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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10070 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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I think the BDSM community downplays the relationship with domestic violence for PR reasons. There's definitely something there.

I'm unclear to what degree it's PR and to what degree it's willful blindness. BDSM is obviously connected to some dark human impulses but people online seem incredibly desperate to deny it.

I'm actually not sure what to make of humanity's dark impulses in the sexual realm, especially when they get tied up in weird fetish stuff beyond BDSM.

For example, there's an entire niche erotica category of downgrade transformation fetishes. It's people getting turned on by the idea of someone magically transforming into a lesser version of themselves. Popular cheerleader to shy nerd, fitness trainer to fat slob, that sort of thing. It's dark, but it is also goofy because it can never happen in real life.

Psychologically, I think it mirrors a lot of what is happening with BDSM, at least as far as D/s dynamics go. A person's relative status is being lowered, so that other people's relative status is increased.

However, I'm not even sure why we have these kinds of kinks and fetishes from an evopsych perspective. Like, I kind of get the idea of the monkey brain fantasizing about seeing someone getting taken down a peg, but how did magical transformations become a part of it? Is this just where the idea of cursing someone comes from? How many Greek curse tablets were secretly someone acting out a psychosexual fetish of theirs?

Perhaps it is just one of those happy accidents with profound downstream effects, like human's love of gold.

I have no idea how it comes about, but I can say that as a boy I had conceived of very weird kinks despite not even having reached puberty and never having been involved in sexual activity. Puberty was less of a sexual awakening for me and much more of an "oh shit, I can ejaculate now, what is this crap?" moment.

Wherever kink comes from, my personal experience suggests to me that it has to be deep, deep down.

Same, I knew my kinks before I even understood how sex happened, without having seen anything even vaguely pornographic at all, without any internet access. It was incredibly natural.

For better or worse, i feel like humans have a bias for believing that their environment shapes them far more than it actually does.

Of course, having rich parents getting nutrition etc does significantly affect your life but I think personality and mental traits are less affected by environment (provided it's an typical environment and not an extreme case). Maybe how they are expressed is affected by environment.

It's not entirely genetics, it might be stochastic random process of how neurons happened to develop in someone's brain.

but it is also goofy because it can never happen in real life.

I think a quick review of the Facebook profiles of acquaintances from 10 years ago tends to beg to differ on this one.

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