“I really wish people would be more open about their kinks,” he said. “I think kinks should be considered normal and not so taboo.”
Except, for me at least, that’s the whole point.
For one, my kinks involve lots of shame, so maybe I’m not the most impartial judge. Now I’m not about to advocate for society to go on a witch hunt after all would-be intrepid sexplorers as the fundamentalist fringes (and fringe-adjacent folks when they get wrapped up in their own insecurities and confusion) are so wont to do. I’m into play shame that cuts me in private emotional nooks and crannies, edgy self-humiliation. It’s sex junk food. Probably bad for me if I do too much, but in small quantities? Fucking heavenly. I like feeling a little naughty. That works for me.
I don’t mean “Ohhh Society, please give me permission to be naughty now, oh Mistress, I’m so baaaad!”
I like doing things that are RA-ONG, wrong. I want to fry my own circuits, cut my psychological scripts to ribbons and then rearrange them like ransom note letters.
Having CC as a subby boy last year was so instructive as a dramatic foil. I have so much positive regard for him, and he’s great, but CC? That fucking kid GREW UP on Savage Love, and he grew up without anywhere near as much shame as I had about it all. To him, fetishes seemed much more straightforward and normal and healthy… things you could order like fucking pizza, and while I was able to have fun with CC, in order to really enjoy MYSELF (because Domming him I wasn’t interested in being his pizza chef), I had to push him so far off-script and curb his habit of topping from the bottom that it was exhausting (in CC’s defense he also noted that previous “Dommes” he’d had were actually quite passive and he had to direct them so he’d picked up this nasty behavior – I ignored and abandoned him until he ceased it; as a pretty rigorous emotional masochist, withdrawing attention was about the only thing that *truly* hurt CC).
I felt this sense of frustration vividly, a year later, as a different person spoke of normalizing kink.
Because these acts, these deviances, these desires, these adventures – to treat them like bucket list surface things rather than authentic challenges and connections?
I’M DONE!
This reaction makes me feel like such a kink artiste – that purist stuck-up painter who is like “THESE KIDS ARE RUINING MY ART,” but goddamn it, the best part for me about kink IS feeling like I’m outside of normal healthy stuff. Kink in my relationships has a way of making me feel truly vulnerable and like it’s a unique thing you’re experiencing with someone else. It makes it so intense – otherwise, I might as well have bowling as my hobby.
After all, my personal model for intimacy is “being in cahoots” – and how can we be in cahoots without a crime?
Which is not to say that I want kink criminalized. I may be an emotional masochist, but that’s a bit far for me, even so. There’s a nice gray spot where it’s not like “This is wrong, I’m bad,” but it’s not like “This is perfectly healthy and right,” – where it’s like “This is all kind of fucked up, and doggone it, we’re gonna do it the fuck anyway”
You know what happens when you take something edgy and fun and thrillseeking and you edit out all the risk, all the transgression?
You end up with smooth jazz and Fifty Shades of Grey, that’s fucking what.