Introduction to Unkinked

Welcome to this space. No matter your experiences or perspectives on kink/BDSM, there is something for you here.

UNKINKED is a philosophy for engaging with systemic patterns of trauma and oppression using the framework of BDSM.

I discovered my local BDSM community in 2015, and it quickly became clear that there was very little compassionate understanding for the reality of systemic trauma and conditioning.

The role of these forces in shaping us is massive.

Our deep psyche, our core identity, is formed by age 7– shaped by factors of which we typically retain little conscious memory.

Cultural and childhood experiences create core beliefs about the world, informing our identity and desires. In other words,

Who are we and what turns us on?

I entered into the kink scene armed with a background in my own trauma healing experiences and an ongoing graduate research career in cognitive psychology.

To me, kink spaces seemed like an obvious place for awareness about how identity, trauma, and arousal become connected. A place for thoughtful, bold conversations on how people become attracted to familiar pain, an opportunity to shed light on how powerful the body is in holding, and transforming, experiences of suffering.

This was not what I found.

Most kink conversations centered denial about kinks and trauma.

Plenty of educational sources and teachers I encountered were quick to dissociate their practice and BDSM as whole from the reality of trauma.

The idea of "safe sane and consensual" silenced any notion that what we choose might still cause harm.

Enthusiastic kink leaders of all stripes confidently gave information on "safely" reenacting cultural patterns like rape, child abuse, slavery, and domination.

Questioning kinks at all was discouraged, dismissed as "kink shaming."

It became clear that the price of belonging was silence and acceptance.

So I came to appreciate BDSM for doing openly what happens invisibly everywhere else:

teaching and normalizing abuse dynamics.

The freedom of sexual exploration and pleasure is one part of the thrill of kink spaces, but in large part:

BDSM thrives on the allure of the "taboo" in domination and suffering.

But domination and suffering exist anyway– by virtue of our larger culture, they are already enforced and enjoyed, via systems of police, education, environmental degradation, capitalism, patriarchy, and on and on.

So sexy, right?

Pain and suffering isn't taboo, it's a rather vanilla reality.

But having the audacity to enjoy yourself while fully experiencing that reality?

That's the edgy stuff.

BDSM is unusual not because it involves domination or pain, but because it celebrates domination and pain openly.

BDSM/kink creates a framework for everything that hurts and feels overwhelming to exist as fantasy, as chosen, as within our control.

The liberal protective framework of "consent" in BDSM shields participants from confronting their connection to anything outside their individual reality.

There are a lot, a lot, of overwhelmed humans on earth right now, just trying to get by.

So in the face of overwhelming reality...

Is it any wonder how many people find take pleasure in a framework that protects them...

...from having to truly engage with the reality of their own will?

Here's the magic question of Unkinking...

How can we harness the audacity of celebrating suffering...

...while also learning to utilize the freedom offered by a BDSM framework?

Which is to say...how do we actually feel the pleasure that comes from our reality, enough to let it fuel us to change and challenge the world?

...instead of, you know, allowing ourselves to keep being trained as willing cogs in a cult-ure machine that demands our fear and submission...

In this kinked-up scene of end-stage capitalist and colonialist degradation, we truly need to remember that domination is an oppressive game, and it can be opted out of. You don't need to keep playing.

You can safe-word out of the scene and choose something else.

Step out of the dungeon. There's a whole other world we can build here, together.

Ditching domination in intimate settings and unlearning the ways it has invaded our desires and relationships means we get to learn to play with real power.

We can learn the ways power also lives in surrender, rest, and stillness. In patience and balance. In the non-aggressive authority in discernment and truth, the resolute courage of a fuck no that rejects what is no longer working.

There is power in grief, in rage, in self-forgiveness; in trusting how our body has learned to survive, and working with it to learn new skills.

When we're kinked we're still bound in shame and unconsciously re-enacting an impulse that has been pushed down out of our awareness.

Kinksters love the kink juuust enough for the hit of arousal. Like a drug, kink is about wanting to keep sipping at a familiar taste, lapping at a familiar wound that never closes.

In unkinking we love our wounded places all-the-fucking-way: enough to really feel the pain and heal it, rather than spinning it out into the world again and again.

Free from the cruel whip of judgement, the degradation of our learned patterns as deviancy or aberration... we unlock real power. Plain and simple, honest and true, walk-in-the-room-and-change-the-vibe kind of power. Power more than just something you can wear inside the bedroom, power that lives in your heart and belly.

Unkinking is a mind-body-spirit process, a holistic perspective that views kinks as literal: a knot, tangle, or restriction in energetic flow.

As humans, we are influenced by all sorts of things from the day we're born– over time these solidify within us and become automatic. The ways we move our body in the world, our habitual emotional responses, our beliefs about ourselves and other people... these so easily become our kinks, the body trying to resolve something old and tangled.

I came to understand kinks this way, as influences far beyond the dungeon and bedroom, as a path for liberation.

Unkinking opens you to compassion for how you and other humans have been able to survive oppressive, violent, painful conditions. And more crucially, it frees you to question, change, and recover real power.

Most of us have been denied the tools we need to stay curious, know our own power, and connect with what we truly desire.

Unkinking will give you those tools.

Welcome.