Your Kink Can Be Cringe (And That's Okay)

You can't help what turns you on--even if it's basic.

As a writer, I feel like I’m under the obligation to write things that haven’t been written before, or at least contain some degree of unique insight (I’m aware some people would argue I succeed in neither of these pursuits but my article The Goon Cavemen, about millennial pre-porn masturbation stories, begs to differ.) I think all writers (or artists of any stripe) have this obligation. They should make sure that they’re not churning out derivative, done-so-many-times junk, assuming they want to be seen as a “good” writer (although obviously there’s still a market for repetitive and predictable content.)

I do not think sex has to be like this. I think that your kinks—or even just vague things that turn you on—are completely out of your control. I wouldn’t say a kink is a sexual orientation, necessarily. But kinks are not intentionally crafted. Some people develop kinks by watching porn and saying, “Oh, I guess I am into bored and nonchalant women getting pleasured while playing video games” (I recently discovered this is a real thing—not, not my thing! Please let me build my Sims Tudor mansion in peace!) I think other kinks might start before people even have a concept of sex, or stem from some random thing they saw in a cartoon as a child (I remember seeing a Twitter thread of people with a hypnosis fetish saying that cartoons where a character was hypnotized by an attractive woman were their “aha” moments.) Some kinks also come from a variety of societal values and the (near) universal connection between taboo and turn-ons.

There’s probably a spectrum, but either way, I don’t think people choose their kinks. They certainly don’t sit down and say, “Let me figure out what’s going to turn me on—better find something unique and interesting that nobody has done before.” And yet, that’s how so many people treat sexual tastes—even the sex positive people who are, in theory, against kink shaming, will see a kink that just feels a bit too predictable and say, “Ugh, don’t tell me you’re into that basic tryhard thing!”

I was inspired to write this when I saw a viral tweet about how straight women with a submission kink are the “most vanilla of all” because they’re just doing what the patriarchy wants them to do anyway. And I have since re-edited this piece since people are saying the same thing about a (cringe) BDSM scene from Euphoria season three featuring a woman submitting to a man (groundbreaking, as they say.)

After all, there is nothing especially transgressive about a woman submitting to a man or being controlled by a man. I actually wrote before about how some of the most outspoken tradwife accounts on Twitter are just acting out a submission kink. So I get the argument—certainly it’s more transgressive for a man to be the submissive one, but given that you don’t choose what turns you on, I wasn’t sure what these people wanted. Did they want submissive women to start calling themselves “vanilla?” (“Oooh, tell me what to do more. I’ll call myself whatever you want, Sir.”) Or did they just want to police everyone’s kinks to ensure they were appropriately countercultural? (“My kink is making zines about prison abolition.”)

I noticed this same sentiment among men when I made the below joke on Twitter. Not to explain and therefore remove the humor from the joke, but I obviously wasn’t serious. I was getting at the fact that women prefer to date liberal men, but sometimes find liberal men’s passive and overly respectful approach to dating at odds with raw masculinity (if you’re into that sort of thing, like some kind of slave to the patriarchy!)

Obviously, I’m kidding! If you haven’t gotten enthusiastic consent from your partner, you should definitely not expose them to any content related to Elizabeth Warren.

But anyway, some men (who I guess didn’t think I was joking?) argued with me about how this was proof that women were inconsistent idiots, or that—despite my apparent protestations, which don’t exist as I’ve always been consistent on this topic—women just want masculine and dominant men.

A couple guys mentioned that women who are into dominant men are just “boring and vanilla” (there’s that word again!) because it’s all soooo predictable. And like, fair! Yes! But also, who cares? If we’re making sexual taste a contest, and the least vanilla person wins, you’re all getting mogged by a 4chan shut-in who’s into scat and dolphins. Let’s please not make this a contest where the weirdest, most obscure or most edgy thing wins. Some of those things may very well be illegal!

I think the issue here isn’t necessarily that people think vanilla sex is bad, or that you need to be edgy, but that people have a problem with popular “lite” kink that’s actually not super kinky. Maybe it’s our natural desire to gatekeep, our need to feel superior, or maybe movies like 50 Shades of Grey have coded the most predictable types of kink as millennial tryhard cringe, akin to Harry Potter or throwing a gender reveal party for your new shelter dog. As you can see from my cartoon below, I’m obviously part of the problem, although I wasn’t trying to ridicule kinky people, but rather point out that geeks are kinkier than they get credit for:

The rising popularity of BDSM (or at least more people acknowledging their interest in the public forum) seems to have fueled this perception. Given that kinks thrive on taboo, one might argue that “stigma busting” is not necessary for these things, and might actually just make the kink less hot.

In fact, while researching kink for this article, I came across an old article about the movie version of 50 Shades of Grey, where BDSM experts criticized the movie. This article somehow made BDSM sound like the geekiest thing ever. First of all, as far as I could tell, people’s biggest issue with the movie was that it wasn’t really kinky (cue Comic Book Guy voice). I think it goes without saying that a film meant to titillate 42-year-old suburban moms isn’t going to tick all the boxes that might appeal to a polyamorous former sex worker who has a real sex dungeon and gets hogtied every fortnight. (Of course, this isn’t the reason the movie sucked—the movie sucked because it was badly written and revolved entirely around a sex contract, not the uhhh…actual sex.) But it’s also striking which aspects were considered not kinky enough. One of the critics criticized the movie for being too vanilla (while also glorifying abuse, because she suspected the main character was secretly not consenting the whole time.) She felt that it was unrealistic because BDSM involves more “spit and sweat” but briefly gave the film credit for including mentions of condoms and the birth control pill. It’s giving, “you aren’t punk rock unless you wear a FUCKING mask.” It feels worth mentioning that one of her BDSM credentials involves having a friend who got, “Teenaged Virgin” carved into her back with a knife—tsk, tsk, no mention of disinfecting protocol!

All of the BDSM experts in that article who criticized the film were coming from a place of Reddit-tier “Well, AKSHUALLY” and assuming that 50 Shades of Grey was supposed to be a heckin’ sex-positive BDSM workshop, not a…movie. Multiple critics complained that the dynamic was too toxic, and one person genuinely expressed frustration that the main characters met in a scandalous office environment as opposed to a safe space like Fetlife. If there’s anything that’s bland and unsexy, it’s taboo power dynamics and forbidden romance! I saw the same criticism recently for the movie Babygirl, which deliberately depicts a BDSM relationship with real, genuinely high stakes—the dom is a much younger subordinate of the (married) sub and has the ability to ruin her life, something he repeatedly mentions to her because it turns her on. Do I want to be in this relationship? No. Did I enjoy the movie? Yes! But I briefly looked it up on Reddit afterward, and everyone was complaining about how the characters didn’t do a good enough job establishing healthy boundaries and a safe word, then arguing that nothing they did was actually kinky.

Anyway, it’s not clear what gave BDSM a worse reputation: the milquetoast nature of movies like Fifty Shades of Grey, or the insufferable leather-clad geeks criticizing it.

I’ve gotten far afield of my original point because that Guardian article was just hilarious and so emblematic of the 2010s “your fave is problematic” mindset (in this case, “your ball gag is problematic.”) But anyway, the condemnation of edgy-but-not-really taste isn’t limited to mainstream versions of BDSM. It’s also not even limited to sex at all. How many times have you heard someone declare that a particular writer or podcaster is a “midwit’s idea of a smart person” without any clarification of what a smart person’s idea of a smart person would be? Sex aside, people really like to feel like they’re the only ones with unique and interesting taste. They may not bother to critique the obviously mainstream stuff, but they’ll skewer anything that feels like it’s trying to be highbrow, obscure, or edgy. And there’s an obvious reason they’ll never say what’s an example of real music, or a real book, or real good movies. They know someone else is going to be quick to tell them that they, in fact, have midwit taste (while this other person actually has unique taste, which they will mysteriously keep shrouded in mystery.) And you especially can’t play this one-upping game with sex, because the person who wins will be attracted to giraffes.

Anyway, if you take away anything from this article, it’s that it’s okay to like Wes Anderson, and it’s okay to like being tied up with a pair of fuzzy handcuffs that don’t actually lock while wearing a cheap Frederick’s of Hollywood corset.