Badness. Wrongness. Being against the normal way of things. So much of kinky sexual activities seems couched in such terms. Those who embrace fetish-style activities or non-mainstream activities in the bedroom are seen as rogues or mavericks. They are seen as people bucking trends, either rashly or boldly.

I find a lot of these attitudes fascinating, not so much because I think they’re incorrect, but because the lure of the “dark side” is such an interesting thing, and the way our sexuality sometimes dances around the edges of socially unacceptable (or destructive) behaviors is really well…kinda cool.

Let’s take something as “harmless” as food-play or other wet-and-messy activities. In the end, this isn’t really dark side behavior, but it does hearken back to “acting up” behaviors. Don’t make a mess! Don’t play with your food! And yet, we gleefully ignore those dictates from our childhood as grown folks who just want to have fun.

And then there’s stuff like BDSM at the other end of the spectrum. Here are activities that in some ways echo rather heinous acts in real life: torture, sexual abuse, assault, kidnapping and a host of others. True, in BDSM things don’t go to the same level, the participants are usually all 100% consenting folks, and the activities are time-limited. Just because you’re chained to the bed for playtime doesn’t mean you’ll spend weeks there, helpless to communicate with the outside world. Still, while there are usually safe words and soft limits and hard limits—and the “perpetrators” often have loving or economic reasons not to go too far into the realm of “evil”—the themes of danger remain strong.

But the thing is, I’m not sure the overriding theme there really is the dark side, per se. I think it’s more than we find pleasure in bad habits.

So many activities that society views as impolite or weak are the ones we celebrate in sexual situations.

The food-play example earlier? Isn’t that, in a way, a reflection of gluttony or waste? Perfectly good food used for obscene purposes (though, in this case, not much of it going to your hips or belly, right—at least not the inside portions).

Isn’t much of BDSM behavior a reflection of insensitivity turned erotic (dominance), and milquetoast behavior turned sultry (submission)?

There are other bad habit, too, that get more erotic play than many of you might know. Spitting, for example, is a whole sub-genre in it itself. Sure, you’ve probably seen dom types spit into the mouth of a slave, but search for “spit kissing” or “swapping spit”, and you’ll see a whole side of this publicly frowned-upon act made erotic without D&S in the mix at all. But, of course you can rationalize that one. It’s just French kissing turned up several notches, right? Maybe. But how do you explain fetishes around farting, pissing on oneself or others, scat, vomit, or snot? They all exist (hell, there’s even “cake farting”, in which a person sits bare-assed on a frosted cake and lets rip for sexual gratification of themselves or others…and that spawned meatloaf farting, and a host of others, I believe). They all celebrate bad habits.

Then you can start getting into more addictive bad habits, or ones that encroach on others’ personal comfort zones, like drinking and smoking. More on the latter later, as that’s my big fetish, but let’s start with drinking. There’s no doubt that being intoxicated has a sensual appeal for many people—many more than would likely admit it, in fact. Getting someone drunk, or having drunk sex together, is a frequent theme, and rarely happens by “accident.” Many people, if forced to examine themselves, probably get a bit hot if they smell alcohol on the breath of another. The reasons could be multitudinous, with just a few being the hint that the person is a “bad boy” or “bad girl”, or that the person is just a little out of control. It could be the taste and smell of temptation—the lure to partake of alcohol yourself, and lose yourself in some orgy of Bacchus. The same can be extended to harder drugs. How many people who enjoy such activities are turned on by a stoned or high appearance in the visage of their lover or hoped-to-be lover? Or who are turned on by the very sensations of being high and being loosed from their normal mental space?

And smoking.

I’ve said before that this is my main fetish area of interest. I have many, but this one is tops. And for many of you, that might seem disgusting. That’s OK. I don’t fancy bloodplay, hooks and needles, either.

Much like alcohol, smoking connotes “bad boy/bad girl” vibes, and has a combination of distinctive flavors, scents, and alterations to mood (whether nicotine or pot) that come into play. But more than alcohol, smoking these days is a often a huge flouting of norms. With so many spaces now smoke-free, and people being told that smoking means you’re weak or filthy or whatever, willingly smoking and doing it for purposes of seduction and/or sexual gratification is a huge “fuck you” to the world. For men, seeing a woman with a cigarette, is a sign sometimes that a woman is free, in control and willing to be sexually open. For many women, the fetish represents a guilty pleasure in which they choose a desirable sensation over “being proper” or “living right.”

Mind you, I’m not trying to glorify addiction, which can be a destructive thing. But for many people, these addictive bad habits may not be an out-of-control compulsion to keep consuming. I suspect many people who enjoy sex drunk or high don’t do it all the time, or tend to go out of control just for erotic play—in the same way that BDSM folks don’t have to be regular abusers of their partners in the course of a normal day.

In fact, now that I bring up BDSM again, how much do the sensual lures of potentially addictive behaviors resemble dominance and submission? A lot, actually.

In the smoking fetish world, I know from experience, close to half—and maybe slightly more than half—of guys with the smoking fetish don’t even smoke (and it’s mostly guys. Some women do have smoking fetishes, but more often they seem to be taking part in the fetish because it’s a tool for them to make the guy hot and/or be in control). In fact, some of them can’t stand smoking outside of a sexual situation—and a few can’t stand the smell at all, and so they only like the visual stimulus, sticking to photo sets and videos. So, for many of the smoking fetishists, smoking isn’t a daily part of life. It’s a diversion, much like BDSM is with most people. Even most of the people who like a lot of BDSM in their lives need some time to cuddle and be sweet. Most BDSM couples or groupings probably aren’t getting the dishes washed by whipping the submissive. They probably aren’t chaining the sub to a radiator in the bathroom until the room is scrubbed clean. Most things in life are handled “normally.”

So, I suspect people who get turned on by drunkenness or being high are much the same as with smoking. If desire and sexual release are the goals, the “bad habit” activity is a tool—one that loses much of its power and hold when sex isn’t on the table. Sure, there are alcoholics who may get turned on by drunk sex, and highly addicted smokers who are also smoking fetishists, but it would be as rash to assume that, as to assume a master or domme always mistreats a sub partner.

Again, I keep coming back to the BDSM example, and there is one more bit of overlap I see with it and my own smoking fetish (and perhaps fetishes somewhat related to mine): Surrender.

Sure, there are those in the camp who are turned on by the total surrender of addiction, either in themselves and others, and who find helplessness and loss of control desirable when it is a part of daily life. But I’m talking something more contained.

Like the surrender to the gentle, all-encompassing, silky mental fog brought on by several glasses of red wine, late at night. The kind of surrender that tells you, “I am a willing slave to the vino. I’m mellow, my inhibitions are compromised just the deliciously right amount, and I’m floating on a gentle tide of intoxication. I remember one such night under just such conditions where my wife spent a couple hours on the phone with her best friend from childhood, while I pulled down my pants and lifted her skirt, and explored her ass and between her thighs with my cock, while I nibbled and kissed at her ears and neck and fondled her nipples. Hot stuff. And the best part? Her telling the friend about it days later, and the friend saying, “Wow! I had no idea all that steamy stuff was going on while we were talking.”

Surrender.

Or with my own fetish for smoking. Before I took the leap to try smoking myself over a year ago in middle age, my wife’s smoking could reduce me to submissive jelly. It was a power she never really tapped much (unfortunately), but the truth is, that a gentle plume of smoke blown into my face, or across the sensitive skin of my neck, or shared in a slow and intimate kiss could send me places. Not quite outside myself, but certainly outside the strict boundaries I (and so many of us) impose on what we will do. She could rule me with her smoky breath alone.

And now, as a smoker myself (at least for fetish activities), I can be carried away with that sense of surrender—of being in thrall to the smoke. It’s not addiction, because I don’t crave or need the cigarettes at other times, and I hardly ever smoke just for the sake of smoking. But when I’m watching a hot video, especially of fetish smokers, and smoking myself, I do lose myself a bit. For a short time, I am addicted, but in a sensual way. My passions rise, and I exhaust one cigarette, only to slowly light up a new one, because I can’t imagine not doing so. Over and over. Maybe just two or three smokes—maybe five or six. But I’m locked into something decadent and just a little “bad” as I explore myself and my desires. As I release them.

Bad habits can be good things. Misbehavior is sometimes just the kind of behavior we need. Sin can be sacred.

Because, as they say, all things in moderation—including moderation itself at times.