The Price of Admission

When you enter the world of kink, you will see things you don’t want to see.

That’s an almost unavoidable part of it – at least, if you engage in any form of kink community. Whether online or in person, however carefully you curate your spaces – through blocking, tag filters, and being selective about events. Kink, fetish, and BDSM covers a huge spectrum of tastes and expression and in the vast selection on offer there will be things that turn your stomach, that scare you, that worry you, and even that trigger you.

Accepting that is the price of admission.

You want to have a place to get tied up and slapped around with an audience? Social media with no vanilla family and coworkers where you can post “hey, just got fisted, loved it!” and have people be happy for you? A friend group where kneeling next to your partner while they take a chair is normal and raises no eyebrows? You have to be willing and able to give the same acceptance in return.

Now – that doesn’t mean you have to engage in everything. You’re at an event and someone starts pulling out their partners fingernails, and that’s a bit too much for you, fine. Leave the room. Hell, leave the event if the vibes aren’t a good fit. And it’s absolutely not ok for anyone to push those boundaries intentionally – if you say you don’t like feet, and i bring up a folder of feet pics on my phone and shove it in your face at best i’m a rude asshole. i’d be inclined to say that’s a straight up consent violation. But if you say you don’t like feet, so you want me to stop wearing sandals in your presence… eh, that’s a little different. We all have a responsibility not to be an asshole, but we all have a right to exist and express ourselves. The line between the two can sometimes be a little blurry or bendy, and there are spicy debates to be had around where it’s drawn, but most of us at least agree that line is important.

Basically, my responsibilities are to look after myself – removing myself from situations that are making me uncomfortable – and to not violate anyone’s boundaries or consent by inflicting things on them that they don’t want. It’s not my responsibility to anticipate what might be upsetting to anyone else, nor is it my responsibility to hide or make myself smaller. Within kinky spaces, there is a certain level of implied consent to be around kinky shit.

When i first started to involve myself in kink communities in 2021, i had some shit to unpack first. There are hard limits i had then that i still have now, and the thought of being around other people doing certain types of play and having certain types of relationships was challenging. The big one – for social, rather than play spaces at least – was age play and DD/lg or CG/l (Daddy Dom/little girl, Caregiver/little) dynamics. Parental-feeling power and authority doesn’t just turn me off, it puts me into fight or flight mode. Although i have some childish interests (looking at you, mountain of Build-a-Bears), there is a clear separation for me between nurturing my inner child and getting to enjoy things i’d have liked as a kid with grownup money, and wanting to actually feel like, act like, or be treated like a child. Feeling like a child makes me feel threatened, and not in a fun way.

None of that means those kinks are “bad”, they are just catastrophically bad for me. And while i can maintain that as a limit for play, and i can avoid watching play that i find triggering, i cannot reasonably expect that someone who needs acceptance and validation in the kink community every bit as much as i do to just “turn off” their headspace, to not interact with their partner in a way that feels authentic, or to hide a big part of who they are.

i needed to work through my own shit that said anyone who was addressed as Daddy or Mummy/Mommy was an immediate physical threat. i knew it wasn’t rational, and didn’t actually believe that – but at the same time knew it in that annoying gut feeling, running on trauma, living in an alternative reality created by my fucked up brain way. i had to unknow it. i had to realign myself with the same reality everyone else was in. Doing that not only made it easier to connect in the kink community – no longer seeing perfectly pleasant people as a looming threat – but also lessened the strength of one of my triggers. Because yes, seeing actual real children calling their actual real parents those words used to have the same effect on me too. And now, it’s fine.

But some stuff runs too deep to talk myself out of. There are a couple of triggers i have that i just can’t desensitise myself to. There’s an honestly really tame and common type of play that i can’t watch without having an intense phantom pain response. Those things are just for me to deal with. i can ground, self soothe, and as i keep saying because it’s important – i can walk away. That’s the sphere of my control. How i act, how i take care of me, how i navigate the world.

So here’s where it falls to bits and gets ugly and messy. A startlingly common attitude can be summed up as “all triggers are equal, but some triggers are more equal than others”. Because yes, we can all acknowledge that kirizal sometimes flinches when someone has mum energy and will run away if they see nipple clamps, but obviously certain things are Bad, Extreme, Disgusting play. They’ll scare the newbies (all the newbies, even somehow the ones who specifically came here for Bad, Extreme, Disgusting reasons). They’ll trigger everyone. Of course, with a smile, you’re valid and your kink is not my kink and that’s ok, but that’s ok in private with the other degenerate perverts, please.

These tend to be the “gross” kinks – blood, vomit, piss, shit – the entirety of the CNC umbrella – rape play, interrogations, play without safewords – the extreme – sharps and breath play and anything else considered heavy play – and sex. Sex is weirdly taboo in parts of the kink community, in a world where almost anything goes sometimes the most fucked up thing you can do is cum. And yeah, i know, there’s no lack of opportunities to have vanilla sex – but there’s something deeply uncomfortable to me about being told it’s fine for me to be beaten until i cry but that my pleasure is offensive. i like being beaten until i cry too, but the implications of that feel icky – especially as an AFAB person who’s pleasure is still often considered taboo or unimportant in the vanilla world. Let’s close up that orgasm gap before we start banning them, yeah?

And there are often good, valid reasons to ban or limit certain things at play events. Bodily fluids are a potential health hazard and trusting members of the public to reliably clean up after themselves is not always wise. Dungeon monitors at least need to know if a CNC scene is happening so that they don’t think they’re witnessing a consent violation and come to the rescue. Higher risk play requires specialised equipment and knowledge (ideally from the DMs too, not just the people participating). But too often the reason given is something dangerously close to a value judgement that – in my view – damages and limits us all. That it’s upsetting, triggering, and off putting to new people. That these activities – even when practical and easy to accommodate – should be gate-kept for experienced people established in the community, or in many cases hidden entirely behind closed doors.

Do you know what scared me when i was a newbie?

i’d fantasised about torture since i was pre-school age. Every orgasm i’d ever had had required a non-consensual fantasy to get me there. i was already acquiring cigarette burn scars all over my body. i didn’t know even close to all my kinks yet, but the ones i had and the ones i was most curious to try were all weird and heavy and gross. And i was scared that even in this new world i’d found where the weirdos go to find each other and play in the dark, that i would still be too strange and perverse to love. Still too much, still not enough, still sexually inconvenient and challenging.

And i’m not – obviously. Perverts like me are maybe not the majority – but hardly a small minority either. But it’s easy to feel on the outside – when the orgasms i struggled my whole life to finally start having are considered inappropriate, when something i love makes it to another “well, obviously that’s too far” list, when someone says unironically “don’t scare the newbies” and i wonder if they’ve ever been really scared? Looking at themselves and wondering if they’re a monster, too broken to want, if something is so deeply wrong that it can never come right. If they’ve overcome, if they’ve struggled, if they’ve finally found their place vomit-streaked and bleeding, resisting and being broken, revelling in filth and sin and finally coming home? Do they know what it’s like on the edges – as a child praying that God won’t read their mind today, as a teenager in those first fumbles feeling dead below the waist because that sweet boy won’t force them, in their 20s wondering if it might be better for everyone if they weren’t alive?

Those were the prices i paid – to stand here now, proud of who i am, what i want, and how i love. And i wonder, is the small price – of tolerating the strange, the confronting, the difficult – really so hard?