Or angry: “How dare she tell me this!” “That selfish jerk!”
Or puzzled: “I thought I knew her... now I feel as if I don’t know her at all.” “How could anybody enjoy stuff like that?!”
Others just feel sort of panicky, heads swimming with sensationalistic images from magazines or television. (Trying to imagine your middle-aged mother in leather and thigh-high boots, for example, is a surefire recipe for overload, as our children will happily assure you.)
These are all very difficult emotions; this book will help you understand and deal with them soon. But in the meantime, if you’re feeling one or more of them, we suggest you be very good to yourself. It is completely understandable that you’re feeling what you’re feeling.
Maybe you already know some good coping mechanisms for when you’re feeling tense or upset. If so, keep them in mind as you read on. If you find yourself feeling uncomfortably strong emotions, please feel free to set the book aside while you take care of yourself.
If you find that your usual coping mechanisms aren’t enough, let us suggest some techniques that work well for us. Take a minute to connect with yourself physically. Where are you feeling the tension? Is your forehead all knotted up? Does your throat hurt? Are your shoulders up around your ears? Is your stomach upset? Are you clenching your fists? Oh, yes... and when was the last time you breathed?
If the tension feels too uncomfortable, please stick a bookmark in this page and put the book down for a moment. Sit back in your chair and close your eyes. Breathe deeply. Try to breathe warm, relaxing breaths into the part of you that feels tense. Imagine breathing out stress and tension and any unwelcome thoughts. Think about something pleasant - perhaps the last time you had a really nice time with your friend or relative, how much you care about them, how good they’ve been to you. Or, if that seems too difficult right now, just think about an image that soothes you and relaxes you - flowers, rolling waves, your favorite leisure occupation.
When you feel your breathing become slower and easier, and the tension has at least started to ease up, it will be time to pick the book up again. Take your time.
Before you read any farther, we want to ask you to remember some other time in your life when you got a piece of news that seemed frightening or overwhelming or infuriating - but that later turned out to be not such a big deal, or maybe even turned out to be good news. Please keep that time in mind as you read on, because we suspect that what you’re learning about your friend or relative will not turn out to be a disaster, but rather a form of knowing each other better that will bring you closer and help you build a truer, more loving picture of the person you already love and care about.
3
About the Language in This Book
Kinky people, like any other small and insular community, tend to develop their own ways of speaking - not just terminology and jargon, but whole new ways of expressing themselves. While we’ve done our best to be comprehensible in this book, we do want to mention a couple of points that may come up for you as you read it, or as you talk to your kinky friend or relative. After all, we can’t talk to each other without a common language.
Gender. Gender tends to be a lot more flexible in the kink communities, and just because the person you’re talking to looks male to you doesn’t mean that s/he feels male or that s/he’ll look male tomorrow. Kinkyfolk are often more comfortable than others with breaching conventional gender boundaries - you may see a gay man partnered with a bisexual woman, or a heterosexual man enthusiastically spanking a man in drag, or a pair of lesbians looking and acting like gay men as they rev their big motorcycles.
Many kinkyfolk have a great interest in exploring the meaning of gender and discovering what lies beyond conventional feelings about gender - so much so that in some kink communities, notably on the Internet, the genderless pronouns “sie” (for “she or he”) and “hir” (for “his or her”) are in frequent use.
We’re not quite ready for those pronouns yet, and you’re probably not either. We’re also uncomfortable with the use of “they” as a synonym for “he or she.” Instead, what we’ve done throughout this book is to refer to your kinky person as “she” in one section and “he” in the next, in pursuit of inclusivity. Please feel free to translate to the gender of your choice.
How to talk about sex? Most of us were brought up in a world where the only “nice” words to use about sex were the ones in a biology or psychology textbook, or nursery euphemisms like “down there.”
Kinky people have found that this linguistic shyness can represent a major barrier to getting our needs met - how can we ask for what we want when we don’t have the words to describe it?
As a result, we have learned to use language that you may find overly blunt or perhaps even obscene. It isn’t that we’re trying to shock or upset you when we talk like this, it’s just that it’s the only kind of language that works for us among ourselves, and sometimes we forget to stop using it when we’re talking to you. (If you see words that you don’t understand, the Glossary in back might be able to help.)
On a related note, we also have developed language (as well as clothing and other symbols) that express our fantasies, the roles we enjoy playing together and the things we’d like to do. We sometimes forget how that language sounds to outsiders. Catherine recently told a reporter that she liked to be “mean and cruel,” then felt a little embarrassed when he called her back for clarification and she had to explain that what she liked was to pretend to be mean and cruel for her own and her partner’s mutual pleasure.
If you find yourself repeatedly having trouble with the language in this book, or with the language you encounter in conversation with your kinky friend or relative, here’s a good exercise. Sit down all by yourself, sometime when you know you won’t be interrupted, with a big piece of paper. On it, write down everything you’ve ever thought of or heard about or imagined that people could do sexually. These don’t have to be the words you usually use, or the sexual behaviors you yourself enjoy - use all the “dirty” words you’ve ever encountered, and write down everything you can think of. If you’re not sure whether or not it belongs on the list, write it down anyway. Nobody but you will ever see this list - you can shred it or burn it when you’re done.
Then read the words aloud to yourself. Start quietly if you feel shy, then try to build up to your normal speaking voice. How does that feel? Do you become a bit more comfortable with practice? We hope so.
As we say, we’ve done our best in this book to speak to you in language with which most people will be reasonably comfortable. But if we use words that make you turn white and want to cover your eyes, we apologize in advance. And we hope you’ll take a deep breath, and go on reading.
4
On Kink
What does it mean to be kinky? Perhaps we first need to ask: what does it mean to be normal? Many people believe that there is some single form of sexual expression that is “normal,” and that all other forms of sex are immoral, inferior, pathological, destructive to one’s health or relationships, or ultimately unfulfilling.
According to the “normal” assumption, successful sex means potentially reproductive intercourse between a man and a woman, preferably married, who plan to have children and stay together in a monogamous relationship for the rest of their lives. Some believe that even within these stringent boundaries, sex is only okay if the man is on top and if both partners reach orgasm at the same time without other sources of stimulation like fingers or vibrators. (Sex therapists call this requirement “Look Ma, no hands!”) Such a limited approach to sex actually satisfies only a very small percentage of people - so by that standard, “normal” sex is actually a statistical abnormality.
According to the statistics that Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues collected in the forties, the average couple has sex two or three times a week, with varying amounts of foreplay culminating in intercourse that lasts for an average of one point seven five minutes.1 That’s one hundre
d and five seconds. If this is “normal,” most people we’ve talked to are striving to be “abnormal.”
Here in California, all forms of sex except the reproductive were illegal until the “consenting adults” act was passed in 1976. In many other states, “sodomy” laws still outlaw sexual variation. When Dossie was first a sex educator, she used to have to advise people that commonplace pleasurable activities like oral sex were illegal, despite that fact that many people find such pleasures to be a vital, often necessary, part of their sex lives.
Imagine a world in which something as simple as pleasuring your partner with your mouth could lead to a jail term! Thinking about the prejudices that may have made your sex life illegal can give you a sense of what it feels like to be told you should give up whatever it is that makes your sex exciting, intimate and fulfilling.
We believe that each individual has a right to reach out for whatever kinds of consensual sex and love are fulfilling to him - because people are different, and are turned on by different things, and because sexual satisfaction is truly an important part of how we love each other and how we feel good about ourselves. We believe that the freedom to explore our sexual natures is an intrinsic part of our right to the pursuit of happiness.
Are kinky people a small minority? It is probably true that people who act on their desires for unusual pleasures and who incorporate kink openly in their relationships are a minority, even though, as we said above, everybody is probably “abnormal” to some extent or other. But in our fantasies, as expressed in art, novels, fairy tales, and much of our culture from high art to Hollywood, there is a whole lot of kink.
One of the sexiest things we read in high school was Yeats’s poem Leda and the Swan, a perverse tale of rape and bestiality based on a story that has fascinated artists for millennia. Most of us can readily see the eroticism of a Venus in Furs, or Count Dracula, or the Wild Ones on motorcycles (wearing really hot leather) that were the sex symbols of the uptight fifties. A lot of the images that raise our adrenaline and turn us on in contemporary movies and television are explorations of the eroticism of power, of pain, of medical or uniform or leather fetishes, of prisoners and fugitives, helplessness and wicked power, victims and villains.
We often wonder how many people would join sexual “minorities” if it weren’t so terribly against the rules to be a pervert.
One useful way to see how S/M and other kinkiness fit into the whole spectrum of people and sex is to compare our sexual preferences with the way we choose how we eat. Some people want to eat familiar food - what Mom used to cook feels most satisfying. Others seek out exotic foods from distant parts of the world. Still others choose fast food, and like to get their needs met without a lot of fuss. Others want health food, as natural as possible, to celebrate in their diet a oneness with nature. Gourmets invest a lot of attention into what they eat, collect specialized kitchen equipment, go to fancy restaurants, seek out obscure and rare ingredients, spend a lot of time perfecting a particular taste. Truth is, all of these forms of nourishment are just fine, and there is no reason to think that a Tarte aux Demoiselles Tatin is any more or less satisfying than Mom’s apple pie.
Yet we often make judgments about other people’s preferences: gourmets may find traditionalists too conservative, traditionalists might think that gourmets are decadent and waste too much time and money on eating. Natural food fanciers are often disdained as “health nuts.” But in food, as in sex, there is really no reason not to honor each other’s choices, and celebrate the joy we all take in our sex lives (and our nourishment) without labeling anybody less than okay. All our pleasures are brilliant.
Is kink sick? Can it be healthy? In the nineteenth century, psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing wrote Psychopathia Sexualis, a sort of encyclopedia of sexual deviation in which he coined the words sadism and masochism, and attempted to describe sexual variation as he observed it in a Victorian mental asylum. Of course, all the people he observed were mentally ill, so he assumed that the sexual behaviors he observed in this population were either a symptom or a cause of their mental illness. He never asked any functional people about their sex lives.
It is to Krafft-Ebing that we owe the idea that masturbating can make you crazy, since he observed that 98% of the inmates masturbated ; he never thought to inquire about the private pleasures of psychologists.
Freud went on to link mental health to sexual development, theorizing that mental problems derive from arrested sexual development. Since he believed that truly healthy people would grow up to enjoy missionary position sex in marriage and nothing else, he assumed that variations in sexual practice that he observed were caused by arrested development, and thus, again, were symptoms of psychological disturbance.
These are circular arguments, based on the belief that when we see something we don’t understand, there must be something wrong in the works somewhere.
For many centuries before the Victorian psychologists, we ostracized sexual explorers as demons and witches. In the nineteenth century we began to justify these superstitions as medical science. The authors of this book see all attempts to link psychological pathology with nondestructive sexual practices as modern fairy tales, mythologies that doom us all to worry that something is wrong with our sexual delights.
The best way to tell if someone is mentally ill or psychologically disturbed is to look at her functioning. Does this person have a way to make a living? Does she maintain a home, a family, relationships, friends? A healthy, functioning person is most likely just that, regardless of how wild and unfamiliar her sexual practices may be.
Sex addiction? Some people believe that what they consider an inordinate interest in sex is a symptom of addiction. Of course, how much interest in sex is “too much” is a question no one can really answer - again, we propose the functional definition, that too much interest in sex is when your sexual practice or fantasies are making your life unmanageable. In other words, no matter how outlandish a person’s sex life may seem to the outside observer, if it is not broken, there’s no need to fix it.
Sexual concerns, sexual dysfunction and sex addiction all do really exist, and bring great distress to those who experience them. Sex addiction is characterized by compulsively engaging in sex that has negative consequences, or by using sex for the wrong reasons: to shore up flagging self-esteem, or soothe anxiety, or as a sort of fast-food substitute for genuine emotional connection with another person. Treatment is available for sexual problems through sex therapy or twelve-step support groups. However, it’s important to understand that sex addiction or other problems can manifest themselves in any form of sexual expression, from the missionary position onwards. Addiction has nothing whatever to do with the form of sex, kinky or otherwise, that the individual prefers.
Why are some people kinky? Nobody knows. Why are you the way you are? There are no statistics that connect S/M or kinkiness to a personal history of child abuse or molestation, or any other traumatic experiences. Kinky people are found in all walks of life, in as much variation as there are people.
Parents often worry about this question, wondering “what did I do wrong?” If your child is kinky, you probably did nothing wrong. Maybe you even did something right: we consider the capacity for sexual exploration to be a symptom of a healthy attitude.
Can kinky people be cured? Why would anyone want to? If people are happy with their lives, then presumably they don’t want to change. It is, however, difficult to live in a society that does not accept the way you express your love and your sexiness. We have known people who have been forced to choose between their kinkiness and their marriages, or their children, or their families of origin, and we feel deep compassion for such a dilemma.
Most of the kinky folk we know feel that their sex lives are so important, so valuable to them that it would be a tragedy to have to give up their most intimate and profound sexual experiences to satisfy a society that hates them. This book is our attempt to change society, to generate mo
re tolerance so fewer of us will be forced to make such impossible choices.
Once you start can you ever stop? Again, why would anyone want to? A common fear about kinky practices is that once you start realizing your fantasies in your sexual relationships you can never go back, and you will never be satisfied with the sex you used to enjoy. Actually, most kinky people do enjoy nonkinky or “vanilla” sex. The term “vanilla sex” was coined by a leatherman to describe the pleasure he took in standard sex, because we all know that vanilla is one of the very best flavors. This term was never intended as an insult to non-perverts.
There is a myth that kinky people can only get off on a strictly limited form of sex that specifically and in every detail matches their one particular fantasy. In fact, most kinky people develop a large and varied repertoire of sexual delights. It stands to reason that if you tell your special fantasy to another in the hopes of acting it out together, that other person will share her particular fantasy, which will probably be different, so now you are playing two fantasies, and maybe you hear about another fantasy that you both think would be neat to try... and so over time the sexual explorer learns a whole lot of sensations to explore, roles to try on and fantasies to play out.
There are kinky individuals, usually inexperienced, who believe that the only thing that will work for them is to find one particular person who wants to do this one particular fantasy down to the last detail. Such people have a hard time finding partners, and would-be partners may resent their single-mindedness and unwillingness to explore their partners’ desires. Such “fixation” is readily fixed by trying out a variety of sexual pleasures and discovering that lots of sex acts are delightful and pleasurable and satisfying, and that bits and pieces of whatever made the original fantasy so wonderful can be integrated into many different activities.
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