For many years kink was portrayed by the media to be the dark alley, the grungy dungeon. Kink was the iconic image of women being shackled to a wall with heavy manacles, in a basement with a gritty concrete floor. Kink was the black and white images seen in bad movies that warned against poor judgment in sexual practices, declaring kink abusive, and practitioners of it abusers, and informing the public at large that anyone who practiced kink was a pervert and should be shunned. Kink was always considered the hidden society, home territory of the poor, the degenerate and under-educated by those not in the know, and sometimes it still is.

But is that true really? Not that I have ever seen. I know many an intelligent person who enjoys kinky sex, and I may be a degenerate and am very definitely a pervert, but I am also very much in favor of safe sexual practices and against abuse in any form. While it is true that once BDSM was kept mostly out of sight, the advent of the Internet and chat rooms helped place the scene square in the light of day. And though I have played out in alleys, these days I attend conferences in three star hotels, and attend dozens of munches and play parties that take place in family style restaurants and in upper middle class homes in quiet cul-de-sacs in subdivisions and suburbs. Kink has become sanitized and available for general and mass consumption, just check out the flood of BDSM flavored erotica on the market, some of which I myself authored, or the one of a dozen porn sites specializing in kinky sex. Today’s dungeons are hardly the filthy pits most envision, or the squalid apartments I used to play in, nor are they hidden. Today they are easily Googled, and memberships to them are based on the ability to pay the fee and sign the waiver, in most cases, rather than the serious vetting processes of yesterday.

In this day and age, we have the media putting a polish on things, thanks to Christina Aguilera stuffing a diamond studded gag into her mouth and giving a video model a serious ride, Rhianna singing S..S…M…M…I like it like it like it, come on…. and many hip hop and R&B singers helping to make it perfectly acceptable to call your lover Daddy. In a lot of ways, that is a push forward. It is the cleaning up of kink, the making it more palatable to the general public, that will keep those of us who like it dark and dirty and edgy from being punished, in a bad way, by the legal system and the people who want to see us return to a time when being kinky meant you were classified as mentally ill and a danger to society and yourself. By selling kink to a large market, we have made it socially acceptable, that is as long as we stay within the lines set down by publishers, and network executives, and the tolerance levels of the general public.

With the conditions of suitable-for-the-public-consumption kink comes drawbacks, however. The conference floors are filled with wide eyed people who think of kink as the porn they see and have no ability to process the sweat, blood, tears, and screams of BDSM play when it is real and in their face. Many cannot comprehend how it can be so different than what they thought it would be. Many do not understand that they need to attend events like munches to meet people in order to be invited to play parties, mostly because, in general, they are held in private residences, and who wants someone they have never seen popping in for an evening? The dungeons are also full of people who have never heard the word etiquette as applied to kink, and so they touch anyone and everything with no regard or understanding as to the fact that it is a violation to touch someone else’s property, and as some people are actually owned and thus property as well, that includes other people. For the record, I refuse to be touched by anyone other than my inner circle, and any attempts to touch me by others are met with open hostility. There are people gleefully and savagely applying the toys they bought earlier in the day, ignoring the fact that they have no idea of how to use them, and then they become angry and combative when the dungeon monitors interrupt their play. Don’t get me wrong, those people are the exception rather than the rule, but the numbers of these types of people are growing.

Kink is being dressed up in shiny latex, PVC and leather then festooned with sex toys and condoms. While I am entirely sex-positive, I have issues with the lack of education amongst so many of our newer players. Kink, back in the days when it was still the bad neighborhood your mother warned you about and the cops kicked your ass for being around, demanded that you be careful in the ways in which you hurt and had sex with your partners. Back then, a trip to the ER was a nightmare. Now it is often a trophy, I have heard it referred to as the honeymoon visit, in fact. That scares me. So does the strange misconception that safe words are something you use only when you are at the end of your endurance. At a time when people can and do flaunt their bruises and marks in profile pictures on social sites, there is a woeful lack of conversation about pain tolerance and the need to take personal responsibility in a scene. I had that talk with a brand new sub at a party last week and was echoed by every other player who had been around for a while. The woman looked at us and said, “Oh, I thought a Good Dominant would just know when it was too much.” I have never seen kink porn where safe words were uttered, nor have I seen pauses for water and sugary treats to help stabilize things. But maybe the makers of these films (and authors of books) should start placing these things within the scenes. I have never seen the riggers rushing through the scenery either, it is amazing how many people think tying knots is easy, or that tying someone’s wrists to their ankles requires nothing more than a length of rope and the will to do it.

We have become the Instant Gratification Generation, regardless of age. When kink was still in hiding, learning a skill was not something to be taken lightly. Not long ago I heard someone at a conference say they wanted to shove a fist into someone. I stopped and began to explain that there is a process to that activity, and was met with an eagerness to learn superseded only by the shock that such an activity required technique. I run into moments like these a lot, actually. It seems people are less willing to take the time out to learn the skillsets. We want the knowledge, so we search for it by pushing a button. In the pre-Internet kink days, you had to go to a play party or find someone who knew how to do what it was you wanted to learn, and then you watched, and practiced until you got it right. Now it seems if you have the equipment you must be smart enough to use it. In our cleaning up of kink and its activities, we have somehow managed to shove safety concerns under the rug and onto the back burner.

So while the floors are cleaner and the view nicer in our dungeons and other play spaces these days, let us not forget that we are still on the fringes, the edges, and that we must bring education out of hiding and haul it out to our new found public homes along with the cross, the spanking bench, and the manacles.

[box]Got something you’d like to say? Check out our Writing for EC page for details on submitting to EdenCafe for a gift card![/box]