Don’t Let the Mainstreaming Of BDSM/Kink Fool You Into Thinking The World Is More Progressive.

Within the kink subculture, we live in a world that is much more open, structured and sexually liberal than general society. Yesterday, in conversing with a lovely educator from the other side of the world, she was discussing how casually she is able to approach things like hook-suspensions and low-gauge sharps, things that may otherwise be considered intense and high-risk, because of the sheer amount of experience she now has with them, and how sometimes, it is surprising when they are a big-deal to other people. I totally understand what she was saying. I feel it too. Within my cocoon of kinky debauchery, certain things are just normal, bread-and-butter, they range from intense forms of play to defining sex as a non-genital pleasure-based endeavour. I take for granted the idea that anyone I approach will understand the fundamentals of negotiating and risk-awareness. I am shocked when people attack me for nailing my tits to a board or stitching my mouth shut, I am shocked that they don’t see it as a chill Friday night. I am constantly shocked when I see things like foot-fetishes being discussed as groundbreaking concepts on the gen-pop socials.

However, the shock only lasts a few seconds.

I can explain why the shock and surprise even exist. First of all, if your sexuality or proclivities are of the type that you had to contend with them before you could even go out and explore them, you’ve likely spent a lot more time thinking about them than the average person. If they are the type that preclude you from being able to date within conventional set-ups, you’ve likely had to find a community or space for people like you which is often great but it also reinforces that there is a reason why you cannot love within general society and not in the same way as choosing to date within a community of sneakerheads or classical music lovers, the rarification by taste is not the same as the rarification by necessity of orientation. When you situate yourself within a community, you learn its norms, and the longer you stay, the more you internalise and operate within those norms. It is because of the kink subculture that certain norms are just drilled into my functional manuals: Anything is doable if you just break it down into a process and mitigate risk as you go, you don’t have to understand why something works for another person but you do have to accept and respect it, pain is a sexuality but it is also completely non-sexual to some people, love can come in the form of a hug or being buried alive for a few, the explicit statement of power-dynamics is crucial to the optimal functioning of relationships, sometimes you have to share the roots of your triggers for very personal traumas with relative strangers because you want them to whip you safely.

Those kinds of things are extremely normalised to me and a lot of other people who have or do operate within the subculture, which in turn leads to the normalisation of the acts enabled by it. It’s not really the hook-suspension that’s oh-so-casual, it’s the practises that support it that are so normalised that the hook-suspension just feel like any other form of engagement, especially when considering your person realm of possibilities, it’s like kissing or anal. I know to approach any engagement—sutures, flogging or plain ol’ PIV—with the same norms and practises that I have learnt as a result of dating, loving and fucking within the kink subculture. That is my normal. Of late, in the past few years, it also appears as if kink has been mainstreamed to a degree in general society. It’s been featured in films and shows have been made about it, Christian Amanpour even attended a rope jam to cover it, events like kink-conventions are getting more curious-attention than ever. Not to mention, every sex-toy and wellness brand is making 30-second content about foot-fetishes and spanking, and calling it education. In the past month, I’ve seen two different creators (a poly educator and a vibrator-maker) talk about how BDSM is mainstream sexuality now and it is being vanilla that is being shamed out of existence. It certainly makes it seem like kinky is the new normal (and just as a matter of personal opinion, I don’t actually believe in the distinction between kinky and vanilla, I think people and their desires are complex and difficult to classify, so I use these distinctions for the purpose of structured discussion, not assignment of identity), which is why, for a second, whenever I experience push-back or people who don’t understand the norms, I am shocked.

The shock abates quickly because I don’t just exist within the kink community or consume within the carefully curated algorithms to which I am subjected by my socials and as a result, I do also exist within general society and what I see there is very different from life in my cocoon, and whether I like it or not, I am subject to it as well.

First of all, there are systemic issues surrounding sexuality that are being taken up by the government and morality police at a rate that is shocking. Our own government suggested sexual education be replaced by yoga and moral education all over the country, and only marginally backed off when the supreme court stepped it to demand comprehensive sexual education. A while ago I interviewed a teenage girl who in talking about the sexual education she received told me they do have classes but the classes are mostly designed to teach them about rape and how to stay safe from it. I will never recover from the reality of a world where children have to be taught about rape before sex. The only sexual sensitivity education my stepson ever received from his school was to teach all the children that if they contact each other over socials, they’ll go to jail for sexual harassment. He was terrified and he wasn’t even on any socials, for weeks, he wouldn’t text his classmates because he didn’t know if it would lead him to jail or not. In four out of the five states in which I’ve lived in the past decade, I had to use a VPN to access porn-sites, Literotica and Fetlife. The government issued a list of websites to ban years ago, but past a point, as always happens when authoritarianism flourishes, service provides started to pre-emptively ban websites that weren’t even on the list just to keep themselves out of trouble. And ours is not the only country where this is happening. Book-bans, especially books that deal with the “sexual” (which includes gender and orientation) are happening. A crusade to ban pornography is ongoing and set to take office shortly. I know multiple young women from modern families who have been forced to give up their career-dreams and live at home with their parents (instead of moving for employment/education), because their families are terrified they will have sex if they live alone. That is also the real world and I can only be shocked by it for a second before it starts to feel innately familiar.

For a few reasons, this mainstreaming of kink and fetishism often feels like an eye-wash to me. I appreciate that in an environment where reliable education does not exist, there are gynaecologists and educators on social media who are trying their best to get some information out there but as far as kink educators go, that’s not what I see (outside of global or local communities focused on kink). In most of the coverage of fetishism, I see us being treated as curiosity, the kind that gets people to click on links, and I have yet to watch or read anything that allows fetishism to intersect with its most vital element, humanity. I don’t care if it is 50 Shades or De Sade, they both fail for me, because they pathologize and victimize more than humanise, to say nothing of the ethics of both entities. Today, with the informational overload, there is certainly more recognition but it often feels like the recognition seeks to normalise an image, not a practise. It makes the imagery of kink more accessible, but it buries the heart. I repeatedly hear people parrot the same basic inanities that apply to nothing in practise but they’re supplemented by quirk and the quickly-fading shock value of being latex-clad and wielding a whip, so they’re fun and more accessible by the minute. Everyone gets kink now, it’s practically cool.

It's funny because it is in the “everyone gets kink now” era that I started to experience more back-lash for what I do than ever before. It’s worse now than when 20-years ago a psychiatrist told me I was sick for wanting to be whipped a little, because now, everyone feels like they can say it. The image of kink is mainstream (in a certain, limited and specific social demographic), but the reality of it is more jarring than ever. I’ve written about fetishism (under my real name) for a decade, but I didn’t receive hate that was motivated enough to find my address to threaten me until recently. If I post pictures of myself kneeling or posing in front of a whip (on mainstream social media), the platform doesn’t love it but the people eat it up, they’re so progressive, they love kink, but if I post a picture of bruises or needles in me, you better believe I get told I should seek mental health help or god, immediately. I get told that what I do is not kink, it’s abuse or illness. You know what drives me most insane about it? When you see me pose before a whip, it’s kink, but when you see what a whip does to a body, it’s abuse/illness? Could there more literal proof that we have normalised the imagery and not the reality or the practise? It’s kink to dress-up in pain, it’s mental illness to experience it.

It's not just mainstream social-media, either. There were always people within or visiting the kink subculture who wanted, more than anything, to tell you what you do is wrong (and/or they do it right and/or will save you). I’ve had plenty of accusations of abuse/illness here, pre-mainstreaming, as I am sure others have, the accusations have increased but that’s not the most telling aspect for me. The most telling aspect is how the nature of activities that garner those responses have changed. Ten years ago, a detailed piece about a (planned and negotiated) abduction that involved a placebo of drugs-use would cause those reactions, now it’s anybody’s guess, sometimes harsh-anal does it and sometimes long-term orgasm control. To me that seems like more intolerance, not less, and that’s bound to happen, with more visibility, you don’t just gather support or become accessible to the people who needed you (which are great things), you also learn exactly how many people are invested in being opposed to what you do and represent as part of their identity. If you’ve ever openly stood-up for your identity or belief, you may know this, the unspoken is easier to accept than the declared. There are plenty of people in my life who are so chill with kink until they find out it is what I do, and then they’re not so chill with me. They still love the colourful foot-fetish posts online, but they treat me like I am ill.

All of this to say, sometimes normalisation of a lifestyle/culture or the mainstreaming of it makes it seem like more people than ever before, understand it and you, but that’s not always true. It has benefits, I think any community benefits from influx because it gives you the opportunity to confront your systems and beliefs, to evolve and to learn from other people, but I’m not sure a spotlight necessarily means you’re making progress. Of course, it matters what you do under that spotlight but it matters more than we retain perspective on the environment in which we exist, alongside our personalised cocoons because all is not well. All is not chill because they ran a story about that so-cool kink event, that didn’t make kink okay to everyone, sometimes it led people to spaces for which they were looking, and sometimes it led governments to feel the need to ban those spaces. It’s a fine balance and it’s hard to tell, sometimes, how one should act within this conundrum. For me, I always want to focus my voice inward, towards the community that exists, not outward, as advertising for it. I am invested in kink-awareness in general, but the kink-education I wish to impart would have no space in the mainstreamed part of the culture and I think that’s okay for me. I think everyone plays a different role and this is mine, because eventually, I would like to contribute to creating a world where sexuality and all it contains is not so fraught and necessarily politicised, but I know four films and twenty thousand tik-toks don’t achieve that overnight. They have their role but systemic change means toiling for generations to make incremental progress and I make sure to retain sight of that, because I don’t want to live in a world where I am cool but ill, I want to live in a world where I am accepted and understood.