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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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Topically for transgenderism, though, there's a particular 'you only think it's desexualized because what the sexualization actually is won't be coherent to you' thing that over time people (particularly men) might hopefully be starting to understand. Steven Universe does it with the 'fusion dance', but most people get frame-trapped by seeing the Fusion dances, going 'it's obviously sex, they're teaching kids to have sex', and ending the scan there.

While I mostly agree with the fact that there's a lot of transgender transformation media that manages to be sexual for a person with a particular kink or fetish without registering as sexual to most of the population, I also think there is a risk with this kind of speculation.

To use an ancient example by way of analogy, look at the animal transformations in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In particular I want to focus on the motif of voice throughout the poem (translation A. S. Kline):

But when he [Actaeon] sees his head and horns reflected for certain in the water, he tries to say "Oh, look at me!" but no voice follows. He groans: that is his voice, and tears run down his altered face. Only his mind remains unchanged. What can he do? Shall he return to his home and the royal palace, or lie hidden in the woods? Shame prevents the one, and fear the other.

Ovid focuses on the voice, and the lack of it in transformed people a lot throughout the poem. But why is he doing it?

I think there's a temptation for a modern person who is aware of the wide variety of kink content online, particularly transformation media, to speculate as to whether this isn't essentially ancient transformation porn. On this reading, Ovid keeps coming back to the lack of voice that results from a bestial transformation because this is the part that is hot to him, the part where a superior human being is made lesser, and thus, in a pattern that mirrors BDSM, hypnosis/mind control content, etc. the part where Ovid places himself in the mindset of a dom looking down on his literary subjects.

But there is obviously another explanation. That Ovid had a normal, non-kinky interest in transformation stories, and he chose to focus on the lack of voice in ex-human animals because that was one of the most salient differences between a human and an animal in his mind.

We will likely never know which of the two explanations is more directionally true.

But this kind of applies to all media that isn't obviously sexual, while appealing to a subset of the population due to their particular kinks. Plenty of mainstream stories feature body swaps (Freaky Friday being the most famous example), but body swaps are also a popular subject in kink. Short of an author or group of authors just coming out and saying, "This is a kink thing, we're writing kinky porn that only looks non-sexual because you're normal and this doesn't turn you on", there are going to be many examples where a cigar is just a cigar, and no intentional kinkiness was actually intended by the author.

It could go either way.

Transformation fetishes are probably more common in the general population than you would expect.

I thought R. L. Stine's Goosebumps books were fire when I was a little kid (like pre-pubescent). I didn't even know at the time that the animal and monster transformation scenes were giving me (proto-)sexual feelings. I just knew that I was very fascinated by them, for reasons I couldn't articulate.