This is Why Kinksters Keep Secrets

This week someone from the vanilla world called BDSM, and my relationship to it, cultish, ugly, and disturbing. He said the mere existence of the kink community was divisive. We’re all just people, after all, so why paste a label on our foreheads as though we’re different from the rest of the world?

The answer to his question is hidden right there in those judgements: we’re “disturbing.” We’re “other”. We’re “sick.”

This community exists because we*are* different, which is often used as a synonym for inferior or scary. When we open up about our sexuality in vanilla settings, we’re dragged through barbed wire by our feet. There are reasons we’re terrified of being doxed: we lose our jobs. We lose custody of our children. We’re ignored by the police when we’re assaulted simply because of our sexual preferences.  BDSM should be an acceptable part of vanilla society, but that doesn’t make it so, so we’ve cleared a place for ourselves in which we’re accepted.

Studies show that we don’t suffer from more pathologies than vanilla people. In fact, in some ways, our mental health is better. Pamela Connolly created a small survey that compared our mental health issues with those of normative samples. She found lower rates of paranoia, depression and other mood disorders. Other research has found that we cheat on our partners less often and feel more bonded. Our consent practices are even being widely studied for their effectiveness, and that makes my heart go pitter-pat.

The DSM-V (psychiatry’s diagnostic manual) has also pronounced us healthy. A few years ago, any and all fetishes were diagnosed as paraphilias, but these days, kink is only sick if it causes non-consensual harm and has negative impacts on our lives. Science—even if it’s the soft science of psychiatry—says our sexuality isn’t toxic, only unusual.

Society is in no hurry to catch up, though. The law can and will make judgements on the basis of what we do in the bedroom. In social circles, we’re called crazy, sick, and abused.

My sister reminded me yesterday that we use this “divisive” community because when we’re socialising with kinksters, we don’t have to hide or pretend. We don’t use the scene to separate ourselves from others, but because others treat us divisively when we’re open about our (perfectly healthy) proclivities.

We all deserve a place in the world where we don’t keep secrets and can be entirely ourselves without editing. Until society becomes less bigoted about our lives, that place cannot be cleared out of vanilla circles.