Growing Up Kinky: Fiction That Shaped Me

These days if you want to read about non-fiction kink or learn about BDSM there are a million websites to look at. There are tons of real resources and blogs from people who know what they’re talking about.

And if websites aren’t enough and you want books, every kind of kink can easily be found by searching on Amazon. For those who prefer to hold a book in their hands before they buy it, most chain bookstores, like B&N, have plenty on the shelves you can flip through.

In other words the information is all over the place.

But it didn’t used to be like that. When I was in high school, Amazon didn’t exist yet, and the local bookstores, even the chains, had very little on kink. You might find half a shelf in the sexuality section if you were lucky.

Most of us had to figure out that this was part of us through fiction and how we reacted to it.

I knew I was kinky from a very young age, even if I didn’t know what that meant. I knew that spanking scenes in books and cartoons made me feel funny. I couldn’t resist looking up the words in the dictionary every chance I got. I was fascinated.

And then when I was around fourteen, I found a new (to me) Robert Heinlein book, I Will Fear No Evil, and realized that for some people spanking was connected to sexuality. That it could actually be a turn on.

It wasn’t my first book by him. That was The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and like most of his books there were spankings or threats in it, but they were more in line with what I was used to, discipline.

But in I Will Fear No Evil things went in a new direction. This book was ahead of its time in many ways and the plot is complicated, but it’s one particular scene that really rocked my world. The main character, Joan, is spanked for breaking her word and having a little bit of a tantrum when it’s time to go. Her lover, Jake, isn’t sure what to do about it, so he spanks her.

Now Heinlein was old school. He wrote strong female characters whom I really admired, but he wrote these books in the early to mid-1900’s and yes, he was sexist at times. Women could be amazons, they could be brilliant doctors, they could be generals, but if they acted up, they got spanked. The spanko in me has always loved this.

So this scene starts out as the standard discipline scene. Joan gets spanked, but afterwards, while cuddling in his arms, she confesses that she might have had an orgasm during the spanking. And also that she’d like to be spanked again at some point.

That was my first eye-opening introduction to the fact that some people might get spanked on purpose, and actually enjoy it. Or even enjoy it on one level while not enjoying it on another level. I knew instinctively that this was going to be me.

Even then, I still thought I was weird, that this was just my thing. I was getting some sneaky enjoyment out of something that wasn’t meant to titillate in that way. It would be years before it occurred to me to wonder if the authors writing these books, might have included such scenes because they were into it too.

I guess I’ll never know.

But since it never occurred to me that this was a valid lifestyle, I didn’t go looking for real resources, not for a while. Instead, I searched for more fiction, and I discovered romance. Johanna Lindsey, Kat Martin, Virginia Henley. All of them were prone to slipping spanking scenes in with the plot, and I quickly became addicted to finding new books with my favorite scenes.

One day I made a discovery. If I thought mainstream books with spankings in them were great… imagine my reaction to coming across the Beauty series by Anne Rice. The series had been republished with her more known pen name on it, as opposed to the earlier publication which was under a different pen name. Suddenly regular stores started carrying them.

I fully believe that it snuck into bookstores all over the country because they didn’t realize how very different this series was from her normal books, which are horror based. I had certainly never seen anything like them before. They were my first glimpse into the world of erotica, but even better, they were entirely based on spanking and other kinks.

As far as plot, there really isn’t much and the series isn’t for everyone since it is very non-consensual from the first pages. The series is based on the Sleeping Beauty legend in the beginning, and like the original story, it begins with rape. After that it has nonstop spanking and sex with every kind of pairing you can imagine.

For a spanko who had mostly only ever seen short teasing scenes, this was… a whole new world. I can’t count how many times I read them. I can say now, all these years later, that they are pure erotica with barely any plot to hold things together. They really don’t make much sense, and they get very repetitive.

But I will always have a fond place in my heart for them, since they were my first taste of BDSM erotica, and from what I’ve heard, quite a lot of elder millennials and X-gen adults had the same introduction.

Once I got tired of them, I went looking for something in the same basic line. There really wasn’t anything. In those pre-50SOG days bookstores just didn’t carry much. But eventually I stumbled across something equally incredible, but very different.

The first book of the Marketplace series came out a couple years later. I was eighteen then, living on my own. Still reading voraciously, every genre, but always on the lookout for any kind of spanking or kink reference. And one day I stumbled across The Marketplace. I think it was in Waldenbooks, but it might have been in a used bookstore.

I can’t remember, but what I do remember was that it was profoundly different from the Beauty Series. That trilogy was all smut with barely a plot to speak of. The Marketplace books are the opposite. I would call them BDSM literature.

The plot is deep and overarching. The characters are realistic, well-written, and compelling. The kink scenes, and there are plenty, were detailed and exciting, but they aren’t the kind of books you flip through just to read the kinky scenes, even if those scenes are very hot.

They are the kind of books that draw you in and force you to devour every word. The first book was great. The second book was incredible and then there was a long gap and I forgot about them for a while, but every so often I would go back and read those first two books.

The series had a profound effect on me and made me much more interested in the deeper kinds of submission. Like many, I started the scene mostly as a brat, but after reading those books I could see the appeal of submitting totally to someone.

By the time the third book finally came out, I had found other resources online for kinky fiction books. Pink Flamingo and C.F. Publications were right up there near the top. In fact by then, I was working for C.F. Publications so I was able to take some of my paycheck in credit to purchase books I’d been dying to read and could only get through them.

Like… the continuation of Sharon Green’s Diana Santee series, which had been deemed TOO kinky, too sexy, and too edgy for mainstream Daw. They published the first two and then stopped. And to be honest, reading them, I was shocked they got into mainstream sci-fi at all. I adore them but they really belonged in a genre that didn’t exist yet.

They were action adventure sci-fi with a strong female protagonist who is forced to submit to a man during a job. Later this extends to her entire life because he returns with her to her planet and ends up as her partner. Her boss, who had given up at ever being able to make her follow the rules, was happy to put him in charge.

These books frustrated and angered me because she was, in many ways, more competent and should have been the lead. It wasn’t fair, but at the same time I found it sexy that they trapped her in a situation where she had no choice. And she always got her revenge in such creative ways.

Anyway, what started out as mainstream sci-fi with a shocking amount of punishment and sexy times, ended up being outright sci-fi BDSM romance after she started publishing through CF Publications, and then self-publishing.

If you haven’t read them… you should. Sharon, who I ended up getting to know a bit, taught me that you can have all the sex, the BDSM, the punishment, and still have a good amount of plot. In a lot of ways I would say she was a forerunner to the genre we now know as Kinky Romance or BDSM romance.

She was ahead of her time and like Johanna Lindsey in bodice-ripper romance, she was known for slipping spankings in almost every one of her sci-fi and fantasy series. If you want the ones that are heavy on the kink and punishment I suggest the Diana Santee series (First book is Mindguest), The Crystals of Mida (very Gor-esque), and the Terrilian series.

Anyway, if you were ever curious the kinds of books that shaped me, and my own writing journey, these would be some of the big ones. I did read some of the classics like Frank and I, The Story of O, and Nine and a Half Weeks as I found them, but I didn’t find any of them really compelling.

I found that books that had a mainstream plot, with kinky scenes falling naturally into place, were more interesting to me then. Plot first, kink second is what I preferred and it’s what I write now.

Even though my sexy/kinky scenes are much longer and more detailed than you’d find in a mainstream novel, I still put a lot of emphasis on the plot and story. Which is why I don’t write erotica.

Someday I hope that my own books will similarly affect someone else’s journey, because that’s really how you pay it forward in this world.