moominmuppet

(cross-posting here so it's accessible to folks who aren't on Fetlife, where I'm doing most of my writing about sexuality these days. Original post is here: https://fetlife.com/users/10935/posts/2913859)

After-school classes, academic summer camps, science fairs -- these were my bread and butter as a kid. As an adult I love a good conference, although haven't been to one in much too long, and I still take classes of various sorts occasionally just for fun. I also read voraciously, but I think best when I get the chance to bounce ideas around with other people. I'm extraverted enough for the social interplay to be mostly energizing, not draining, and formulating my thoughts to express to other people always helps me sort them in my head. And there's the benefit of other people's knowledge, experience, and perspective, of course!

I often explain to vanilla people in my life, half-jokingly, that kink is a natural extension of sexuality for me, because it's the sex that involves homework. Thinking about sex (in the broadest sense of the term), talking about it, engaging my curiosity and intellect, learning new skills and ways of thinking, finding new bits of my own sexual map; that's a big part of what gets me hot, engaged, and excited. It's not that you can't be thinky about vanilla sex, or that all kinksters are into kink for that side of things, but I've said for a long time that I think the overlap between the kink communities and the geek communities is less than coincidental, and I stand by that. It seems I find a lot of my people here; the ones for whom the analysis and planning and learning is a big part of their joy.

I've also been thinking about the pull of the community, about why I choose community over playing solo, even setting aside the access to fun equipment and technical specialists. A lot of it has to do with the ways that being a community around sexuality shifts the boundaries on appropriate conversation. I'm a sexuality geek, not just about kink but overall. I want to bounce about the newest reseach on the g-spot, or the excellent new indie porn producer, like some people want to replay the winning field goal from Sunday's game. I am, overall, pretty TMI and NSFW, although I have elaborate thoughts on consensuality and boundaries regarding discussing sexuality and handling other peoples' comfort levels, and there are plenty of environments where I just bite my tongue and talk about things that actually interest me much less. Incidentally, for a long time I used Livejournal as my primary outlet for rambling about these topics; I'm trying to get started doing much the same here these days; it lets me shake the words out of my fingers so I don't explode.

I've tailored my life to this in many ways; my household, my friends, and some of my other communities (especially sex education, reproductive health, queer studies, and sex-positive feminism) are similarly open to these topics overall, and I love that. My academic studies have often revolved around topics of sexuality. It's one of my great passions, and my approach to it is deeply informed by my politics and philosophies about the benefits of open communication and shared information.

The kink community is one of the places I can breathe a sigh of relief, stop biting my tongue, and have the conversations that are always trying to bubble out of me anyway And it's especially fun because the boundaries are different in some ways. The nature of a community where we share space sexually, and where direct personal sexual expression is generally appropriate, allows for different conversations, different shared experiences to reference and discuss. That's intensely valuable to me. It's an intersection of my academic and political interests with my personal sexual experiential fun. Powerful stuff.

I feel less compartmentalized within the kink community than in most other environments, and those other environments where I feel as or more complete and at home are those that are also sex-positive and kink-positive. The feminist sex-positive movement, especially where it intersects with the queer kink community, is probably most "home" to me of anywhere -- feeds all the parts of my soul in very special ways. And I've been finding that within the larger kink community more easily these days, more of "my people" floating through the crowd.

Although I like to play, and I particularly like to play publicly, it's not the primary reason I'm investing time and energy in building my connection with the community. It's a bonus if it happens, but there are plenty of nights I come home from parties feeling sated and fulfilled in the ways that matter to me most even if I didn't play at all; the mental stimulation and connection is primary for me. Certainly, I have lonely nights here and there, but when I do it's less about the frustrations of not having a partner with me (or finding one to play with), and much more about those off-days when I feel awkward and self-conscious and can't connect socially as easily, can't seem to have the conversations I want.

So, I can't say it's "in a nutshell", but there's a good bit of why the community matters to me, fwiw.