Do you Kink?

It is a Foolish Dimwit, who doesn't realize it a waste of time unless a thing concerns fucking

-Pietro Aretino, ca 1527




My writing partner and I have discussions that would likely, if we sat in a coffee shop and had them, curl the toes of most of the ‘normal’ people around us. Ahem…cough…we are normal, by the way.

Normal; adjective - Conforming to the standard or the common type; usual; not abnormal; regular; natural.
1. free from any mental state – sane
2. approximately average in any psychological trait, as intelligence, personality, or emotional adjustment.

I assure you, by the definition of the word, I am normal. My writing partner too. But if you heard us saying ‘do you think sex on the first page is too soon? Should they have anal sex? If the two guys having sex with her are…. When a man is fucking another man do they… Was her head upside down when she was giving him a blow job?’ Yep, real conversations. You’d never know it to meet me on the street. I am certainly sane, well emotionally adjusted, an extremely responsible adult / parent member of society who reads, votes, and does all that every day crap you do.

If you were in my head, would you think I’m normal? I’m not even going to go there. Depends on where you are standing, I think. How about any of the other writers I know? Same thing, I suspect. It’s how we go where we go when we write, our minds don’t have a lot of borders, in most cases. We wander, we dream, we write.

So; kink and erotic romance. There are some with kink, some without. Some read, some don’t. Some m/m, some m/m/f, some m/f/m, some just m/f. Some plain old love, lust and HEA and some BDSM, to a whole spectrum of degrees. Have no idea what those are? I need to improve your reading list!

What makes people go there? This is a question in the mind of my writing partner, for sure. I read all of the above including BDSM and write on the edges of it. Her? Not so much. The tone of a lot of it makes her tense, and some authors do use it to push plots forward with some pretty heavy pain / punishment type themes. Me, I like the mental part of it, but this isn’t about what I write, it’s about what reader’s read, and why they go there, or don’t.

I like kink when it’s used well, as part of a person’s mind set, but it doesn’t always make the story better. For her, it often makes it worse. Sometimes the essence of a man being dominant is enough, sometimes, it needs to go much further.

I often wonder, do people who live kink, read erotic romance with kink? Does it even come close to the real thing? Obviously for most readers they love to stretch their imaginations and read, but it’s a fantasy they don’t live it. I know a lot of the readers can’t share with family, even husbands what they write and read and not even the really kinky stuff, because it’s ‘out there’. Does that make it more exciting for them, taking the risk of someone finding out what they read?

So, do you kink? Does it scare you? Why do people go one way or the other. I remember a famous quote that applies I think. When asked why he climbed Mt. Everest, George Mallory replied “because it’s there.”