Kink orientation

We assume kink follows sexuality because it would be tidier if it did. It frequently does not, and the people it does not work out for spend years assuming that means something about them.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

What it means

Kink orientation is the idea that who you want to do this with sits on a different axis from who you fancy. Most people assume the two line up, because they do line up for plenty of people and because it would be neater if it were a rule.

The configurations are ordinary rather than exotic. A woman who has been with women for twenty years and wants to go over a man's knee. A gay man who wants a woman to do it. A straight woman who cannot imagine any of it with a man. A straight man who only wants it from another man. None of these is a puzzle to be solved, and the full treatment is at when your kink and your sexuality do not match.

The mechanism sits underneath a point the site makes elsewhere: for a great many people this is not a sexual activity at all. See does spanking have to be sexual. Once that is true, the other person's gender is no longer answering a question about desire. It is supplying something else.

In practice

What it usually supplies is one of three things. Borrowed authority, which in this country is still overwhelmingly coded male. Size and containment, which is a fact about bodies rather than about attraction. Or simply the particular shape the fantasy has, which tends to be fixed and specific and was never consulted about who the person happens to fancy.

There is an honest complication here. For some people it is partly charged, and that also reassigns nothing. Somebody can find the situation electric, be entirely uninterested in the person as a person, and hold both of those without ever resolving them. A great many people leave it unresolved permanently and are none the worse for it.

The useful diagnostic is to work out what the gender is actually supplying, because that tells you whether it can be met another way. If it is borrowed authority, a woman can play a magistrate perfectly well. If it is size, there are large women. And if it simply has to be a man, that is a complete answer that requires no defence.

What people get wrong

Concluding that the mismatch means their stated orientation is wrong. It does not, and a decade of quietly wondering is a miserable way to spend the time.

Hearing "this is not sexual" as an opening position. This is the real practical problem rather than an abstract one. Some people treat it as shyness, as a phase, or as something that will change once she relaxes. One push after a clear statement is enough information, and no second data point is owed to anybody. See red flags.

And accepting a session while privately hoping. Anybody who cannot run it without hoping should decline rather than accept and hope, because hoping applies pressure later without the person ever deciding to apply it.