Not Kinky

The panel at the literary festival features celebrated contributors to a collection of “transgressive” erotic stories. It’s not a fringe work—they’re taking erotica mainstream. The group skews younger, racially diverse, predominantly queer. Some of them are among my favorite contemporary writers. When pressed to define what constitutes “transgressive,” they are quick to clarify: “We’re not gatekeepers,” an editor assures the audience. “We’re not trying to say, ‘That’s too vanilla, get out of the kinky-kids club.’ Our primary interest is good art.”

I nod. They talk about the frisson of vulnerability, performance, and power. They describe the subversion of adverbs, the eros of nouns. Everyone in the audience nods. My whole forehead is pulling toward my nose, but I keep nodding. Yes, of course, who is to say what kink is or isn’t. Yes, I too am sexy and transgressive and cool. I am aroused by literature, not Google image searches of the phrase “spanking cartoon.”

“Mm,” I assert, nodding and nodding.

As they discuss the theatricality of the erotic, the writers never utter the word fetish, or even spank. They do mention spit—twice—and both times my girlfriend winces at my side.

“Is spitting the new choking?” I whisper, my hand in her lap, twined in hers.

“Ew.”

I mostly write plays, but I’ve skipped the dramaturgy panel in favor of this. It is among the most popular events of the festival. Large oscillating fans flank the walls, working at triple-speed to cool the packed rows. The crowd gleams with sequined sneakers, asymmetrical haircuts, brocade blazers. My girlfriend and I are underdressed. But I met her from reading her erotic stories, so surely we belong here.

That is what I tell people: That my girlfriend writes “queer erotica” and that is how we found each other. I like the sound of it—bold, sexy, vague. I don’t often fill in the details: that we connected on a site for adults with fetishes, that we met in person at a casino hotel convention for adults obsessed with recreational spanking, that almost none of her stories contain sex.

My close friends know these details, or the gist of them. I struggle with specificity. I like words like kink and even BDSM because they pretend to disclose while deftly masking the truth of things: the all-day immersive boarding school event for which I designed an extensive character backstory, the platonic friend I sent to the corner for breaking her promise not to get high before work, the extra minute added for fidgeting. They picture leather harnesses, red lamps, manacled limbs; we are fully clothed in loose flannel PJs, staring at the wall in silence. My secret transgressive sex life is LARPing. It is Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, before those things attained the sheen of cool.

“It strikes me that in a shame-free world without taboos or transgressions, what we think of as kinks could not exist,” one of the writers says, intelligently, like someone who has never masturbated to message boards that share poorly written “memories of discipline from the old days.” Like someone who gets off to poetry, to pornography. “Writings like these are part of the project of reducing shame, building toward such a world, but I wonder what that world would look like, what new shapes desire would take.”

“Yes, yes!” chimes another panelist. “Kink futurism. Here for it.”

My girlfriend squeezes my hand.

“He’s almost too cute to handle.”

I look at my beaming girlfriend, at the panelist. Yes, he is cute, his excitement, his grin, his beanie. There’s nothing to disagree with, but I blink, bemused anew at my girlfriend’s generosity with the world, her readiness to be delighted by it. She offers affection where I am appraising, furrowed, and mistrustful toward the impressive writers whose work I admire. I slump lower in my chair, feeling combative, a fetish separatist, wanting someone to speak to the specific, non-vague, non-universal, Magic-the-Gathering-wall-staring reality of our kind. Our lived experience, as they say. Even as my shoulders curl I feel the absurdity of it. Time spent in graduate school, in public dungeons, and on social media has taught me the difference between a tantrum and a critique, oppression and being annoyed.

I squeeze her hand back, because her warmth is grounding, particularly at the threshold of a tantrum.

I am now angry at this panel, this frustrating panel that thinks sex is vowels or commas or something

Be more like her, I tell myself. Be generous with the art and adorableness of others. I look back to the writer who I resented for the invented crime of enjoying pornography. Videos don’t do much for me, even the fetish ones. My imagination is lush. Moreover, I am extremely picky. Besides, the more time you spend in a fetish scene, the harder it is to find a video that doesn’t star one of your friends.

My girlfriend faces the panel, but her eyes swing toward me and she tugs my wrist.

“Sit up straight.”

I glare at her. I am not angry at her; I am now angry at this panel, this frustrating panel that thinks sex is vowels or commas or something, when sex is obviously the website of a pro-corporal-punishment military school in the Deep South, or maybe an animated car whose trunk is popped to reveal a little bottom that the Dad-car spanks (but you’re not ready for that conversation, screams my Twitter-addled mind), this panel full of adults and their grown-up sex and grown-up art, these kinky luminaries, these frauds. I am not angry at her, but I am allowed to glare at her, so long as I’m willing to accept the consequences.

She looks at me. I sit up straight.

A friend—a vanilla friend, I have no qualms with these distinctions—once asked if I would still date my girlfriend if she weren’t into spanking.

No, I answered so immediately it felt almost like a betrayal. In guilt I hastened to explain myself, with the struggle for language that always accompanies haste and the righteous sense that I shouldn’t have to explain myself at all. It’s like asking a lesbian if she’d date a man. But parallels to gender felt uneasy, unfair, formed on shifting sand that could slide into reductive or TERF-ish quarries. I quickly changed tack. Got lofty, a professor. For us, it’s not a discrete act, or a preference, but a primary means of ascertaining the erotic.

Professor-speak is great because I can say “ascertaining the erotic” instead of “sexting GIFs of claymation penguins” and Ctrl-F searching select passages of the Anne of Green Gables series.

That, I realize, with the newfound perspective afforded by good posture, is what frustrates me about the panel. How they wield the elevated discourse of literature, which masks the silly, banal facts of lived transgression. I want them to stop being ambiguous and fancy and name their weird shit. Of course, they are being asked to speak about a book before strangers at a literary festival, not to explain their personal lives to their close friends in the kitchen at 1 a.m.

I pull my free festival pen out of my free-with-purchase festival tote bag and start clicking it furiously.

“Is everything okay?” my girlfriend whispers.

“I . . . wanted it to be more kinky,” I answer, weakly. “I mean, more fetishy.”

“Well,” she shrugs, with a good-natured sigh. Well of course. Well of course we want that, we want everything to be more like that. That’s what it’s like. She takes the pen.

The language conflict has always been a problem for me. I do not believe fetishes are explicable to those who do not possess them. It feels unseemly, like an unsolicited dick pic. But if the truth is inappropriate, what’s left? Academic ambivalence, the wide umbrella of BDSM, the lovely meaningless adult sensibility of “kink.” Even within my niche in the kink scene, I’ve found ways to hide with language. Many of my own early erotic stories were exercises in literary gamification, designed to show off my imaginative abilities rather than reveal my desires. Why would I need a short story to get me off, anyway? I got off to the Wikipedia page for “spanking.”

These were stories I wrote as a young adult. As a child, I was more honest, scribbling scenes exclusively for myself and hiding the Mead notebooks in the back of my closet. Then later, typing them into the computer, savoring the glow of the monitor and the strain between my legs before saving them to floppy disks under names like “Potassium Paper” and “Social Studies: Fall.”

My girlfriend leans forward slightly in her wooden folding chair: The moderator has mentioned “whipping,” a promising development. It’s the largest bone we’ll be tossed this session, sadly. We look at each other—we know exactly which words catch our attention; we seize on the same phrases. There is no language barrier here. And she doesn’t have the same struggle with translation; she loves to answer questions for an inquisitive vanilla. The stories she writes are lovely and tender, undisguised, attuned to the vulnerable details that induce shivers. They’re not stories about sex, they’re alt-universe vignettes in which friends discipline each other when they misbehave, not for sexual gratification but for their own good. No one in these stories is kinky. To acknowledge kink or sex would be to break the spell. I masturbate to them all the time.

Her hand finds my thigh. I have no idea, really, what I’m angry about, why all the muscles in my face and chest contract when the panelists expound and riposte. Sometimes I have a tantrum because I need my girlfriend’s hand on my thigh. I do not think this is one of those times, but it could be.

I am not the first person to fall in love with her from reading her stories, and if I linger too long over my own luck I will be overwhelmed, as sometimes happens when she kisses me and I can’t kiss back, stricken and stilled by the impossibility of answered desire. These bouts of paralysis frustrate me. I worry she’ll think I’m not responsive, when the truth is my body leaps for hers pathetically. Often she messages a photo and a spasm below my belly will cause my toes to flex in opposite directions. She can have this effect with a line of text, with an emoji. It is embarrassing, and wholly new, though I have been sexually embarrassed since I was five years old and experienced my first moment of sexual awareness from a clip of an animated bear cub turned over mother bear’s knee.

“To think,” I once told my girlfriend, “I might have been a furry.”

The audience Q and A begins, and someone asks about the relationship between kink and queerness, and the panelists give thoughtful responses I agree with and respect. Someone inquires about the writers’ own literary inspirations, which disappoints me, because it seems like a waste. They could ask that at any panel; I want someone to ask about shibari or vore or feet. At this point I don’t care which fetish it is, I just want to hear the cool writers talk about them. At play parties I’m frustrated because I want to talk about subjects other than kink—literature, say—and now I’m annoyed the literary festival isn’t pervier. I make accidental eye contact with a volunteer in an orange T-shirt. Maybe they’d politely ask me to return the mic if I brought that energy to the panel. Dungeon Monitors maintaining the code of conduct. Maybe I’m annoyed because an editor said they weren’t necessarily looking to explore the obvious transgressions, and I’m offended that my sexuality is “too obvious.”

That’s what I tell my girlfriend, later in the line for the book signing, when she returns to the spot I’ve held in the queue with refills of white wine in two plastic cups. She laments that spanking got zero shoutouts, her sole negative review of the event.

“Because it’s too obvious,” I say, trading her book for my wine. “Kink should be subtle, like . . . a semicolon, or critical theory, or having vanilla sex.”

“Mm, that’s way too out-there for me.”

I want to say something flirty, but I’ve swallowed a sip of wine too quickly, producing an interval of undignified sputters.

“They didn’t really . . . They didn’t really get at the thing, though.” I’m shifting from foot to foot, and my head is tilting back. “Did they?”

She stares. “I liked it a lot.”

This is a betrayal, somehow, because “like” is not the emotion I am having, and she’s left me stranded by expressing it; then again, it was mostly my idea to come to this, and I’d hate for her not to have enjoyed herself.

Of course, I liked the panel too. I frown.

“Don’t be pouty,” she says. She smiles and starts talking about one of the panelist’s novels, which we’ve both checked out of the library and are taking turns reading out loud to each other before bed. When we talk, when we text, we dip in and out of roleplay and fantasy, sometimes as characters, others ourselves, in ways I find difficult to encompass with the words role or play and so describe in terms of a language. As if the question were grammatical, not ontological.

You can see why I was drawn to these writers.

“But in real life, you’re not a disciplinary person,” a friend once observed, when I explained that my fetish had less to do with hitting and more to do with discipline. I conceded that this was correct, as if my bratty friends had never tried to levy my antiauthoritarian politics against me to free themselves from corner time.

In reality, I do not believe anyone should ever strike a child, I do not believe violence is the answer, I do not believe prisons or police should exist. But in my real life, if I do not turn off the lights by the bedtime we’ve agreed to, my girlfriend will drag me across her lap and spank me with a hairbrush until I beg her to stop. And she will not stop.

This is what I’m thinking of when the person in front of us collects their signed book and exits the line. Because it is only a thought, and not my current physical ordeal, it is so hot I do not move forward when we’re supposed to. My girlfriend notices the lag and reaches back, in time to catch my glazed face before I arrange it into the smile of a gracious reader.

There is neither dignity nor shame in bottomless want.

We thank the writers and tell them this was the perfect date, and my girlfriend says we’re looking forward to reading it out loud, and the panel loves it. They grin and awww at our queer literary love, happy to facilitate bookish dates like benevolent kinky godparents. I’m happy too, thrumming with the currents of approval flowing between us. I am thankful for the book, for the date, for the opportunity to give the writers a moment of gratification—it always feels good to compliment writers. It’s how I met my girlfriend, praising her writing even when she was a stranger, even when I rarely say things to strangers, because it felt good to do so.

If there were more time, if we were getting a round of drinks at a bar, I’d tell the writers the truth: “We’re not kinky; ‘kinky’ is the respectable veneer we wear over our fetish,” to see what they’d make of it. Maybe then we’d get into specifics, distinctions. Talk shibari and vore and feet. Would any of them share our inclinations? We haven’t seen them at the parties, but that doesn’t preclude anything. Maybe some of them would have the Tom-spanking-Jerry GIF saved in their phone, or maybe they’d just listen, rapt, as my girlfriend explained why she does. We would talk transgression and shame. I’d tell them I’m not ashamed of my fetish, which has brought me a rich fantasy life and a beautiful imaginative girlfriend and many intimate friends, but that it is embarrassing. Embarrassing like falling in love is embarrassing. We were meant to be brought low by it. There is neither dignity nor shame in bottomless want.

And the writers would nod, agreeing that indeed, that was embarrassing. My girlfriend would kiss my face.

I imagine all this, a series of compressed images, as we walk away from the book line, both in unspoken agreement that we will skip the next session and remove each other’s clothes at the earliest opportunity. Some of it comes stammered out in half-formed thoughts and declarations.

“What about the social side of things? What about the snack table at the dungeon, what about going to awkward munches, what about smoke-filled casino lobbies and feuding polycules?”

“Maybe you should write that book,” she says. “I would love to read it.”

There is no hint of condescension or confrontation in the suggestion, yet when she says it I briefly forget how to walk. It’s not the idea itself, but the accuracy of the diagnosis. In naming a treatment for my frustration she’s identified its source, rooted not in the desire to hear about the panelists’ perversions or have my fetish represented in their literary output, but to be among them as a writer, to be on the panel and not in the crowd.

“Oh.” It’s all I can manage. “Oh.”

“I’m serious,” she says. “I’ll contribute to it, if you want.”

“Yes, I want,” I tell her, though on the last word I nearly run out of air.

I’m not resentful of their cool adult sex, but their cool adult books. We walk past vendors of atlases, zines, coloring books, romance novels, comics, stationery. I want to be legible on the page, and I’ve wanted it as long as I’ve wanted the stern ministrations of chaste authority figures. I am not embarrassed by the convention hotel where I dress alternately like a newsie or a governess; where color-coded name tags designate Bottoms, Tops, and Switches; where I make small talk with people I know only by nicknames next to a massage table on which a woman lies luxuriant under the rhythmic rise and fall of a leather strap. At least, that’s not what I’m embarrassed by at the literary festival among the writers of prestige erotic fiction. They’ve no doubt done their share of cosplay and LARPing. More keenly felt is the dusty rented black box of my latest “staged reading,” the sparsely attended BYO-music-stands affair where I LARP being a theatermaker. “No, it’s not a production,” I explain for the whatever-eth time to my poor puzzled parents. “But there are actors, and lights, and there’s complimentary boxed wine.” I hope the wine detail will stop my mother from her inevitable next question, but it does not. “So do you get paid?”

A hand tightens around my waist, pulling me back in. My girlfriend knows when I’ve wandered. She’s indulgent, but one doesn’t hand the reins to another only to be indulged. We walk between the food trucks and merch tables, beneath the festival banner and toward the exit, autographed first editions in tow, hungry for each other and ready to pounce. My shame is not about sex, but it is about art, and maybe I share this with the writers.

I want to contribute to a prestigious collection and be In Conversation. And when someone says, “We’re not gatekeepers, saying, ‘You’re too vanilla,’” I crack, “I’ve no problem gatekeeping the vanillas,” and a decorous, friendly laugh ripples across the panel and into the crowd. Instead of cobbling together rent money from part-time jobs and contract work, I will have a play in a real theater and books in real bindings and a way to answer for myself as to what I have made of my life, of my lifelong devotion to fantasy.

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