Do you think you’re kinky?
Does the idea of a little choking or spanking pique your interest? Even a bit of bondage? Maybe your interests go even further, get a little more unconventional.
Your intrigue in kinky activities is actually completely normal.
Richard Sprott, California State University, East Bay human development and women’s studies lecturer, said kink is an umbrella term that emcompasses a wide variety of interests that fall outside or are stigmatized by mainstream culture.
Sprott said that includes BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadism and Masochism), role playing, sensory play and fetishism.
“There are some kinks that are unusual and then there are some that are very, very common,” Sprott said in a Zoom call. “One of the more common [kinks] is spanking . . . if you talk to a bunch of kinky people, everybody’s done spanking at some point. Everybody’s done blindfolds at some point, almost everyone.”
About 50% of people have partaken in BDSM-related activities at some point in their life, according to a September 2017 Journal of Sexual Medicine study.
In today’s society, kinkiness is defined by its taboo nature so why do people continue to develop these interests and why are they so commonplace?
Sam Hughes, University of California, Santa Cruz social psychology doctoral candidate, said it's nearly impossible to find a universal answer to why kinks exist because for every possible kink, there’s “a million” different reasons why someone would want to practice it.
“While there are these kinds of general patterns, it’s also the case that kink is so unique and so diverse that the individual, qualitative stories people have to tell are really important too,” said Hughes, who openly identifies as a kink community member, in a Zoom call.
Sprott agreed with Hughes’ sentiment, adding there’s no blueprint for when people develop their kinks either.
While many people discover their kinks through being introduced to them later in life, others can develop kinks as soon as their early childhood, he said.
“Some people can point to early experiences, things, games they played, TVs or books or movies that they saw that really excited them,” Sprott said. “Sometimes that's before they're even sexually aware. They just know they had a certain, you know, [feeling and] got very excited by what they saw.”
That was the case for Hughes, who said he can remember feeling this type of excitement since he was a child.
“I have memories from kindergarten and first grade, hanging out with a neighbor friend of mine,” Hughes said. “And we would do things like, you know, pretend to be robots together. And I think that's where some of the earliest inklings that I had some kind of fetish interest, at least in retrospect.”
Hughes described himself as a switch, sadomasochist and fetishist, specifically with “robot play” and materials including uniforms and wetsuits.
“Some of the fetish plays I do today involves, sort of playing, like being turned into a robot or turning other people into robots and doing a lot of sort of mind control type, role-playing activities,” Hughes said.
He added that, while he did develop some of his interests during childhood, they didn’t become sexual in nature until early puberty and he discovered many of his kinks during early adulthood.
While no one can definitively know why or when kinks develop, it’s known that those who willingly practice kink can greatly benefit from it.
Hughes said one of his favorite experiences in the kink community is witnessing the reactions of people who get to fulfill a fantasy for the first time.
“I have a friend in the kink community who likes to say the kink community is a space filled with people who like to make each other's dreams come true,” Hughes said. “There's something very beautiful about that, about people getting to experience something that they so deeply want and seeing those kinds of needs be satisfied.”
Sprott said while most people practice kink simply because they enjoy it, it can also have many physical and psychological benefits.
People often use kink as a means of forming closer emotional connections with partners, healing from trauma through “rewriting the script,” managing chronic pain through creating endorphins and managing mental illnesses including autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D., Sprott said.
Julia Schiffman, associate clinical social worker and author of “Women and Kink: Relationships, Reasons and Stories,” said people in relationships with neurodiverse individuals can use kink to connect better with their partners, who might have different needs and sensitivities.
“[For example, some autistic individuals] have sensory sensitivity and in kink, what you can do is there’s something called sensory deprivation,” Schiffman said in a Zoom call. “It’s either the person who is autistic can have that control or they can ask for things that would be helpful for them in terms of sensory deprivation where they can connect with their partner.”
Despite the benefits of practicing kink, it’s still widely stigmatized by society and kink community members often face discrimination if their interests are made public.
Kink was listed as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until 2013.
Sprott said kink community members can face discrimination not just from friends and family but also in professional and legal situations.
“There are people [who] have lost jobs, people have lost custody of children,” Sprott said. “People have been [discriminated against] when they've reported a crime, the police have ignored them or the police have said ‘you must have wanted that to happen,’ or other things like that.”
However, visibility of the kink community has improved in recent years and led to more accepting attitudes toward it, Schiffman said.
“The huge shift was when [Fifty Shades of Grey] became mainstream that people started talking about kink as fantasy, as realistic, as dominant and submissive, as the idea of pain and pleasure coming out in real life,” Schiffman said.
The 2015 romance drama “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which is R-Rated, is based on the erotic 2011 novel written by British author E. L. James. The four-novel series became an entire movie franchise.
Hughes stressed that while people should be risk aware and take steps to protect themselves from discrimination or other harm, they shouldn’t be ashamed of exploring their interests with like-minded individuals.
He said kinks don’t make people “wrong or broken.”
“A lot of people are really terrified by some of the fantasies that they have,” Hughes said. “Whether it's things that are just sort of on the weird end of the spectrum or things that are sort of deeply personal and very scary, almost like feeling immoral . . . when the reality is that a lot of these fantasies are relatively common.”
