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Kink Is a Good New Thing

Published November 11, 2025 • 11 min read

The current condition of human culture and society has many blemishes-wealth inequality, dictators and dictatorships everywhere, the seeming requirement that art and ideas must now focus exclusively on the disempowerment and disenfranchisement of minorities and the traumatized, the terror that artificial intelligence may be bringing-some people say it’s coming as soon as 2027!­ - it would be illogical for there not to have arrived some counterbalancing tremendous advancements. Cognitive psychologists tell us that it’s human nature to “disqualify the positive.”

We’re so busy hand-wringing that we’re not noticing that we can get answers to questions without spending three days in a library basement looking at microfilm images. We’ve taken away HIV’s power to kill people in horrible ways. Agricultural production is sufficient to feed a population of eight billion people, theoretically, of course-were it not for the starvation imposed by the dictatorships. PEPFAR has saved 26,000,000 lives between 2003 and 2025, the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease. The mobile Internet revolution has enabled six billion people, or 73% of humanity, to gain access to human knowledge, banking, education, healthcare information, job markets, and democratic participation. Between 2011 and 2024 more than two billion people, many of them women, have gained banking access-billions now escape the predatory operations of informal lenders and are able to invest in their own businesses. Between 1950 and 2022 adult literacy worldwide has jumped from 56% to 87%; over five billion people can now read and write, compared to fewer than 100 million two centuries ago. Between 2000 and 2020 three 12.7 million deaths have been averted due to global malaria control efforts. I’m not even discussing the reduction in worldwide poverty. The revolution in child mortality, the fact that clean power has surpassed coal for the first time in history in 2025; the gender revolution in education in that 90% of girls worldwide now attend primary and secondary school, up from massive disparities decades ago; and the doubling of agricultural yield using the same quantity of farmland since 1960.

All that’s great, but, to indulge in a bit of narcissism, let me talk about an advance for which I’m grateful. The Internet has allowed me to find a dream husband, a guy who is smart, hot, kinky and who likes the way my mind works. He was living in Kentucky, about a thousand miles away, and we fell in love by writing to each other, over the course of a summer. I never thought it would be possible to find such a great guy and wonderfully sexually deviant person, let alone attract him with a couple of pictures of myself and an essay. And while perhaps I and Frank are lucky, this new means of courtship seems to have replaced most of the old ways. We look on YouTube, laughing, at “Video Dating” (you know the theme song-it begins, “Are you looking for someone…?”. I remember personal ads in newspapers with horror; I remember the expectation that I was expected to find a bride at a college party. That was impossible, because I was gay, and college parties, in 1990, didn’t allow you to be gay.

Yes, we know that it’s okay to be gay, now, and even to be trans-the Supreme Court has given its imprimatur of legitimacy to the former in 2015, even, but here I’m commenting on a different, perhaps even more widespread aspect of romantic connection: The tolerance of different flavors, those besides vanilla, in romantic or erotic practice. I’m speaking of kinks. (Maybe I should use a new phrase, such as “alternative sexualities”: Dom-sub, furries, demi-sexuality, sapiosexuality, and others that can’t be expressed in a single word-take, for example, the practice of a man “cucking” a supposedly straight, heterosexual couple. It’s not got a name yet, but it’s a phenomenon that I don’t think is “just a phase.” Of course, there are “alternative sexualities” that society won’t tolerate and shouldn’t-pederasty; bestiality; involuntary sexual enslavement. Drawing the line between the alternative sexualities that ought to be celebrated and those that are wrongful and criminal is a task that must be done, but it’s not as difficult a task as some people assert.) But let’s stick with the simpler word “kink.” The kink that I practice and am most interested in is what I call Dom-sub. Others call it S&M or “Leather,” or BDSM, but I’ll stick with “Dom-sub, here.” It has existed as long as human beings have. It’s only now, though, that it’s been able to force its way into the extant dominant “vanilla” sexual culture and demand recognition, or at least, a legitimate place on the menu of romantic options.

The Divinyls sang, “There’s a fine line between pleasure and pain”.[1] What’s the difference, anyway, between the two? Between physical pleasure and pain, and between psychological pleasure and pain? Ecstasy contains, inherently a good measure of agony. The moment of orgasm it’s not an explosion of pleasure as much as it is pleasure that has reached such an extreme intensity that it becomes agonizing. In other senses we find that the intensely pleasing ends up being close to the intensely displeasing: the delicious tastes of parmesan and kimchi are very close to the flavor and odor notes in vomit and in spoiled fish. If a piece of music has too perfect a set of harmonies, it can sound flat, lifeless, and childish–minor key moodiness and the accident harmonies are usually required to provide a frame that sets off a particular piece’s beautiful moments. We find this in visual stimulus, too: consider the way the evil character Peter Riviera’s beauty is described in Neuromancer, “His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset."[2]

I don’t need to go on trying to prove this. Great sex often celebrates pain, discomfort, and feelings of fear and degradation. There is inequality-many people find exciting the monopolization of pleasure by one of the partners together with the repudiation of pleasure by the other partner. Thus arise expressions such as “I’m going to fuck your brains out,” or “I’m going to fuck you silly,” or even “I like it rough.” Just as Peter Riviera’s beauty would have been ruined by a nose that had “been too nicely sculpted,” and just as “barnyard funk” is an aroma that is prized in certain fine wines, great sex isn’t just pleasurable sensation after pleasurable sensation. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes there’s an agonizing delay of gratification. Sometimes our partner ties us up and ridicules us, rather than breathing whispers of adoration into our ears.

Kink and BDSM have become better tolerated and visible with the rise of the World Wide Web, beginning in 1994. Maybe as a result of this, or of this plus some other factors, it seems that Generation Z is the cohort most tolerant of and interested in kink erotic practices. How encouraging this is, despite Gen Z’s often misplaced enthusiasm for psychiatric labels, which has let it to over-value Freud’s description of paraphelias, and his further characterization of most kink practices as paraphelias. (The paraphelia[3] is particularly nasty concept that I shall describe and explain in a moment-and the operation of essentially kink xenophobia to try to marginalize kink practice and portray them as immoral extremist and even criminal, not because of any intrinsic problems but because people who wish to provide unnecessary moral policing in a society have been able to target kink practices because it is very easy to make them appear scary and risky.)

It’s perfectly all right to enjoy erotic discomfort. It’s all right to seek it out, and it’s all right to establish a long-term partnership, or even a marriage, that is predicated on sex that features stimuli other than pleasure. It doesn’t make you twisted, or perverted. It makes you normal. BDSM is following the path LGBTQ+ identites traveled. Once, they were pathologized. In 1973, LGBTQ+ identities were de-pathologized; homosexuality was removed from the DSM. And by 2015, gays and lesbians achieved the right to marry, which marked legitimacy. I see the same thing happening with BDSM. Right now, BDSM fantasies and practices are pathologized, listed dismissively as paraphilias in the DSM, just as homosexuality used to be. While some paraphilias are immoral, even criminal, such as pedophilia (sexual attraction to children), and ought to continue being considered pathological, something like a mutually consensual domestic discipline relationship is most certainly not pathological.

The desire to give or receive discipline, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, is harmless, even though it’s still sneered at, if not vilified. That vilification and sneering is rapidly falling away. Part of the reason for the growing acceptance is the Internet’s ability to form communities from the raw materials of individuals whose erotic fantasies had, before the Internet, caused them to feel shame, first, and isolation as a product of that shame. A related reason for BDSM’s growing acceptance, as I’ve discussed above, is that younger generations treat BDSM as unremarkable.

Gen Z’s ho-hum attitude towards BDSM isn’t just an indication that mores are changing. Mores always change. Gen Z’s ho-hum attitude is actually moral leadership. Older people, including Gen Xers in late middle age, like myself, look at the Gen Z shoulder-shrugging and find blessed tolerance. This tolerance feels different, however, from the tolerance of LBGTQ+ cohort that the Supreme Court, in its majesty, granted in 2015. That felt like an identity-based tolerance: “If you’re ‘born this way,’ if it’s not your choice, we’ll still allow you to get married. We won’t treat you differently based on who you are. But we won’t necessarily be able to think about the sex you have without a shudder of disgust.”

What Gen Z adds, with its ho-hum attitude, is a blasé attitude towards sexual practices. It replaces the shudder with the shoulder-shrug. Kink and BDSM cannot hide behind the “born this way” justification; kink and BDSM aren’t exclusively about who you are. They’re about what you choose to do. The ho-hum attitude doesn’t just apply to seeing two people of the same sex holding hands as they walk down the street, or as they apply to rent an apartment. It applies to sexual and erotic activities that people choose to do. It’s a grant of sexual autonomy, and an acceptance of sexual minority practice. This is far bigger than a rigid, identity-based acceptance of people who are “born this way.” This is a willingness to-with the exception of acts that are criminal for reasons we agree upon-let go of our disgust. This is a true replacement of “I have no objection to your being gay, just don’t rub my face in it” with “Oh, you like to butt-fuck each other? Well, good for you! Oh, he spanks you? I’m glad that keeps you in line!” – This makes me think of one of the more striking erotic images I’ve seen recently-the image of the backs of two men wearing jeans and white t-shirts. On the larger man’s t-shirt is a black arrow pointing right, to the smaller man, with text above the arrow, also in black, reading “He spanks me”. Somehow this confession-or is it bragging?-makes more of an impact on me than black leather or piercings or collars. Maybe it’s this message being carried in the vehicle of jeans and white t-shirts, so this scene could be happening anywhere. It could be Main Street, U.S.A., and not necessarily a specifically-delineated time and space such as the Folsom Street Fair or IML (International Men of Leather). If any cohort had the guts and the frankness to pull this message out of the margins of one of these BDSM “fairs” and into vanilla society, it’s you, Gen Z. I dare you to make us even more jealous.

THE END

***

I. The Obvious Trajectory (Option 1)

  • Bridge from your gratitude section: The same forces that allowed you to find Frank are working for kink broadly
  • State the parallel: BDSM is following the path LGBTQ+ identities traveled
    • Moving from pathology to legitimate variation
    • Internet connecting communities, reducing isolation/shame
    • Younger generations treating it as unremarkable
  • Acknowledge the genuine progress: “This is happening. The question is just how fast."

II. The Pivot

  • “But framing this as just another identity category awaiting its turn actually undersells what’s at stake.”
  • Or: “But that’s less important than the deeper principle this exposes.”

III. The Real Argument (Option 2)

  • State the distinction: Kink can’t hide behind “born this way”
    • This isn’t (primarily) about discovering an immutable identity
    • It’s about choosing to do things others find disturbing
  • Why this matters more:
    • It’s a purer test of whether we actually believe in sexual autonomy
    • Or whether we only tolerate what we’ve been conditioned to accept
  • The uncomfortable question: If two adults consent to something that makes you squeamish, whose problem is that?

IV. The Landing

  • Frame the stakes: This isn’t about kink specifically-it’s about whether “consenting adults” actually means something

  • End on the limit case: If we can’t tolerate chosen expressions of sexuality between consenting adults, then our sexual liberation is just tolerance for the acceptable minorities, not respect for human freedom

  • Optional final beat: Return to gratitude, but sharper-“I’m grateful I can love Frank openly, but I shouldn’t have to be grateful for that.”

  • Divinyls. “Pleasure and Pain.” What a Life!, Chrysalis Records, 1985. ↑

  • Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace Books, 1984, p. [page number]. ↑

  • “Sexual desires regarded as perverted or irregular; spec. attraction to unusual or abnormal sexual objects or practices; an instance of this.” “Paraphelia.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, November 2025, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/paraphilia_n?tab=meaning_and_use#31902899. ↑