Contrary to the beliefs of many straight vanilla people, sexual focus, kinks & fetishes can’t usually be traced back to any defining event like being molested; most often, they are innate and the individual is aware of them to one degree or another at a very early age. I was fascinated by bondage from at least the time I was four, though I had no idea what sex was; I just knew that depictions of women being bound or otherwise restrained had a very definite effect on me. They made me feel “funny” and I couldn’t help watching, yet I was uncomfortable if anyone else was in the room with me (especially an adult). As I grew older, I recognized these feelings as sexual, but even before that I would’ve almost certainly been deeply affected had some adult restrained me without my permission; I think it would have felt like a personal violation, attended by feelings of shame. In fact, my friend Jillian Keenan has argued that this is a good reason to refrain from spanking children: spanking fetishists experience spanking as a sexual act, often from a very young age, so when she was a child spanking felt to her like an intimate and humiliating violation, what we as adults would call sexual assault. And since there’s no way to know which children have the fetish (it’s not at all an uncommon one), it’s a bad idea to risk inflicting a punishment which could result in sexual trauma.
Well, last week I was reading about female prisoners being shackled while giving birth, and a friend of mine wrote about being forced into shackles for a court appearance. And in both cases I experienced weird, highly unpleasant, deeply disturbing feelings with sexual undertones, as I often do when reading about the subject. And that started me thinking: does being turned on by bondage make nonconsensual shackling worse than it would be for vanilla people? What if being bound by someone I do not trust and to whom I have not given consent, someone who deliberately intends to harm & terrify me, makes the feeling of being restrained by pigs that much more terrifying, appalling & violative than it would to a vanilla woman? It’s not just humiliating & scary, as I’m sure it is for everyone; it also makes me feel violated & dirty. The feeling is not at all dissimilar to that of being raped: it’s something that I perceive as a sexual act, something that at the hands of a person I trust would be exciting and hot, being used by evil thugs to display their power over me. And since I have experienced both at the hands of pigs, I know whereof I speak; it’s not exactly the same feeling, but it is extremely similar. There’s the same sense of contamination, like you want to shower afterward until the hot water runs out, but don’t feel as though you’ll ever be clean again. And there’s a lingering trauma effect of feeling unsafe, even alone in one’s locked house, or in company of beloved friends, that never quite goes away ever again (though it does fade over time).
No conclusions here; it’s just food for thought. But when I explored this idea on Twitter last week, a couple of men who are not kinky & have never been raped (one had been arrested, the other didn’t say) had the mind-boggling nerve to mansplain to me that the feelings weren’t the same, because (presumably) they can peer into my head and measure the reactions for comparison. So before any bootlickers reading this claim its “necessary” for “officer safety” to shackle women, please let me preemptively tell you to shut the fuck up. An average-sized woman arrested for a consensual “crime” is not a violent male criminal; there is no way my unarmed 132# self is of any danger to cops, and that goes triple for a pregnant woman in labor. The handcuffs and shackles are solely for the purpose of humiliating and degrading the prisoner and breaking her down psychologically; they serve no other function. They are the tools of a police state, and in defending the practice you are complicit in it.
