, Master, Top, etc. Daddies are commonly Dominant types that are associated with gentler or more nurturing practices.  

Daddy can be used by anyone of any gender and does not solely describe male practitioners.


This was confirmed for me on 11/5/24 when I was listening to podcast coverage of what happened. I think it was The Daily’s episode1 that began with audio clips from a bunch of Americans. The very first clip?:


A Trump supporter proudly exclaimed: “Daddy’s home!”


I nearly spat my coffee out, this was exactly what I was noticing!


I continued to listen to election coverage and think, well, many things. But a few thoughts I had were: 


  1. Why are these people throwing our country away because they want a Daddy?

  2. What would the world be like if they were just educated, supported, and guided into healthy power dynamics instead of throwing our country away because they want a Daddy?


Look, I had a lot of thoughts. Many of the ones you probably had. But if I wrote about all of the thoughts and feelings I had surrounding the election, this wouldn’t just be a blog post. This would be a Proustian length novel in which a coconut tree recalls the fear and horrors of the time.


But this where my brain always goes- how can we take the pile of sh*t we’re in right now and use it for fertilizer for the world we want to build?


It’s no secret that early American colonizers were Puritans. They’re sort of infamous for the white bonnets and the religious zeal. They left many legacies, but one of my biggest foes is the American obsession with sexual purity. 


In America, we use sex to make people buy things but you better not actually embody it or enjoy it for free. 


There’s a nonstop crusade against comprehensive sex education, reproductive healthcare, and sexual and gender expression.


As I write this, I am sitting in Louisiana, a state where “abstinence only” education is the only sex education available in public schools. We also have one of the highest rates of teen pregnancies in the country. Louisiana also ranks as one of the states with the highest interest in edge play.2


Reproductive healthcare has been on the chopping block since the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022, and New Orleans just lost its only Planned Parenthood.


The attacks on the LGBTQ+ community (pioneers in gender identity, expression, and sexual orientation) are so vast that the ACLU actually has a tracker on their website where you can stay up to date.


There are so many examples of the way sexuality, sexual health, and gender identity are repressed in America that, again, I need an entire novel’s length to expound on it.


So it stands to reason that kink and “niche”3 sexual interests would be repressed as well.


If you’re trained from birth to not even talk about condoms, how are you going to talk about wanting to be spanked for pleasure?!


There’s a lot of stigma and shame around sexual interests, kink especially.


And most Americans aren’t taught social-emotional skills at all, let alone around more complex topics like sex and sexuality.


I imagine a world in which sexual education is extremely comprehensive. To the point where we are talking about these things with people at a much younger age- definitely by 18 years old. Because people are either:

  1. Going to the internet to learn things (can be helpful, can be extremely dangerous).

  2. Repressing the fuck out of what excites them and then making the rest of us pay for it.


Even if you feel squeamish about people learning comprehensive sex education (something way way more expansive than the Mean Girls-style: “If you touch each other, you will get chlamydia, and you will die” variety), there’s so much low-hanging fruit.


The bottom tier of comprehensive sex education to me would be the Four C’s of BDSM:

  1. Communication. Communication in relationships, be it friends, partners, sexual relationships, work, or others. Communication is a very important skill and one that people are rarely taught.

  2. Consent. Without consent, it’s not sex. It’s an assault. Consent ties in a bunch of skills: the ability to read your own internal system and see if you want to do something and the ability to communicate with your partner about your internal state. The ability to regulate your emotions when what your partner wants either aligns with what you want or not.

    1. Consent is important beyond just sex. Think about that coworker who constantly vents about her life to you. Wouldn’t it be better if the social norm was to ask for consent before dumping on someone?!

  3. Care. Learning the emotional skills to navigate being in healthy relationships, whatever those look like. How can you both give and receive care?

  4. Caution. This is where typical sex education comes in. Everything in life comes with risks, it’s important to know them but also important to have the skills to make decisions. Sometimes the cons are worth the pros.


After this first tier of sex education, I would have a second tier that explores pleasure. Yes, the oft-forgot component of sex: pleasure!


Pleasure: is it fun? Does it feel good? What are you hoping to get out of this experience? How can you work with your partner(s) to get both needs met?


Again, I find myself writing a novel. Do not get me started talking about the world I envision if you want me to be on topic!


This is just a taste of what I would envision, a world where this is the norm. Where people aren’t shamed or made to feel less than for wanting something sexually.


I truly believe if we dropped the Puritanical shame and embraced kink (or any other mode of self discovery and pleasure), we’d be in a very different place than we are now.


I want everyone to have the knowledge, resources, and self-assurance to pursue a caring, communicative, consensual, and safe sex life, kinky or not.


If folks had that, would they stop subverting that need into harming others? I don’t know, but I sure hope so.




1episode titled A Guide to Election Night 2024, it’s no longer accessible to me so I can’t double-check that this was the exact episode I listened to.


2A quick and dirty definition of edge play thanks to the Kynk dictionary: a range of scenes that can be considered “high-risk”; subjective from person to person but refers to behaviors that can potentially be dangerous, damaging, or have long-lasting consequences. Not to be confused with “edging”.


3Kink is actually not a niche interest! It’s a pretty challenging thing to study (because the definition is subjective and also because people are not always honest on these self-reports) BUT 45-60% of the population is interested or fantasizes in kink and a whopping 20-46% have engaged in a kink-related activity.


4Want to learn more about kink/BDSM? Here are some book recs!

 
 
 

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