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Recent disturbing assault allegations against celebrities such as Armie Hammer and Marilyn Manson have overshadowed the fact that sometimes saying “It’s just kink” is simply not an excuse. There’s no question as to whether these men crossed a line with their partners; still, the actual meaning of kink remains somewhat mysterious. Authors R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell co-edited a new collection of stories called Kink. The book explores the different facets of what is considered kinky, consensual, and/or healthy. On this week’s episode of The Cut podcast, Avery Trufelman sits down with Kwon and Greenwell to discuss why there is such a gray area around the world of kink.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Lately, there’ve been some truly salacious stories in the news about powerful celebrity men who crossed some lines with women they were dating. They’re sort of aftershocks of the Me Too movement where these new accusations — I’m thinking of Armie Hammer and the allegations of abuse and cannibalism or Marilyn Manson’s “rape room” — brought back this important conversation on the ways power and fame can be abused.
But the fascinating thing, this time, is the way these celebrities have responded to these accusations. The reply has essentially been, “No, you don’t understand. That was consensual. We are kinky.”
Kink is one of those things that’s hard for some people to understand, myself included. I think for a long time, I was like, Whatever. You have your shit you like to do behind closed doors, and that’s your business. I didn’t really feel the need to interrogate it too deeply beyond a basic sort of understanding that I shouldn’t shame anyone’s kinks, you know? And when the internet seized on the gripping details of Armie’s supposed cannibal fetish, I was like … Should we even be lampooning this? Is this a legit kink? Would there be a right way to do this? I mean, everyone was talking about what a wild fixation this was supposed to be. There was much less focus on what Armie Hammer’s accusers were actually saying about their relationship — which was, fetish or not, their relationship started one way, and it took a turn.
We at the Cut believe these women who are making these accusations, and that the men they were involved with are hiding behind the mantle of kink. Kink can’t be an excuse for abuse. In order for us to understand where lines actually get crossed, as a culture, we’re going to have to engage with the ideas of kink much more fully — for all of its richness and deep, deep complexity.
LUX ALPTRAUM: We understand that you can be vicariously excited by violence, even though real violence is disgusting and you don’t want to actually hurt people. It gets framed in this way where it makes it sound like if somebody is kinky, they’re beyond criticism. That’s not what it means.
TRUFELMAN: This is Lux Alptraum.
ALPTRAUM: I am a longtime sex educator and an abuse survivor and someone who thinks a lot about abuse and kink. I think people think kink is choking people and kink is leaving bruises on people, and it can be. That’s not really what it is.
TRUFELMAN: So what is kink? Everyone I talked to had different ways of explaining it.
GARTH GREENWELL: What kink means differs for different people.
ROXANE GAY: Well, kink is a very specific subset of the erotic, and it can mean a lot of things.
R.O. KWON: If one feels that one is kinky, then one is kinky.
TRUFELMAN: For Lux Alptraum, kink is very much about consent.
ALPTRAUM: In a kink situation, it might look like the domme has all the power and control, but the real control lies with the submissive person. It’s not the purest iteration of safe, consensual kink unless you can say no or say your safe word or say whatever and make it all stop immediately.
TRUFELMAN: This is a very clear dividing line. For Armie, the women said “stop,” and he kept going. For Marilyn Manson, it was an entire lifestyle that if you said “stop,” you were punished more. Just like in all consensual sex, kinky or not, there’s a lot of nuance and negotiation that needs to happen between the people involved. It’s all within the context of wanting to be giving.
ALPTRAUM: There’s so much pressure on you to be compliant, to please your partner to do all these things. That has nothing to do with kink, but when you are in a kink environment, that can be taken to the nth degree.
TRUFELMAN: So much of kink is about exploration — about going into unknown or taboo terrain. So you have to be on the same page.
ALPTRAUM: There’s these moments where I would be surprised with a thing that I had never expressed interest in and maybe didn’t want to do. I don’t think there is this, like, bright dividing line between abuse and kink. There’s no three-step guide for doing this, or there is, but it’s, like, talk to people. Have conversations, be willing. It’s like the easiest thing and the hardest thing.
TRUFELMAN: To hurt the ones you love. To act out scenarios that aren’t normally like you. To play with power. It’s playing with fire, really. Yet culturally, kink doesn’t get talked about with gravity until something goes horribly wrong. It either gets whispered about as this super-freaky, unspeakable thing, or it has this reputation of being this kind of dorky form of, like, Dungeons & Dragons. Something that couples try to spice up their marriage after reading Fifty Shades of Grey.
KWON: I think it’s almost jumped straight from being something that’s forbidden to being a cliché and being a joke. We skip the part where we look at it as something to be taken just as seriously as anything else we do as humans. I think that was part of what we were hoping to do with this anthology.
TRUFELMAN: Author R.O. Kwon co-edited a collection of stories called Kink. It just came out this month. Her co-editor is poet Garth Greenwell.
GREENWELL: I would say kink creates an occasion for investigation of elements of ourselves that, in other aspects of our lives, we may find too frightening or too dangerous to investigate. So that, to me, is part of the great value of kink and of literature around kink.
TRUFELMAN: Kink, like any kind of sex, like any kind of intimacy, is quite simply another way of looking at how people interact. It’s not all good, and it’s not all bad. R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell have curated this collection of stories that show, yes, how kink can be fun and safe … and how it can go wrong and be unpleasant. It can also be kind of meh.
GREENWELL: One of the things that our book does not do is try to present kink as, like, a pure sort of stream of positivity.
TRUFELMAN: Garth Greenwell’s story in the anthology is called “Gospodar.” It’s about a murky, quite scary kink scenario.
GREENWELL: It takes place in Sofia, Bulgaria. The narrator is an American high-school teacher who’s lived for some years in Bulgaria who is meeting for the first time a man he’s chatted with online. It’s an encounter that begins consensually and then, very slowly, degree by degree, moves toward violation of consent and becomes something very scary. I wanted to dramatize a kind of failure of fantasy and desire where someone discovers that what he thought he wanted and in fact does not want. I wanted to dramatize something that I don’t think is super-uncommon. Which is the extent to which we are mysterious to ourselves — I think there’s an unknowability that we never exhaust, and that’s actually a really important component of love.
KWON: I agree with that, and I also feel that there’s almost nothing more loving we can do for one another than to really see each other. And there’s almost nothing more trusting we can do for one another than to let someone else see ourselves.
TRUFELMAN: And that sort of attempt to see the unseeable in someone you love — that’s what R.O. Kwon’s story is about in the anthology. It’s called “Safeword,” and it’s about a couple who goes to visit a dominatrix in a dungeon. It turns out one partner is way more into the experience than the other.
KWON: Part of what’s going on in the story is that there’s an asymmetry of information and that the far kinkier person has been thinking about this and has, of course, read about it, has much more of an idea of what she wants. A narrator who’s being introduced to this world doesn’t.
TRUFELMAN: The striking thing about this story, and many of the stories in the collection, is that the characters aren’t always able to define their precise terms and boundaries in advance. Because over the course of the kinky encounter, the characters are experimenting with what they want. They are discovering likes and dislikes they weren’t anticipating. They’re surprising themselves.
GREENWELL: This is another way in which kink, I think, is an aesthetic act, that there are fictions that allow us to get to the truth.
TRUFELMAN: In a mask, in a costume, or in a new persona, with a new set of norms and rules that exist only between you and your partner or partners, you’re creating a new culture. A new set of circumstances to operate within. This can help you more clearly see the sexual norms we’re used to operating within, instead of taking them for granted.
GREENWELL: Who knows what is normal.
KWON: I might argue that on the face of it, heterosexual missionary sex, where a cis man is ramming something into the body of a cis woman over and over again, does not seem definitely loving and definitely affectionate, and this is one of the most loving things we can do for each other.
TRUFELMAN: So much of what is considered “normal” or healthy or good, it lies in the way the act gets framed and talked about.
GREENWELL: If I’m having sex with a guy who spits in my face, that is not mean. That is that guy contributing to my pleasure. When I think about the really good sexual experiences I’ve had, my sexual experiences that involve consensual violence or consensual degradation, my feeling is one of great gratitude and tenderness. What interests me about literature as a way of exploring kink is that it allows us to approach it as the complicated thing it is — to not try to iron things out into cruel or tender or mean or nice but instead to acknowledge the complex, dynamic thing that human relations really are.
TRUFELMAN: The complexity of kink is a double-edged sword. It can cause harm and create rifts and unearth unknowable parts within someone you thought you knew, including yourself. But also, kink can be a way to heal from trauma. Author Roxane Gay talks about her relationship with kink in her story in the anthology. Roxane Gay’s contribution to the Kink anthology is called “Reach,” and it’s about the ways that, even when two people are exactly on the same page in a long-term kinky relationship, complications still come up.
GAY: You know, a lot of times when you read about kink, you read about it in the context of sort of exciting encounters with strangers and play parties and, “Oh, that’s good.” But I’m old. And so what does it look like in a marriage? So what would a couple that was sharing this kinky dynamic look like? How would it look in the sense of erotica? That’s the story I wrote. Kink is a very specific subset of the erotic, and it can mean a lot of things. But I think it’s like queer, a catchall term. It’s a catchall term for people who are interested in dominance and submission, BDSM, and alternate forms of sexual expression.
TRUFELMAN: To a degree, the definition of kink, as you said, is big and all encompassing. To what degree could one argue, like, we are all a bit kinky?
GAY: People would love to say that, just like we’re all a little bit queer. But the answer is no, we are not. I think that anyone can be interested in spicing things up and trying new things, and some of those things might be kink related, for sure. I would hope that everyone has a capacity for kink, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think that there are people who prefer things to be very traditional, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. There are some people who are like, “You know what? I want to eat peanut butter and jelly every single day, and I love it.”
TRUFELMAN: Although, I feel like if you do eat peanut butter and jelly all day every day, it goes full circle into being like a crazy kink.
GAY: I think that’s very kinky, quite frankly — that’s a lot of peanut butter and jelly.
TRUFELMAN: Roxane’s story is all about that unknowable tension that still exists between this married couple and the way kink lets them exist in that void. Knowing that can’t really unravel the mysteries of each other and the mysteries of themselves. Honestly, they’re not trying to. As Garth and R.O., the editors of Kink, point out, looking for a “reason” or a root cause of kink is so not the point.
KWON: I think I personally am uninterested in looking for a cause, because I think that once you start looking for a cause, it can be very easy to start wondering if there is a cure. I’m extremely uninterested in the idea of a cure.
GREENWELL: I agree with R.O. — that anytime you start looking for an ideology of something, you’re on the road to pathologizing it. I don’t know where the impulse comes from. I don’t know where the form comes from. I don’t know where the desire comes from. But some of the content through which those desires are worked out, I think it is interesting.
TRUFELMAN: Kink is a way of constructing a trellis of rules and agreements, and so the process of figuring out what you want and don’t want, of trying different scenarios, can make kink a sort of laboratory of desires. For this reason, Roxane has found kink to be healing.
For the uninitiated, it seems kind of fascinating that one could use BDSM as a way to heal from trauma. How does that work?
GAY: It just depends. I don’t think it’s for everyone. It’s definitely something, especially in my early 20s, that helped me understand consent, because I had dealt with sexual violence and was carrying quite a lot of trauma. When I stumbled into the kink community, I found a framework for consent where I could be sexual and be safe at the same time. I think when you are 19 and 20, and you’re carrying all this trauma in your body, and you’re scared of men and scared of being touched, you find that there’s a language that you can use and that there are things called “safe words” and that you can negotiate an encounter before it ever happens. You can choreograph the entire thing. It’s safe that, you know, whatever happens, what I’m afraid of is not going to happen. That can be very reassuring.
GREENWELL: Kink is a way of dramatizing things to which one may have been subjected. It’s a way of taking violence that one has suffered and to transform that violence into an occasion for pleasure. That’s an incredibly powerful thing that kink and other kinds of sexual practices can do. I mean, the ways in which we eroticize questions of oppression. The way in which I, as a gay man who grew up in the pre-internet American South, have eroticized the word faggot — like, that is not a choice I made. I think that is a mechanism by which I survived. What can be a choice is to script an encounter in which I take control of that word and how that word is used against me. Therefore, that word can give me access to a kind of rapture that nothing else can.
KWON: It seems to me like a not entirely separate impulse from the ways in which we can turn our personal-life problems, trauma, suffering, loss into literature and into art and into writing. It’s turning pain into flowers.
TRUFELMAN: The weird sort of gray zone that exists within kink is its appeal and its beauty. It straddles the liminal space between love and anger and all the unknowable parts of yourself and the unknowable parts of another. It can be, as Garth Greenwell put it, a technology of transformation. Although, it is a powerful and sometimes dangerous technology.
This all underscores the gravity of the accusations made against these high-caliber celebrities. Imagine how hard it must be to explain — to a rigid legal system, to a media landscape that thinks in black and white — that a line was crossed. To have the courage of your convictions to know, to feel, to understand that nuanced yet definite boundary between pleasure and pain.
To hear more about the perception of kink in today’s society, listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
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