My nephew is skeeved out by my kinky life. How do I stay true to myself without ruining the relationship?

Setting boundaries without shame.

A wooden hand holding a corn.

We’ve got a quick & dirty Autistic Advice / Sex Liberation question in the ask box today, from an Autistic person whose journey of self-acceptance has meant getting a whole lot more openly interested in kink. Unfortunately, their newly sexually liberated lifestyle gives their younger (but still adult!) nephew the ick — and the shame and guilt that this is stirring up is threatening to send Anon back into masking who they are. Let’s take a look:

Hi Anon, thank you for writing in with this question!

I’m someone who lives their sexual deviance out in the open, so I’ve faced dilemmas somewhat like yours. Not long ago, a younger adult relative who looks up to me admitted that reading all of my essays about cruising and kink do make them feel a little bit…awkward. I know I’d feel the same way in their position. Thankfully, this relative is a canny student of human psychology and a highly analytical Autistic person (I guess it runs in the family or something), so they were able to separate their own reactions to the subject from their sense of what my responsibility should be in what I say or cover, so we were able to address the whole thing with humor.

I’ve been very brashly open about a lot of things over the years (from my family history, to my identity, to my ever-evolving radical politics), which has established to everyone in my family that if they don’t like something about how I live, they’re gonna have to just get over it, and do what they can to manage their own exposure to things that they don’t want to read.

That’s worked well for me. It’s also filtered out friends and professional contacts who wouldn’t accept how I genuinely live, and made me impossible to blackmail. There is a refuge to be found in audacity. But there is also a particular hell to having the most sensitive parts of you be scrutinized by a wide audience, and slowly coming to realize that how a loved one sees you has fundamentally shifted because of something they learned about you that they cannot understand.

Seeing that shift of incomprehension and discomfort behind someone’s eyes hurts. And it can be really embarrassing to be seen as a sexually fixated, kinky person, especially when you’re still working to liberate your life from shame. You clearly want to do right by your nephew, whom it’s lovely you feel protective of — but you don’t want negotiating around his feelings and judgements to pull you back into closeting yourself.

So what do you do? I think the answer’s fairly simple, actually.

I think that you have the opportunity to have a really valuable conversation with your nephew about how a person should handle feelings of discomfort, and a chance to negotiate adult boundaries with him that will really enrich your relationship and help it to grow for the long haul.

First of all, thank your nephew for sharing with you how that he has been feeling this way. He's telling you that he is finding something challenging in your relationship, which gives you both the chance to do something about it, and that's wonderful. You’ve helped him grow into a young man who can acknowledge his feelings, and he trust you enough to share something that he must know could put you off. That is a testament to the health of your relationship.

Next, understand that what your nephew is sharing with you is DATA. It is not a moral declaration of your failure, and it is not shame. I understand that it might not be pleasant to hear that he’s grossed out, but he’s not actually telling you that what you are doing or interested in is gross. Just that he finds this particular topic really unsettling, at least when it’s attached to a relative.

It’s wonderful that your nephew is letting you know a little bit about his own feelings regarding sex and kink, and how difficult those topics are for him to navigate. He might not want to get into it in detail with you, which is his right, but by being so open about your own sexuality, you have opened the door for you both to have frank conversations about your sex lives and how much you acknowledge sex to one another. This is only going to help him develop better, stronger sexual boundaries for himself in the future. It’s actually because of your choice to be so open and casual about sex that he now is free enough to set his own limits surrounding it, so pat yourself on the back a bit for creating a chill, sex-neutral environment.

Let yourself process all the feelings of shame and mortification this has kicked up for you. It’s natural that you’d feel like you’ve overstepped some line, traumatized him, made a disgusting display of yourself, damaged one of his own familial relationships, or whatever other narrative your anxieties are telling you. It’s okay to feel ashamed sometimes. You’re not a failure at candor and sex positivity.

Keep in mind, your nephew is NOT telling you to stop having sex or being kinky, or to stop being open about those things. He's sharing that he is having a hard time, and wants your help, as someone who loves and looks up to you. Your role in that is to provide him with help navigating his discomfort, not to eradicate anything about yourself that he might not like or approve of.

Though it will probably freak you out to hear your nephew speaking negatively about your sex life, try to really listen at the emotional truth behind his words. You can ask him to share more about what has been bothering him, if he likes. He might be responding the way he is out of fear of sex, shame about his own desires, identity confusion, past experiences of being bullied for his own differences, prejudices he's internalized, a sexual abuse history of his own, or any other number of things. And you can respect where he is coming from, emotionally, without ever agreeing that what you are doing is wrong or needs to be hidden from plain sight.

Next, have a real conversation with your nephew about what he can control his exposure to. Keep this very practical, and focused on boundaries that you and he can set to prevent causing problems in the relationship. None of this is about changing your sexual habits or how central they are to your life. What can be changed, though, is how you two communicate about your lives, especially if he learned more about your kinky special interests through social media.

Are you social media mutuals? If it skeeves him out to see you posting sexy photos or posting about your fixations, he can just unfollow you. Or you can agree to create a separate account for SFW family updates. Being family does not mean being obligated to see everything that a person is up to in all facets of their life.

In the days before the corporate-owned social internet, most people had a number of different private selves that were only expressed in particular contexts: there was the worksona you put on around your colleagues, the buttoned-up family self who gave short answers to questions at weddings and funerals, the gamer self who showed up to pub trivia and got a little wild when he was drunk, the relaxed-at-home self whose balls hung out of his gym shorts, the unabashedly queer self who showed up to the parades and the bars, the kinky self that partners and close friends knew, and maybe the really controversially kink self who only ever expressed his most freak longings around the truly accepting handful who can handle things like age play, blood, feral, or CNC.

An awareness of social context used to be really important. It’s why coming out originally meant coming out into public queer life, not outing oneself to every hiring manager and neighbor. A few decades ago, people were actively discouraged from sharing their every interest, personal life detail, and identifying information on the internet. The internet was where we went to quietly express what we could not say anywhere else.

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But now the internet is a technofeudalist attention economy that profits from our data and our eyeballs, and so we are encouraged to broadcast every personal detail to everyone, and to spend all our time consuming all the posts of everyone we know. That has created a lot of conflict and uneasiness between relatives that simply never would have happened in the past. There’s the fighting with your racist grandpa that’s worth doing, and there’s the bad opinion your aunt has about The White Lotus that you’re better off ignoring. Between those two poles, there’s a whole spectrum of possibilities for human friction that you get to decide whether to engage with or not.

It seems like you and your nephew are clear on the fact you don’t want to fight about your wild sex life and his hang-ups. So that means you can both agree to limit your exposure to both those sides of one another. So if social media is a problem here, find other ways to stay in touch! Play games together, trade pet photos, meet up for coffee and block one another on TikTok. It’s totally fine.

Does your nephew hate hearing you talk about sex? If so, then you can decide to share fewer details about that aspect with him directly, AND he can learn to leave the room when it comes up in conversation and he doesn't want to hear it.

Does your nephew not like seeing kink books/gear/any suggestion of human sexuality around your house, or hearing sex talk around others? You can choose to keep the really overt stuff like floggers and sex furniture behind a locked bedroom door if you want to, but since unmasking is often about transforming our spaces and our personal presentations enough to allow us to be who we are, I’m not going to encourage to do any of that if you do not want to. Boundaries, after all, are about what we will do to look after our own well-being - and so your nephew will have to think about what sources of discomfort he can learn to live with, which ones he can limit his own exposure to, and when he needs to politely ask you for a conversation subject change.

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You can be honest with him about what concessions you are able to make, and how he ought to manage his responses himself. Some variables you might want to discuss:

• Partners: People you date/sex/kink with regularly are an important part of your life, and you should get to speak about these things with a beloved relative. You can agree to be vague to your nephew about what you do with your partners, but he will have to deal with the fact that there are people you have sex with (perhaps multiple people) and however that makes him feel.

• How you spend your time: If kink is a major part of your life, you probably attend events related to that special interest like munches, conferences, sex parties, and classes, and have regular kinky dates. You can allude to these things generically to your nephew — “What did I do this weekend? Oh, I went to a really interesting class [on fisting].” — and he can learn when not to ask too many questions.

• Gear/jewelry: Think about the role you want your kinky accoutrements to play in your life. Are you a sex-swing-in-the-living room type person in an infinity collar? Or do you wear a subtle day collar to work and keep most of your toys in a chest? Decide for yourself what level of overt kinkery in your home and personal style is best for you on your unmasking journey. You can always give your nephew a warning that walking into your home is going to expose him to visibly sexual stuff.

• Wounds/Marks/Visible Signs of Kink: Sometimes our kinky play affects our bodies visibly, or gives us psychological Dom- or sub- drop that people around us can pick up on. If you want to, you can be intentional about restricting marks to easy-to-cover places on the body, and only alluding to your nephew about having a tiring day. But if you feel like this will prevent you from leading your life out in the open, then you can tell your nephew this is something he can occasionally expect to happen to you, and tell him that he shouldn’t ask for details if he doesn’t want to hear the answer.

There are a few recurring themes here that you might have noticed, in terms of how your nephew can protect his own peace:

• Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to.

• Don’t go looking for information that’s going to make you upset.

• Find a way to distract yourself or calm yourself down if certain ideas make you uncomfortable.

• Ask to change the topic of conversation if you don’t want to participate in it.

• Walk away when you need space.

• Tailor your own digital experience using blocklists, notification controls, deleting apps, etc.

You both have a responsibility to one another here. You should do what you can to respect when your nephew doesn't want information and doesn't want to see anything, but he ALSO has the responsibility to notice how he is feeling and find ways to communicate that, and to learn how to regulate it.

Your nephew will absolutely make mistakes in this, and say things that hurt your feelings, because he is younger than you and presumably less experienced. I think that in general, you should be patient, and model for him that two people can have completely different feelings about a subject without either person folding and changing who they are. Try not to get too much in your own head, and remember that feeling bad or unsafe isn’t the same thing as being unsafe, and you haven’t caused him any harm.

But also, sometimes you might just have to tell him to suck it up and go complain about his gross sexually promiscuous aunt/uncle/nuncle/however you identity to his friends! That is acceptable. People have been feeling the ick about their relatives' sexual lives since the beginning of time, probably, and he might have felt this way anyway even if you weren’t kinky. You're showing him what it looks like when someone overcomes their repression and masking and chooses to live how they want to, and giving him some amazing training in self-advocacy and conflict negotiation that will last him his whole life long.

How wonderful that you have this close relationship with a young person who didn’t have any other family to step up for him. I don't think it's untoward for you still to think of him as a kid as you approach this stuff; you feel an obligation to do right by him, and you know that he's been looking up to you for cues. But your responsibility is to help him continue to develop into a capable person who has a healthy relationship with you, not to coddle him or prevent every negative emotion.

And all of this is a fabulous exercise in boundary-setting for you too. You can feel horrible when you haven’t done a single thing wrong, and then keep on doing the thing you want to do in spite of it. And you can love someone deeply and also tell them to mind their own business. Who we are in our caregiving and familial relationships does not have to be the person we are in the dungeon, and though digital communication technology has really blurred the lines between all these aspects of us and granted everyone in our lives equal access to all sides of who we are, you do get to draw firm lines and let a significant portion of your existence be not-safe-for-work and not-open-to-critique.

I wish you both tons of luck and learning.

You can submit questions or suggest future entries in the series via my Tumblr ask box, or you can email questions to askdevonprice at gmail.