Prelims

Emerald Interdisciplinary Connexions

Dynamics of Kink and Everyday Life

As the various conference presentations revealed, the term “kink” connotes different things to different people. For some, hearing this word calls to mind images of deviancy and depravity. For others, it generates excitement for sexual activities and ways of being that are regarded by many as nonnormative, yet are enjoyable and often empowering for those who choose to engage in them. The term was derived from notions of a “bend” in an individual's sexual practices or desires, which leads one away from conventional (or so-called “vanilla”) forms of sexual expression in favor of engaging regularly in more unconventional ones, including BDSM (a classification category encompassing bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism) and fetish activities. “According to a large-scale survey a decade ago by Susan Wright,” notes Savin-Williams (2019), “the most frequent kink behaviors engaged in by 75% to 90% of practitioners were bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, spanking, leather, role-playing, exhibitionism, polyamory, clothing fetish, and voyeurism” (para. 2).

Kink has evoked an array of cultural responses over time, ranging from curiosity to disgust, arousal to fear. Nevertheless, it has simultaneously experienced an intriguing expansion in popularity and increasingly surrounds us in our everyday lives, even among individuals who opt not to participate in kinky activities as part of their own sex lives. Most people encounter kink regularly nowadays – whether in films, television series, works of literature, preferred sex establishments, or their own bedrooms – and the range of its potential activities and their variations is quite broad. Consider, for example, entries from the scrolling list of kinky practices and potential choices of relevance to them that appears on-screen during the opening moments of director Rupert Everett's 1996 film, Skin & Bone, about the daily lives of three male sex workers in Los Angeles. Options pertaining to bondage include “precede by humiliation,” “verbal count of blows,” “gleeful, amused sadist,” and “turned on, aggressive sadist.” Options pertaining to spanking and flogging include “blacksnake,” “bullwhip,” “cat o’ nine tails,” and “schoolboy cane.” Options pertaining to tolerance include “no marks,” “welts,” “long-term bruises,” and “painful, month-long bruises.” Options pertaining to flesh mementos include “no blood or scars,” “scars OK,” “scars desired,” and “lots of blood.”

In addition to BDSM, kink in our everyday lives can take the forms of experimentation, fetishism, gender bending, group sex, performativity, public sex, and sexual role-playing, among many others. It is quite impressive, therefore, that director Gregg Araki, in the combined offerings of his teen-apocalypse trilogy during the decade of the 1990s (i.e., 1993's Totally F***ed Up, 1995's The Doom Generation, and 1997's Nowhere), explicitly included references to and representations of all of the following kinky phenomena: ass play, body shaving, bondage, diaper play, discipline, dominance, enema play, erotic humiliation, face-sitting, fetishism, fisting, fun with sex toys, golden showers, group sex, paraphilic infantilism, public sex, rimming, sadomasochism, sexual fluidity, spanking, submission, voyeurism, and even the occasional turkey-baster insemination party. In this regard, it is important to note that Araki intentionally incorporated such phenomena in his creative output at a time when they were only quite rarely encountered in U.S. cinematic offerings. In doing so, he endeavored intentionally to acknowledge the existence of, and destigmatize, such kinky activities, helping to pave the way for the growing number and range of kinky representations on film that have begun to appear more frequently since then. It is further impressive that, while doing so, Araki refrained from imposing any sort of moral judgment on these various on-screen activities as they unfolded, providing no guidance whatsoever as to how individual viewers should regard or respond to them (Hart, 2013).

At its core, kink requires “negotiating with a prospective partner before anything happens. If that negotiation is done right, it's more like a collaboration toward a common goal: each party's pleasure” (Yu, 2019, para. 9). This negotiation process simultaneously enables participants to overcome the socialization message that it is shameful to ask for what one desires sexually and helps to ensure, in most instances, that they do not experience any unwelcome violations of consent (Yu, 2019). Aftercare – the physical and emotional caretaking that enables participants to reset their equilibrium and readopt their everyday roles in relation to one another – is also an essential component of any kinky sexual encounter (Jones, 2020, para. 5).

Researchers have found that kink can provide safe spaces for individuals of all kinds to establish and experience inclusive environments; it can also enable members of marginalized communities (such as trans people) to become more comfortable in their relationships with their own bodies and with others (Desai, 2019). In addition, research has shown that many individuals who embrace and indulge in kink tend to be less neurotic, more extroverted, less rejection-sensitive, and more open to experiencing new things than those who do not (Aswell, 2019; Hers, 2020). It is important to note, however, that kink is experienced quite differently by different people – what is regarded as kinky by some may be considered ordinary or “vanilla” by others. Along these lines, the editorial team of “A Beginner's Guide to Kink” point out:

Kink is usually looked at through the lens of what a given culture or society deems normal, but it's also relative to each couple and individual. If the missionary position seems foreign to you, but you don't think twice about using blindfolds, missionary could be defined as one of your kinks.

(Hers, 2020, para. 2)

This means the many manifestations of kink are regarded and experienced differentially by a wide range of participants, at least in part because significant differences exist within and among societies and cultures when it comes to conceptions of human sexuality (Patton, 1991). Despite those important realities, a recent survey nevertheless found that nearly half of its respondents were interested in kink, even if they have not yet explored it themselves (Aswell, 2019).

Analyzing Kink in Everyday Life

This book explores kinky sexual phenomena (past and present) as experienced in bathhouses, circuit clubs, dark rooms, fetish clubs, hookup culture, pornography, sex shops, and other domains and as represented in literature, film, and television. Acknowledging that individuals outside the kink scene continually make assumptions about its practices and participants that are based heavily on fictional discourses rather than factual realities, it is intended, at least in part, to challenge such uninformed, inaccurate, and frequently deleterious notions. In doing so, it serves also to demonstrate how nonnormative sexual activities and ways of being constitute healthy expressions of human sexuality for an increasingly wide range of individuals and contribute to ever-evolving notions of inclusivity and acceptance. For as Savin-Williams (2019) emphasizes:

In the public mind, kink is often equated with “weird sex,” which they don't understand and usually don't approve of. However, it is critical from a kink perspective that what kinksters do is not just about sex but, more importantly, about enhancing intimacy between partners. Thus, kink is usually a partnered rather than a solo activity.

(para. 4)

The first four chapters in this collection, grouped under the heading “Reflections on Practice: From Suspension Hooks to College Hookups,” explore everyday experiences and manifestations of kink that result in exciting, safe, and healthy expressions of human sexuality. Their topics span the center and the fringes of the kink community, offering insights into a world in which kink is no longer regarded as being dangerous, deviant, or perverse.

The first chapter in this section, “Kink-Space and the Body: Transforming the Liminal” by Teresa Cutler-Broyles, analyzes a 2019 BDSM performance, by Maegan Machine, as a performative event that occurs within a particular “kink-space.” It demonstrates how instances of such ritualistic performance frequently render established understandings of kink power dynamics obsolete and, in this specific case, can serve as a powerful expression of women's oppression in a patriarchal society.

Next, in his chapter “Creating Spaces, Maintaining Places for Male-on-Male Kink,” Nick J. Mulé articulates the significance and importance of establishing and maintaining places where male-on-male sexual activity on the premises can regularly occur. In doing so, he focuses on the role that backspaces play in enabling individuals to present different sides of themselves in different contexts (including, in relation to his argument, bathhouses, circuit clubs, dark rooms, and porn theaters) and the centrality of male-on-male subaltern spaces and places in serving as fantasy-based alternatives to the monotony of everyday life.

From there, Lucie Drdová and Adéla Mölzer Hrabáková, in their chapter “United Collars of BDSM: Critical Exploration of Changes in the New BDSM Scene in a Postcommunist Environment,” endeavor to address the dearth of kink research devoted to postcommunist countries and contexts by focusing on the establishment and ongoing evolution of a BDSM subculture in the postcommunist Czech Republic. They reveal how the contemporary BDSM subculture in that country is far more diverse today than in past decades and substantially reflects the current generation's mindset.

Rounding out the contents of this first group of chapters is “There Has to Be a Better Way: Kink-ifying Campus Culture to Overcome Communication Challenges” by Noelle Summers. In it, she argues that use of an intervention called the Hookup Card can enable college students to experience more positive outcomes of their casual sexual encounters, whether kinky or otherwise.

The additional four chapters in this collection, presented under the heading “Reflections on Portrayal: From Victorian Porn to Contemporary Media,” identify ways that kink culture generally, as well as various of its subcultures, have been represented in a range of media offerings over time. They demonstrate how conceptions of kink continue to evolve and how media portrayals of kink can potentially – and actually – impact audience members in different historical eras and stages of life.

In “Kink in the Time of Sexology: An Interdisciplinary Approach to ‘Abnormal Sexuality’ in Victorian Culture,” Lorraine Rumson explores how contemporary reactions to kinky sexual activities are rooted in categories that emerged in the legal and medical discourses of the Victorian era. In addition, she examines representations of nonnormative sexual practices in noteworthy literary offerings of Victorian pornography.

In “Ooh, Shiny! From Catwoman and Mrs. Peel to the Latex Submissive,” Jeremy Vaughan applies concepts of objectification, fetishism, and the aura to the pervasive phenomenon of shiny bodies in the kink aesthetic. He utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to reflective practice, involving personal reflections from different stages of his life combined with noteworthy viewing experiences of different media offerings over time, to cultivate a clearer understanding of the appeals of shiny objects and bodies to audience members of all ages.

In my own chapter, “Kinky Sex Lives and Groundbreaking (Exploitation) Cinema,” I analyze the contents of two groundbreaking cinematic offerings – Cruising (1980, directed by William Friedkin) and Feed (2005, directed Brett Leonard) – that depict kinky sexual activities and ways of being, and were targeted primarily to mainstream audience members, at historical moments when doing so was highly atypical. In the process, I demonstrate how both of these films, as a result of their exploitative approaches to representing their chosen subject matter during their respective historical moments, likely ended up doing far more representational harm than good when all was said and done.

Finally, in “Healing the Image: A Conceptual Investigation of the Healing Narrative in Cultural Representations of BDSM,” M. Susanne Schotanus problematizes the concept of the “healing narrative” when it is applied to both BDSM practices and media offerings that represent them. More specifically, she explores the concept of “healing” in relation to relevant representations contained in the feature-length film Secretary (2002, directed by Steven Shainberg) and the Showtime cable television series Billions (2016–present).

As sexual-health consultant Francisco Ramirez explains:

Kink is anything that falls outside the bounds of culturally defined expectations, which, because of often wildly puritanical societies, could basically be anything that's not penile–vaginal intercourse. […] Whether you have kinks or fetishes or both or none, remember that all options can be perfectly healthy so long as sexual events are consensual and enjoyable for all parties involved.

(Mandriota, 2019, para. 5, 10)

Accordingly, when considered both individually and collectively, the chapters in this collection demonstrate how kinky activities and ways of being are not only “normal” but also becoming the norm for the many individuals who regard them as empowering, exciting, healthy, liberating, safe, and stimulating expressions of their sexuality. It is hoped they will provide practitioners, scholars, and others with an understanding of past and present approaches to thinking about and analyzing kink and inspire new avenues of exploration in this intriguing area of interpersonal, sexual, and research activity.