Wading The Warm Waters Of Golden Showers, Trump & Kink-Shaming

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jan 11, 2017 8:16PM

Journalists and editors continue to argue over the ethics of BuzzFeed’s controversial publication of an appropriately yellow-lined dossier containing unverified reports that Donald Trump “employed a number of prostitutes”—supposedly arranged by the Russian spy agency—“to perform a golden showers (a.k.a. urination) show in front of him” and specifically “defile” the bed on which the Obamas had previously slept. But a second, shadow debate quickly, um, streamed forth, as well.

Did a collective snarky social-media reply constitute kink-shaming? Or were the requisite R Kelly jokes a well-earned bit of levity? Could we rightly label #GoldenShowersGate jokes—as long as they didn’t begin and end with “eww gross”—stigmatizing given this specific context, especially given what we know about Trump and his attitudes toward women? With so many questions, we reached out to a member of Chicago’s kink-positive sex-ed community and an educator who teaches courses dealing with sexuality and media ethics to help us swim through the hot piss takes.

Generally speaking, the bedfellows of politicians should be off limits, and simply being into urine play is not something that should be mocked, but there are some complicating factors in this instance, said Sunny Megatron, the Chicago-based star and executive producer of Showtime’s Sex with Sunny Megatron.

“In general, [when ]talking about any sex scandal, any politician, what we do in our bedrooms is our business, period,” Megatron told Chicagoist. “If we have something to criticize about their business, their politics, that's one thing, but saying that Donald Trump is into golden showers—big deal, that's not something we should shame him for.”

But the full scope of the situation, at least as reported, adds the key wrinkle.

“However, if Trump used this as a vehicle to defile, desecrate, make his own private commentary on what he thought about Obama, that's a completely different point of view. If he was into golden showers because that's what he liked to do… in privacy, no big deal. But that doesn't seem to be the context here.”

Neither the reported piss play nor the employment of sex workers is a rightful target for shame, Megatron stressed. ("Golden showers are the least of what we should be concerned about with Donald Trump.") So don't vilify those who consensually, responsibly partake; and mock DJT in this context only insofar as it represents vengeful megalomania rather than fetishism.

But overall the hullabaloo is most emblematic of the general public's greater concern with "moralistic issues rather than political issues," Chelsea Reynolds, an adjunct professor in DePaul University's College of Communication, who teaches classes on sexuality and digital media ethics, told Chicagoist.

When we over-focus on the "salacious," it overshadows important "policy issues, military issues and health-care funding issues," said Reynolds, who cited the initial Anthony Weiner scandal as a similar corollary.

"If we were focusing on the legality or autonomy of the sex workers in question, who may or may not have given golden showers, or sex workers' rights, or kink as everyday life, rather than, oh, Trump might have a golden shower fetish," she added.

So regardless of how one parses #WaterSportsGate, don't let your eyes off the bigger picture.