The Uncomfortable Truth about Kink

I have to thank @quietriot_girl for prompting this post. We had a short exchange on twitter about it. She has some very insightful takes on things. Please visit her site.

Photo: miss_blackbutterfly

I once knew a man with a deeply rooted shoe fetish. He didn’t just like shoes, or think they were sexy on a woman’s leg. He had an instant sexual response to certain types of shoes, if he got close enough to smell the leather of them.

As someone wise once said, behind every fetish is a story. In this case, however, it’s not a very nice story. When the man in question was pre-pubescent, his nanny used to step on his crotch as a punishment. It was certainly child abuse. It’s not that he enjoyed being stepped on. It not only hurt, but was humiliating. However, this curious combination of abuse, context and age were such that throughout his early adult life, he found the smell of shoe leather so arousing he was terrified to walk through the footwear area of a department store. Once he realized what it was – what he was – and found a name for it and a mechanism by which he could take that paraphilia under his control and use it for his own pleasure, he became a much happier man. With, unsurprisingly, a very large collection of shoes.

The truth is, our sexual wiring begins to knit far earlier that we care to acknowledge. It is an inconvenient fact that many social commentators, especially those who expound publically on sex, conveniently ignore. It may not happen at the same age for everyone, and it may happen in stages, but some of the things that form the deepest incarnations of our sexual desires rear their heads at an age, which in our society currently, we find it hard to acknowledge any sexuality exists at all.

The other phenomenon is that of the apparent embracing, sexually at least, of what is historically reprehensible to us. Very few seriously submissive women I have met are actually women who espouse male superiority in society. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Most self-acknowledged women who get off on taking an extremely submissive and sometimes masochistic role in a sexual relationship are some of the most rabid feminists I’ve ever met: incredibly critical thinkers. Acutely aware of both the overt and subtle ways in which a male hegemony has marked our history as humans.

This is the paradox. Another one of those uncomfortable truths about kink – it is perversely political and apparently perversely politically incorrect.

The truth is… some of us get hard caning a woman’s ass. Some of us orgasm from having the breath choked out of us. Some of us crave humiliation. Some of us want to see blood. Some of us want to wear diapers. Some of us want to be used in ways that, as responsible members of society, we would fight tooth and nail to prohibit. To try and put some sort of positive or negative spin on this is ludicrous. It is what it is and we are what we are. To attempt to frame it in logic is equally futile. These seeds are sown far too deep in our psyches for sophistry.

What I do know is this: we are what our past experiences, personal, social and historical have made us. The marks those pasts have left on us cannot be soothed or reasoned or psychoanalyzed away. They cannot be wished away by militant feminists who think that, if I would only realize my full potential as a woman, I wouldn’t want to get tied up and fucked like meat. They can’t be soothed by well-meaning sex educators who insist that if I could only see sex as a healthy and positive thing, I wouldn’t get off on the idea of being dominated.

There are altogether too many people in the world who want to relieve me of my kinks, or explain them away, or obscure the marks they’ve left on me with the sticky ointment of patronizing concern. This obscene collection of tattoos I carry is the map of what the world has made me. And there is no blame here. That would be pointless; like blaming the rain and the wind for making the Grand Canyon.