Your Extreme Is My Vanilla

Welcome to this special Valentine's edition of Kink-e-Zine. Well, that's not really true. It's the February issue, but that Hallmarkiest of Hallmark holidays just happens to fall within the cozy confines of our second publication of 2012, and we'd be remiss if we didn't mention it. But the reality is that kink doesn't need a holiday to be celebrated any more than love, sex, respect, friendship, or companionship need one. We shouldn't ever need an excuse to engage in the things we most enjoy.

What we can do, however, is use it as an excuse to talk about some of the issues that maybe get shelved in our work-a-day lives. It's easy to get distracted, and when the time comes to blow off steam, be it going to a bondage club to socialize, or tie up your lover in the bedroom, we typically just focus on that moment and don't want to be bothered. But there's an irony there. Because the fact of the matter is we *are* bothered. We're bothered by quite a lot, even if we don't want to admit it.

For a community of people based on diversity, acceptance, and tolerance, it always amazes me to see how offences often rise from seemingly inconsequential corners of the play space. Most of us get plenty of political correctness in our work spaces or social circles. We practice personal censorship through our internal governors in deference to those we assume might easily take offence. But within our community, there is also a clear tendency to look for things that make us mad; that rub up against our values. And it's understandable. Kink, after all, is "alternative." Most of us have spent our entire lives looking for acceptance, and now that we have it, we want to defend it.

That defense, however, can come at a cost. We can defend our territory in constructive or destructive ways. We can look for those things that might set us off; those things that identify a person or a group as "other," and then we can take them on. We can take them on for exhibiting heterosexual privilege, male privilege, racial privilege, or whatever other privilege we may choose. We can rant, rave, and accuse the intolerances of that privilege as an infringement on our very rights. We have, somehow, developed a perceived right to be offended.

A reality of kink, however, is that many of us (actually, I'd hazard to say all of us) act in opposition. We have sex as an opposition to normal, vanilla sex. We play publicly in opposition to the idea we must remain behind closed doors. We construct scenes to challenge assumptions of race, creed, identity, or belief. We play to shock. We play to offend. We also play to love, and to show and demonstrate intimacy. We play to steal power from large, ugly things from our histories, individual and collective. We dress up as priests or nuns, schoolgirls or marms, as soldiers or sailors, rednecks or sophisticates. We mock the pretentions of high society by pantomiming its darker side. We inhabit a world of the grotesque in all its wonder, beauty, and glory. We poke fun at what the outside, gaping, anxious world calls acceptable, by heaping excesses onto reconstructed images of that normalcy.

When these machinations cause offence within our own fringe community, then, I am left somewhat bemused. In a construct where "right" is mercilessly mocked, it is curious how so much can be perceived as "wrong." Yet, we do it. We say that my kink is ok, but yours offends me and needs to stop; that what I do is allowed, but what you do should be altered; that what you do makes me uncomfortable, so stop making me uncomfortable. I disagree entirely. To take the power out of racism, you have to show the absurdity of it. To belittle religious excess, you have to humble it in a new context. To counter any established or seemingly sanctioned idea of correct behavior, you have to be willing to make it absurd.

To those who offend, congratulations. To those who take offence, ask what it is you value. Because we are offended only by those things that challenge our values. Before we accuse, demand change, or sanction others, consider the consequences of becoming the very thing we work so hard to subvert. Here at Kink-e-Zine, we offer this month articles on bondage, sex, polyamory, and relationship dynamics. It's a safe bet these pages will not find universal appeal. And that fact makes me happy. If every article written appealed to every single reader, I would worry.