Kink Subculture Can Provide Liberation, Decolonization Through Consent + Expression

TW: Sexual Abuse, Sexual themes

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My earliest childhood memory is of being molested. I didn’t know anything about sex, but I knew that what was happening was wrong. I was too ashamed to tell anyone. Later, I received a very comprehensive sexual education through various levels of school and my mother’s desire to protect me with knowledge (and a slightly less comprehensive education through stolen romance novels). 

By age 12, the knowledge I had was theoretical and didn’t help the next time I was molested. Diagrams don’t prepare you for someone being inappropriate with a child. I again knew it was wrong, but I was more worried about my father finding out about what had happened to me and landing himself in jail. I escaped, washed my hands in burning water, looked into my deadened eyes in the mirror, and pretended nothing had happened. Shame. 

Then I was assaulted the day before I turned 18. It wasn’t the violence that Law and Order: SVU would have you imagine. It was having someone I trusted offer me weed to lower my inhibitions and taking advantage of my sympathy for their difficult time to get what they wanted. By the time I realized what was happening enough to say no, it wasn’t too late, but the damage was done. I was broken, I was dumb, how could I let this happen again. How many times can one person be led down a hallway under false pretenses? Shame. 

Before I knew anything, I knew shame. Sexual predators thrive under this umbrella of shame.

To provide a bit of orientation for the rest of this op-ed, some voices and sources I would like to incorporate in my conversation and personal expression of thoughts regarding sexual liberation include Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic as Power”, the version of which I’m referencing is embedded in adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism, The Politics of Feeling Good. Following my time at the Fetish Ball, I thought a lot about sexuality, sexual expression, and energy. Audre Lorde started the Black, Queer, feminist rabbit hole long ago and will surely come up in my writing again, along with adrienne maree brown. 

Lorde describes the erotic as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual place, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” I can’t speak much to my thoughts on what masculine energy is, but if I think about feminine energy, I associate it with creativity, rather than any particular set of genitals. Lorde also touches on this and more. The energy of this creativity, I believe, is the foundation for passion or Eros. Lorde goes into Eros and the ways that the erotic can be used outside of a sexual context as a guiding mindset that steers you through essentially how you want to live your life. 

From my boudoir photo shoot

Jasper Blue Photography

Anna Howard, in conversation with Lorde, discusses this in her Wild Geese podcast episode titled ‘why are we afraid of LOVE? 🥀reflecting on creativity + eros 🌹’ where she brings to the discussion the concepts of tapping into feelings of limerence and transmuting them into creative pursuits that you have control over. Also discussed is how the seeking of love or desiring of desire is its own creative process that can be harnessed outside of having a crush or for the benefit of another. She brought up the want for a love that is generative rather than feeling like love is being taken from you, and the dangers presented in your love, if left unchecked, may cause you to abandon your personal projects. 

All of this information oriented me to this thought:

Sexual experiences and the art of creation—

If the process of sex is a transference of energy, then the cycle of each “session” can be broken into giving/providing and receiving. The cycle, like all other natural cycles, should include both for the ‘creation’ of and flow of energy (as an aside: another time I’ll discuss more thoughts I have about natural cycles and energy). Current societal expectations around sex, and especially the concept virginity, prime women to expect and accept the feeling that they’ve lost something and men ‘become’ men through the taking of that something. Casual hookup culture encourages everyone to be takers and then both sides leave feeling depleted. Ultimately we are in a sexual cycle that is not regenerative, turning this energy into a scarce resource. 

Lorde touches on this as well: “We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves.” If the energy of creation is seen exclusively as something that can be extracted from women, despite its existence in all of us, then of course men will do all that they can to acquire it, including deceive and most harmfully, just take it. Lorde goes on to say, “So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.” 

Additionally, in the chapter titled “Love as political resistance,” brown provides a list of ways that we love that are detrimental to our overall society: 

“How have we been loving?

• defining love by obligation

• celebrating love on externally marked holidays

• keeping the realities of love behind closed doors

• framing love as a fairy tale on social media

• framing love as a product we give each other

• framing love as a limited resource that gets swallowed and used up, tied in plastic when we’re done and piled up out of sight

• prioritizing romantic love over self, comrade, and friend love”

Having existed primarily in the heteronormative, monogamous relationship sphere for a good portion of my life, I can say that Queer love and ethical non-monogamous love tries to play by different rules. There is a lot of unlearning required. In terms of sex and the creation of sexual energy, I believe the BDSM/Kink community is combating the sexual culture created through capitalism and under the patriarchy.

The first BDSM club I went to was the first place that someone outlined consent to me in a no-bullshit way. It was mandatory, it was non-negotiable, and there were very clear non-verbal cues for knowing that you don’t have it. I learned about scenes and sexual expectations, negotiating what you want to do based on how you want to feel. Trust, vulnerability, the enthusiastic yes—which ties in nicely with Lorde’s concept of the “orgasmic yes”. I’ve learned a lot since then, but I still have a lot of unpacking to do. 

I know that predators exist in any and all arenas, but the kink community has gone out of its way to make them feel unwelcome and root them out. Perfect strangers want to protect you and your freedom of sexual expression and this is considered a counter-culture. “Safe, sane, and consensual” has been a saying since the ethical framework was co-founded in 1983. Anne O. Nomis, ‘regarded as one of the world leaders in Dominance studies’ according to her blog, has an excellent article breaking down the ethics and evolution the community has taken in respect to creating a safe environment in which people are able to partake in the vulnerable expression of sexual, creative energy. 

It’s very different from my experiences growing up moderately religious in the South. It took away the shame and self-blame. In heteronormative, vanilla sex, there are too many unspoken expectations and too many assumptions about what’s going to happen, that some people just begin following the script without any sort of communication. This, I believe, leads to situations like what 17-year-old me experienced, where I left thinking I had led someone on and realized years later that I was actually assaulted. I don’t know if he knows this though.

Me and my husband at Fetish Ball

Shoot That Klown

Ultimately, I’ve never felt safer in an erotic space than the Seattle Fetish Ball. It allowed me to find freedom and comfort in my sexuality and embrace a side of myself that was steeped in shame and discomfort before I was even fully conscious of it. I leave off with this question that adrienne maree brown poses: “How do we center creation and desire as integral to liberation?” 

If we can take any page out of the BDSM/Kink community book, it could be that if we all strive to keep sexual encounters in our minds as a reciprocal creative exchange of sexual energy, then maybe fewer people would climb out of bed (or whatever surface) feeling like they’ve been robbed. 

I hope to continue making progress and I hope to attend next year, even more confident and, as always, looking hot as fuck.