I Was Never Kinky.

“I was always kinky/sexual,” she says. “Even though I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 17, pretty much right after I started experimenting with kink, threesomes, lesbian sex, and orgies.”
And I feel a little sad, because I was always just slutty.
Slutty’s different. You don’t need to know anything to be slutty.
Which is to say that I didn’t so much as kiss a girl until the month before my seventeenth birthday, but from then on it was lighting a firework. I dated wildly, widely, catastrophically, racking up about forty new women in the next four years…
But weirdly, I was also strangely vanilla.
I knew about kink, of course. I’d read all up on PENTHOUSE LETTERS, and Playboy advice columns, back in the days long before the Internet. But that was the moral equivalent of porn. I knew threesomes existed, I knew that people tied each other up, I knew that bisexuality was A Thing, but…
Culturally, I knew nothing, Jon Snow.
These were days long before the Internet, a good decade before THE ETHICAL SLUT was penned, and so while I’d heard of wife-swapping I’d never heard of polyamory. I knew about whipping people, but never understood what purpose it fulfilled in people’s lives.
Basically, there were normal people, and then there was Kink. And Kink was a big red door you passed through and never returned from, an all-consuming passion that devoured all your other hobbies, and when you became A Swinger you never woodworked or had children or played tennis, you just fucked and fucked and fucked because nothing else satisfied.
And to be fair, the handful of Swingers I bumped into were like that, omnivorous, not interested in mere friendship, every relationship they had angling towards getting you in bed. If you didn’t fuck them within a few months, the fuse was burning down, and once they realized you weren’t walking willingly towards their bedchamber, the friendship terminated.
None of this was shameful, mind you. If they wanted to surf on a tide of Crisco, good for them! I had no problems with gay men spending their days in bathhouses losing their minds in anonymous sex.
Yet I had other hobbies, so I wasn’t kinky. The PENTHOUSE LETTERS erotica was mostly the same: Innocent, Roped Into Crazy Once-In-A-Lifetime Adventure. You couldn’t just start kink, you had to have someone basically abduct you into it.
I was a lesbian sheep, waiting patiently for someone to arrive, not quite sure how to start this process. I would have welcomed a threesome, or some crazy orgy, but those didn’t just happen – they were planned, by Orgy People, with Orgy Invites. The Orgy People owned Orgy Apartments.
So I ran rampant with vanilla sex, and some of it was in weird places – in the backs of hearses, on the floors of bookstores, certainly in theater bathrooms – but though I wanted threesomes, I didn’t know anyone who was a Threesome Girl. Because if you were a Threesome Girl, then you’d be nothing but a Threesome Girl, and all I knew were women who went to concerts and watched The Simpsons and had, you know, normal things.
Which was stupid, obviously. So fucking stupid. While I was doing all of this vanilla fucking, I was emceeing the goddamned Rocky Horror, surrounded by phone-sex girls and strippers and bisexual women who dressed up like men and fellated dildos for fun.
Yet I knew them in other aspects. And again, kink was the eclipse of all other hobbies, the black hole into which you fell and never emerged, and these people weren’t those people.
Furthermore, I wasn’t those people. It never even occurred to me to experiment. My girlfriend hog-tied me once and I fucking loved the experiment, but that wasn’t kinky. She just tied me up one day, bored, while we were watching television. If it was kinky, she would have worn An Outfit, and put on mood lighting, and started talking dirty – oh, God, I have such problems talking dirty – and I would have known that Kink Was About To Happen because man, Kink was a performance like Rocky Horror where Frank strode down that fucking floor and you knew.
She just tied me up. You couldn’t have kink in a living room with television reruns, man. Or have part-kink.
What I’d enjoyed wasn’t kinky, it was just… a thing. Which I didn’t know how to ask for. Because how do you ask someone to tie you up without it sounding kinky, and that’s awkward because you’re not kinky, you just want a girl to tie you up and sit on you?
Christ, I was so fucking stupid.
But that’s why I think the people who grew up with the Internet are at a real advantage. They’ve seen the same porn that I have, sure, but they’ve also seen FetLife and CollarMe and tons of other discussions of polyamory and kink and QUILTBAG issues where they can go, hey, alternative sexuality is an addition to a personality, not a subsumation of it. They watch accounts like KittyKuriosity’s Twitter feed, where yes, Kitty is a sexy owned painslut camgirl, but she also has pets and wants to be a vet some day and is getting into Final Fantasy cosplay.
And had I seen that melding back in the day, I think I would have been a lot kinkier. Because I could look at myself as I do today and go, “All right, I need to finish up my chapter of this book, and find some plans for the bookcase I want to start this weekend, and get some more alcohol for my fire wands, and get some ice cream.” That kink was a thing I did, not a destination.
I would have realized that some of those girls were Threesome Girls, I was just too stupid to see the signals, and I would have asked my girlfriend to tie me up, and I would have said “Hey, let’s try poly instead of me cheating all the damn time,” and I would have explored more.
Instead, I was convinced all that Kink stood far away from me, clearly for Other People, and I was a straight boy from Connecticut. It didn’t even occur to me that I could explore there.
But I’m here now. A little late. A little slow to understand that hey, maybe I could do that, too – even after all these years.
It’s a nice revelation to have.