Building Your Kink-Palace on Half-Knowledge Is Like Diving Into The Ocean Having Learnt To Swim In A Bucket.

Let me tell you a fun story about a bizarre institute. A part of its program promises to teach its students to swim but they cannot afford a pool, nor to hire swim coaches, so when they enlist students, alongside the other course material, they issue to each one: a small bucket, a raised wooden plank and swim goggles. In the summer, in the vast expanse of their playground, you can see hundreds of men, flat on their belly on the plank, face inside the bucket, being told to imagine the tactile resistance of the water as they flap their legs and arms. After they complete their studies, they are issued a swimming certification. Now, tell me, would you like to hire one of them as your swim coach?

Some things cannot be learnt without experience, and I would posit, BDSM is one of them. Let me first clarify, there is immense value to good information and discussions, I could hardly denounce the power of the essay, given that I am writing one at this very moment. However, I have recently become mindful of a growing trend, the intellectualisation of kink/BDSM to the point where the people having the discussions start to be believe they are a viable substitute for experience. Thereby positioning themselves as “experienced kinksters” (and sometimes worse, as educators) simply because they have been on a website dedicated to kink, they have been to some munches, maybe hosted some, read some articles and participated in spirited debate about subjects like CNC and TPE. All of those things have value, but that value only serves as a framework for *application* to what you do, so you can see how it works and make adjustments according to what you experience, and only then does it turn into knowledge, and even then the knowledge has to remain adaptable. At this point, I’d also like to define what I mean by experience, I don’t just mean doing something, even regularly, I mean: *reading/discussing, doing, reflecting, understanding, identifying your gaps, repeating, reflecting again, reading more, applying learnings to your gaps, asking questions, adapting, doing again and maybe again. It’s much like learning to swim, on your first day in the pool, the best you can hope to learn (unless you are truly prodigious as a swimmer) is how your body responds to buoyancy and how to control it. On the 100th day you may have learnt the stroke, and maybe on your 10000th hour you come close to mastering it.

Sometimes, the way that the term “experienced” is used within this particular sexual/social subset of people is as a checklist (*I’ve done breath play, edge play, CNC…*), as a goal (*once I attain the title of being experienced I will be certified and can present myself as such and that is where everyone is trying to go because it's the only way you are "in"*), as a flex (*I’ve been around since you were in diapers, I understand everything about this world even though I haven’t updated my knowledge since 1984*), as the price of admission (*if I need to be experienced in order to get partners, what if I just say it, and learn and debate all the terminology really well, I can create the illusion of experience*) or as being post-learning (*the term “experienced,” in itself, has a finality that “in my experience” or “as I am experiencing” does not have, it’s as if to say, don’t think you can actually teach me anything, I already know it all*.) And on other, more grim, and sometimes gendered occasions, “experienced” seems to imply, “*have been expectedly violated and have therefore learnt my lesson*,” (the lesson seems to vary, but as a community, we pretty much ensure that the lesson is almost never “violators will be held liable, ousted and made accountable for the good of the victim and the community,” go figure). When I say “experience,” I mean, none of the above, I am referring to an active, endless process and practise of learning, doing and adapting.

In the past year, I have been out amongst the people of the kink-community once again (and seriously, this is not an indictment, it’s an observation), and I have had a lot of discussions with people, young and older, which have given me pause. First of all, I seem to no longer meet people who say they are “new” or “learning,” and on the occasions that I do, within a few months, they are on the internet presenting themselves as experts or educators (and the older ones, often taking in flock to educate or mentor), and seriously, it’s none of my business from whom people choose to learn, but the misrepresentation of their “experience” is truly appalling (because I also have some experience playing with these people or picking up the pieces after they hurt/harm their partners or friends).

Now, I gotta disclaim this by saying that perhaps I have no leg to stand on here, I am currently, presenting myself as an educator, and I am by no means, an *expert* at sexuality or kink. I have some experience, I have written about it for a long time and admittedly I have *some* skill at organising information into easily accessible and comprehensible structures. I also ensure that I preface every class with the information that I am not an expert, my teachings are based solely on my learnings and observations, and there are things I cannot answer because I am not a competent authority on them. I can give you a structure, you have to fill it in with yourself and decide for yourself, if the structure works for you. There are few abject truths to sexuality or fetish. However, to arrive at even the semblance of structure, I had to do a lot of shit, read a lot of shit, apply a lot of it to my life, see how it worked, make mistakes, have successes, learn how to communicate, determine what questions were pertinent, grow, change, transform, make more mistakes, try more methods, acquire some peace with things that are not for me, recover from several frenzies, identify my own emotional and sexual motivation, keep up with changes in them, introspect actively, communicate vociferously, and that takes some *time* and some *practise*. Obviously, this happens at a different pace and age for different people, being young does not mean you are necessarily less experienced. But, at any age, theory can only take you so far, because there are some aspects of doing things, that are invisible, until you try to do them and they are different for all of us. The best contribution that experience makes to our lives is that is shows us *what else* we should be considering, *what else* we could be asking, *what else* could happen. It directs your questioning.

The second thing is the nature of stories I am hearing—long, winded opinions on CNC (it’s having a moment? Remember when we had to explain that CNC is not just rape-play? These days, I am having to explain that not all BDSM is CNC) followed by an, often single, instance of exploration/experience with a partner (which frequently ended in someone getting hurt which weirdly also makes the speaker more of an expert(?) somehow)—and the nature of problems people are bringing (to me, I am not soliciting, evidently my face makes people want advice from me). In the past five months, I have heard all of the following things from people who called themselves or their partners experienced, well-read or long-standing community members:
- There is no danger to breath play that makes it qualify as edge-play. What could happen in so little time?
- I am constantly depressed because of the conditions of my dynamic, but that’s the point of TPE, right? (Yikes)
- I like to present with a little pushback so I think I should just do a hardcore CNC scene.
- My master keeps injuring me during play, but he says it is part of what I agreed to so I feel like I have to continue doing it even though it makes me scared and worried.
- There are so many instances of ambiguous consent, is it really even possible to achieve true consent? (this has some intellectual validity in terms of rumination, but the context in which it was asked, was essentially a confession to having violated consent)
- My CNC scene backfired and none of the parties involved will take responsibility (*1000)

Those are a few examples. And honestly, seriously, a lot of those things *could* be how you developed a dynamic, willingly and with informed-consent, but based on further discussion, that was not the case in any of these instances. It’s partly because we put such a premium on acquiring information that we don’t consider that not all information is good information, not all community-leaders are competent voices, not all people come into the scene with pre-existing knowledge (and it is so easy to start thinking that learning the terminology and having a couple of scenes, posting a few pictures means you now just *know everything*) and information only takes you so far. Freedom of discourse allowed me to learn about the socio-political influences on sexuality, the ethical constraints of sexuality, the influences of my life on my sexuality but practise and learning, taught me to ask *better* questions and develop enforceable practises. It was through a sustained practise of domestic service that I began to consider the ramifications of a child seeing the “woman” in the house as solely responsible for that, It was through years of being slapped that I learnt to evaluate the long-term effects of facial trauma, it was through several sustained power-exchange dynamics that I learnt how effective communication looks different than just speaking a lot, it was through years of playing with the same person that I learnt how a safe(r) no-safeword dynamic can be sustained, it was through making mistakes that I learnt how I presented risks to other people, it was through actively taking accountability that I learnt respect for my partners is more important than placating my fears, it was through repeatedly being in situations that resembled a crisis that I developed ethics on accountability and responding to crises (and to demand, good faith and compassion, as the bottom, at all times), it was through sustained experience within altered states (commonly referred to as subspace, though, I have a long-essay on why you could use some specific descriptions as opposed to a blanket term) that I learnt how to handle those without damage to myself or my functionality, it was through a lifetime of parsing through experiences of pain that I have come even close to appreciating the vastness of masochism, it was through a myriad, pleasant and unpleasant experiences, with dubious consent that I even began to understand the possible breadth of CNC and its applicability. You can know the term risk-awareness, but until you have been in sufficient situations where you have experienced the fabric of potential risks, you wouldn’t know what to be aware of. I can go on and on, but I suppose you get the point. It is not embarrassing to know “less” than someone else, we all know “less” than someone else but skipping ahead or thinking that learning ends at theory is so dangerous. I can see the dangers clearer than ever before.

You cannot learn to swim in a day on a field, you cannot learn to kink in a fortnight on the internet. You cannot skip ahead to accolades (and this is where the metaphor falls apart a little, there are no accolades in kink, there are no prizes, you win nothing, unless you consider healthy relationships and play an accolade, which I think is a good one). And even when you achieve what you think is excellence, you still have a world of knowledge and experience that you have not yet encountered (which is why listening and reading is of import), you may be the *best* in the community pool, but when you “graduate” to a sports facility, you will see how much else there is to learn and at the Olympics every expert still runs the risk of finishing last. But the struggles and questions of all levels of experience have value to everyone when shared freely and honestly. I learn more from “inexperienced” people who have questions than “experienced” people who have only answers. If you are continuing to practise, do more things and read more and touting your *years* of experience as credentials, and you don’t have any new questions, you may be swimming in a bucket, and eventually it will be comprised only of water that is tainted by you, and when you inevitably splash it on someone else, they bear the risk of getting sick. A risk you wouldn’t know to present, because you never thought to question the knowledge you have acquired.