From the quippy, queer and (q)inky author of Kink & Identity comes this masterful musing of meta-ness…

The only thing I love more than talking about kink is talking about talking about kink.  It’s a thing that I didn’t grow up doing: white girls from the suburbs, despite whatever romanticized notions 50 Shades of Grey postulates about the adventurous inclinations of the nation’s repressed, tend not to get very far beyond admissions that yes, in fact, sex does exist – now will you please pass the broccoli?  Where college, for many, is a time of sexual revolution, for me it was a revolution of talking about sex.  The euphemisms of my teenage years segued into academic, even clinical, discussions about sex (no joke – I took an actual class for which one of the sections was a porn screening, complete with discussion and the campus Christian group walking by the window looking horrified), and I realized that there might be a lot more out there than even my rich high school browser history would suggest.

Writing this article was in a lot of ways a summary of all the things I found most interesting and important about all those conversations.  If you’re taking the time to read this, you’ve probably read at least a little about the absolutely horrifying prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses, and mine was no different.  This means that a lot of the conversations we had about sex were also about consent: who gets to give it, how it should work, how important it is.  So talking about kink in a lot of ways is one big discussion of consent – and that might be my favorite part, because it’s not just making sure that everyone says “yes”.  It goes way deeper; it’s much more affirmative. When you’re talking about kink, you’re making sure that everyone says yes to themselves.

I was so excited to finally get to write a little bit about queerness and kink.  I’ve been queer a lot longer than I’ve been kinky, and as any of my (very patient, kind, tolerant) friends will attest, it’s one of my favorite topics of conversation.  And obviously the two are related: there is a sort of necessary relationship between sexual orientation or preference and sexual practice, but I think their relationship has a lot less to do with sex than it does with ideology and identity.  Writing the article made me reflect on the ways in which the things that I really like about being queer – that I do get to be a bit different, but that difference is my own secret to share – map pretty directly onto thinking of yourself not only as a person who enjoys kink, but as a kinky person.