The Science of Kink
It’s not a pathological aberration, but part of the healthy spectrum of sexuality
In recent years, kink has become increasingly mainstream: whether it’s Rihanna professing a love of S&M or the Fifty Shades films bringing in hundreds of millions at the box office, it’s clear that there’s an increased appetite for sex that strays from the straight and narrow path.
Broadly defined as sexual interests that exist outside the norm, the boundaries of kink can shift depending on where, and when, you are in the world. For some, anal sex could be considered kinky, while others would dismiss that attitude as the height of prudishness. At present, kink is generally accepted to include BDSM (an acronym for bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism, and masochism) and fetish, where a particular object (such as feet or latex) is considering essential to a person’s sexual pleasure.
Even as many of us have become more comfortable talking kink, we’re still operating under a lot of misconceptions about what kink looks like, and what kind of role it plays in the lives of practitioners (see Fifty Shades, the success of). Kink is often assumed to be an all or nothing situation, where people can’t enjoy any sexual contact unless it involves their preferred “perversion,” and the specter of the “creepy fetishist” driven…
