serene | Joy in transgression (Reply)

snippy posted "Part of the fun is being transgressive", about how immature it can seem when people break the rules for the sake of breaking them. This was my response, which I liked, so I'm posting it here. I'm nothing if not self-referential.

There is an element of "Look how naughty it is to be bad!" to some of the joy in transgression that I see -- that's something that cannot, to my mind, be rationally explained or understood. It's hot to some people to break the rules. It's hot to some people to play at rape or torture or other things that are at least in part about how thrilling it can be to be naughty.

But I've seen another side to this -- it's more like, "Look how fun it is to break *bad* rules, and show people how irrelevant/wrong/stupid they are." Men can have a lot of fun wearing skirts, but that's not necessarily because wearing a skirt is fun in itself -- it's because it *can* be fun to feel the freedom of poking at people's expectations. There's no reason for a man *not* to wear a skirt, outside of social strictures that are completely without reasonable basis, but it's impossible for him to wear one where I live without attracting a fair bit of attention, and men who do it *know* this. Some of them do it because it's who they are and they are doing it in spite of the attention. Some of them do it specifically to make a statement about how absurd the strictures are in the first place, and that can be fun.

I love kissing stonebender. I get an extra joy out of kissing him in public, because I know that we challenge people's ideas of what a sexual being looks like (for those who don't know, I'm very fat, and stonebender uses a power wheelchair and is fat, as well). The kiss isn't better, but it's a political act of defiance, and not an immature defiance, either. A defiance born of joy and a vision for a better world.