Something that is true about people in kink[1] is that, almost universally, we are afraid. We are socially afraid of what will happen if our friends or family members figure out what it is that we do for fun. We are financially afraid of losing our jobs if our predilections come to light. Some of us are afraid for legal reasons. We may lose our children, our homes, or our court cases. And so we are afraid.
We wish that what we did were normal. We wish that what we did were legal. We wish that we could link our moms to our Tumblrs or tell them where we met our partner (ahem). We wish we didn’t have to be afraid.
Every so often, someone from the outside shines a light on us. This happened most recently and brightly with bestseller 50 Shades of Grey. It happens all of the time, though. It’s Willow enjoying torture and riding people around in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and most vampire sex in the show). It’s every time the victim “liked it rough” in Law and Order: SVU. It’s folks buying their first kink toy, a head-to-toe, wallet-busting rubber suit in American Horror Story. It’s 8MM and Secretary and the video for Rihanna’s S&M.
We hate this. We hate it so much.
We hate this, but we hate it for different, conflicting reasons. One the one hand, we hate these depictions of us because we’re treated as objects of curiosity, fear, and derision. We are the other. Worst case scenario, we’re serial killers. Best case scenario, when Christina Aguilera isn’t herself tonight, it’s us that she becomes. We’re a sexual curiosity, a sideshow.
On the other hand, we cringe away from the light of the mainstream because if, somehow, we were to become that mainstream, our little world would stop being separate from everything else. It’d be gone forever and all of these people, all of these unenlightened people would come streaming in and would ruin everything. If our weird sex were to become normal, safe, accepted, then what about us would be special? Or, a more sophisticated argument with tones of William Gibson: we are the backwater. There is something good about the backwater and about being it, and it would be tragically lost if the harsh light of the mainstream caused us to evaporate.
This hatred can be seen in our fear of spectators. Many BDSM events and venues have dresscodes and this is specifically to keep gawkers—people who don’t belong—out. We argue about who is “truly” a dominant, or a submissive because we fear that people who just wanna spice up their sex lives will show up and somehow contaminate us.
This is, at least in part, unjust and unfair of us. The “tunnel and bridges” kink crowd, the “french vanillas”[2] who like some handcuffs and some spanking, only like it in the bedroom, don’t want to go any further, and don’t want a community centered around unusual sex are not necessarily bad or not to be trusted. They may not be who we’re looking for in partners, but they shouldn’t be unwelcome or treated poorly.
What is more justified is our mistrust of that light of the mainstream this post keeps talking about—kink’s portrayal in (more) mainstream media. It’s justified because these views of us almost always portray us badly, as was mentioned earlier. But, more than just bad portrayal, they actually get us wrong. They’re made by outsiders looking in and we can tell.
Some examples:
- Even people into full-on rubber and latex with hoods and zippers don’t tend to use the word “gimp” that we’ve heard.
- Women who are dominant for pay don’t, that we’ve heard, call themselves “dominatrices.” They call themselves “pro-dommes.”
- Neither Rust nor Rake has ever seen anyone, in real life, wear a ballgag. And we do go to the right parties.
- Portrayals in media almost never include the usual safety measures that real-life folks use. Safewords, negotiations, safe-calls and references never appear.
- We are and have a community. We have community events where we do stuff other than fuck and hit each other, including the classes and conferences mentioned earlier. We have our own Facebook for heaven’s sake.
There are these ways in which, barring those people who want us to avoid the mainstream and remain a subculture, we want or need to be understood by outsiders because we want to stop being afraid all of the time, but we cannot trust outsiders with those depictions. We need to be understood, but it must be on our own terms. Every time we see the pictures that outsiders draw of us, they get our anatomy so wrong that we wish they’d never heard of us at all and we want to hide.
So for those of us who wish that we, our culture, and our sexuality were more acceptable to those outside our bubble it seems that our course of action, as kinky people is clear and is twofold:
1) We need to be as out as possible. If we have nothing or little to lose, we shouldn’t hide what and who we are. We need to come out of our closets and show our friends and acquaintances that we, “normal,” pleasant, nice, happy, stable, and interesting people are into BDSM.
2) If we are kinky and we are artists, we need to include BDSM in our art. We need to draw our own pictures of ourselves, but those pictures can’t just be about us and for us. We need to write kinky characters into our books and screen plays and these characters need to defy mainstream stereotypes as we, kinky people, tend to defy those stereotypes. We need to make sculptures, drawings, and paintings with BDSM themes and for a mainstream audience.
We need to be the change we want to see in the world, if we want it. No one else is going to. Just ask Christian Grey.
[1] We’re going to use “kink” and BDSM—Bondage and Discipline; Domination and Submission; Sadism and Masochism—interchangeably, as is common parlance in BDSM communities. We understand that these terms are not actually interchangeable necessarily, but that’s what we’re gonna do until we have a good reason not to.
[2] “Vanilla” is usually used as a catchall term meaning “non-kinky.” We’ll almost certainly have a post about it and its usage later, but we’ll go with it for now.
BDSM—Bondage and Discipline; Domination and Submission I love it