Permanently Deleted
It’s a desire to submit to something. Societal pressure or repressed urges or what have you. You’d have to elaborate on what you mean by your statement
Be Doing Sweet Moves
Oh heck, I’ll answer seriously. Caveat emptor: I’m asexual, so my fascination with kink is purely intellectual. As a result, my experience is more of an outside observer trying to understand alien behaviors than anything else. If I sound like a weird scientist treating kink-enjoyers as experimental subjects, sorry. It’s inherently all theoretical to me.
So, in answer, kink is a broad space that goes well beyond just submission, so without even getting into just the question of submission, it is not all the sublimation of the desire to be submitting to capital (domination, for instance, is not the sublimation of the desire to submit to anything). Submission itself is still not a narrow space, and the wants of submissives vary enough that it seems extremely unlikely that all of them reflect a desire for submission to any one thing. That said, I’m sure that capitalism does shape kink in a lot of ways (beyond, of course, the obvious commodification process and commodity fetishism lending absent meaning to consumption).
I’m sure that the experience of the untrustworthy nature of power informs and shapes the desire for there to be an authority that can be trusted with power. Similarly, I’m sure that the inherent betrayal of discovering that you can’t trust power creates a nostalgia for when that trust existed. I imagine that some forms of play can help serve as a form of exposure therapy in a controlled environment, too.
There is a confounding variable. Watching a bunch of adults play with coloring books at a little playspace party does give that impression. And there are subs that are so crushed by the weight of the world submission is a release from the stress. Similar doms so comodofied being able to experience controll is profound. We must also consoder it is fun and hot. We are alienated from our selves so badly that we can’t accept that aometimes having fun is a goal in itself.
I think the psychoanalyst’s counterargument is that what is or is not fun is shaped by the same social forces that shape all preference, and that therefore, something being enjoyable cannot be extracted from the same motivating factors as other actions.
I’m not a psychoanalyst, though, so I’ll acknowledge that ‘it makes my brain release lots of endorphins’ is at least partially a justification in and of itself, and that kink tends to involve actions that create very large spikes in endorphins even in comparison to vanilla sex, so there’s definitely an element of ‘it just feels good’ (where ‘feels good’ isn’t necessarily invoking pleasure, merely some pleasant experience) that needs to be acknowledged. What is interesting about that to me is that it means that we build a lot of social constructs that abut behaviors that ‘just feel good’, and, as a result, those social constructs tend to be very instructive w/r/t the relationship between broader social behavior and more instinctively hedonistic behavior. Therefore, the socialization and society of kink become the place where we can try to rectify the confounding inputs.
I think it’d be ibteresting to try to figure out the incidence of kinks across societies. Anecdotal we see more repressive societies have a higher incidence of kink typenactivites but I have no idea how the data actually is. You aeen any numbers?
Kink culture is bad because it was made by boomers as a comodified knock off of gay culture. Which really goes applies to a lot of things they made. The milenial and zoomer kinksers have a generally very diffrent approach that I would have to do some research to describe accurately. It’s hard to say if that this is part of the natural evolution of post war institutions and this replacing large parts of authentic culture we have lost. Or, if this is simply an analog of greater cultural themes we think of seperately because of old taboo and zoning laws.
In the post war era we entered into a new epoc of modernity and a good deal of cultural history was lost. In America people have created the kink identity to help replace some of the cultural institutions that we don’t remember. At least that is the story as I know it. Is there a better history than what I have found?
idk if ur doing a bit but in case your not this isn’t accurate at all
bdsm has antecedents long predating boomers :very-smart:
I dunno if any of our kink societies can trace any lineage back to that group. Interesting if true, but that kinda thing isn’t in any of the cultrual histories I have known of. I suppose I am being amero centric, they probably are places with history in other places. There are shoe stores in Europe older than America.
The history I hear at munches is that our modern American kink culture came from hippies mixing with vets after the war and it grew to replace our lack of authentic culture that had died and that it was self consciously patterned after the gay leather community. People been fuckin’ I get that part. I just mean that as a self conscious community it came up to help replace working class intuitions in the post war era. I am sure there was stuff before that, but no one currently has a strong cultural memory of it that I am aware of.
identifying as a public, self-conscious community is a bad benchmark. that was part of a struggle for civil rights, the people didn’t spring out from nowhere when they started organising.
there’s plenty of literature & art predating the 50’s, it’s safe to say some group of people were the audience & praxists even when they weren’t self-identifying
