What Kinks Are About

One of the great puzzles of psychology is why kinks exist. Not only are we typically highly selective about who we sleep with, but many of us are – in addition – extremely particular about what will adequately excite us when we do. The sexual act in its raw state is – oddly – far from enough. To allow ourselves to be properly enthusiastic, we may need recourse to very specific sorts of clothes (a tight-fitting suit, a floral dress, labourer’s overalls). And we may then need to ask our partner to adopt equally specific personae (a punitive teacher, a devoted member of the clergy, a high-minded librarian, a ruthless crook, Henry VIII) and set in motion a tightly plotted script that, in its intricacy and specificity, would greatly surprise – and maybe even amuse – an alien visitor attempting to understand Homo sapiens while on an exploratory trip from planet Kepler-22b.

When our frenzy and excitement are over, we might well step back and wonder what we are up to. Why such a charge around certain materials and words, stories and identities? More acutely, how did we come to have the kinks we have? Why very much this and very much not that? What does it say about us that we respond so intensely to particular prompts? Why do our thoughts circle a handful of topics so obsessively? How could we ever explain this to someone else, let alone ourselves?

A theory of kinks might begin like this: when examined sufficiently richly, every kink appears to sit astride an area of psychological tension or stress, pressure or difficulty. Wherever there is something that excites us, we also find – in a buried form, beneath the superficial play – evidence of pain, often dating back to childhood. To interpret a kink, we must therefore always ask not just: ‘What does a person enjoy?’ but more pointedly: ‘What was difficult for them? What burden are they carrying? What might be exhausting and tricky for them?’

To which there are a plethora of answers that typically include:

— having to be good all the time

— having to be responsible and mature

— having to impress through neatness and decency

— having to be a strong male

— having to be a demure woman

— having to manage sibling rivalry

— having to ensure that one is respected and authoritative

With such a theory in hand, we may not even need to ask someone what their kink is. We can simply look out for where the strains in their life are likely to lie – and take an educated guess. Beneath their superficial diversity, kinks tend to cluster with remarkable consistency around a handful of topics. They are attempts to seek solace from fear and anxiety around key pressures: to grow up, to be conscientious, to follow gender codes, to assert ourselves against rivals, to secure our safety, to look after loved ones, to escape vulnerability and to police our status. For a few moments, with a cooperative and sympathetic partner, we can hope to build a miniature utopia that protects us from our ordinary encumbrances. We aren’t just getting idly turned on; we’re in ecstasy because – through the dreamlike distortions of our kinks – we’re intuiting a path towards a less gruelling, more easeful way of living.

Take the person who might, during sex, greatly enjoy being passive, shouted at and told what to do. We can predict with a certain confidence that this is likely to be someone who is, day to day, in upright life, drained by the need to appear knowledgeable, established and dependable. Similarly, the person who, during sex, abandons ordinary decorum in order to rely on obscenities and rough manners is likely to be the same person who ordinarily feels a particular pressure to be decent, mild and thoughtful. Decades of pressure to be ‘good’ can lead to intense enjoyment around making a mess; those who have grown up ‘too soon’ may most need to return to an earlier, less exacting state. Those who have been denied access to their own fragility may have a taste for delicate fabrics. Those who have stoically never been allowed to cry may have a special inclination for tears.

It’s precisely because kinks are related to our sufferings that they can be especially challenging to admit to a prospective partner. We are called upon not just to explain what excites us, but also where we’ve felt especially absurd, inadequate and unacceptable.

But this is also why sharing our kinks constitutes an essential part of getting to know someone properly. We might go so far as to say that a relationship without a discussion of kinks will be cut off from a vital source of closeness and awareness. There can – let us venture – be no one who has no kinks at all, only someone who has been denied access to an important part of self-knowledge through shame and fear. Kink-filled sex isn’t simply more ‘fun’, it is a hugely important gateway to a less lonely, less stringent, more self-accepting and more intimate romantic life.