AMA: What do you think the best book is for an intro to kink?
My book recommendations for people looking to explore the naughtier side of being naughty.
In a society that feeds off of our unhappiness and our disconnect from personal pleasure, seeking self-pleasure and the erotic is a radical act.
Agh, I loveeee this question. Thank you for sending it in, dear reader! I am so glad you asked.
Kink is a delicate balance between the intimate and the unknown; a gray area where the unfamiliar is celebrated, and intoxicating. Some of the pleasure of kink is from its very nature of being something naughty, deviant, or unusual. Intimacy is the biggest killer of eroticism, and so it’s natural to fear that learning too much about your kink can lead to boredom or a feeling of being underwhelmed (hello, scrolling through hundreds of porn clips because they just don’t seem to do it anymore).
However, because kink toes the line between normal and fantasy; because it loves to push boundaries and test power dynamics, it is very, very, very easy to accidentally harm or traumatize someone; even if you don’t mean to. Therefore, it’s good to do research to make sure that whatever your kink is, you are practicing it in a way that will only bring pleasure and good memories for your partner, and not something they will spend years undoing in therapy.
In kink, it’s best to practice the golden rule of camping: leave it better than you found it.
I started my kink journey a long time ago; as a means to heal my sexual trauma, and to give myself power and agency over my desire. Growing up in a religious household, I was taught how to please a future male partner, but never how to pursue pleasure for myself. It was more important to learn how to cook and clean and how to even give a blowjob, but touching myself was a sin. I was raised to be desirable, but never taught how to figure out what I wanted. Paris Hilton, one of the most iconic sex symbols of the early 2000s, is described by her then-boyfriend Nick Carter as being ‘bad in bed,’ because she just ‘lay there.’ At the time we were all quick to call her a prude, a pillow princess, a selfish bimbo or even a dumb bitch, but when a person is only ever taught how to be sexy but never taught how to enjoy sex, you’ll often find that sex, a two-way conversation between two consenting bodies, feels like shouting into the void, or, well, fucking a corpse. Hilton later describes herself as follows, “I was known as a sex symbol, but anything sexual terrified me. I called myself the ‘kissing bandit’ because I only liked to make out. A lot of my relationships didn’t work out because of that.” I remember when I first starting having sex that all of my focus was on what I should be doing to make my partner happy. I focused on sucking in my stomach so he would see my abs, on pushing my boobs out so they’d bounce, on making the right noises and saying the right things, but never on my own pleasure. I missed out on so many enjoyable moments of connection with those partners, and in turn, denied them the chance to give me the pleasure that I actually wanted, but didn’t know how to ask for.
As I aged and started dating (and stopped going to church), I eventually started going to sex parties, orgies, dungeons, and fetish events. I was fascinated by what turned other people on, and adopted a ‘don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,’ mentality. I tried almost everything from splooshing to fisting to peeing into a man’s mouth to locking a slave into the garden on a night that it was snowing. I slowly built my own pleasure map, learning the things I liked and the things I didn’t. Certain things helped more than others; I really loved the local communities I became a part of or tests like this one; the oldest and perhaps best-known and thorough list of fetishes and kinks to test, and I even did tests with partners where only the questions you both answered ‘yes’ on will show up on your shared results. These are great if you’re say, secretly a furry but would rather not let a new partner know that unless they too, put furry sex on their list of things they want to try.
Of course as I got into these communities I also got into the literature, which finally brings me back to the question at hand: what book is the best for an intro into kink? Let me introduce you to my bible: Ultimate Guide to Kink: Bdsm, Role Play and the Erotic Edge is an amazing and comprehensive book that not only explores how to practice safe kink play (whether it’s tying someone up, choking them, hitting them with shit, or straight up sadism). It’s not a book for rabbit holing, but it is the best and more thorough introduction to the subject. What’s more, author Tristan Taormino includes entire sections about the psychology of kink and how to teeter on the edge without pushing someone over. Each chapter focuses on a different kink, and each is written by a different expert in that field, giving readers a broad and encompassing general knowledge.
If you’re looking for something a little more fictional that leans more on erotica than an actual handbook, I really loved this collection of short stories called Kink: Stories, edited by lauded writers R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, and featuring a roster of all-star contributors including Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, and more. Each story is a bite-sized tidbit of kink and fetish, and like in normal relationships, there are some you’ll love and some that will most likely make you deeply uncomfortable. It’s a good one for exploring not just kink, but how kink makes people feel.
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