My body is not your Neverland — Fetishes hurt the soul
In the hopes of finding that spark you post a profile online, seeking out the man who will make you tick, and then stop time as you build that connection. Your pictures are tasteful, with enough suggestion to hint at something more. You spend ages writing out the perfect, yet short, profile, including an off hand comment that you are trans. Just, because, you know, if he finds out now he is less likely to harm you if you actually do get past first base. Click, done, you’re now live.
Then your inbox is full of tumbleweeds, obviously that off hand comment scares away anyone you might actually be interested in. Until your phone pings, and its Jack, or Steve, or Malcolm, or BigDogg69. Excitement and butterflies pepper your rush to open the message, knowing that he will, of course, actually want to treat you as a human being. Of course he will. The message opens, and while it is not a dick pick, goes something along the lines of ‘my wife is out of town, fancy hooking up, I’ve always fancied some of that trans tight ass’, or some variant less polite. You will be his dirty little secret, his dick fix without the guilt.
As I wrote earlier, there is absolutely nothing shameful or wrong with straight men having intimate relationships with penis owning women. They are straight/bi, and their relationships and hook-ups are heteronormative. However, where it strays into fetish territory is when our genitalia become the sole reason for hooking up with us. That your Shangri-La is between our legs, and our worthy is a means to getting your end away, puts the singular aspect of our identity at the core part of what ever congress we engage in. Your idea of a quick fix, the frisson of excitement you feel every time your illicit a rendezvous makes us feel less than human, more zoo exhibit than active sexual partner.
It is very easy to slide into someone’s DMs, make her feel like a queen, and one booty call later you are kicking back on the sheets and she is sobbing into the toilet as you run out of her. Sexuality is both as simple as hooking up without any expectations, yet as vastly complex as all seven billion people on the planet. Each of us have our own kinks, desires, and ways of getting off, yet it is how we interact with our sexual partners that sets intimacy apart from harmful fetishes. This is not to kink shame, rather, it is to show that just because you may desire a human form does not mean you can divorce the genitals from the person. If you single out a particular set of genital configuration without considering the person behind it you are setting them up for a world of hurt and pain.
Of course, there are plenty of trans sex workers who have a professional eye on this, and often their business model relies on this particular fetish. They rely on men fixating on their genitals, seeing their womanhood as something ‘other’, something exotic and foreign, a fruit worth paying for but not worth sharing with friends and family. The degrading aspects of sex work dehumanise all sex workers, especially when clients either go beyond transactional boundaries into outright abuse, or treat sex workers as automatons to unload into. Trans sex workers have intersections of sordid personal histories where rejection, abuse, and desperation collide, and when fetishization enters the frame their identity gets rolled up into your fixation.
When fetishes become the singular focus of a person’s interaction with another it invariably harms the fetishized person because it treats them as a simple means. Without the emotional respect and underpinnings that connect even a basic transactional sexual encounter, transwomen are left bereft of comfort and support, alienated from their peers and the wider society. Many trans tropes and ‘reveals’ centre around the notion a general fetishization of their genitals, that by owning a penis it makes these women (it usually always is about trans women and not trans men) into objects of derision, pity, and moral pearl clutching. Just think of the children.
By allowing penis owning women to be pushed to the margins, society turns their very identities into fetishes. Our bodies become othered, our identities challenged and questioned at every turn. It makes simple things complicated, yet paradoxically it turns complex identities into a singular reductive notion. That we transgress a particular notion of binary identities is something that society has always struggled to get to grips with. Many countries porn searches are dominated by men searching out penis owning women, the vast majority will be straight identified, and thus the validity of these women’s identities is both enhanced and reduced to a singular aspect of themselves.
So, when we post our profiles on dating apps, build OnlyFans pages, seek out connections in bars we take a leap of faith. For some penis owning women it is simply about love and relationships, for others it is about building a career in a world that rejects them from many others. Hope on the one hand, practical desperation on the other. We commit our bodies to the deep wide web, swimming our from our safe harbours into possibly shark infested waters, and every time we are fetishized a small piece of us dies. Each of us deals with it in our own ways; some cry and talk it through, eventually finding someone to cherish them beyond the singular, others turn to drink or drugs to numb the pain. Each of us has a coping mechanism to deal with others stereotypes of our core identities, dealing with society’s fetishization of our bodies in our own way.
Neverland enabled the Lost Boys to never grow up, to be forever young. In many respects the internet has the same effect on sexuality whereby you are often never directly confronted with the actions you take when you search and view your chosen porn. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with watching porn with over 18 actors in, pick your desires and you will generally find something to slake your lust. However, when that overflows into your wider interactions with the people and women around you, challenge your assumptions and ideas of who those people are. Give and show them respect, treat them as ends of themselves, rather than just a means for you getting your jollies. Our bodies are precious to us, and with respect for our identities we can build meaningful sexual relations that go just beyond a genital fixation.
