Other People's Kinks

There is a very good essay over at Kristina Lloyd's blog on The Pleasure of Degradation. It got me thinking about other people's kinks - you know, the ones you don't have. It's funny how viscerally we react to a sexual kink that isn't our own.

It's not like food: "Oh, you like mashed potatoes? Hmm... Not me." Or taste in movies: "I love films where things blow up." "Eh, not so much."

Very often and, for a lot of people, their reaction to a kink that lies outside their own sexual portfolio is: "Fuck, that's disgusting, wrong, perverse." And it doesn't just stop there. We start making judgments on the whole of someone's character based on what they like to do in bed. Of course this isn't new. It wasn't long ago that a great proportion of the population was convinced that every gay man was a dangerous pedophile, a coward in battle, and generally unreliable.

I'm going to own that I am, in my less lucid moments, gripped by the same capacity to make these really stupid judgments. I tend, after my initial jolt of non-understanding, to force myself to think neutrally, and eventually I do work my way into an interest, intellectually at least, of what the allures of said alien kink might be. But it certainly isn't instantaneous, and for that I am ashamed.

What I love about erotic fiction is that it gives you time to grapple with the heat of that initial repulsion. If it's well-written, the writer will offer you some insight into what makes the kink erotic. I find a lot of fetish writing I come across very annoying. It reads like masturbation, not an invitation to the dance, because the writer assumes you have the same proclivity as they have. And this completely locks out anyone without that fetish, and pretty much ensures you aren't likely to develop a taste for it. Bad fetish writing doesn't tell you the story behind the fetish. Good kink and fetish writing, however, can draw you right in. I posted a story the other week about watersports that I felt was a perfect example of this. It is still very unlikely that you are going to rush out and find someone to try it with, but in the play-space of the mind, it does give you a larger pallet for your fantasies.

The other thing Ms. Lloyd writes about is her feeling that a rejection of the kink she's writing about is a rejection of her own kinks. I have read Ms. Lloyd's "Asking for Trouble." It's a very well-written exploration of a need for sexual humiliation and degradation. This wasn't a kink I came to the book with, and I haven't left with it either. Nonetheless, the attraction of it, the mechanism of the sense of freedom it triggers, the thrill of the transgressive are all very, very well painted. I 'get' the eroticism of it even if it doesn't quite hit and sit at cunt level.

Meanwhile, I have my own set of kinks with their attendant set of social judgements. I'm an addicted voyeur, have a huge taste for non-con and a bit of an ageplay fetish. The last two have brought some rather strident criticism down on my head. There's a certain breed of feminists who seem to think that my non-con kink somehow validates the actions of rapists and violent men. The age-play kink got me on Australia's banned internet sites list and some extremely nasty emails accusing me of promoting pedophilia. Funnily enough, the voyeurism doesn't seem to bother anyone. I gather that's because I'm female; if I were male and admitted to it, I'm sure I'd be in for a barrage of shit.

I guess I wanted to make two points with this post. First, a book about a certain kink is not an instruction manual; it's a piece of fiction. You can like it or not, keep reading or close the book / screen/whatever. But the responsibility for the consumption or non-consumption of the text lies with the reader. Readers need to understand that they are responsible for what they consume.

The second point is that making assumptions about the the character of the writer based on the kinks they are writing about is just plain unfair. The vast majority of us are law-abiding, socially conscious and responsible individuals who have lives that are larger and much more complex than might be reflected in our fiction, and it's a big mistake for a reader to assume they are looking at the entirety of a persona in by opening the covers of a book.