The Ultimate Guide to Kink

by Tristan Taormino

PUBLIC/PRIVATE

  Where will you set the stage for your encounter? Will your interactions take place at home, at a public kink event, or among the general public? If you are dipping your toes into the pool of age play, a more private location is suggested. Private play is more intimate: you don’t have to factor in uncontrolled input from the outside world, so it can feel safer. At a kink party or conference, there may be special activities or space reserved for regressive age players (often called “kidz” or “littles”). In these kinky spaces, you can meet and interact with other age players, feel acknowledged as your alter ego, play, compare notes, etc.

  FREQUENCY

  Is this something you’re curious about and you’d like to try once? Do you want to do it on occasion to spice up your sex life? Or is it play that you want to develop and do on a regular basis? Do you want to incorporate age play into your 24/7 D/s dynamic? You don’t have to know the answers right away; these are lifestyle options to consider. Play can happen once or sporadically. A scenario can incorporate the same characters or different ones. Scenarios don’t necessarily have to mature. And long-term investment in the role play is not essential. I have done one-time scenes as well as created continuing characters who reappear again and again. I have been developing one of my little personas for years. Creating a continuing character has helped me tap into the psyche of the character and develop her more fully: she has a name, a birth date, a family history, and memories. I have invested time, money, and emotions in her, and this makes for a richer, more complex experience when I embody her in a scene. She has grown and changed over the years, and so have I.

  PROPS, COSTUMES, SCENE ELEMENTS

  When it comes to role playing, our imaginations can take us to faraway, wonderful places. Props and costumes can help propel the imagination, but keep in mind that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to get into the perfect head space. Shopping at secondhand stores or getting hand-me-downs from friends are a great way to obtain a variety of clothes and props to play with. A coloring book, a box of cereal, Grandpa’s cane, Daddy’s pipe, Mama’s purse, diapers, or a stuffed animal are all exciting elements you can add to your play. These items allow us to fall deeper into our roles—make us connect to what our alter egos like, do, use, or need. I have a second pair of glasses I call my “girl” glasses. When those glasses rest on my face, I am transformed. Do you fantasize about sucking on a pacifier? Does a lollipop bring out your inner toddler? Think about items that connect you to your character, embrace them, and have some fun.

  NEGOTIATION

  In the process of making your own laboratory list, think about what your particular role means to you and work on verbalizing it to your play partners. Simply saying that you are interested in embodying a “dirty older brother” is not enough. Different roles, especially familial ones, can be interpreted in different ways and will often reflect your background, race, culture, ethnicity, or religion. You want to make sure that you and your role-paying partners are on the same page. If not, the scene may go in the wrong direction or can even be triggering. The same goes for a player who asks her partner to play a specific character. You can say you want a daddy, but what does Daddy mean to you? Is he stern and punishing, gentle and caring, or something else altogether? Finding clarity about characters can be difficult—we must dig deep, examine, and name what turns us on. The outcome of this internal work can be rewarding.

  There are various precautions you and your partner(s) should also discuss when negotiating. You have to take proactive as well as possibly reactive measures. If there’s anything the BDSM scene prepares you for, it is that anything can happen. I think that’s the sheer beauty of it. When you role-play, you imagine and create new worlds, new temporary realities, and those realities can be both good and bad.

  Just as a top asks a bottom about past injuries in order to assess areas of the body to avoid hitting, the players in age play should talk about past emotional traumas and triggers. For example, I had a fuck buddy who role-played a teenager who was raped by her neighbor, played by me. When negotiating the terms of our play, she revealed that she was once assaulted and during the assault she was choked. She told me that anything around her neck would trigger her, so we agreed that choking or using a collar was a no-no. Another play partner let me know that I should not address her as “honey.” She had been sexually harassed and the perpetrator consistently used that endearment to minimize her.

  Age play can be healing and therapeutic for some people, but it is not the same as therapy.

  Knowing people’s individual triggers helps you avoid pushing the wrong buttons in a scene; however, you cannot always prepare for what might come up. During age play, people can regress to a much younger age that can bring up intense primal or instinctual feelings. It can put both top and bottom in a very delicate head space, so you must keep that in mind. Even when you plan ahead, all scenes have the potential to go south. Be open to that. Accept it. Knowing this can allow you to be more receptive and as ready as you can be to react to a situation you did not plan on.

  Age play can be a highly emotional and challenging journey for survivors and their partners, for those who love us and those who play with us. Age play can be healing and therapeutic for some people, but it is not the same as therapy; this is especially important to note for survivors of childhood incest, sexual abuse, or trauma. Age play, accompanied by therapy, the support of friends, and artistic outlets, has been extremely healing for me. This will not be the case for all survivors. We find what healing paths work best for us.

  When you combine age play with incest play—scenarios like Daddy/girl, Mommy/boy, Sister/brother, Uncle/nephew—it can take your play to a whole new level. It can be based in nurturing, caregiving, letting go, emotional exploration, trust, tapping into your inner child, reliving, and more. Think about some of your core truths and you may discover some of your core fantasies. Is it to feel the undeniable love of a mother? The sexual taboo of incest? Mix in consensual coercion, fear and terror, rape and abuse fantasies, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a very intense scene. This kind of age play is not for everyone. It can be exciting yet explosive. Exploring taboo subjects can open up emotional floodgates. So it’s key to negotiate, renegotiate, and check in. Checking in directly after a scene can be enough for some, but others may need hourly check-ins, maybe a check-in days later. This type of play may bring to the surface sadness, anger, fear and hatred—in yourself and your partner. Navigating the root of the feeling and dealing with it appropriately can be a challenge, but it is an important part of understanding the responsibilities of playing on the edge. We have a responsibility to ourselves and those we play with. This is why honest, clear communication and negotiation is key.

  One thing we can plan for is aftercare: what takes place after a session. It’s the attention you give one another emotionally and physically. Aftercare is for both tops and bottom. Like other BDSM activities, age play can drain us, especially emotionally. Aftercare is a wonderful way to be taken care of, revitalize, and come back to embodying you again. Aftercare looks different for many people. It can be minimal, or as detailed as the players want it to be. I know people who just want a cup of water and to be left alone for a while. Others need constant touch and affirmation. Still others want no verbal communication, just to be held tight. Whatever your aftercare needs, remember to discuss beforehand.

  I’ve laid out some tools based on personal experience, conversations, and writings on the subject that I hope will help you and your partner(s) understand and navigate age role play. Experimenting with age play can be scary but it can also be extremely fulfilling. Sexual age play is vast, dirty, and desired by many. Take time to figure out what turns you on about it. Sit with it. Fantasize about it. Jerk off or touch yourself to the possibilities of it. Decide whether you want to take your desires from fantasy to reality. Communicate openly and as honestly as possible with your fuck buddies, lovers, play partners, or spouses. Play to your heart’s
content. Listen to your inner voice and concoct all the sexual age play you desire.

  CHAPTER 18

  DIGGING IN THE DIRT: THE LURE OF TABOO ROLE PLAY

  MOLLENA WILLIAMS

  Author’s Note: I recommend that you read Chapter 11, Stop, Drop, and Role! Erotic Role Playing, before reading this essay. It will help provide context. Okay—let’s rock.

  Naughty is nice. Bad is good. Evil is better. Violence is love and fantasy is a secret passageway into a reality gone deliciously, dangerously, erotically haywire.

  You with me? Good. It only gets darker from here.

  One of the aspects of role play that I love is taking responsibility for abdicating responsibility. How is this paradox possible? By enacting a scenario where you take or relinquish control, you inhabit a sexually charged world of endless possibility. By negotiating your scenario including your limits and boundaries, and mapping out expectations and outcomes, you create a matrix into which you can insert your dreams, fantasies, and darkest desires. This liberates the role players, giving them the freedom to explore some of humanity’s darkest impulses, and to explore them without the limiting trappings of guilt, apprehension, and fear. Sound intriguing? Want to jump right into that hot-and-heavy rape fantasy? Ease back there, my friend. There is a lot to dig up, uncover, and sift through before you jump into the deep end.

  Uncovering the roots of your desires can truly assist in your explorations, especially if you are experiencing guilt around wanting to ravage—or be ravaged by—another human. It is not easy to get to the point of being comfortable even thinking about some of the darker fantasies that many people entertain in the recesses of their hearts. I know that, for me, it was a multistage process and remains an ongoing one.

  One of the earliest sexual memories I have is the fantasy of being overpowered, ravaged, taken against my will, and forced to submit to a power I cannot resist. Every captured-princess tale whispered to me of secrets behind the gauzy veils and pointed hats. The creaking wire bookstands in the supermarket were packed with racks of romance novels. The covers of these pulp fictions depicted heaving-bosomed and wild-eyed women resisting, pushing, straining against broad-shouldered, thickly muscled men who smiled arrogantly, seemingly impervious to the willowy resistance of the heroine. One of my favorite Star Trek episodes, “Space Seed,” included a rather evocative scene in which the villain, Kahn Noonian Singh (played with smoldering sensuality by a young Ricardo Montalban), seduced, overpowered, and dominated a crewmember of the Enterprise into crawling, pleading, abject submission. I looked to those fantasies, told over and over in different forms and narratives, as confirming my desire to be overpowered, to be ravaged. Until reality hit me and I became convinced that my desires, my fantasies, were wrong. Very fucking wrong.

  As a child, watching the miniseries Roots was a major event for me, and everyone I knew watched it. It was especially gripping, as a black kid, to see the story of people who looked like me, people with a similar ancestral history, unfolding in epic glory night after night. I was swept away in surges of emotion: pride at their bravery in the face of oppression, rage at the evils of enforced slavery, fear at the pain and suffering depicted, rather graphically, in the story. But the biggest conflict for me came up in the scene where a white man forcibly rapes a black female slave. This was not the sexy ravishment of those Harlequin Romance novels. This was not a whispered fairy tale, where allegory and wistful gasps and sighs gave only hints of secret lust. This was brutal violence, horrible and horrifying, and I couldn’t understand how something that looked so much like my fantasies left me sick and terrified. And fascinated.

  Unable to make sense of this dichotomy, I internalized the idea that there was something profoundly wrong with me, that I carried a secret I could never, ever share. I knew that there had to be a difference between the fantasies I had and the reality depicted in this scene of brutal violence, but—they looked the same. What was the difference?

  The deeper and darker a secret feels, the more likely it’s a common one. When I became old enough to take control of my own fantasies and let go of my initial fear of being “sick” for having these thoughts, I discovered that not only was I not alone, but these fantasies were common. My first boyfriend and I played with resistance in our sex: “You want it, I got it, I ain’t givin’ it to ya without a fight!” Sometimes he would let me overpower him, and I would exert my own power, with much delight. And sometimes I would find myself overpowered, taken, and ravaged to my heart’s content. This was still not something I felt I could share with anyone but him, but it was a delicious secret that we shared and we thoroughly enjoyed its transgressive energy.

  These early explorations might never have blossomed into a deeper, darker journey save for a brief incandescent affair I had in my mid-twenties. Previously, any rough sex I’d had was playful, contextualized, and something both parties had to agree to for any play to begin.

  Then I encountered someone who did not ask, did not negotiate, took what he wanted with no preamble. And I found that…irresistible.

  It was a revelation to have an encounter with a man who was effortlessly dominant, sexually aggressive, and able to read me so well that even my stunned responses and token resistance did not slow his roll. Previously, any sexual aggression I’d absorbed had taken place after explicit communication. This was not so clear. He pushed, I acquiesced. He pushed harder, I retreated. He demanded, I crumbled. He took what he wanted, I gave it up with a delicate blend of relief, fear, and confused arousal. Here was exactly what I had secretly craved: someone who knew, just knew, my deep, dark secret who took one look at me and reached inside to that dark place and exploited it for his own pleasure. And ultimately for mine.

  Fantasizing about acts that are manifestations of nonconsensual encounters is one thing. Deciding to consciously explore them is another.

  As I unpacked this experience and started sharing it with trusted friends, no one chastised me for my fantasy. Friends nodded, a gleam in their eyes, asked for details, wanted to know what happened next. And next. I realized I wasn’t on the fringe. Not by a long shot. And I wanted more.

  But getting more presented a substantial challenge.

  Fantasizing about acts that are manifestations of nonconsensual encounters is one thing. Deciding to consciously explore them is another. I think we can all agree that the violence of rape and sexual assault, the violence of bigotry and racism, the horror of sexual abuse, the crime and horror of incest, are not acceptable. They are inexcusable, criminal acts of violence.

  So how can it be that so many of us have fantasies along these lines? How can it be that, in one breath, I can condemn the rapist and yet fantasize about being ravaged and raped?

  INTENT AND CONSENT

  There are two fundamental concepts here: consent and intent.

  The intent of those participating in taboo role play is not to harm others. Their intent may vary. It can be a reclamation, a re-creation, an exploration—but it is never a decimation, an obliteration of the humanity of the people involved. Intent is all-important when diving into these dark waters.

  Consent is also pivotal. Inasmuch as a person who engages in a fantasy about being used and degraded by a terrifying sexual predator has consented to the scenario being manifested, the acts are elevated above criminality. Rape, incest, abuse based on race, gender, sexual preference, or physical ability are not acceptable—unless they are. Once these taboos are brought to light as a forbidden fruit that the participants willingly, and with open eyes, choose to ingest, the game is entirely different. It can be transmuted, with negotiation and consent, to a profound exploration of the darkness within us all. It can be everything from light and fun to darkly cathartic.

  But you must enter into this maze with a grounded sense of yourself, your motives, and your desires, and an awareness of the inherent and hidden risks.

  Let me be very clear. I am in no way condoning any behavior that is nonconsensually perpetrated upon another perso
n as a means of physical and emotional violence. Rather, I am saying that those who desire to explore these fantasies in the context of a consensual, self-aware, intentional exploration of personal desires ought not be reflexively pathologized. I believe that these fantasies can be deeply empowering, and we should give ourselves permission to dig in this dirt.

  It is vital to understand that consent must be granted by all involved parties when exploring scenarios that employ physical manifestations of violence and psychological shades of coercion. As someone who has been on the receiving end of sexual assault, I can tell you firsthand that there is a universe of difference between the dark seduction of a rape-play fantasy and fighting off a would-be attacker or being taken advantage of via emotional pressure or coercion. Consent and choice are what sets this type of play apart from abuse and assault. I choose the time, the place and the partners with whom I play in this realm. I make the decision with a clear-eyed and sober mind-set. I negotiate and I check in. I know my partners will be with me before, throughout, and in the aftermath of our shared experience. And I know that they care for me. The sexual abuser or rapist is not in the business of negotiation and thoughtful, caring planning. Your fantasy and desire is not their1 concern.

  Playing in the realm of consensual nonconsent may blur the lines of default “No means no!” language. But remember, all involved parties must give consent to and accept responsibility for the risks associated with these boundary-pushing scenes. Everyone assumes a risk. Being aware of and prepared for these risks is pivotal. Maintaining boundaries is not something to be compromised.

  WHY GO THERE?