Book Excerpt: The Ultimate Guide to Kink by Tristan Taormino

As part of our effort to profile more authors within the LGBT community, we present Tristan Taormino.

As part of our effort to profile more authors within the LGBT community, we present Tristan Taormino.

Taormino is a celebrated sex writer and educator.  She has edited sixteen editions of Best Lesbian Erotica and authored The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, for which she also directed the adult video.  A former columnist for The Village Voice, she has a column in Taboo and has been featured in The New York Times, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour,and Playboy.  She has appeared on CNN, MTV, and the Discovery Channel.

Here is an excerpt from her book The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge:

Chapter 1

"S is for...": The Terms, Principles, and Pleasures of Kink

Like other subcultures, kinky folks have developed (and continue to develop) a vocabulary to describe the unique elements of our world. This chapter will define the most common words and phrases used among kink practitioners and throughout the book.

In addition to a specific vernacular, members of the kink community have adopted a set of principles that represent its core values: consent, negotiation, safety and risk reduction, communication, and aftercare. These values are the foundation of the work of all the educators in this book, and they apply to each of the chapters and all of the activities discussed here. To avoid repetition, most authors will not define basic terms or tenets covered here, although they may elaborate on them or define other terminology as it relates specifically to their topic.

TERMINOLOGY AND LINGO:

Kink

In this book, kink is used as an inclusive term that covers BDSM, sadomasochism, kinky sex, dominance and submission, role play, sex games, fantasy, fetish, and other alternative erotic expressions.

BDSM

BDSM is an acronym and an umbrella term that was first used in the late 80s and early 90s in Internet discussion groups, including one of the early newsgroups, soc.subculture. bondage-bdsm. It did not become the umbrella term of choice until the 2000s. BDSM is a combination of several shorter acronyms that reflect the history of our kinky vocabulary and the wide variety of practices that it incorporates:

B & D or B/D stands for bondage and discipline. It is an older term that first appeared in personals and magazines in the 1970s and became widely used by kinky folks in the 1980s to describe their interest in kink. It wasn’t necessarily meant to denote only bondage and discipline, but rather a range of activities that revolved around power exchange. Today B & D is much less frequently used as a term on its own.

SM (also S & M, S/M, S/m) is the common abbreviation for sadism and masochism or sadomasochism. (Definitions of these and related words appear later in this chapter.) These terms were coined by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1886 and have appeared frequently since then in psychoanalytic literature to describe sexual pathologies; however, kinky people reclaimed them beginning around the 1970s, and S/M was the most popular term until BDSM gained widespread use by the 2000s.

Embedded in the acronym BDSM is D/s (also DS or d/s), which represents dominance and submission or Dominant/submissive (defined in detail below). These terms have been around for a long time; people began using them in the context of kink in the 1980s to describe the power dynamic within a scene or relationship. People used D/s to reflect the power exchange in SM activities or to communicate their interest in roles like master/slave or daddy/boy, for example. Today, D/s is most often used to denote relationships that are built around a dominant/submissive power dynamic where power exchange is always or very often present (and may exist without other elements of BDSM). [1] In those D/s relationships where the power exchange is always present, partners inhabit their roles and reinforce the dynamic through various rituals, protocols, and behaviors all the time; these relation- ships may be referred to as 24/7 D/s (as in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), lifestyle D/s, TPE (total power exchange), or APE (absolute power exchange).

BDSM can be used as a noun (“I’m interested in BDSM”) or an adjective (“I went to a BDSM event”). Some people use other terms interchangeably with BDSM, including SM, kink, and leather. The use of the word leather (as in “I’m part of the local leather community”) originated in post-World War II gay male biker clubs and bars and continued in leather bars and sex clubs from the late 50s all the way through the 2000s. [2] Leather is still used today, especially by gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer folks, to signify kinky interests, identities, and communities.

People do BDSM for the same wide variety of reasons people have sex, including for pleasure and connection. Just as some people love oral sex and others love sex in the woods, some love BDSM. Plenty of folks have told me they believe it’s just how they’re wired. I’ve heard countless stories of the first time a lover held her down, the first time a woman put a collar on him, the first time she got spanked. Many experienced a visceral reaction to these experiences before they had language to describe what they were doing or knew there were other people out there doing similar things. For some, BDSM does not have to focus on or even involve genital stimulation to be pleasurable and even orgasmic. For others, a good flogging and a good fucking is the perfect combination—BDSM enhances the sexual experience.

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