Has BDSM Become Blasé

Let’s be honest, BDSM has lost its edge. After all, there are only so many places we can take whips and chains, even in the vast expanse of fiction, and shock loses its value the second time around. So many of us seem to be taking a yawning been there, done that attitude with kink stories.

So why are we still telling them?

Because, for those of us who live and love this lifestyle, it was never about edge or shock. Its value lies in something else.

For me, it’s love. Romance, sure, but more than that. It’s about sharing a love of this lifestyle and, more importantly, a love of the people in it.

When I started Show Me, Sir, I wanted to tell more than just a love story.  I think one of the best parts about beginning to discover and explore your kinks is finding and befriending people who are just like you. Who share this thing inside you that feels so different.

And, for all the BDSM fiction I’ve read, that was a story I hadn’t really heard a lot. For all that we’ve culturally come out of our closets since the popularity of authors like E.L. James and Megan Hart, so many of our stories still stay there. So many are still confined to bedrooms and couples when, for many of us, our worlds are so much larger.

With Max, I wanted to give the lifestyle more scope.

Because, for kinksters, taking it out of the bedroom can be fun. In my first novel, The Taming School, kink was something Kat had to hide from everyone else. That she could only enjoy under pseudonyms and in the privacy of her partner’s bedroom. And that is an experience that many kinksters have. But it isn’t every experience. I wanted, in my second novel, to have both Max and her Sir have friends and connections in the kink world outside of each other. I wanted them to be able to share this aspect of their lives and love with those friends, both in terms of active play and in communal support.

Community events like munches and play parties offer fantastic settings for stories still yet to be told. Stories that allow us to discuss things like the more-than-monogamy mentality that many of us have with relationships, where play and sex and love aren’t always confined within a couple, but are often more open to personal interpretation and preference. And it allows us to talk about the nature of play which, while innately sexual, is often friendly and…well, playful, and not always romantic or exclusive. There are so many ways to love and connect in kinkland that are unique and too often unexplored.

And, by taking kink out of the closet, it also allows us to address more of the dangers many of us face, the prejudices still out there in the world. The further we come out of our closets, the more open we make ourselves to the world, which is still not always a welcoming place for us, for all the attention we’ve gained within it. There are still so many assumptions made about who we are and what we do. Most of which has very little to do with who we actually are and what we actually do.

So, when we come out, we face things like family and friends and lovers who are suddenly afraid for us or are afraid of us. People who’ve known us our entire lives or who’ve known us better than anyone else in the world, in one admission, look at us like we’re strangers or frauds. Who, as Mollena Williams puts it, “fear the pervert cooties”. Suddenly, employers or coworkers who had never cared what we do in our off-hours feel like they can and ought to weigh in on our private lives. And, should we happen to trust the wrong people with this side of ourselves, we can lose friends, family, children, jobs. In the wrong state and in front of the wrong authority, we can even find ourselves on the wrong side of the law.

And, even in less extreme ways, there are a million micro-aggressions we face everyday. Accusations of setting back feminism or equality. Unwarranted assumptions about our sexual appetites or habits. Disparaging comments on our personalities or life choices. People thinking that, just because you’re submissive, that they can push you around without your consent or that, just because you’re Dominant, that you must be abusive or controlling.
There is still the pervasive belief that, if you're kinky, you must be unhealthy, unhappy, or unlovable.

We need more stories about us that are told by us. Stories that seek to speak not just to the kinky things we do, but to who we are as people. To say that kink stories are blasé, when there are so many kinkster’s stories that aren’t often captured in traditional kink stories, is like saying all love stories are blasé. We’ve told love stories forever, yet we keep telling them. Because each story is different. Each story is unique and special. Each story is important and deserves its chance to be told.

Including ours.