Forget about the exact time of day — I don’t even remember the month or year of my initiation into the world of sensuality.
This was a precarious realm, dangerously forbidden but easily accessible. For an eight- or nine-year-old who had only ever talked about a vagina or vulva in the context of menstruation, anything with even the most subtle suggestion of sexuality was forbidden. Secretive, undercover, hush-hush.
I’m not so shallow as to subscribe to the idea that sex can only be associated with clinically accurate (or often, inaccurate) terminologies for human genitalia. But what I’m trying to say is, that is exactly how I processed the grown-up talk — the “you are not dying, you just got your period” talk, the “nice girls don’t say the s-word aloud” talk, the “sex only after marriage to a nice husband” talk and the “bedroom” talk.
My own body was morphing into a foreigner that felt utterly unwelcome in most realms, not just when it came to sexuality. I was tempted to internalize the ridiculousness of believing the premature emergence of my breasts at eight years old messed up my brain and body to the extent that my sexuality became synonymous to a cracked window distorting every single one of the desires I embodied.
Feeling good at the thought of being tied up? Early puberty fucked me up.
Feeling excited about the thought of being held captive by a non-Edwardian vampire? Hormones and pop culture conspiring against me.
Finding beauty in intricate rope work decorating breasts? My premature chest is definitely preparing me for a tour around Hell.
As I was devouring a highly forbidden — and frankly, poorly written — story from Kindle Unlimited, I stumbled upon a scene where the main character is pursued by two werewolves in a deep, dark forest. When they catch her, wicked (but very, very sexy) things happen (I’ll leave out the details, but I encourage creativity — picture clothes torn by bare hands, three people having the time of their lives and activities that would put any high-intensity interval training gym session to shame).
These wicked things, irrespective of the quality of their execution, re-ignited those sullying, shameful and secretive feelings that I had promised to bury under 10,000 different layers of dirt, earth and muted confessions.
Or maybe I didn’t want to talk about that scene — an example of primal play, I now know — because the story was poorly written. Perhaps I confused sexual embarrassment for literary embarrassment. I don’t recall exactly, and the memory keeps losing relevance because burying and digging up and re-burying and re-digging up these things grows tiring.
So now I lay these moments on my dormitory bookshelves, allowing them to permeate every special interests rant and Ubyssey article that perhaps I will refrain from sending to my family WhatsApp group chat.
Shame is a language I mastered too well — I felt it when I was harshly berated for knowing a little too much for my age (at least according to prissy adults), mocked at school for being the Moral Defender of Queer People on the Internet and when I accidentally flashed my mother a sexually explicit (and in hindsight, quite comical) visual from my GL (girl love) manga (which makes for an excellent memory to recount to friends at sleepovers).
I felt like the only one awake in a sexual dystopia. Queerness had always been my mother tongue, but this shame had colonized my mind and tongue for long enough that I had to start learning her from scratch, all on my own.
Much of the online realm of Tumblr, AO3, Wattpad and the grander corpus of absolutely toe-curling, sheet-clenching and gasp-inducing smut resembled the utopia I had carefully hidden away from the prying, judgemental eyes and ways of the people in my life. The unordinary and the non-normative was safely performable in this world.
I do not recall a singular moment, the one incident, the ultimate story of how I discovered kinks and how I got into the things I got into.
Maybe it was one of those terribly written kink play scenes in Monster’s Bride. Perhaps kink embodied the thrilling possibility of being desired in a non-normative way that I found tempting. Perhaps it proved to be a site to unpack my familial and sexual trauma without any social consequences, judgement from my parents or carceral time. Or maybe even just the fantasy of kink play made me feel so, so sexy, I morphed into this vixen who would put one stiletto-heeled foot on a man’s neck.
Or perhaps the other kinksters I found online didn’t make me feel like a sexual deviant with a predilection for the bad and the bizarre. And that was such a relieving revelation.
But it wasn’t just one single person, one single moment or one single desire — there wasn’t a remarkable first time or remarkable anything really. The mechanics of kink made me think of all the ways we can experience pleasure. I could say kink culture called out to me, called out to the Queerness I embody and, in return, I found solace in the subversive nature of this existence.
The remaining contradictions in my head settled down when I allowed characters in my stories to enact scenes that would have otherwise drawn an appalled and defensive reaction from me had they lacked the critical elements of fantasy and affirmative consent.
I might as well be a patchwork doll made of non-normative desires, misplaced moralities and shameless pursuits of pleasure, embodying every single one of those nightmarish characteristics my parents feared their child to possess.
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