David Davis XIII Part 3

On validity

My first “real” published piece of nonfiction was about Instagram and food porn. Fascinated with the way I saw food being depicted in that particular corner of social media, I made some suggestions about what it could tell us about our cultural anxieties around sexuality and desire. I had some questions, too, about our conflict-ridden desires for things we are ashamed to want. “Why do we want to consume anything that we see online, particularly when this consumption, to varying degrees, seems to cause such anxiety?” I asked.

I’ll be the first to admit that the writing isn’t very good. But as I’ve been thinking about how to wrap up this series—in which I’ve been exploring some of the ways that the concept of validity is used in service of assimilating and commodifying deviant genders and sexualities—that essay keeps coming to mind, perhaps because of how much Instagram, and social media more broadly, have changed since The Millions published it four years ago. Text is flourishing on the image- and video-sharing platform in a way it didn’t in 2016, lending itself to chunks of written content designed to inform, inspire, call out/in, educate, agitate, and organize, as well as provide the “personal” update that drew us all to Facebook 15 years ago.

You know what I’m talking about: the “infographic industrial complex,” as (I think) Daemonumx calls it, which includes a bustling cottage industry of dubious “therapeutic” and “wellness” Instagram accounts whose owners brand themselves as as educators and activists while spreading disinformation, fearmongering, outrage, or feelgood liberal platitudes, whichever is best at generating clout, garnering attention, or making a buck, best exemplified (this week, anyway) by Wildflower Sex’s continued attacks on Black women and non-binary creators and sex educators. It’s aesthetics standing in for substance or value. Same old story, slightly updated format.

I flatter myself to think I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding accounts like this, especially the ones concerned with “queerness,” sexuality, and BDSM. There was a time when I might have followed them just to get angry (is there anything more pleasurable than righteous indignation?), but I don’t even do that anymore. For one thing, I aint buyin what they’re sellin. I’m not curious about or questioning my sexuality the way I was when I was younger; as I wrote about last time, queerness was a much less valuable commodity when I was that age.

As far as kink goes, I’ve been playing since my early twenties, was a fetish worker for a few years (which was when I actually learned about BDSM), and since then have become a lifestyle leatherdyke who’s more or less whittled down the acronym to the two letters that interest me the most. SM, or sadomasochism, is the foundation of my erotic comportment, desire, and intimacy, and it’s inextricable from my non-erotic life: my relationships, my politics, my sensibilities. I am not “kinky” or “into BDSM.” I am a pervert. To most people, being a pervert means that inappropriate orientations and objects replace the so-called natural sexual instinct toward cis, heterosexual, middle-class, white-coded procreative copulation; to perverts, being a pervert is not a transitional condition (though it can be an adaptive one, in my opinion). The foot is not the middleman. Sometimes a foot is just a foot.

Which is why I have little use for Instagram “educators” on this topic. It’s not that I know everything about leather. Far from it, as I’m reminded every time I play (I’m also not a skills girl, unless the skill in question is pain management, so I’m basically eye-level with vanilla people when it comes to stuff like rope or vivisection). But I prefer to learn from my fellow leatherfolk, people that I know personally and who are already my associates or play partners or friends, or can at least be spoken for by other people I trust in our various communities. There are plenty of untrustworthy people in and around the scene, as I wrote about in the first installment of this series; it pays to be careful, and intentionally building community among circles of trust is one way of doing just that.

Nevertheless. Last week, I got sucked into one of those dubious Instagram accounts, one run by a white queer in their very early twenties whose advises on kink and sexuality with affirming, inclusive, and thoroughly corporate-sounding language with the aid, of course, of pastel infographics deployed across a carefully strategized grid. The text posts say stuff like, “You don’t have to label yourself for anybody. You are valid.” It was all very annoying.

It wasn’t even that I disagreed with most of what the account had to say, including the post above, and yet there was this core of distrust I couldn’t shake. Like here was another account spoon-feeding leather to people who see it as a plug-in to their online brand rather than as a tradition, a lifestyle, a community-based politics, or just plain old dirty fucking, all while people practicing leather—most of them sex working, trans, and/or of color—are being even more censored on IG than ever before, despite the platform’s attempts to obfuscate its racist, ableist, fatphobic, and whorephobic policies with empty gestures to nuance in its ever-evolving TOS. Feeling valid might be of use to people with no skin in the game, but for others, the squishy benefits of validity simply don’t go far enough.

But like, really, why should I care? This account doesn’t do anything for me, but it does something for hundreds of somebodies. This account, and accounts like it, can become very popular, with thousands of followers who engage with enthusiasm and happiness. These followers are hearing things they want to hear, or didn’t know they needed to hear, and I say without an ounce of sarcasm that there are big aspects of this whole approach that I think can be helpful to people, especially those just dipping their toe into the turgid waters of BDSM with no community to tap into.

When I feel challenged, I try to listen carefully to that which challenges me. I am an often-angry person who has learned that it’s in my best interest to give my anger and irritation my full attention, and I tend to regret it when I don’t—like I’m typing this out while wearing a big heavy orthopedic boot because two days ago I fractured my foot while kicking something in a fit of rage. I’ve learned the hard way, is what I’m saying.

So let’s try to understand that anger. Why do accounts like these annoy me so much? Why does a post like this one (from that same account) make me roll my eyes?

Maybe it’s because I don’t see what’s wrong with a kink or fetish being weird. In fact, isn’t that sort of the point? I wonder who it serves to pretend that people won’t think you are weird, or gross, or worse, if it turns out you, I don’t know, like getting fucked with feet? I wonder who requires permission from a stranger on the internet to explore their desires and fantasies. And I wonder on whose authority the stranger on the internet can grant permission to explore them—as if their permission will eliminate all of the interpersonal and structural consequences of this exploration, of which there are many! It seems dishonest to pretend that validity is the end of the discussion, instead of the beginning.

It really is magical. As I follow the direction my anger takes me, it starts teaching me things: I’m realizing that what annoys me is that in its quest to validate everything that a kinky or kinky-questioning person might do or think, this account and ones like it tend to eliminate the need for critical thinking about those actions and thoughts—which include engagement with the social realities of non-normative sexuality and gender, as well as our individual responsibilities when exploring these sometimes challenging, disturbing, dangerous, or activating topics—while also flattening our understanding of just what constitutes taboo and what doesn’t. Looking at the graphic above, you might think that there is a stigma against using a safe word (there isn’t). You might think there is some kind of structural pressure on anyone to ~be kinky~ rather than not (there isn’t. Feel free to email me or comment if you disagree and would like some explanation. I got a whole post on this cooking and just need a reason to pull it out the oven).

Like, who is It is okay if you do not have fetishes even for?

Before he was a sexually predatory Congressman, Al Franken was a sexually predatory comedian on SNL who had this skit about crunchy, New-Age-y people. Daily Affirmations with Stuart Smalley poked fun at self-helping 12-steppers who gave themselves so much permission to make mistakes and be themselves that they were never accountable for the mistakes they did make. I don’t find the skit funny, the homophobia of the character is boring and blatant, and Franken’s own management of his scandal around “sexual misconduct” thirty-odd years later is a golden example of the very person it’s meant to parody: one who claims progressive values in order to skirt the accountability they claim is so important. Franken’s real-life behavior eventually parodied his own parody, but I do think there’s something to be taken from the original skit, despite its problems: If everything is worthy of validation, doesn’t validation cease to have meaning?

What do accounts like this accomplish? They may help midwife nervous or confused people into a stronger and better and deeper understanding of their desires, sure. But they’re also accomplishing a conflation of all states of being—kinky and not kinky, straight and queer, whatever—thus depriving us from our very useful models for determining when we are being oppressed and when we are not. An environment where everyone is valid and we’re all the same tends to benefit people with more structural power, like white people (like me), or cis people, or straight people, or what have you. If we’re all the same, all valid, and all exempt from examining our power, privilege, and position within greater systems, we are less inclined to do something with that information. Because it’s not just knowing the right buzzwords or admitting that we’re white, or whatever. As Dolly writes in her recent takedown of tenderqueers (subscribe to support her and her thoughts!):

It’s not just about going to BLM protests in your coveralls, sharing nap ministry posts, and making sure to say “believe survivors,” “listen to Black women,” and “trans rights are human rights” at the right times. You have to check your shit all the time. What are the power dynamics in your interpersonal relationships? Who do you flake on consistently? How do you react if people confront you about your behavior?

If I could have shared that image without the watermark, I would have, as I don’t mean to “call out” this Instagram account. I’m using it as an example of a larger phenomenon that wouldn’t be changed if the account disappeared overnight, not that I want it to be. If I’m asking that we all do our best to both think critically and to do, rather than just posture—rather than just Stand & Model—I’m also asking that we be intentional about calling out and calling in, rather than engaging in pile-ons and flamewars, which are practically cardiovascular in their effect on our nervous symptoms but not so great for creating and maintaining systems in which we can hold others and ourselves accountable for harmful behavior. When I am irritated by Instagram text posts from “educators” that insist on emptiness (“Practicing kink outside of a dungeon is a totally valid way to practice it!”) rather than real engagement with the many thorny, complicated, and conflicted aspects of a healthy, community-minded BDSM practice (“Is it irresponsible for me, as a white gentile, to participate in a Nazi scene in this public play party without giving anyone else any warning?”), I am noticing how distressingly easy it is to repackage (or commodify) a radical subculture for a mainstream, white-washed, pro-carceral, pro-capitalist palate (or algorithm).

As I’ve mentioned before, my day job is copywriting. I work in marketing, which means I’m not only implicated in the very thing I spend my time railing against (though I think we all are but anyway), but I also have something of an insider’s perspective on how the sausage is made. If I can’t tell the difference between a corporate-sponsored ad campaign like “Love Is Love” and an IG account that’s attempting to normalize an anti-assimilationist subculture, shouldn’t that send off little alarm bells that manifest in, say, irritation or even anger?

What is your anger telling you?

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.