i don't know how to ask this question in a nonstupid way so ill just ask. is there any kink that isnt sexist? the female gaze is so difficult to define even though i know im looking through it, like is the idea of kink so caked in patriarchy that there is nothing underneath? what even is kink anyway
"Female gaze" is a misappropriation. While the power of "gazing" has been discussed in many ways throughout history, the idea of the Male Gaze entered popular understanding because of this essay by Laura Mulvey with specific regard to film. The camera is a POV and integral to the medium, and film is inherently a visual medium. She begs the question of who does the camera represent. In any case, at this point the idea of a female gaze has been kicking around long enough that I guess dismissing it as misappropriation is maybe lazy on my part, but I'm not aware of any specific text defining it in a specific context like the male gaze has been defined in the visual arts.
I mean, yeah. I see "kinks" as a bastardization of sex, a commodification of it, a juvenile performance of it. It's not that any one sexual act is learned or bad or wrong, but when we consider something rather tame for example: using a feather to tickle your partner...there is no reason to call this kink. Or abnormal even. The healthy viewpoint is to see that the feather and the act need not be paraphilia, because they are inconsequential to the actual sexual stimulation. The same thing is achieved through touch, breath, scarves, toys...at it's barest essential it's lightly touching the skin to tantalize by engaging erogenous zone. This is not a surprise, this is seeing sex as a full body experience, this is the natural human body acting exactly as expected.
But when the culture at large is misogynistic, where sex must be commodified, sold, and controlled, where sex is seen as sinful and dirty, people's relationship to sex is so skewed that normal behaviors: sitting on a vibrator, spanking ass, a little role playing - are seen as naughty or strange. They're normal, they're just not everyone's cup of tea. And then all these normal experiences that have to be extracted, highly defined, and put in opposition to "normal, boring sex", are then lumped into things that are awful, violent, and misogynistic. A light slap on the bum is seen as equal and the same as beating your partner's ass raw, because they are the same "deviant act". Role playing as strangers meeting is seen as the same as role playing rape fantasies because they are essentially the same "deviant act."
The reason why feminists like me get into circular arguments with people about this is that we are literally talking on a completely different paradigm. I'm not "against kink" in the sense that I have a definite idea of how everyone should always have sex, I see the word itself as obscuring realities about sex. Women don't have a praise kink, they have a normal desire to be treated lovingly during sex at the same time their sexual vocabulary is so limited. Men don't have choking kinks, they have been consuming violent pornography in a media landscape where violence against women is sexualized in non-pornographic media as well. It's not that "kinks" are deviant in and of themselves, it's that they reveal an approach to sex in our society that is completely demented and juvenile and puts women at risk for sexual violence. And then on top of that many kinks are just, you know, violence and humiliation.
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