Suspicion and doubt in South Cambs

When it comes to privilege, I got dealt 4 aces: white, male, middle-class, straight (well, straight-ish, but as far as anyone else sees I'm straight). I don't think I can count "cis" (or as I prefer to call it, "stato", but anyway) because my gender identity thing is definitely off the beaten path of privilege, and has been from an early age. If I had that as well, I guess that would be the royal flush of privilege. Anyway, getting away from the poker references and back to the point of this post...

I've been dealt a pretty good hand when it comes to privilege, so that means that when I come up hard against prejudice, it really comes as a shock. Of course, it's nasty (and a lot worse in terms of nastiness) if you get it all the time, but the sheer surprise factor I imagine to be somewhat lessened by familiarity.

It gets to be even more of a shock when you get that prejudice coming at you from your own family member(s).

My parents know about my kink. I thought they were okay with it, at least enough to joke about it a bit with me, even if they're not comfortable with what it implies goes on in the bedroom (which, of course, I don't talk about with them, any more than anyone else would talk to their parents about how they fuck). So in my last stay, I was more than a little bit upset when I was met early on in the stay with a classic prejudiced attitude from my father.

It's one of the oldest prejudiced beliefs in the book, applied to anyone whose sexuality deviates from the norm, whether it's the (now) legal, such as homosexuals, or the absolutely illegal and immoral, as in paedophiles. Almost the first assumption people leap to is that, if you identify as sexually "different", then somehow you are uncontrolled in your sexual appetites. It's why people conflate homosexuals with paedophiles. It's why they have things like Megan's Law in the US, and why they want something similar in this country. And now, that same belief has been (it seems) turned on me, too.

In particular, my father has bought himself a new PC (he does this regularly), and my sister, her boyfriend and my brother all had their own accounts set up on it, so naturally I decided I would set myself up with my own account, too. As a courtesy, I let my father know what I was doing (once I was already there, but hey). To my surprise, he asked me to stop (oops!) He told me, "I know about your... predilections, and you can understand I'm very nervous about you using my computer because I really don't want anything dodgy turning up on it, what with my line of work." (He works in the education sector and specialises in Special Educational Needs, so his area of work is, in fact, one where he has a right to be a little paranoid about such things)

I wouldn't have minded, but we'd had this talk several times on previous visits. I know about his concerns, and I am very careful (it's why I wasn't able to check sex-positive bloggers that I usually do, like Renegade Evolution and Amber Rhea, while I was away). For him to want to banish me or apply special restrictions to my use of his PC that didn't seem to apply to anyone else, because of my sexuality and no other reason, was like a sharp slap in the face and a reminder that for all the liberal and accepting attitudes my parents show, ultimately they are still prejudiced about me and about who I am because I am kinky. It said to me, "I cannot trust you to show self-control, because you are different."

If my own parents, who as I say are pretty liberal and left-wing in most of their views, and who know me about as well as anyone, can still be prey to such prejudice, then what hope is there for the rest of society at large?

For what it's worth, that was the only sour note: the rest of my visit was very positive and we got on really well. And I never did anything that could have brought any harm to my father in terms of what wound up on his PC. But that one incident really got me thinking.