Your kink cannot Be a deathwish

I'm seeing a very weird ideological crossover between gay men who want to get HIV as a kink and women who take seriously the idea of tradwifedom. So my uncle is gay, he was a gay boy in Indiana, so obviously he left as quickly as he could and he moved out to Arizona where he worked in a gay bar. And at the bar he saw everything, right? But one of the things that disturbed him the most, and I remember him telling me the story, and I had really conflicted feelings about it then, you'll understand why. There was a guy who came into the bar and was basically, advertising that his kink was that he wanted to get HIV. This is a real thing. And I forget how exactly he was doing it, like if he'd written on a chalkboard or if he'd put up a poster or like whatever it was that he'd done. You know, there are ways. My uncle tore it down. He was like, you cannot do that here. That's not okay. And when I first heard that, I was like, I mean, that's like, really, really weird, but we don't kink shame, right? Like, is it okay to infringe upon someone's desire point blank, period? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe that's your controlling nature, coming from a deeply conservative home where you think it's okay to impose what you believe is a moral ideal on other people. Now, what does this have to do to tradwifedom? The thing about tradwife ideology is that it is fundamentally cope. It is cope for the fact that we live under a system that values money more than life. It is this, um, sort of pseudo-religion, and in some ways actually very, very real religion that glamorizes the sacredness of birth while trying to also glamorize the loss of agency. There's all this terminology, right, of like melting yourself. You are one flesh. It doesn't matter if you don't have the right to vote because you and your husband are fused. It doesn't matter if your daughters can't decide for themselves because why would you wanna decide anything? In a similar way to wanting HIV, it is a death wish born out of a feeling of helplessness in a world you are profoundly afraid to exist in. You do not feel safe within the system, and so you look to a saviour rather than looking to change the system. And I think a lot of the women who criticise tradwives come off in the same way my uncle did to me where it's like, oh, just let them live, you know, just let them be into what they're into. But the problem is that in the very same way that getting HIV perpetuates the risk for other people to get a disease, perpetuating tradwife ideology increases the risk that other women will lose their agency. Just because you are afraid of existing in a system without shelter from a man. As if the man in question is not himself a slave. There's a quote by Bernard Shaw in which he says, women fare worse under the capitalist system because where the capitalist system makes man a slave, it makes women dependent on man for money, which makes her a slave to a slave, which is in his words, the worst form of slavery. Some ideas do not belong in the public space. Some belief systems are harmful. Some diseases kill people and can be stopped. So? Ah, I don't know. That's just what I've been thinking about today.