Teenagers in Kink Spaces
I’m sure I’ve already lost many people with this concept. That’s okay, but I hope you’ll read to find out what I think anyway. If we can recognize young people need adult support, and that they sometimes need support for their sexuality, these two things together make it pretty clear—Especially when you consider how some kinks can be dangerous!
>Teenagers are too young to have kinks!
Blatantly incorrect. Many MAPs find out about their paraphilia while teenagers! I’ve heard similar from zoophiles as well. Paraphilias and kinks have a heavy overlap, for instance one of the most common kinks is rape kink, and that’s also known as biastophilia (the dominant perspective) and autobiastophilia (the submissive perspective). I myself can remember experiencing attraction to a young boy for the first time at 16, and I can also remember discovering my rape kink (as the victim, for the record) not long before that, around 15. I discovered my kink for urine even before that, probably around 13!
Saying teenagers are too young to have kinks or paraphilias is like saying someone is too young to know they’re gay. Sexuality develops a lot during adolescence, which biologically and developmentally makes sense!
>They should be encouraged away from having kinks
The original expert on paraphilia, John Money, found that people who grew up in sexually conservative homes, and highly religious and moralistic homes, were more likely to develop paraphilias. So this just is not how it works. The more forbidden the fruit, often the more appealing it can become.
Suppression can also end up making thoughts louder! I’m sure this presents in different ways, for some people it may be constantly thinking about sex. For others it might be feeling so uncomfortable when their taboo interest comes up that they lash out against it. They might bury the feelings under moral disgust and hatred, like homophobic gay people who are in denial. This also goes in line with the fact that religious conservatives tend to commit more sex crimes. Suppression and repression doesn’t make the thoughts/feelings go away—It simply prevents dealing with those thoughts/feelings in a healthy way.
>It’s okay for them to have kinks, but this should be in private or only discussed between peers
This is more amicable, but there are some problems.
1. Safety concerns
Not all kinks are safe to practice. Maybe someone can keep their urine kink private and be fine! But this is less true for masochism. I used to play with hot light bulbs and tape. One of my friends and I did this together, and once I burned them quite badly because I had left the tape on the light bulb too long. We obviously had no adult’s cautioning us, this was also before either of us had access to internet. The adults we knew in person also would have simply told us not to, or prevented us from being alone together at all. So we kept things like that secret! As many teenagers do if they feel their fun and freedom will be taken away. This is obviously a bad thing, if we fear intervention and therefor keep secrets, accidents happen.
Another example without a peer present would be someone who enjoys choking themself. If you do this in a position you can’t easily get out of it can be much worse than a bad burn. And yes, there are sometimes safety guides for what you want to do, but there’s not any replacement for being able to talk to someone experienced and ask questions.
2. Shared inexperience
Most teenagers do not have extensive kink experience, because sexuality is generally new to them. On emotional, social, and physical levels they’re often inexperienced with kink. So even together, it’s more often going to be the blind leading the blind. I’m not saying an adult needs to be present and giving directions in the moment, but having an adult to learn from through talking can be helpful, especially if you want to try something that isn’t well documented.
Even if an adult doesn’t want to offer advice directly, they can probably point in the right direction. Or teens can simply observe adults talking in an online space and learn that way, as they have been doing since the dawn of the internet. Which is another thing, teenagers are already in kink and sex spaces. They always have been, we just like to pretend they aren’t.
3. Internalized shame
Maybe they don’t even necessarily want to try practicing kink, but the issue is emotional. A lot of kinks and paraphilias are stigmatized, and this can lead to internalized shame and can make someone feel really bad about themself.
To use myself as an example again, I discovered my misogyny kink around the same time as my rape kink. That fucked me up quite a lot at the time, because I felt so confused and ashamed by it. There also weren’t really any resources for that kink at that time, I mostly saw it from the perspective of genuine misogynists who used kink as an outlet, but still also firmly held the belief that anyone female was a sex object.
I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone, adult or peer, face-to-face about this, because I had so much internalized shame. It might have hurt me at the time even more than being a minor MAP did, because at least those attractions didn’t threaten the integrity of my personhood.
You can say they can get this kind of support from a peer, and potentially they can, but this comes back to “shared inexperience.” Young people are probably even more sensitive than adults to societal attitudes like stigma, and many young people are anti-kink for that reason. We can’t just assume every kinky teenager has cool supportive kinky peer friends. If they do, that’s great, but adult support may still desired and helpful.
I will note: There is the option of some anonymous websites for asking questions, like “Go Ask Alice” for instance! But that’s not really an adequate substitute for ongoing, potentially in the moment, support. For example, if someone has a kink-related mishap and needs immediate advice, but isn’t sure they need medical intervention. There’s also the chance that when something is kink or paraphilia related, the person tasked with answering may just not know due to their own inexperience and lack of widely available information. Lastly, emotional support from friends is just a lot different from some complete stranger you wont have any other interactions with.
>It leaves room open for predatory adults!
Like I said before, that’s already reality. Teenagers who want to seek out sexual adult attention are already doing it, just as I did it. They don’t need permission from kink spaces to do so. If they actively go against what they’re told to seek their own interests, why would our limiting their ability to seek more kink/sex-related adult support stop them?
By giving them a wider support network in which they can get open support for their sexuality, we make it easier for them to exit potentially abusive relationships. After all, if they have access to many cool adults who are willing to give advice and support on kink, they probably aren’t going to keep going back to someone who’s selfishly fixated on their own sexual gratification, or someone who mistreats them!
However, if the ONLY adults who will discuss kink with them are those kinds of adults… Well then they might just continue to settle, similar to how I did.
There’s also more room for support for abusive relationships to be had. “My partner does xyz, is that okay?” “No, that’s abusive, the healthy alternative is…” Etc. And if this is posted on an online space, there will likely be multiple responses, all of which may help in different ways.
Ending this page with a quote from Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine:
In Uganda, the Denver Post reported, an ambitious national AIDS-education campaign asked rural villagers to overcome their modesty and “talk straight” to their kids. Skeptical about this expectation, the report pointed out that “mothers across the globe . . . find it difficult to talk to their children about sex.” But the Africans, she reported, already had a custom that circumvented parental embarrassment. A Zimbabwean mother explained: “The aunties talk to the children.”
While teens tell people carrying clipboards that they wish their parents would discuss sexuality more, I believe that given the choice, they’d rather talk to the aunties. Chalk it up to the incest taboo: children don’t want to know about their parents’ sex lives and, from the moment they might conceivably have a sex life, they usually don’t want Mom and Dad to know about theirs.