Let’s Talk about BDSM

Listen—we need to talk about kink. 

It’s 2020, so we’ve certainly started talking about it more than before. Fifty Shades of Grey, for all it’s faults, plastered BDSM on the big screen. There’s an annual kink festival held in Portland every year. Now it’s printed in your school paper. 

When love is in the air, it’s an excuse to talk about kink more openly. But what about every other day of the year? Does everyone suddenly brandish their cuffs and their crops on the 14th, only to be shoved in the nightstand drawer for the rest of the year?

Kink does not stop as soon as we throw out the chocolates and heart candies. The conversation shouldn’t either. 

Damned if you do

Don’t kinkshame me, bro.

While conversations over kink are still stigmatized, jokes about kink are still funny and socially acceptable, so long as the joke reinforces the stigma, perpetuating how taboo kink is in society. 

See Saturday Night Live’s episode, with Fifty Shades of Grey actress Dakota Johnson hosting following the release of the movie. The show was granted the opportunity to present kink on screen, and what they present was a person, in full latex attire, clearing standing out among the audience they were sitting in. They stood to ask a question, first a political one, until they corrected themselves to ask a humorously inappropriate question on kink. 

The character was framed as someone who is strange, the odd one out of the otherwise normal audience when kink may not be so strange at all. While the results of studies and surveys on how many people are into kink in their spare time vary wildly, none of them are particularly small. A survey done by the condom company Durex found that 35% of people use bondage tools, while one done by erotic retailer Ann Summers, in the United Kingdom, found that 75% person have a fetish. One research paper paper on BDSM stigma cited studies with results ranging between 14% of American men having practiced S&M and 65% of Canadians have fantasies of being tied up. 

However, regardless of the number who enjoy BDSM in secret, we will never be able to tell who else in the room is into it—both because people generally don’t announce it with a latex get up on the daily, and because the presiding social stigma imposes too much of a social risk to out oneself. 

The misconceptions against BDSM are not without serious consequences. A 2008 study done by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom found that 26% of their participants had experienced discrimination based on their interest in BDSM, ranging from harrassment on the internet, losing a job, to losing custody of a child. 

Damned if you don’t. 

Why would kink be the hill that anybody is willing to die on? Talking about kink carries a serious amount of social risk, for little personal reward. 

For one, starting the dialogue is the first step to correcting the stigma and the discrimination. After all, how’s it going to get solved if we can’t even acknowledge it freely? Saying nothing at all may help those numbers, but not for the right reasons. 

It’s nearly impossible to find others with similar interests if you’re silent on this—and when kink generally requires at least one other person to happen, that can quash the opportunity to participate at all. While it is possible to attend BDSM specific events and businesses (like Catalyst, here in Portland; their events are fabulous if you have the transportation) it can still be difficult to find a community of like-minded people when it’s relegated to the shadows. 

And there is another reason. It’s a profound one—radical even. It’s one I’m sure you’ve never heard before, but because it is still so hard to seriously discuss kink, lean in closely. You’re going to want to hear this.

Because it’s fun. It’s an exhilarating time. 

At the end of the day, you are not a hose. Whatever kinks you’ve got don’t need to be straightened out for you to function.