Day 14
In your own space, share your love for something fannish: a trope, cliché, kink, motif, theme, format, or fandom.
I want to share my love for the Kink Meme.
Almost every fandom has its own Kink Meme, and I think the whole concept is really fucking fabulous. A Kink Meme is this amazing, subversive space where people of all gender identities and sexual identities can freely explore their fantasies.
In society and the media, female sexuality is so often at best ridiculed, but more often censured and oppressed, and at worst abused and exploited. Queer sexuality is frequently treated worse. It gets ignored, fetishized, pathologized, violated.
Those are the coordinates of fandom demographics (see centrumlumina’s 2013 survey). Fandom is female. Fandom is gender non-conforming. Fandom is queer.
Because fandom is not – as mainstream media still seem to maintain – a domain of straight cisgender middle-aged women. It’s rather the other way around: Fandom and all its sexy and kinky niches is also the space of straight cisgender middle-aged women. You know, those women whose sexual interests get publicly ridiculed as “mommy porn” and whose kinky fantasies are fobbed off with mediocre, unhealthy narratives such as 50SoG.
For gender-nonconforming persons the situation is much worse. Just living their identities can be dangerous in real life. Literary representation is already hard to find. Sexy, kinky stories even more so.
Same goes for the other minorities that make up fandom. Outside of M/M romance and erotica, there’s not much to choose from. And within that genre the erasure of other sexual identities, especially bisexuality, is a real problem.
I think that’s what makes fandom culturally and socially such an important space in general, and the Kink Meme in particular.
To start with, the Kink Meme offers a fantastic selection in topics, kinks, and fantasies that is not easily found elsewhere, much less for free.
More than that, the Kink Meme provides a safe space to explore sexuality in diverse ways as the member of a community. The dynamics are completely different from those in commercial contexts of porn. The free, equal, and anonymous sharing of prompts and stories creates an atmosphere that is mostly free of pressure and exploitation (if not, of course, from all wank and drama).
But there’s even more to it than the “gift” aspects of fandom, I believe. What I’m trying to get at is that neither writers nor readers are left alone in their explorations. The structure of the Kink Meme – of prompts with comments and stories with comments – provides opportunities for conversation beyond instant solitary gratification. I think this structure also has a certain grounding, humanising effect. Neither writing nor reading happens passively, in a vacuum, but within a creative and critical community of women and various minorities. That at least reduces tendencies of objectification and fetishisation, and overall encourages a healthier perspective of sexual fantasies and porn.
Most of all, the Kink Meme is fun for creators and consumers.
In other words, all hail the Kink Meme!