Source: Briony Smith, Flare.com

The press and public went nuts gobbling up news about President-Elect Donald Trump’s alleged watersports encounter with several Russian sex workers. Here’s why the kink-shaming behind #GoldenShowerGate really pisses us off.

Another day, another Donald Trump scandal. As writer Louis Virtel tweeted so succinctly, “If you think this golden shower news is crazy, I recommend remembering that we CAUGHT HIM ON TAPE BRAGGING ABOUT SEXUAL ASSAULT.” Virtel sums up nicely how our current predilection for publicizing and consuming Trump’s more salacious antics propelled him to power, despite a track record filled with assault, among other odious behaviours and incidents.

The newest revelation: yesterday, Buzzfeed published a 35-page document that discusses Trump’s scary, decades-spanning dealings with Russia. At worst, it contains several items that could be construed as treason. At best, it contains several items that are completely inappropriate for the man about the assume the position of leader of the free world. The documents have been circulating among some journalists for several months; reporters have been unable to substantiate any of the content, although the source is allegedly a reputable intelligence agent. But what does everyone want to talk about? The small section of the document that details Trump watching several sex workers urinating on a bed in a hotel—one where President Obama and the First Lady once slept. It reads: “According to Source D, where s/he had been present, TRUMP’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) in front of him.”

Now, the report also speculates that this incident was a set-up by the Russians, preying on Trump’s apparent love of watersports (i.e. getting off on pissing on people or being pissed on) to produce incriminating footage of Trump for future blackmail.

This is all infuriating. For starters, there is no reference in that short paragraph that states that Trump was either being pissed on, or pissing on anyone, so, despite the ominous claims of Russian agents deliberately creating kompromat out of this encounter (if this even happened at all), it is far more likely, it seems, with Trump’s track record, that rather than a healthy expression of any kink, it was a move motivated by racist loathing to further degrade the Obamas (which even the leaked papers state that he “hated”). A heinous capper to years spent dogging Obama about his birth certificate and anything else he could think to lob at him.

That is all just speculation, however, on something that is potentially—and most likely—untrue. (There is a reason why the cadre of journalists that the document cycled through declined to publish it.) However, the one thing that many news outlets had no compunction whatsoever about was gleefully blaring the kinky sex mention to get more attention. Virtually every website on the Internet started writing alarmist headlines trumpeting the president-elect’s love of watersports and propagating hashtags like #GoldenShowerGate like mad with the same vigour for discovering, say, that he likes cooking and eating children, or suffers from some other character defect that deserves at least four to five hard years in a really bad prison. The tone of coverage was that of a chorus of tut-tutting grannies: “How heinous,” they screeched! “How disgusting! How awful!” The Daily Beast classily referred to it as “smut.”

Trump is awful, to be sure. And if the alleged sexual act is motivated by his deep, racist contempt for a man he was dead set on proving un-American (despite Obama’s election to the highest office in the land), that is truly abhorrent. But kink-shaming is kink-shaming and such judgmental coverage—even when it condemns a man most worth of condemnation—reflects poorly on the press for elevating unconventional sexual acts into heresy, and poorly on us for gobbling it up so quickly, so happily.

In theory, it would be classified a sex scandal even sans watersports, due to the involvement of sex workers. Add in the piss and it’s news gold (pun definitely intended). But why do we even have the term “sex scandal” anymore? It only serves to vilify any behaviour outside the sexual norm. This includes seeing sex workers, or kinks ranging from mild (sending out naked selfies to strangers on the Internet) to wilder (David Carradine’s unfortunate demise). But there is no sexual norm. Kinky sex is the sexual norm, whether you practice it or not. If the press continues to blare sex scandals—and kinky sex scandals—as the most horrendous thing that could happen to a public figure, the public will continue to conflate sexual preferences and peccadilloes with the strength of someone’s character and innate goodness, and more repression and shame will result, forcing people to hide their perfectly natural, harmless sexual proclivities and activities that don’t hurt anyone. A little consensually-applied urine is harmless; shame and repression are not. If you want to protest Trump’s sexual activity, protest his history of sexual assault, of racism—and, now, potentially, of high treason. And stop pissing all over people’s kinks.

Filed under: Russian sex workers, Trump, watersports