Your Kink is Okay, but Your Door is Ajar

[bcholmes]

This appears to be completely consentual. So why does it weird the heck out of me?

Comments

[rosefox]

Yeah, people actively consenting to having pointless go-around-in-circles arguments about which opinions and thoughts are "okay" weirds me out too. But there are all these places online where that's totally the norm! Bizarre.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

possibly because while everyone involved is consenting [pls insert discussion of whether or not sex workers actually consent or are coerced yada yada yada here], it is mimicking a nonconsensual situation. and that's something that, in various forms, creeps a lot of people out. a lot of people find bdsm creepy, for example.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Hm. I read this as the equivalent of an exasperated eye roll at me. Is that read of the situation correct?

[rosefox]

Oh, no, not at all! I don't think we have the sort of relationship where I'd start an interaction that way. *) It's an exasperated eyeroll at pointless online arguments, which have really been annoying me lately.

I appreciate that you doublechecked. I hope I didn't cause offense.

[angilong.livejournal.com]

Even for kinky folk, consensual rape scenes bother a lot of people.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

Maybe if they explore it as BDSM, where of course consent is by definition *required*, folks may understand that, well, consent is *required*.

This isn't my kink, but I'm not at all weirded out by it.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Bingo, with the addition fun of concern about someone having issue maintaining the separation between club and other trains.

On the other hand, given that it's less common that someone won't be able to distinguish, it gives others an outlet, and gives people that aren't sure if they'd like that particular kind a place to try it out without breaking any law or harming anyone. Those seem good things.

[redbird]

One thought: the article reads very much as though this is a kink that the men have, and the women will accept money to indulge, rather than a shared kink. I know that's how the sex industry in general works: but in most cases, whether it's pure vanilla intercourse with a prostitute or a paid dominant, the person being paid is doing something that other people, in another context, cheerfully do for their own pleasure. Sometimes that the person being paid sometimes does for pleasure, with other people.

That might weird you out even aside from the extent to which the particular kink/scenario described overlaps with a normal, nonsexual part of many of our daily lives.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

If I had to guess, I'd say that it's because there seems to be a great possibility for blurring the line between the consentual situation described and non-consentual situations these people are in daily. In particular, if you get used to associating being on a subway train with getting to have sex with the other people on the train, how will that colour your perception of and possibly interaction with people on the regular train. I assume that this differs from a lot of fantasy and paid-sex situations because they often aren't simulating situations that people run into in their day to day lives and share with others who aren't consentual.

As a test of that, does the idea of a service whereby your pay to wear a high-power executive suit in a nice office in which you call in your "secretary" (a consentually paid sex worker) and, after going over some dictation and the like, eventually wind up having your way with them give you the same feeling? Does that get stronger if you find out that it's mostly being pitched at real-life high-power executives?

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

Don't know about you, but for me the ick is that it seems like a square peg for a round hole. While I admit that I don't understand the jones for groping an arbitrary woman in a subway, I doubt that it would be filled by groping a woman who doesn't mind. So my fear is that this just reinforces the urge to authenically scratch the itch, and if anything it helps the client to perfect whatever technique it takes to avoid identification in the field.

[firecat]

I find it interesting that most of your commenters are assuming train-groping fantasies are necessarily about a nonconsensual situation. Why can't a person fantasize about groping people on a train who are into being groped? In which case the fantasy train more or less ideally fulfills the fantasy.