In the Beginning

I’ve always been a sexual person, as long as I can remember back into my youth. I used to practice kissing my motorized Teddy Ruxpin doll when I was as young as 5 or 6 years old and soon after I realized that buzzing fuzzy mouth felt good other places too. Typically, talking about these young experiences is taboo – the last real taboo, perhaps – but they were formative. By age 8 or 9, Barbie and Ken had active sex lives, and often partner-swapped with my best friend’s equally active Mattel couple.

I was a smart kid and a total book worm. I devoured fiction to the point that my parents would deliver boxes of stories from church basement and garage sales and couldn’t keep up to monitor the content. In my preteens I devoured horror and thriller fiction and read through the age-appropriate titles available through my library before I started puberty at age nine.

I remember several stories that both excited and confused me – a series of British short horrors featuring a young woman with nipple piercings who enjoyed water sports on the beach (and I don’t mean windsurfing); a Dean Koontz novel about government mind control with at least one forced sex scene; a detention-center escape thriller with a graphic adult male boy-rape scene. The latter is the one that finally alerted my parents to the questionable content I was consuming. After that, my only access was the saucy romance in my father’s westerns, until the internet arrived in our home office.

I was young when I was first introduced to the concept of “fetish” – perhaps too young, but such is the nature of the modern age. I discovered kinky sex at a time very soon after discovering my first porno, found myself incredibly drawn to erotic stories (which took minutes rather than hours to download) of force, power and BDSM. Barely-a-teenage girl, who had never even kissed a boy let alone explored any of my masturbatory fantasies, these dark desires were like a secret realm that existed somewhere outside the world I knew.

The Cool Crowd

When I moved back to my hometown after University, significantly more enlightened, joyously bisexual, flamboyantly pagan and in search of the cool kids. I found them. While I put myself back together after what we will for now suffice to say was a bad breakup and worked at my normal job after nearly two years as a phone sex operator and adult web designer, I met up with some of the coolest kids I’ve known.

I developed social skills, made close friends with people who lived the life I dreamt of, outside the hum drum 9-5 bustle, not making apologies for their freakishness to anyone.  I partied, had a few good hookups and met a young deviant couple who introduced me to functional kink. I blossomed and the relationship ran it’s course. I started dating a good friend from University after a hallucinogen-induced birthday experience that left me bathed in morning light in an exhausted puddle on the floor…. quite literally.

The Fellowship of Fetish

Since being married, embarking on a continent-wide honeymoon road trip and once again returning home, we have taken the opportunity to engage with a wider community. Our experience with the local fetish groups have left us wanting. We are both shy and I found it impossible to locate and chat up the cute kinksters while feeling so intimidated by the lifestyle fetish crowd. I’m not sure if it’s the history of avoiding persecution, vetting members, keeping our deviance away from prying eyes. Perhaps the clique mentality develops from the pervading conservative sentiment in this city, where the local BDSM Munch has been relocated almost as many times as years it has been running (more than a decade). Maybe the atmosphere was pervaded by the oppression of the number of people who live in secret for fear of losing their livelihood by being outed.

I don’t judge – I believe that we are all free to do what makes us happy, with the consent of those whose lives we affect, but I find it difficult to relate to people from any walk of life who are able to maintain compartmentalized identities. I can’t imagine pretending to be someone else in order to live in a home and eat healthy food, and I am saddened that so many feel the need to live this way today. I’m filled with gratitude for my good fortune.

It seems that many of these cases involve players who come into their kinkiness after experiencing the rites of passage into spousal bliss and parenthood, or otherwise traveling the roads of adulthood. Did knowing early that I was a kinky freak somehow free me, allow me to design a life where I work for myself, live how I want and don’t make apologies for who I am? Could breaking the last taboo of the modern age lead to a future generation of freaks who wear their kinky proud and refuse to sacrifice their self-identity?