Anti-kink and transphobia have no place in Paganism

[icymist]

It was feminists like Budapest who made it hard for people, especially feminists, to come out as kinky in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. With their statements that you are a failure as a feminist if you engage in kink, especially dominance and submission play, they made a lot of kinky feminists feel alone, marginalised, and ashamed. It is hard enough to come to terms with being kinky in the prevailing culture without having your own communities attacking you. People in kink-excluding communities, who have to remain in the closet, live in fear of being exposed as kinky, and feel marginalised, alone, and attacked. Their membership of the community feels conditional upon not coming out as kinky. Endless research studies have shown how damaging it is for LGBT people to remain closeted – surely the same applies to kinksters?
Similarly, the biologically essentialist view of being a woman held by many second-wave feminists made it very hard for those who are gender-variant. Their rhetoric about all penetrative sex being rape obfuscated the issues around rape, made things difficult for lesbians who enjoy penetration, and for heterosexual and bisexual women who enjoy sex with men. Even other lesbians in relationships were attacked for “aping men”.


Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/sermonsfromthemound/2014/09/anti-kink-and-transphobia-have-no-place-in-paganism/#ixzz3IAS67Xcf

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This is an interesting take on this subject. I used to have a neighbor that was into this kind of kink. Me, just arriving to Seattle two years before had no idea that people did some of these things! I grew up in farm country around Springfield, Illinois. Anyway, this neighbor is also a witch and we hit it off right away! I learned a lot from her in losing up my sexuality, though I never did get into the BDSM thing, I did become to understand it.