Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1 - Welcome, and Thanks
Chapter 2 - What Are You Feeling Now?
Chapter 3 - About the Language in This Book
Chapter 4 - On Kink
Chapter 5 - What Do Kinky People Actually Do?
Chapter 6 - How We Stay Safe
Chapter 7 - Your Kinky Person’s World - And Welcome To It
Chapter 8 - Coming To Terms
Chapter 9 - A Special Chapter for Helping Professionals
Chapter 10 - What If It’s Your Partner?
Chapter 11 - Conclusion: Kink Unburied
Glossary
13
© 2000 by Dossie Easton & Janet W. Hardy.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Published in the United States by Greenery Press, 1447 Park Ave., Emeryville, CA 94608.
www.greenerypress.com
ISBN 1-890159-23-9
Readers should be aware that all sexual activities carry an inherent risk of physical or emotional injury, and that discussion of these activities carries some risk of injury to the emotional well-being of individuals and relationships. While we believe that following the guidelines set forth in this book will minimize that potential, the writers and publisher encourage you to be aware that you are taking some risk when you decide to engage in kink or to discuss it with your friends and relatives, and to accept personal responsibility for that risk. Neither the authors, the publisher, nor anyone else associated with the creation or sale of this book is responsible for any damage sustained.
1
Welcome, and Thanks
Can anybody really ever understand someone else’s experience, someone else’s life? We all know that an upper-middle-class female suburbanite might have trouble understanding what goes on in the heart and mind of a male inner-city denizen. But can that suburbanite really even understand the life of her next-door neighbor? If you’ve ever had the experience of attending a movie with a friend, then afterwards finding out that each of you had a completely different understanding of what that movie was trying to say, you have some idea of the challenge of bridging the huge gulf in perception between one person and the next.
Each of us brings a lifetime of experience, learning and belief to the task of forming our own perceptions. When we try to understand someone else’s reality, we cannot help but be influenced by our background. Often, it’s easy: you may not understand why your friend adores caviar when you think it tastes like, well, fish eggs - but you compare his love for this odd food to your love for chocolate truffles, and that gives you an idea of why he’d pay absurd amounts of money to fill his mouth with lumpy black goo.
Sometimes, however, it’s not that easy. If you learn that someone you care about enjoys something that you’ve been taught is weird or funny, or even wrong or sick, you may see that person in a whole new way. The gulf between you may seem uncrossable. You may even wonder if you ever knew that person in the first place.
Yet many people cross that gap every day. By learning more about whatever it is that their son, daughter, friend, parent, sibling or co-worker enjoys... by trusting that person’s ability to make healthy choices... and, above all, by continuing to offer love, friendship and affection even when things seem confusing and weird and impossible... they discover deeper, truer connections than they ever had before. That is what we want for you, and why we wrote this book.
Many, many people in this world have sexual interests or practices that are in some way unusual. These people may enjoy bondage or spanking, erotic role-playing, dressing in special clothes that turn them on, or a host of other activities that place them outside the sexual mainstream. Your mechanic might have an alternative sexuality, or your librarian, or your kids’ teacher, or your boss.
Any one of these people might enjoy alternative sex play occasionally, behind closed doors, for fun. Or they might do something considered “kinky” as their primary sexual expression. For some, their “kink” becomes a central part of their lives and their identity, so important to them that without it they’d be a different person. For a better idea of what this means, think about music: some people play a musical instrument occasionally for fun or relaxation, others play every day and consider their music an important part of their creative expression, and still others, if asked to describe themselves, would respond, “I’m a musician.”
So if you count the full spectrum, ranging from those who experiment occasionally to those who identify strongly as kinky, you’ve got a lot of people. And each one has a constellation of people who care about him or her - mothers and fathers, siblings and friends, children, spouses and co-workers.
If someone you love has a sexual kink, or if you suspect that she may, and you want to know more about what that means to her and how you can deal with what it means to you, this book is for you.
How did you get this book? Perhaps someone you care about gave it to you, hoping to help you understand more about his life. This person must trust you a lot. Many kinky people have had sad and bitter experiences with people turning away from them once their sexuality becomes known. The person who gave you this book is hoping you won’t do that. He loves you enough that he wants you to know some very important facts about his life, and he’s probably crossing his fingers right now hoping that you’ll still care about him after you’ve finished reading this.
Perhaps you bought this book yourself, because you know or suspect that someone you care about has a sexual kink. You may feel confused and ambivalent about what’s going on in her life, maybe even worried about her safety or health, so you sought out this book as a way of helping you understand. Good for you!
Maybe you bought this book because you suspect that someone you care about has a kink, but you’re not sure. Many kinky practices are rather trendy right now, so it can be hard to tell whether your friend or family member is just trying out a little “kink chic” as an experiment or for fun, or whether his kink is a long-term, deeply felt part of his central identity.
If you want to know, you’ll have to ask him... and before he gives you a straight answer, he’ll have to trust that you won’t become angry or upset or refuse to hear about unusual sexual practices. Showing him this book may help convince him that you want to hear about his life and that you can handle it. Maybe the two of you can read this book together.
No matter how you got this book, we want to reassure you of something very important. Your friend or relative is exactly the same person she was before you learned about her kink. All the things you love about her - her generosity of spirit, her affection toward you, her humor and her courage and her infectious laugh - are still just what they were before you found out about her sexual desires. Please keep that critically important fact in mind as you read on.
Who are we talking about? In this book, we’re going to address the friends and family of people whose sexual behaviors are outside the mainstream, but we won’t focus directly on issues of sexual orientation (homosexuality, bisexuality, heterosexuality) or gender identity (male-ness, femaleness, somewhere-in-betweenness).
In other words, when we say “kinky” on the cover of this book, we’re not talking about what gender someone is or wants to be or wants to have sex with (although your kinky person may certainly also be gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or transgendered). There are already some excellent resources for the loved ones of gays,
lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered folk; we’ve listed some in the Resource Guide of this book.
We’re also not going to directly address the families and friends of sex workers (prostitutes and other people who work in the sex industry). We’d love to see such a book published, but, unfortunately, we don’t have the expertise to write it ourselves.
So the kinds of kinky people we’ll talk about here are people whose desires and/or behavior include fetishism, crossdressing, bondage, spanking, sadomasochism, dominance and submission, and erotic roleplaying - either occasionally or as a lifestyle. If you’re feeling confused by these terms, unsure even what we’re talking about... don’t worry, we’ll explain everything as we go.
You may be feeling terrified, your head full of scary pictures of leather and whips and activities that you might only have heard whispered about. Let us reassure you - much of the far-out clothing and accessories you may have seen people wear are designed as turn-ons and recognition signals, but they can look pretty frightening to outsiders. None of the activities we’re discussing in this book are as scary as your imagination might make them seem. Please take a deep breath, relax, turn off that overactive imagination if you can, and let us try to give you a better explanation of what’s going on.
Why do you need to know this? You probably don’t tell your kinky friend or relative what you did in bed last night, so you may be wondering why it’s so important to him that you understand his sexual desires.
If you’re heterosexual and not kinky, you are fortunate that the world you live in provides a place for you. People around you already pretty much understand your sexual needs and behaviors; you don’t have to do a lot of explaining. Even if you enjoy an occasional walk on the wild side - a bit of bondage or role-playing - if you consider those activities to be a special treat or experiment and not part of your essential identity, you’ll probably still fit in pretty comfortably.
Fitting in may not be so easy for your friend or family member. For many people (including your authors), our kink is central to our sense of who we are and where we fit into the world - as important as our gender or our race or our life-work or our marital status. Our kink places us, for better or worse, firmly on the margins of society, living always a little bit in a shadow. We often feel unsafe, never totally sure who knows what about us (or who should). We put a lot of time and energy into building our own communities to provide us with support and safety and social connection. For us, when our sexual lifestyle is essential to our sense of identity, anybody who doesn’t know about our kink doesn’t really know us.
Imagine how it would feel to spend time with someone who likes you and cares about you and knows a whole lot about you, but doesn’t know, and isn’t allowed to know, that you’re married (or a person of color, or a professional artist, or whatever). You can see how uncomfortable that would be, how you’d feel as though you were always lying just a little bit.
Do you really want your friend or relative to feel that way about you - to have to hide something that important to his identity and his life, and to always feel just a little bit on guard while talking to you? We hope not.
Where are you getting your information? Often, the friends and family of kinkyfolk have as their only source of information a lot of very sensationalized and inaccurate images put forth by television, movies, newspapers and so on. Please keep in mind that the people who create movies, television shows, novels and the like may know less about kink than you do - and that their job isn’t to spread good information, it’s to make money. In the old advertising phrase, “sex sells,” and sensational sex sells even better. If all you get to hear about kink are such negative, exaggerated and inaccurate messages, then of course you’ll believe that kinky people are screwed up and scary, and chances are you’ll feel upset to learn that someone close to you is “one of them.”
So where do you get reliable, non-sensationalized information? Well, that’s what we aim to do in this book. We’ll give you definitions of many terms you may not understand, and descriptions of what’s actually involved in various kinks. The Resource Guide in the back can point you toward more information about particular practices, and to good, well-researched, accurate books.
But your most important source of information is your kinky person herself. If you’re feeling confused or uncertain about what she’s trying to explain to you, don’t turn to the National Enquirer or even your old college psychology textbook - ask her. Only she can tell you what she actually does, why she enjoys it, what she gets out of it, and how she keeps herself safe and happy while she does it. If you can’t imagine yourself talking about such embarrassingly intimate stuff, this book will help you.
No apologies. Most of us grew up in a world where sex was a source of shame, and non-standard sex practically unspeakable. You may be accustomed to people who act guilty or ashamed about their sexual behaviors. If so, the tone of this book may seem a little unusual to you, because you’re not going to read any apologies in here. We think that sex is wonderful, and that kinky sex is wonderful too, and that an interest in sex outside the mainstream is something to be proud of.
Proud? Of being perverted?? Well, yes. It is very difficult to come to terms with an alternative sexuality in a culture that teaches us that we are bad, sick, damaged and/or undesirable for wanting what we want. It’s also difficult to find ways to enact “unacceptable” fantasies in a manner which is healthy, fun and consensual for everybody involved. We think any kinky person who has succeeded in doing these things has done something of which they - and you - should be very proud.
Your behavior has power. Kinky people often feel scared and isolated. Sometimes they may even hate themselves for “giving in” to a sexual kink that they know sets them apart from the rest of the world.
We’re pretty sure you don’t want anybody you care about to feel frightened, alone or self-hating. As someone who cares, you have a great deal of power to help or harm your friend or family member. Your behavior matters - it can help your kinky person to feel healthy, loved and accepted, or leave them feeling rejected, isolated and alone.
By reading even these first few pages, you’ve taken an important and positive step. THANK YOU!!!
Who are we and why should you listen to us? We’re two middle-aged women living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dossie is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who specializes in the needs of people who have unusual sexualities. Catherine is a writer and publisher. Between us, we’ve tried and enjoyed a lot of the kinks in this book, although we’re best known as writers about, and practitioners of, S/M (sadomasochism) and polyamory (multipartner relationships). We’re here to tell you what our world looks like from the inside.
We’re both fortunate enough to be surrounded by people who care enough about us to accept all our kinks. Both of us are mothers of grown or near-grown children who are aware of our proclivities and comfortable with them. We’re both also on good and honest terms with almost all of our families of origin, our co-workers and associates, and even our exes. And, yes, we both know how incredibly lucky we are.
We see ourselves as messengers from faraway places. We have traveled in forbidden territories where many others have not, and acted upon a great deal of what you may know only from stories and fantasies. We have explored territories inside ourselves and between each other that many people have forbidden themselves even to think about. These experiences have made us very different; we live in a different culture, with different assumptions, different rules, different agreements, different boundaries...
Our hope in writing this book is that we may offer you information and answer questions about life on the fringes of sexual expression, increase your understanding and your tolerance so that you may, perhaps, feel more secure about your friends and family members who live in our world, or even have a clearer idea of what the consequences might be if you choose to travel here yourself. We also hope to pass along to you some of what we have learned on this bizarre journe
y, for how we love and how we play has brought us some knowledge and wisdom that can be found in this particular way.
This will be clearer later on. For now, we will strive to find the words to communicate to you both the joy the wisdom we have found, an expanded understanding of how we express ourselves and share sexual experience.
But we didn’t want our voices to be the only ones you heard in this book. So we also asked as many people as we could contact to write “the letter you wouldn’t dare send” - the letters they don’t dare send to their parents, children, friends, siblings or spouses, explaining their kinks and asking for acceptance. Some are funny, some angry, some sad, some loving.
We have scattered these letters throughout the book, to give you an idea of the thoughts and wishes of kinky people everywhere, and to help you understand what your kinky person might want you to know.
2
What Are You Feeling Now?
Learning that someone you care about has a sexual kink isn’t like finding out that they like their cheeseburgers with onions, or that they’re going to Disney World for their next vacation. While your situation may not be as terrifying or upsetting as it seems right now, how you feel about it is important: it can affect how you see your friend or relative, her relationships, and her place in the world.
Here are some thoughts or feelings we have heard from our own friends and relatives:
Some people feel scared: “What if he gets hurt?” “Doesn’t she know there are diseases out there?”
Others feel guilty: “What did I do to make him this way?” “Is this because I spanked her when she was little?” “If only I’d been more loving...”
B003B0W1QC EBOK Page 1
