#is outing someone who doesn't want their sexuality to be public knowledge suddenly okay if they've been famous for 60 years

[patronsaint-ofthedenial]

Ffs Mick Jagger is not a "bisexual icon" even if he really is bi, he isn't open about it and he clearly doesn't want to be, famous people don't have to be out

[vaspider]

I’m hoping you’d be able to explain something to me as you’re much more knowledgeable on it than I am; I’m struggling to understand how pup masks and leashes/harnesses aren’t inherently sexual.

Unfortunately I’ve not been able to go to a pride event yet as I’m not out to my family and also Covid, so I’m not able to see this is a real life situation and ask people about it. I just came across your comment on the pride post (I assume you know which one, I don’t know what to name it 😅)

I’m sincerely curious and wanting to learn so I’m hoping you can help me!

... because... They're not? They're clothing.

Let me put it this way: I know people who have kinks or fetishes for/including/about the following clothing:

Wool suits

Khaki pants

Silk shirts

Cheerleader skirts

Sundresses

Clergy attire (nun habits, clerical collars)

Swimsuits

Rubber aprons

Tailored pencil skirts

High heels

Strappy sandals

Suspenders

Does that make this clothing inherently sexual? No!

I know people who wear pup masks because it's gender-affirming for them. Collars and leashes have long been a part of club/goth/raver wear, but they seem to suddenly become objectionable when the presentation is openly queer rather than "skinny white girls in faux-schoolgirl outfits and collars who are presumed cishet."

So after saying all of that, I have to ask:

What if they are inherently sexual? So what? What does that matter?

We do not censure or censor cishet displays of sexuality through clothing. Tiny bikinis, bodycon dresses -- heck, women wearing see-through dresses with pasties is a regular on the Project Runway runway, a-ok by Bravo and Lifetime viewers -- leather pants on hot women who are presumed het... clothing is, among its many other purposes, a sexual signaling device. It's such an assumed signaling device that there are entire rape defenses which hinge on the idea that clothing on women especially exists to convey sexual availability. Saying clothing is "inherently sexual" opens a door to "well look what you were dressed like," and that's not a thing we need to continue to perpetuate. Clothing is a way humans sexually signal to each other, but it's not the only thing humans do with clothing, so... clothing itself can't be deemed inherently sexual. Everything is context, and that context comes from behavior.

So that brings us back to clothing vs behavior rather neatly. Does the clothing matter or does the behavior matter? If someone is doing something to you without your consent, the clothing doesn't matter, that's wrong, but, and this is important: simply existing in public in a pup mask isn't doing something to you.

Or, more bluntly, why is this okay:

but this gets people's panties all bunched up?

(First page results for "woman in collar" and "gay man in collar".)

Both of these images show people wearing clothing which renders them decent in terms of the parts of their body which are covered. What's different in the second is that this image is read as explicitly queer. (And it IS queer, to be clear.)

And that's why people get all fucked up about it.