Step 1: Sanitize sexual perversions with euphemistic, even playful, language. Step 2: Bring perfectly normal proclivities under the same linguistic banner, thus blurring any moral lines. I speak, of course, of the word “kink,” a term that has enjoyed explosive popularity in recent years as its usefulness to the Left has increased.

During the not-memorably-prudish ’90s, the word “kink” appeared in 65 New York Times articles in a sexual context. Over the last 10 years, that rate has nearly tripled. (Other papers’ data are similar.) Browsers of the internet have responded accordingly, more than quadrupling the term’s search frequency since the birth of Google Trends in 2004. Yes, “kink” is having a moment. The question is whether progressives can use it to attain yet another culture war victory. 

American politics has seen this kind of move before. In the decade prior to Obergefell v. Hodges, the sentiments “No one wants gay marriage” and “How dare you oppose it?” existed brazenly alongside one another, at times, it seemed, in the same speech or conversation. Five minutes ago, conventional wisdom on transgender athletes shifted from “That’s not a thing” to “It’s a good thing” before anyone could blink. If today’s contortions are necessarily more complicated, that is only because the work in question is a heavier lift. Rather than improving the fortunes of once-despised sexual minorities, the Left now means to dispense with the notion that sexual propriety so much as exists. To do so, it will have to convince us that “kinks” are funny, innocent, and possessed by all. Wouldn’t you know it, you, your Sunday school teacher, and your octogenarian grandma each has one? 

The first part of this gambit involves a kind of saturation therapy, whereby the culturally attuned grow used to the new lexicon via regular exposure. In the last few years alone, the progressive website Slate has dismissed as mere “kink” such deviancies as rape fetishism and Holocaust-themed sex. (In the latter, one partner pretends to be a Nazi “overpowered” by her Jewish lover.) The nonprofit organization DomesticShelters.org describes on its website the “kink” of two people agreeing that “one of them will be drugged for sex.” At the Daily Beast, “rope bondage” is a “kink,” as are sadomasochistic practices more generally. Mashable, meanwhile, devotes an entire 2023 article to the “kink” of “age play” (i.e., pretend pedophilia), about which more to follow below. 

To browse Reddit and other social media apps is to find every “kink” imaginable, both normalized and praised. (I do not recommend replicating this search.) Yet the common denominator on both social media and mainstream sites is an ostentatious refusal to judge anyone for his sexual urges. To do so would be “kink-shaming,” a postmodern offense that “errs” by positing a widely applicable moral standard. Rather, the Left insists in post after post, in article after article, that one man’s depravity is another man’s harmless fun. And all of it, irrespective of severity, is gatherable under the cutesy, cheeky, and half-ironic umbrella that is “kink.” 

As previously mentioned, this is only half the game. The other half requires the enlistment of every human being within shouting distance of the internet. Like an Oprah Winfrey giveaway — “You get a kink! You get a kink!” — the project involves full participation. Only then can “kinks” be made so ubiquitously anodyne that any particular person’s is a matter of unremarkable chance. 

Consider, for example, the recent enlargements of the “kink” sphere. An interest in conventional sex is now a “vanilla kink,” according to the audio-erotica website Quinn. Elsewhere online, simple hugging lies in “kink” realm, as do cuddling and kind words. Perhaps most tellingly, entirely nonsexual inclinations now qualify for “kink” status among our taste-making elite. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, enjoying revenge against one’s political opponents warrants the K-word. (“Watching [Trump supporter Mike Lindell] get bad news in real time … is my new kink.”) At UnHerd, the elevation of Keir Starmer to British prime minister promises to unleash a “kink” of political “competency.” 

My opponent will protest that much of this is a joke. I cede the point. Nevertheless, when internet searches for “my new kink” yield encomiums to bananas, penmanship, the color pink, “audio booking in the park,” working 12 hours a day, men who go to therapy, and “Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a cowboy hat rubbing his earlobe,” one is forced to conclude that the joke has legs. 

Thus, we arrive at today’s unsavory moment. Despicable behaviors are mere “kinks,” and so is your sister-in-law’s interest in knitting. The man who must inflict pain to achieve satisfaction is no worse or better than the one who pursues loving monogamy. I am not ready — quite — to call this development an organized conspiracy, complete with code words, officers, and a paper trail. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t purposeful. Note, by way of analogy, the speed with which nearly every legacy newspaper jumped aboard the Kamala-was-never-border-czar train last month. When the woke signal shines from the rooftops, the woke-man leaps into obedient action. 

One way to understand the present language game is to imagine an inner and an outer party. The former has access to our cultural machinery and spends its time writing such articles as “Eroticizing Our Play: Pleasure and Healing in Kink and BDSM” (published by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity). To argue that these men and women have in mind no ideological project is to strain credulity to the breaking point. The latter group, meanwhile, are the tens of thousands of social media drones who are pleased to have hit upon a vogue expression and excited to use it to crack wise. Quite obviously, the “my new kink” crowd means no harm. Nevertheless, its efforts advance the undertaking. One think piece or television gag, but also one post or offhand remark, at a time, we are losing our ability to identify and condemn the reprehensible. 

Where all of this leads is clear enough: the final elimination of Judeo-Christian sexual ethics from American society. In their place will reign a god born of the enlightenment and thus far more amenable to the Left’s catechisms and redefinitions. His name, as all sentient political observers know, is Consent. And while he is not without his power, he is too changeful a deity to keep anyone in line for long. 

“The supreme law is consent and having everybody on board,” Slate argued in a recent article. “The kink is not the highest court.” For the moment, this is good news of a kind, introducing as it does at least some measure of externally produced restraint on behavior. The problem is that while consent is a moral reality, existing whether or not we sinners acknowledge it, the “age” and “terms” of consent are nothing more than political settlements. When the relativists take up such causes as interspecies marriage, necrophilia, and pederasty — and they will — little will stand in their way but a few easily rewritable statutes. After all, the desires in question are each just one more “kink.” The god Consent having nodded his head, opponents will have nothing on which to stand but our revulsion. Let us see how far that gets us. 

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It is typically here that the Left begins to howl its outrage: “How dare you suggest that we want legalized pedophilia!” Yet as readers of this article have already been reminded, Democrats said the same thing about gay marriage. Furthermore, the logic of “kink” is inexorable. Give it an inch, and it will take a mile. Already, pedophilia is being discussed in some circles as a “sexual orientation.” So-called minor-attracted persons are the beneficiaries, now, of a softening euphemism. Though we are unlikely, this decade, to see a prime-time television host confess his “kink” of partnering with children, that whisper is audible online and abroad. To be sure, multiculturalism will stoke the engine. (Isn’t it racist to deny an Afghan his bacha bazi — literally “boy play”?) Here in America, however, “kink” will drive the car. Having persuaded us of kink’s essential normality, the Left will expand its borders until nothing remains outside. That is what the “progress” in “progressive” is all about.

What is to be done? Nothing, I suppose, though declining to joke about “kink” is a noble gesture, as is refusing to watch whatever prestige television show (a la Amazon’s Transparent) whitewashes the next depravity. My own guess, however, is that this circuit is unstoppable in the absence of another Great Awakening, an eventuality for which even secular conservatives should pray. To put it another way, God help us. Only then are we likely to stop helping ourselves. 

Graham Hillard is an editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.