Embrace that fetish!

Let us defend the things that stop the interests of our genes and serve ours. Contraception. Sterilization. Abortion. The cultivation of non-procreative sexual practices. The renunciation of the pursuit of status, especially when it conflicts with the relief of suffering or the realization of pleasure.

Should antinatalists get kinky?  Sure!

One should start with the realization that pleasure is good, but that there are a lot of people who now exist who suffer from its deprivation.  The existence of this suffering is one of the good reasons for being an antinatalist, after all.  (I concede that it might not be the most important one and that it is dominated by more active forms of suffering, but it still matters.)  Sex is an important source of pleasure, perhaps the most important one.  But there are good reasons to believe that standard-issue partnered sexuality isn’t going to work very well for many people, and indeed, might actually generate more suffering than pleasure.

A creative kinkster helps out here, because she’s in the business of generating forms of sexual pleasure centered on new modes of activity and new ideas, and many of them will be opportunities to step out of the traditional roles and expectations of two-person partnered sexuality (whether through multiple partners or just that useful standby of going solo).  In thinking up and promoting new ways of experiencing sexual pleasure, the kinkster is adding pleasure to the world.  And new ideas, freely spread, are by their very nature nonexclusive — my enjoying some new kink doesn’t interfere with your enjoying it, any more than my enjoying a new story means that it is “used up” and no good for you to read.

At a higher level of abstraction, enjoying kinky sexual activities reinforces the wholesome notion — one antinatalists should have little trouble getting behind —  that sex is for fun, rather than for making babies.

And getting kinky takes a whack at a pronatalist culture, because many forms of kink are forms of mockery and satire aimed at right at that culture.  (One thinks, perhaps, of M. Christian’s terrific story “Guernica” in the collection The Bachelor Machine, in which BDSM enthusiasts recreate and mock the oppressive morality of their culture in hidden clubs.)   Example: the institutional Roman Catholic Church may wield vast political power in favor of a pro-natalist agenda.  Dressing up and playing naughty nun isn’t just fun, it encourages us to laugh at the Church.  And laughter drives out fear.

And what is more, making sex as much as possible an act of the imagination stimulates the imagination.  And imagination is the inveterate enemy of the status quo.  In daring to imagine things that might be, we undermine complacent acceptance of the way things are.  ”The way things are” is a species of technological ape making endless copies of itself.  That needs to stop.

Need I add, by the way, that having interesting kinks raises the opportunity cost of having children?  Let us recall fondly blogger Holly Pervocracy’s deliberations on whether or not to have children, which included this point on the con side “Difficult to explain poly/BDSM to six-year-old. Impossible to explain to thirteen-year-old.”   (I believe she came down against, eventually.)

So if you want to get out there and be kinky or be pervy, the by all means do so and feel good about yourself.  You’re not just having fun. You’re making the world better.