From Fetish To Deviant, Who decides?

… Or to ask a far more meaningful question – Who says what is and is not deviant?

The media love to put people in boxes, label them and in so doing denigrate them. I think it derives from the media’s belief that nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of their readership. That may be so, but to aim low and thus not challenge your audience is a crime in my eyes.

We all need chewing gum for the mind from time to time, but equally we like to be treated as intelligent adults. I’m minded of the labels applied to the New Romantic movement of the early 80s, the media tried all sorts of names for them including “The Blitz Kids” after the club in London where the genre briefly flowered. The same was true of the early days of rap music and very amusingly street/break dancing, where I recently saw a re-run of a Brian Hanrahan report where he earnestly described a New York street dancer as performing “Electric Boogaloo” in a fine English accent that explained nothing and made me chuckle.

Sexuality is so varied and so vivacious that it defies description and all but the most unimaginative of lovers is beyond the sort of compartmentalisation that the media attempts to use simple to ensure that certain white middle-class English people can use to pretend they understand it. Not that many white middle class English people don’t get up to all sorts of naughtiness – but some of them still regard sex more than once a fortnight or in anything other than missionary position as a bit odd.

Labelling sexuality leads to people thinking that BDSM is a certain thing, to transvestites should act in a certain way or vanilla heterosexual sex only involves such-and such … rubbish. Labelling any sexual practice and trying to define it in terms that non-devotees can understand is restrictive and ill-conceived leaving you constrained, handcuffed and fucked, rather than informed and enlightened.