Ask Beastly: Why I Love the F-Slur

My name is Alexander Cheves, and my nickname is Beastly. I write about sex. I even wrote a sex memoir. Everything else about me can be found here.

Have a question for me? Email askbeastly@gmail.com or use the contact form.

This site is supported by readers like you. There are no ads, no sponsored content. Visit my Patreon to support this blog and get special perks.

You talk about fetishes a lot, and about feeling shame. Is there any fetish that is just too shameful, that I should be trying to get rid of rather than fantasize about? For example, if I were attracted to children, would it be wrong to fantasize about fictional children? Assume no real children are involved, that’s obviously a step too far.

Howdy, 

You can do anything in your mind. Just be very, very careful to keep your mental activity out of the real world. Some fetishes (like cannibalism) can’t be indulged without being a bad person, but that doesn’t mean you can just “get rid” of them. Ask anyone who has ever tried to “get rid” of anxiety: it is hard to banish thoughts. The harder we try, the more they stay.

Your mind is yours. It is free territory. In your head — only in your head — you can have any thoughts you like, so long as you control your actions and impulses in response to them. Most people can do that, but some can’t. Those who can’t need the support of a good therapist.

A fetish can be seen as a thought or fantasy. No one chooses thoughts, but with training, we can live with thoughts in healthier ways. This is true of all intrusive and difficult thoughts. People with depression and anxiety have the same struggle: they have difficult thoughts or patterns of thinking that they must learn to live with. Attempting to push thoughts away tends to result in the opposite effect.

Let’s talk more about fetishes. No one chooses to have a fetish. No one chooses the things that turn them on. We are slaves to our genes, childhood experiences, traumas, and turn-ons. A fetish is probably the result of all these. I cannot say for certain if I think people are born kinky or if kinks and fetishes emerge later in life as a response to childhood stimuli. Either way, as adults, we have little control over them. Some people get lucky and have fetishes for things that are socially acceptable, like anonymous sex with strangers or getting tied up. Others are less lucky: they have fetishes for things that, if done, would harm them and others.

If you have one of these fetishes, you have done nothing wrong. Your fetish, being a natural thing you did not make, cannot on its own be “right” or “wrong”. Your actions, on the other hand, can be right or wrong. A thought or fantasy is not an action — it’s a thought. We do not police thought — not yet — but we do police internet activity, porn viewership, porn possession (for certain types of porn), and virtually all other actions that can be taken in response to thoughts. Living with an unlivable fetish requires self-control, and usually a therapist.

Some people have fetishes for corpses and dead animals and kids, and these fetishes, though natural, cannot be acted on without being a bad person. I pity people with fetishes for things like being eaten alive or killed because, for them, their fetish is literally unlivable — you can’t enjoy a fetish if you’re dead. Some fetishes must stay in fantasy land. That’s possible.

Fisting — my favorite fetish — was, for years, something I was happy to keep in fantasy land. My life would be no worse now if I had. I watched fisting porn (which is legal in the U.S. but not England) online for years and did not want to do anything more with it — until, one day, I did. Luckily for me, fisting is a legal, consensual, and (for the most part) socially acceptable fetish nowadays, though that was not always the case. Other fetishes are not. But the fact remains that I was able to keep fisting in the realm of fantasy for a long time. I made the choice to pursue it in real life. Our choices define us, not our thoughts. Many kinky people have a range of kinks, some they talk about and some they don’t, some they do in real life, and some they don’t do. Our choices, not our actions, make us good or bad people.

Bringing certain fantasies to life would force many people to break the law and abandon their ethics, so folks with these fetishes must either a) make peace with not doing them or b) try role-play. Role-play is a pretend game, an activity in which one or more consenting adults mutually agree to act like something or someone they’re not to facilitate an erotic experience. Adult babies are not real babies and human pups are not canines — they are adults engaging in consensual role-play. You can’t have sex with a baby or dog without being a bad person, which is probably why these popular role-play games exist. You can push the limit of role-play pretty far, as do people into rape fantasy and simulated rape (like me). As long as it’s consensual and agreed upon between two adults who are aware of the risks, it’s fine. 

There are so many things you can do — such a wild sex life you can have — that there’s no reason to act on a fetish that is illegal and that would destroy your life. My sex life is fine without stepping into that territory. I don’t need that. I have enough fun. 

In meditation — something you and everyone reading this should try — we learn that the mind likes to think. That’s what it does. Thoughts are things that happen to us, things we don’t have much control over. My belief is that extreme and taboo fantasies pass regularly through the minds of most people, and most people suppress them or try to push them away. Pushing away thought is hard and tends to be ineffective: a resisted thought often grows large until we can’t ignore it and must do something with it. Meditation helps us react to thoughts more gently. Remember: a thought is just a thought. It says nothing about you, nothing about your values or beliefs. Thoughts come and go. We can experience them without judging them.

Those who have ample experience in meditation will tell you that, while we cannot control thoughts, we can work on how we relate to them. With practice, we can learn to just let them be. Not every thought is valuable. Some are dumb and weird and don’t require our involvement — we can give them space to bounce around until our attention moves to the next thing. Humans are easily distracted, and thoughts are visitors. They leave eventually.

I’ve done what I do now for a long time. I have talked to many people about their fetishes. I know a small number of nice humans with fantasies about underage folks. I suspect it’s a relatively common — albeit heavily tabooed — fetish. I do not believe any of these people will ever act on their fantasies because they can control their behavior. Controlling one’s behavior — from table manners to spending habits — is just part of being a healthy adult.

Think, for a moment, about how our culture glorifies images of beautiful dead women. Look at all the gothic romance and vampire content in the world. Look at popular horror films and thrillers: lots of dead, beautiful women. This makes me think that many people fantasize about sex with a dead, beautiful woman. But necrophilia is a highly taboo and illegal fetish that will land anyone caught doing it in prison, and statistically, only a small percentage of people become killers. So there must be a chasm, a gulf, between thought and action, and that chasm is what separates healthy humans from the few among us who — for various reasons, including mental illness — cross that gulf and turn thought into action. There are many mental steps one must take between thinking about something and actually doing it, especially when that thing is violent, forbidden, illegal, and cruel.

Asking for help is wise. It means you are trying to do the right thing, which to me is the purest definition of being a good person. I recommend a good therapist and, as always, meditation.

Love, Beastly 

Hi, man. Look I’m a 19-year-old guy and I guess I’m gay, I don’t like the word, it just doesn’t fit my personality. I’m shy and really anxious so I always overthink things, not to the level that I can’t talk to someone but a bit neurotic. I know I’ve liked men for as long as I can remember. The first time I felt arousal I was 2 years old, watching TV I just saw cute guys and my penis would stand up, I didn’t know what it was, just that I liked it. Once I asked my mom what it was and she just laughed at me, and I just ignored the fact. I would talk to God, every day, looking up at the ceiling for him to take away my likes, and for some strange reason I thought he would listen to me, then I stopped believing in him because he never did what I asked him to do. And I would just talk to myself like I did to God, and that helped me not to feel that my likes were not wrong because he talks and talks back to me and those answers helped me process my feelings. I discovered gay sex on Facebook, then on porn sites and I masturbated 5 times a day, that started when I was 12, I did weird things like smelling my own dirty clothes, imagining that my classmates were using me sexually, I masturbated on the school express without anyone around me knowing and I got turned on when some boys at my school teased me. At first, I felt guilty, but then I felt indifferent, I just liked it, if they saw me they wouldn’t imagine how depraved my thoughts were because on the outside I was quiet and introverted. Up to that point, I felt fine, I had accepted my preferences at 14 and told myself I was gay. But then I discovered new styles of hardcore pornography, fetish blogs, trans man porn, and FinDom Twitter accounts, among others and it just disgusted me. My guilt multiplied and my anxiety mixed with school drove me crazy. I watched everything, searched everything, and just felt exhausted, I don’t even know how I managed to be one of the best students in my school, maybe everyone else was too dumb. Anyway, my addiction made me feel so insecure about relationships because of all this content. I mean I’m not sure if it was normal that at 15, I found domination porn, urine, spit, violent sex, fisting, rape, chastity cages, sissies, straight porn that confused me, incest, whatever, I went from indifference to distaste. I felt they turned their traumas into something disgusting and horrifying. But a lot of that stuff I liked like feet, muscles, stereotypically straight men, pleasing a man, some humiliation, insults in English and Spanish plus degradation. I know the origins of each one, my family that yells all the time, my first interactions with boys at school, my fear of public speaking, that when I was 8 and 9 years old I peed in the classroom, only 4 times and the boys didn’t actually bother me for that, more for being introverted but studious. I’m actually surprised I’m not more disturbed, I still have several traumatic experiences. I feel that by not empathizing with those fetishistic and nasty people I am bad, but I know I am like them plus I still get turned on by a lot of the pornography I already mentioned. And I feel lonely because I have never had sex and I think I need to learn to bond with others, process all my traumatic experiences, and find my way in life. But I feel like these people are bad and the gay community in addition to all its nuances is repulsive. I am from Latin America, so I don’t know if this is well written, and you as a blogger feel disturbed by my writing. I know this writing is very long, but I wanted to vent to someone, I still don’t tell anyone about my tastes, just random people on the internet. Anyway, we have the same birthday March 7, 2003, that’s why I wrote you I thought it was a good coincidence, sorry for bothering you with my writing. Bye.

Hey birthday brother, 

I hope in five or ten years you look back at this message and see all the shame and trauma in it. It breaks my heart a bit. You are shaming and judging yourself so much. Why?

If you read nothing else of my reply, read this: You don’t have to judge yourself so much. You can like what you like and enjoy how you are. You have wild tastes. So what? I do too.

We all experience trauma, and sometimes trauma does result in bad, unhealthy behaviors, but none of the behaviors you describe (watching porn, masturbation, being kinky) are bad. They are, in fact, quite common. Many people like all that hardcore stuff. The real effect of trauma is all this self-shaming and self-judgment. Shame is the problem here. That’s where trauma lives. Shame is not helping you solve the riddle of yourself. It is not helping you grow. 

You are young. You are still figuring out your sexuality and your desires, and you are absorbing all the shame and judgment the world has put on you, the same shame and judgment it puts on everyone like you — the same shame and judgment it put on me when I was your age. I experienced judgment growing up, and it took me a long time to unlearn it and stop directing it back at myself. At some point, I asked myself the same question: Why? Why am I treating myself this way? Do I really think these parts of me, these impulses I have, are wrong?

No. Sex with men has been among the most beautiful experiences of my life. My kinks, my adventurous tastes, have made me interesting and powerful and given me so much fun, so much beauty, and such great friends. The best minds of my generation are kinky motherfuckers. So why hate myself? Why do I have to feel bad about what I like, what porn I watch? What rulebook says I am “depraved”? Why do I feel this judgment?

That self-hatred came from a conservative, religious upbringing and homophobic people. Nothing more. They’re just people, just my family, just the little town and ugly religion I grew up in. Nothing to fear. I got out. I found a better life. All that self-judgment came from the church and the social norms I was taught from a young age. When I got older, I found people who were healthy, nice, and just like me — people who watched the same porn I did, and who actually did all that wild, hardcore stuff in real life and did not hate themselves for it. I needed to connect to those people to heal myself, and that’s what I did. And that’s what you must do.

I am now one of those healthy, nice adults who like “domination porn, urine, spit, violent sex, fisting, rape, chastity cages, sissies” and so on. (Well, not really urine.) You are right: you need to “bond with others, process all my traumatic experiences, and find my way in life.” That is a good description of growing up. We grow up with others’ help, and for people with wild tastes — people like us — finding others is a bit harder and takes a little more time. Don’t give up.

You have not had sex yet, so my advice is to pause all the self-judgment long enough to get some real sexual experience behind you. Sex is a journey of a lifetime, and on that journey, you will make some mistakes, especially in the beginning. Some sexual experiences will not be great. No one is great at sex in the beginning. On the other hand, some sexual experiences will be so much better than you expect them to be. In time, you will see how beautiful and life-changing sex is, and how dull and mediocre it can be. It is both — it’s just sex. It’s nothing to fear or judge. It’s just something fun that adults can do after they become adults.

Sex is not the best thing in life or the worst thing. It’s fun, difficult, and ever-changing. I know you see it now as this big, confusing, scary thing that has “warped” you, something you’re “addicted” to, something that makes you bad — something you have never actually done. You are making estimations and judgments on something about which you actually know nothing. As you get more experience and sex loses its newness, you will be able to judge it fairly.

As you get older, you will see that sex is just one thing we get to enjoy while we live. It is not the most profound pleasure in life, but it’s pretty good. If anything, the really profound pleasures — idleness, love — grow more mysterious while sex gets pretty easy. Profound things get deeper and richer. You start seeing miracles everywhere. Sex becomes just a good way to spend a Saturday night.

You’re judging yourself based on outdated beliefs that “gay” is repulsive and having adventurous sex is wrong. I promise that someday your feelings and turn-ons will make more sense — after you’ve lived with them for a bit and gotten some experience. Having sex with real people (not watching porn) requires you to actually communicate with others. Watching porn is a solo thing, something done with yourself. Equating porn to real sex is like watching videos of people skydiving and thinking you know what it’s like to jump out of a plane.

Many people like the porn you like (that’s why it exists — you are not the only one watching it). None of the things you like are shocking to me. I have watched all that plus much, much more. But I have a lot more experience than you in the realm of actual sex, and through that experience, I learned that sex — wild, adventurous, hardcore sex — is beautiful, healthy, and quite normal. I still love getting my butthole wrecked, but I have progressed to the stage where sometimes I just want to dance with someone. I have gone almost as far as one can go with my kinks, and living on this side of them sometimes feels like I’m back at the beginning — back to the time when a little touch, a little heat, felt like Heaven. I now know how powerful it is to just sleep next to someone, and fisting and bondage have nothing on that. What a trip!

In time, you will probably find a word that describes your sexuality. You do not have to find that word right now. In the long run, such a word will help your sex and dating life happen more smoothly. That word may end up being “gay” or “queer” or something else. That word does not have to be permanent — you can choose a different label, a better one, later. Many people do.

Take a breath. Be nice to yourself. Speak kind words to the person who is always present, the person you have to live with: you.

Love, Beastly 

Thank you for sharing your life in your book! I am wondering why you refer to yourself as a fag, which is a hurtful word to many in our community. I know some of us use that term, maybe trying to claim power over it? I am wondering what goes through your mind when you use that word? Is it just sex talk or meaningless or is there another reason you use it?

Thank you for reading my book. I am glad you asked this.

There is some synchronicity between these questions — they seem to lead to each other. I assure you they were not chosen for this. I answer questions only in the order I get them.

Like the person above, I do not identify strongly with “gay”. I was never “repulsed” by it, but it never fully fit. I became more comfortable with “gay” after I saw it as a cultural description rather than a strict sexual orientation. I love gay culture — drag, harnesses, camp, and all the cartoon hunks with big cocks and bubble butts. But am I, strictly speaking, gay? No. As a sexual orientation, “gay” defines a man who is only attracted to men, and I fuck everyone. More accurate words are “pansexual” and “fluid”, but these do not ring in the heart like “faggot”.

This is semantics, but to me, “faggot” is, like “gay”, more of a cultural invention than a sexual orientation — a fusion between a hedonist, anarchist, slut, zealot, and heretic. A faggot is “gay” on steroids. A faggot celebrates his sex as a social and political act. He is anti-church, anti-hetero, and anti-establishment, and defines himself and his body as the very thing homophobes hate. He embraces the things they abhor. A faggot is a student of sex and knows the risks, is comfortable talking about poop, knows our history with AIDS, is kink-friendly, and embraces non-monogamy and all the nontraditional relationship structures that have long been standards of gay life. A faggot sees himself as part of a global fraternity that celebrates pleasure. A faggot loves being a faggot. His soul points a middle finger to Ronald Reagan and Jesus Christ forever and ever. For him, sex falls somewhere between a hobby and a faith.

Yes, I fuck with (get fucked by) all genders, but the side of me that loves and fucks men — my predominant sexual side — is “faggot”. And since I have yet to find a word that encompasses all of me, the only word I am certain of is the one that explains this primary facet of my sexual being, so that is the word I use and cherish.

There is, of course, a highly sexual element to the word “faggot”. I’ll be frank: “queer” is just not a sexy-sounding word. It never was. It’s toothless, synonymous with “odd” or “strange.” A queer is a curio, an oddity, whilst a faggot is an effete cornholer or dangerous miscreant. A straight man calls a gay man “queer” to mock him. A straight man calls a gay man “faggot” because he is terrified of him, and his fear translates to rage. That is power.

It’s hard to place one’s finger on why, exactly, “faggot” is sexy but most people can feel it — its oomph, its brutishness. Many power words in English start with an “f” sound and end with a percussive consonant (fuck, fight, freak, fate, fend, fist, fast) so it may be that the word simply sounds more aggressive than its softer alternatives, or else the word’s sexiness lies in the inherently combative nature of its usage. Words that shock will always be charged with sexual energy. Think of other slurs — for women, people of color, and so on — that get eroticized and have made their way into kink, role play, and rough sex. In kink, “faggot” is often used to describe a gay submissive into degradation, who gets used hard, fucked sloppy, and loves it. That’s me. So “faggot” connects to me on both a social and sexual level, and these connective points are not separate. “Faggot” will never be separated from sex. When gays say “faggotry” they are talking about buggery and assfucking. It’s remarkable how well “fucking faggot” and “cocksucking faggot” fit together, like puzzle pieces made for each other. 

This went down a semantic and theoretical hole, but it’s a great hole. Language is fun.

Love, Beastly