People...I’m into a lot of fucked up shit. Some of it I’m willing to discuss publicly and some of it I save to masturbate to privately. But luckily for me, most of my perversions are either things I’m able to hide from the world at large, or things that I don’t need to. When I say I like having sex with consenting humans and sex toys, there’s an entire community of people to give me a high five and shout “welcome to the club”. The whole thing makes me feel pretty damn warm and fuzzy inside.

Sadly though not everyone is so lucky. There's a large number of people in our society that we marginalise and even terrorise, purely because we find their sexual proclivities or perversions too distasteful. Even the most liberal minded among us tends to have blind spots when it comes to certain sexual activities.

From kink shaming to criminalisation we have a lot of tools in our arsenal to demonstrate our varying levels of disaproval and disgust for sexual acts that fall outside the norm. From furries to foot fetishists, coprophiliacs to necrophiliacs or even virgins, the overweight and the elderly - most of us will have a visceral response to the things that we find a bit ‘weird’ or ‘freaky’.

Regardless of how open minded your social circle is, there’s always some sexuality that becomes a punchline, even in the more sex positive communities. Among BDSM and kinksters the laughter is often directed at "vanillas" while furries will turn up their noses at zoophiles. And often we take it a step further and just use these sexualities as the benchmark by which to set our insults. The most common example of course is the pejorative use of ‘gay’ to describe anything and everything. This is completely unnecessary, since it's completely possible to emotionally cripple someone with a good insult without calling into question theirs or anyone else's sexual activities. 

When “kiddie-fiddler”, “dog-fucker”, “pathetic virgin”, “slut” etc become shorthand for “I don’t like you”, we’re telling everyone in the world that what they do with their genitals is the benchmark by which we will measure their value as a human being. Using sexual identities, preferences, or fetishes as any kind of insult is not okay. It breeds fear, it breeds animosity and it results in abuse and harassment.

It sounds kind of insane, me sitting here telling you not to use pedophilia as a punchline or an insult. After all, aren’t they the worst of the worst. Well here’s the thing, when we vilify certain behaviours to the point that we have vilified pedophilia, we get to the point where any attempt at rational discussion on the topic becomes seen as ‘apologism’.

Pedophilia is a great example of this. It's so reviled, so hated, that if you even attempt to discuss it in front of people the entire conversation will be derailed into an assortment of horror film-esque cliches about what people would do to a pedophile if they ever found one.

"So what?” you might ask. When people feel the need to register their personal revulsion more than they feel the need to understand something, we’re past the point where we can achieve any meaningful change. Without the ability to discuss and research topics like pedophilia, incest, bestiality, etc, we are robbing ourselves of understanding what causes these behaviours, understanding how common they are, whether intervention is required and what that should look like. In short, if all we’re concerned about is expressing how opposed we are to something, we’re committing to not helping anyone who might be affected by it - including potential victims.

When I mentioned to friends that I was researching these fringe sexualities, the response seemed to be a universal “Be careful”. The people I spoke to were concerned that even attempting to look into some of these topics would tar me with the same brush as the people who engaged in the activities.

The fact that there’s any topic on this earth that we can deem “too risky to talk about” honestly breaks my heart. If we can’t discuss things, we can’t understand things. The more controversial the issue, the more it deserves to be explored. We seem to have this idea that unless we’re vehemently and violently denouncing all attempts at a conversation about these topics, then people will suspect that maybe we’re secretly one of them.

You might be asking why on earth you'd want to have a better understanding of someone who is sexually turned on by things that disgust you. The answer is, because they're part of the same world you and I are. Understanding the people we share our world with is always a good thing.

Understanding is not the same as approval. Understanding more about pedophilia doesn’t mean that you support sexual relationships between adults and children. Learning about incest doesn’t mean you’re attracted to your own family members. Exploring the psychology of kinks and fetishes doesn’t mean you want to participate in them. It means that you recognise that they exist. It means that you are better informed about the people around you. Rather than pointing and laughing at people because they’re different, let’s look closer.

So I hope you’ll join me in this new series as each article we explore the fringes of different areas of human sexuality. I'm hoping you can suspend whatever prejudices you might have and learn something you didn’t know before.

That is all.

You may go now.