Are You Actually Kinky? podcast episode

[jesse_the_k]

Avery Trufelman* leads The Cut’s† weekly podcast. This week’s news hook is #metoo accusations against powerful men who attempt to fight back by saying "don’t kink-shame me." Trufelman opens with:

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.

Listen: https://pod.link/1437189814/episode/d44a082938d479ae48dc431bc058dfc8

Read: https://www.thecut.com/2021/02/the-cut-podcast-are-you-actually-kinky.html

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.

[… snip …]

One of the things that our book does not do is try to present kink as, like, a pure sort of stream of positivity.

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.

Roxane Gay’s short story explores kink at home:

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: 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 & Greenwell curate a kink reading list https://lithub.com/on-taking-kink-seriously-a-reading-list

* I loved her ARTICLES of INTEREST series

† The Cut is part of the New York Magazine/Vox media empire