Kink for Dummies Cheat Sheet

Despite its loud detractors, kink offers a widely cherished, compelling set of intimate and sexual practices that create ecstatic connections among its devotees.

Kink For Dummies can help you figure out whether the desires you may be hiding or struggling with can be joyfully realized through kinky play and relationships.

Like other forms of intimacy, kink involves emotional and physical risk. The intensity of kink play has created a world of conversation and practice in kink community around consent, pleasure, and safety.

Kinks connections are often multifaceted and layered. A kinkster may have a spouse, a favorite partner, a number of casual playmates, and a social club where they observe or explore about kink practices.

People who seek out kink are pushing back against monumental directives — religious, social, cultural, and familial — and often need resources, support, and community in order to identify and explore their desires and feelings.

Understanding kink principles and practices

While kink is an ancient practice — evident in art and literature across the ages — mutual respect and consent are hallmarks of modern practices of kink.

Strong relationship skills and self-awareness are essential, especially around direct communication. Being able to clearly articulate what you do and do not want are crucial to a satisfying kink life. Co-creating kink agreements with your crushes, partners, and/or lovers can be a hot, enlivening, and intimacy-building process.

Similarly, understanding your burdens around attachment, abandonment, violence, and harm in your childhood and adult life will help you assess your capacity to connect with your partners and minimize communication missteps around consent and safety.

Ideologies about mainstream relationship and monogamy create a scarcity game that sends the message: there’s only one person in the whole universe for me. This can fuel jealous competition. And while many kinksters are monogamous, or monogamish, the kink community rejects the scarcity theory by centering an abundance model that embraces openness and connection to pleasure and layers of intimate connections.

Great Dominants (Doms) or submissives (subs) don’t hide their needs or wants to fit in or impress others. Great kinksters speak their truths in the moment, thus taking the best possible care of themselves and their partners.

Coming back from breaches of trust is difficult in the context of the heightened arena of vulnerability that kink may create. But healing is never impossible. Making a sincere apology, committing to honesty, being consistent, and giving your partners time to heal creates an opening for recovery, but there are no guarantees.

Managing the emotional demands of opening yourself in kink spaces or in a kink relationship is serious work. Having kinky peers and community can help you find creative ways of managing this.

Diving into your kink quest

Here’s a great introductory activity to help you start to think about what you want. If you could describe yourself and your desire with just a few key terms, what would they be?

Define your descriptors

Get a journal or create a dedicated private digital journal for your questions and reflections. Then block out time just for you:

This exercise and many others in the book will help you center yourself in your questions about your desires and your kink potential. It might be fun to share your choices with friends or crushes. What might life be like if you centered and freely spoke about your desire?

Find support

Your kinky life will be much more meaningful and vibrant if you can find great friends and supporters along the way.

• Identify confidantes. Prioritize people who will fully support your discovery process. Choose wisely.
• Join online discussion groups where curiosity, care, and information-sharing are valued.
• Find experts — therapists, relationship counselors, event producers, Dungeon Masters —- whose values and ways of thinking interest you.

Get out there

Here’s another fun exercise. Choose one of these prompts or all of them. Before checking out kinky people and profiles on dating apps:

• Write a four-line personal ad. Base this strictly on your kinky desires: what do you want? Describe yourself and who or what you are looking for.
• Create a hypothetical profile on a kink-positive dating site.
• Create a 90-second speech about yourself. Describe what you are looking for in terms of compatible sexual partners and your kink life. Pitch yourself to a potential crush.
• Create a microblog or short social media post of your ideal sexy kink encounter.