In conjunction with my project Portraits of Kink, I’ve been reading and listening a great deal to other people’s opinions of what kink is. I think we can pretty well all agree that kink is whatever is kink to you. However, of course, your kink is not always recognizable to another. And within some BDSM communities, I get a sense that there is often some competition to ‘prove’ just how kinky you are. It reminds me a little of a bunch of Englishmen at an Indian restaurant where they’re all jousting for spice-tolerance position. Ironically, one of the reasons I’ve never fit very well into that community is because I find traditional definitions of kink to be … well… kind of traditional. However, I consider the prospect of getting married, taking out a mortgage, having constant vanilla sex and pumping out 2.3 children to be …way too fucking kinky for me. That’s roleplay on a level that scares me to death.
“Kink” is a social construct. It is intimately connected to what is considered normative within a culture. So definitions of what is kinky is going to vary through time, and across cultures. There was a time, not so very long ago, when ‘disciplining your wife’ wasn’t in the least bit kinky. Now, of course, it is.
Some people say that kink always has a sexual aspect to it. Others say it’s not an integral part of what makes something kinky. Personally, I’d like to define it as a non-normative, transgressive behaviour that incites desire and pleasure. The outcome of it might not be sexual, but both pleasure and desire play their part.
As a writer of erotica, I’ve often tried to look at kink from obtuse angles. Perhaps because my personal kinks are so enormously obscure. So, I’ve tried to either approach familiar kinks from lateral perspectives or used storytelling to ask my readers to consider that there are kinky aspects to some of the most quotidian parts of life. Admittedly, I have always associated these kinks with sexual desire – but then I would, I’m an erotic fiction writer.
For me the kink of something lies not in the act, or the object, or the scenario, but in the way the characters orient the thing in their mind. A story that involves spanking can just be about the power dynamics of the people involved – and have little or nothing to do with the act. It can be about why one person lets another do what is, by most understandings, something that only a parent has done. It can be, quite simply, about what it precipitates. For me spanking is always about the sheer physical wallop. It forces tears. For years I just could not cry. It was the key to unlocking the sheer pleasure of bawling my eyes out. I’d save up my reasons to cry and let them all out at once, in that great explosion of air and skin and pain. It was catharsis. And although some people would point out that this isn’t sexual, I’d have to disagree. For me, that catharsis, that unburdening, became a sexual act.
Recently, I got a very nice tweet from someone who said they liked my work and mentioned “The Virtue of Patience” as one of their favourite stories. I immediately thought: oh, what an interesting man! Because I assumed he ‘got’ what I considered the essence of the story. However, after further conversation, I realized he liked it for completely different reasons – kinky in their own way – but not at all what I considered the ‘kink’ of the story. It served to remind me that, as one of my favourite erotica authors, Mike Kimera says: what I wrote is not what you read.
However, what it also prompted me to do was look back at some of my older stories and wonder how often readers see completely different and delightfully surprising things in my work. I thought I’d make a list of some of my kink stories: some that represent obvious kinks looked at from unusual angles, and some that represent more obscure kinks that have appealed particularly to me. I’d be very interested to know what you felt the ‘kink’ in the story was, or if there was one at all.
It’s probably to do with the complexities of the link between desire and drive. The desire attaches to the object which has in some mysterious way become attached to the basic drive to orgasm. I once came across a curiosity while checking out medical fetish sites online. One guy’s site consisted of nothing but pictures of examination couches – no people, no costumes, no equipment, no narrative – just the furniture. I can see that there’s an associative link, but it seemed odd to me that these couches were presented as erotic objects per se. The human imagination is the strangest playground of them all.
Oh, I think that’s a lovely quote, Jim. So true. And, on a very personal level, I so get the kink with the medical couches.
In response to “pattern passion” (had trouble with the comment page refusing to submit):
“Admiring from a distance your face on a sunlit train
made my hands itch for pencils and my mind for talent
to record forever the way that lucky sun kissed your lips
and turned your red hair to gleaming bright fire
to match the way my heart leaped to see you there
just dreaming on that morning train launching hidden worlds
where we walked and twined as lovers in tall towers
of morning light, steepled glass and rumpled waves of silk”
Thanks for more inspiration, RG 🙂 x
Thank you for engaging and sharing!