‘Not My Kink’

This is my second post for Smutathon 2018! Eight of us are spending 12 hours today furiously writing erotica, blogging about sex, taking filthy photos, and generally producing smut in all its glorious forms, to raise money for the Abortion Support Network. To find out more, to enter our sex toy raffle, and most importantly to donate to an excellent cause, click here!

Given the right set of circumstances, I am very enthusiastic about spanking people. It doesn’t turn me on, exactly, but it’s a fun, physically vigorous, and often surprisingly sociable activity, which creates all sorts of interesting sounds and skin marking. More to the point, people who volunteer (or ask) to be spanked tend to have very strong feelings on the subject – and respond in a vocally appreciative way when you hit the right spots.

I don’t have the same natural enthusiasm when it comes to face-slapping. Even though they’re essentially the same activity, looking someone in the eye before sharply slapping their cheek feels more personal and much more intimate than hitting them on the arse with a hand or paddle. In part, that’s because they often produce very different responses. You can see the tears forming after each stinging slap, and the thinner, more sensitive skin ensures that most people’s facial pain threshold is much lower, meaning that I naturally feel more tentative and cautious about hitting them there.

Nevertheless, I’ve found over the last few years that any ambivalence I have about face-slapping can quickly disappear if the timing and situation are right. Not to the point where I enjoy the activity itself, but enough to remove any reservations I have about doing it. That’s only happened a handful of times, and in each case it’s because I’ve got to the point with someone where I’m confident not only that they really want it, but that it’ll be a thing we can share and enjoy together because of how much they want it.

To me, that illustrates a couple of things. Firstly that when it comes to sex in general and kink in particular, communication is key. You knew that already, of course, but it’s a message never not worth sharing. Communication allows us to learn what someone wants, but also to understand why they want it, what effect it’ll have, and how that can impact whatever broader dynamic exists between you. It helps keep us safe, and gives all parties the best chance of enjoying any given sexual encounter – both at the time and afterwards.

What it also made me think about is the many nuances to every kinkster’s favourite acronym: YKINMKBYKIOK. Or ‘your kink is not my kink but your kink is OK’. It functions as super-useful shorthand for all those occasions when you want to say to someone “hey, this thing you’re into, I don’t like/enjoy/understand it, but I support your right to do it and hope you have an amazing time.”

Within that though, the words ‘not my kink’ can conceal a multitude of subtly different messages. For me, those can range from ‘it’s a hard limit for me and I don’t want to be involved at all’ all the way through to something like spanking, which isn’t technically a kink of mine, but gives me a different kind of pleasure by proxy.

Face-slapping sits somewhere between those, which is why I find it interesting to consider my own somewhat mixed responses to both the concept and the act itself. It is decidedly not my kink, and I won’t do it with just anyone. I have to fight an instinctive aversion to what it symbolises in a lot of non-sexual situations – humiliation, physical chastisement, assault – in a way that I don’t with spanking, which raises some uncomfortable questions in itself. I’m scared of doing it wrong, and I don’t typically enjoy the stark power imbalance that inevitably comes with it; I like playing around with that dynamic, but not in such black-and-white terms.

However, to watch and feel someone getting aroused by it, or to know that the act of being slapped is pushing a whole bunch of important buttons deep inside them, is still a really powerful thing, and one I can’t help being affected by. In those rare moments, it becomes my kink – because it’s so obviously and viscerally theirs. That makes sense in the context of my wider sexuality; I get off on the enjoyment of the people I’m fucking, so it’s no surprise that I can separate a partner’s response from the thing that’s causing it, even in cases where that thing might otherwise be an active turn-off.

Thinking about that grey area while writing this post has made me reconsider how I view and categorise other activities that I’d previously lumped together as ‘not my kink’. The acronym itself remains invaluable, and I strongly support its use beyond the kink community to combat casual kink-shaming and encourage people to be more accepting of alternative sexualities. I just like the fact that it encourages further interrogation of what sits behind that simple statement – and what it means for the way we explore kink together.