Free Use (Fetish)

About

Free Use is a sexual fetish or kink in which someone consents to be sexually available for their partner at all times. While the typical dynamic in a free-use relationship is considered to be an initiating man and a willing woman, free-use relationships can be mutually applicable. Interest in free use as a pornography category has been steadily rising since the late 2010s, however, a series of women claiming to be "free use" to their partners on TikTok brought the kink into the wider limelight during the 2020s.

Origin

The NSFW subreddit /r/FreeUse was started on October 24th, 2014, and is primarily used to share pornographic clips that are considered to be representative of "free use" as a kink. The subreddit defines "access" as a unifying point of all free-use content in which having total access to a sexual partner irrespective of context is considered "free use." The subreddit has gathered over 1.4 million viewers in nearly nine years. The subreddit's sidebar continues this definition as:

In a free use world, women are to some extent available for men to use sexually (or the other way around). Though the context can vary wildly from porn to porn, in free use smut any man can walk up to a woman and do whatever he likes to her. A common standard in this fantasy involves women ignoring how they're used and/or society as a whole treating it very casually, but this isn't always the case. If that gets you going, you're in the right place.

Spread

On June 18th, 2016, performance artist Milo Moiré posts a YouTube^[3] video about a performance art piece she conducted in response to the news that hundreds of women were reportedly groped on New Year's Eve in Cologne, Germany.^[4] Moiré's performance is described on her website as follows:

Performance artist Milo Moiré wears a trapezoidal skirt made up of mirrored surfaces; a rectangular opening at the front is closed off by a red curtain. With a megaphone, she invites passers-by to reach into the opening for 30 seconds, in order to touch her vagina. “I am standing here today for women’s rights and sexual self-determination. Women have a sexuality, just like men have one. However, women decide for themselves when and how they want to be touched and when they don’t”, declared the artist.

The YouTube video has gathered over 14 million views in seven years and has been described as a performance some may consider to be representative of "free use" as a concept.^[5]

On April 12th, 2017, Urban Dictionary^[2] user TheTedd posted a definition for the term "free use" as well, gathering over 200 likes in six years (seen below).

2023 Spread On TikTok

On August 15th, 2023, X^[6] user @notkasanna made a post that read, "I hate tiktok so much I did not need to know what 'free use' means we’re really mentally enslaved as a gender." They then quote tweeted the post to share some examples of TikTokers discussing their "free use" fetish (seen below), calling it the "yassification of rape" and asking women to consider why they would want this. The post gathered over 21,000 likes in two days.^[7]

Also on August 15th, X^[8] user @magdajtaylor quoted the aforementioned post with the caption, "what’s jarring about this is less the kink itself but the transformation of the kink into a digital identity. private transgressions (fun) have been sublimated into publicly consumable categories (not fun)."

what’s jarring about this is less the kink itself but the transformation of the kink into a digital identity. private transgressions (fun) have been sublimated into publicly consumable categories (not fun) https://t.co/Or9sozXKNa

— Magdalene J. Taylor (@magdajtaylor) August 16, 2023

That same day, X^[9] user @k1llacourt made a post that read, "I find it annoying that most of the ppl promoting this type of content are SWers who don’t post any sort of disclaimer."

Search Interest

External References