Before the Attention Economy, BDSM Used to Happen Without Professional Photographs

They say back in the Paleolithic era, kink was the sort of thing you did in your bedroom with a girlfriend. Sam spanked Jess with a hairbrush and never even considered what the world might think of that. Mark tied Jack to the chandelier for no reason other than that it seemed to be a good idea at the time. The Leather Community thought they’d defined BDSM in those days, but Jack bought chaps for Susan and Susan alone. People used to play with toys they bought at the hardware store.

Today, BDSM is a curated experience glossy enough to put on the cover of Vogue. Every woman owns shares in La Perla and a walk-in closet for knickers alone. Every top has a wall of floggers big enough to show up The Red Room of Pain. Yes, we kinky folks are all millionaires. We have whole BDSM wings in our houses served by slaves who look like Vogue models.

Jessica the Rope Bottom teaches her own Pilates class and can literally hang from a cloud. Jack the rope top spins his own bespoke rope from spiderwebs and fairy’s tears. Mark can fit a pen in his urethra and still tie it in a knot afterwards. These people don’t have jobs, so they have an orgy to upload to Only Fans every day. Did you know Judy and Jake know every poly prefix in the dictionary? That’s because you’re only kinky if you’re up on all the lingo.

Forget about Michael and his shelf of hitty kitchen implements. You’re only kinky if you have all the right gear and have thrown your TV off the balcony. You’re only kinky if your slave is under-employed enough to wear her buttplug 24/7 and crawl everywhere she goes, even the supermarket. If the world doesn’t think you’re freaky, are you even kinky at all?

No. Not if Jessica and Mark have something to say about it, but before there was such a thing as an attention economy, folks used to kink without (trigger warning) taking professional photographs for Instagram. They would even (trigger warning) use toys they found in the garage. They looked like regular people. They took their own pictures, so the horizon was always 25 degrees off-centre. They had jobs and only played once a week. They didn’t know what a polycule was, but they were sure it had something to do with margarine. In those days, sex shops were skanky places that smelled like strawberries and bleach.

I love the exquisite photographs we see on K&P every day. I’m obsessed with the creativity of our best rope tops, but they don’t represent the rest of us. They’re just one of the many personas that make up our community. Trust me—most of us don’t know what a polycule is either. Our toy shelves are uninspiring and we can rarely afford a new hitty thing. If we did take photographs, they’d never trend, and yet many of us are blissfully happy.

You don’t have to be Super Stacy the Cloud Hanger of Pilates Rock. You don’t have to be Mark the Kinbaku Pro who learned rope on the cliffs of Mount Fuji. You don’t have to be a size zero or own an eight pack. Nor does your kink need curation. It’s lack of curation doesn’t make you less. None of us are perfect. Some of us just look that way in a particular kind of light. People are still practicing BDSM with repurposed canes and wooden spoons. They just don’t talk about it much anymore.