Grab your galley whip, prepare your pup mask, and round up your rope—because today is National Kink Day! Celebrated each year on October 6th, National Kink Day just so happens to also fall within National Kink Month, which runs—you guessed it—through the entire month of October. No matter whether you are a 24/7 practitioner of BDSM, one-hundred percent vanilla, or anywhere in between: this is an occasion to celebrate and center the erotic non-normative.
But wait, you might ask: erotic non-normative? What the hell is that?
Well, friend, read on.
The Er0tic
Some of my friends (acquaintances might be a better term) refer to kink as “that weird sex stuff.” It’s annoying, but it’s hard to blame them. The cultural association of sex with kink is pretty deeply ingrained. In principle, though, the two are separable: sex can obviously exist without kink, and kink can just the same exist without sex. The sheer number of asexual kinksters (like myself!) is a testament to this fact.
So if kink isn’t essentially connected to sex, how should we understand it? On one way of moving forward, we can conceive of kink as essentially centering the erotic—which sometimes overlap with sex, but sometimes explores other territory entirely. Sometimes the erotic is physical, sometimes more purely mental or emotional. It’s such a big concept that it can seem hard to even begin to wrap our heads around it—yet, somehow, with our hearts and gut, we know it. We feel it.
Though the word erotic has its roots in the Greek erōs, which means something like intimate or sensual love, the term covers much more than such a limited translation might suggest. In the 1980s, queer Black feminist poet Audre Lorde discussed this broader coverage in her "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” There, Lorde characterizes the erotic as “creative energy empowered” and “those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.” In exploring these empowered, creative energies, we find the power to effect change. In this way, then, the erotic is fundamentally a form of deep agency, a personal agency that allows us to connect deeply with ourselves, with others, and with the world as we shape it into a place of deeper meaning.
The Non-Normative
It’s no secret that we live in a society governed by norms: social conventions, sometimes made explicit and sometimes left unspoken, that govern how we are “supposed” to act, both individually and collectively. All societies function this way; they’d probably collapse if they didn’t. This doesn’t mean, though, that all of the norms are sacred—or that we shouldn’t push back against some of them or ignore others entirely.
Consider our norms regarding the erotic. They are often highly restricted, restrictive, and rooted in disempowering and dehumanizing ideologies. Such norms are riddled with misogyny, cisnormativity, homophobia, ableism, classism, and more—in short, they’re the sorts of norms that often actively get in our way and block our path to flourishing, on both personal and cultural levels. (They’re also the sort of norms that largely exist to serve those who wield the most power.)
The practice of kink, however, gives us space to step outside of these norms and explore that which the dominant culture deems transgressive. While much of our culture decries free erotic expression, kink revels in it, inventing and reinventing conventional erotic scripts. It treats these scripts as starting points, rather than end goals. In this sense, kink is inherently non-normative: it exists in opposition to and in defiance of established norms of how eroticism must be practiced.
This isn’t to say, of course, that kink is invariably practiced in a manner that pushes back against misogyny, cisnormativity, homophobia, ableism, classism, etc. To say that it is would be dangerously misleading. What it does do, however, is open a space in which eroticism can be embraced, explored, and celebrated in a manner that facilitates, with intention and care, a divorce from such insidious ideologies.
Centering the Er0tic Non-Normative
Putting together all of the above, we arrive at an understanding of kink as the exploration of a deep form of agency that transgresses narrow and restrictive cultural norms regarding the “proper” expression and experience of the erotic. Sure, kink is whips and rope and leather and degredation and … — but, under the surface, it is so much more than that.
On occasions like National Kink Day (and all of National Kink Month!), we center this exploration of the erotic non-normative. In doing so, we draw it in from the margins—where it usually lives—and grant it center stage. In terms of erotic culture, we let it lead for a while. Not for the sake of assimilating kink into the dominant culture, of course, but for the sake of utilizing kink as a tool to erode the stifling erotic norms that grip so many of us in a strangle hold. The goal isn’t to defang or declaw kink, but instead to wield it tooth and claw as we all seek erotic liberation and step—individually and collectively—into our own deep agency.
Written by Ley David Elliette Cray, PhD (she/they),
GSRD (Gender, Sexuality, and Relationship Diversity) Content Specialist for the Sexual Health Alliance.
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