Ed Schipul/Flickr (CC BY-SA)
If the internet has taught us one thing, it’s that sex, eroticism, and physical desire make no sense. Whether it’s bondage, sadomasochism, macrophilia, feederism, oviposition, foot fetishism, vore, you name it: there is no explanation for why we desire the things that we do. The trauma theory model—i.e.: we gravitate toward kinks related to our traumas—is a weak-kneed defense that’s got more in common with pathologizing sex than sexual liberation. It seems far more likely kink and fetishism are just another part of the human experience.
"A kink is a particular kind of set of circumstances or a particular environment that you like for sex to happen," sex therapist Cyndi Darnell told me in a Daily Dot interview. "And because we tend to see vanilla, heterosexual sex as ‘normal,’ and anything outside of that as ‘abnormal’ or ‘kinky,’ the only reason that vanilla, heterosexual sex is considered ‘normal’ is because it’s at the top of the pile with regard to social power and social access."
So if we all know fetishism is a thing, why do we keep acting as if sex is just reproductive? One word: Control. When a socially privileged group dictates what is and isn’t sexually valid, they gain power over others on a deeply intimate level, as Darnell told me. If you can control people sexually, you can control them entirely. So by labeling certain desires as outliers and then creating a culture of shame around these interests, the most privileged group gets to decide how sex plays out between people.
In America, we’ve seen this play out through conservative anti-porn “abstinence-only” sex education, moral panics over online porn and “messy” art like Cuties, laws like SESTA-FOSTA and legislature like the EARN IT Act, and social media censorship initiatives like the Tumblr NSFW ban. Meanwhile, moral panics put intense social pressure on adult creators, sex workers, and sex educators to button their lips and stay quiet. And that’s just describing secular spaces. In religious (and, in particular, conservative Christian) ones, right-wing values around sexual shame reinforce anti-sex messaging in the secular world and vice-versa. While many of us break free from this sexual conservatism and learn how to live our lives as the erotically-charged people that we are, we’ve only gotten there by spending years of our lives trying to heal from the sexual trauma we went through.
There’s one flaw to conservatives’ anti-sex pearl-clutching: they can’t really agree on what sex should look like instead. Your traditional cishet WASPs generally prefer straight, reproductive, and cisnormative Christian sex. They’re anti-porn, but also anti-feminist. Meanwhile, sex-negative feminists are staunchly anti-porn but equally critical of your standard traditional conservatism. The alt-right is at odds with both of these groups, and it has a much more complicated relationship with sex and porn (some alt-right members are staunchly anti-porn and proudly NoFap, or masturbation abstinent, while others tend to enjoy kinky pornography built for the white male gaze). In the contemporary far-right social media world, these three groups rarely get along. Lock them in a room and try to get them to agree to anything, and you’re bound to see some sparks fly. That infighting plays to our favor as sexual liberation activists. But while the right dukes it out, the left has a problem of our own: reactionary elements from within.
In the “LGBT community,” leatherdykes like myself are at odds with what Edmund White calls the “dull normals,” who are far more interested in emulating heteronormativity through gay domesticity than radical liberation for queers (also known as “homonormativity”). Many of these “dull normals” are millennials who punch down on kinky queers and sex workers in a bid for acceptance. Meanwhile, zoomers are coming of age in an era of online sexual censorship polluted with conservative astroturfing tapped into the “dull normals” anti-sex zeitgeist, as seen by the whorephobic astroturfing project Exodus Cry. At best, these young sex-shamers grapple with tons of culturally ingrained whorephobia and homophobia. But some are starting to join together and create loose social networks. The latter are sexual authoritarians and puritans (SAPs), a growing reactionary group within the LGBT community invested in limiting sexual expression into neat, simple packages imposed on everyone else.
Itmost//Flickr (CC BY)
SAPs are the militant dull normals. They suppress queer sexual expression specifically to maintain cishet neoliberal support for “gay acceptance” and “tolerance.” This makes SAPs homonormative because, in their eyes, gay rights is about mirroring heteronormativity, not challenging the social order. For instance, a common SAP claim is that public sex shouldn’t belong at Pride because it “isn’t normal.” Normal for who? The privileged group that gets to define what is or isn’t normal: cishet people. Similar claims include: queer women cannot create boys’ love material because it’s “objectifying” queer men; consensual nonconsent porn enables domestic violence; or the classic SAP hallmark, “BDSM is abuse.” SAPs similarly overran my Twitter earlier this month by claiming a few trans girl-cis girl “breeding kink” joke tweets were misogynistic to cis women. You could only really make that argument if you think a trans woman has enough social power over cis women to control how society views cisgender bodies. It’s the transmisogynistic equivalent of straight women getting mad at lesbians who make jokes about turning straight girls gay.
SWERFs, TERFs, and SAPs have plenty of overlap because they share a common goal: controlling the marginalized body and purifying it from modernity’s grasp. Their obsession with an (imagined) traditional body, bestowed onto us by nature, is both a western construct and ahistorical. It’s fascist rhetoric. It’s also upheld by force: SWERFs, TERFs, and SAPs use dogpiling, DARVO, and sexual harassment to get their way. And while SWERFs and TERFs don’t always get along with SAPs, they’re all part of a pipeline that, if mobilized, could put queer rights in a seriously dire place.
Earlier this month, Twitter user @fireh9lly penned a Venn Diagram that shows three different converging reactionary groups coming together: 21st century Satanic moral panic fanatics, TERFs, and SAPs. All three, @fireh9lly warns, have just enough in common to create a reactionary movement that could be here in as soon as five years. Shortly after her meme went viral, @fireh9lly and I chatted a bit about her take over Twitter DM, where she stressed just how many newly out SAPs have religious roots behind their reactionary tendencies.
“Most of the people I saw the other day saying the age of consent should be 25 (which inspired the Venn) were very religious people. The one person retweeting my Venn to call me a paedophile had a crucifix in the username and retweeted lots of Christian stuff,” @fireh9lly told me shortly after her tweet made the rounds. “What seems to be happening is it's people from reactionary backgrounds who haven't reevaluated their actual thinking on things like love, sex and purity, BUT were smart enough to figure out that it's fine to be a big old lesbian online.”
This is where things get complicated. As she puts it, geekdom is filled with shame, and “antis” (or the original SAPs, a group of “anti-shippers” who dogpile adult content creators depicting ships they dislike) feel so much shame and disgust for being fandom geeks that they project this shame onto both their hobby and queer sex. This makes sense, given how so many antis (and SAPs) are teens. But what happens when a community built around a sexual moral panic ages out of adolescence? They become stunted adults, a nightmarish reality Gretchen Felker-Martin has written about at length. This puts SAPs, who have come into their own through a community based entirely around pearl clutching, into a very vulnerable position for future conspiracy theories. And while SAPs don’t exactly get along well with TERFs nor conservatives (the alt-right in particular hates SAPs for being "childish and desexualized," as @fireh9lly said), all of these groups have one thing in common: bigoted conspiracy theories. SAPs, like TERFs and the alt-right, commonly overstate harm done by trans women to isolate trans feminine targets from their communities. Many SAPs regularly parrot transphobic talking points without realizing them, too, as TERFs successfully astroturfed transmisogynistic feminism on Tumblr years ago. Outwardly, SAPs may not like TERFs nor the far-right, but transphobia is the unifying factor that can bring these reactionary groups together into a very loose, decentralized circle.
“I think what is more likely to happen is SAP culture will latch onto a variety of centrist [beliefs that are] openly LGBT supportive but reactionary, who already are the prime TERF demographic,” @fireh9lly said. “It will be a reaction based around a sudden sexual/culturally conservative turn, with the idea of ‘protecting kids,’ done by people who are cosplaying as reasonable libs, but who if you scratch them will spout a mixture of Q rhetoric and TERF shit without knowing that's where it came from.”
Guessing what the next reactionary movement will look like is sort of like reading your horoscope: it can give you a lot of sobering insight, but sometimes it just confirms your perconceived biases. That’s a risky endeavor if you’re privileged. Case in point, I’m a white, middle-class, cis-passing trans woman with a fair amount of social capital, and I have my soft spots in my praxis due to my race and class. There are certainly plenty of other elements waiting in the wing that may not be targeting people like me. And as @fireh9lly stressed to me, her take is just guesswork. So is mine. We don’t know what the future holds.
But if there’s one thing fascists, authoritarians, and oppressive institutions are good at, it’s figuring out how to gaslight people into fearing their own sexual desires. This is a common theme in every single reactionary movement, and it’s how whorephobes have gained so much power. Hacking//Hustling’s new report on shadowbanning, “Posting Into the Void,” reveals just how much power social media platforms have to silence sex workers, activists, and sex-working activists.
“Our research begins to show how the identities of sex workers and [activists, organizers, and protesters] intersect to create more severe content moderation for people who hold both identities. The more you use a platform for your activism or your sex work, the more likely you are to have your content repressed or invisibilized by algorithms,” Hacking//Hustling warns. “The paradox of the seemingly unyielding surveillance and censorship of digital technologies coupled with our growing reliance on these technologies has brought about another example of sex workers and AOPs serving as canaries in the coal mine—suffering the extent of these restrictions before they are noticed by the general public.”
From “Posting Into the Void” via Hacking//Hustling (Fair Use)
As the United States increasingly slides into fascism, we’ve seen infrastructure pop up that exists to efficiently silence and repress the most marginalized among us. The current reactionary movements are already here and using these tools to their advantage. The next ones may be even stronger. It’s on us as anti-fascists to keep close tabs on how these groups come together and what issues they seem to coalesce around. We must be ready to fight not just our current adversaries, but their successors, too.
If we successfully deplatform our enemies, we may never know if we succeeded. But if we fail, we’ll know for sure.