Growing Up Kinky: Finally Finding Some Non-Fiction Information on BDSM.

Fiction is pretty much always the gateway to kink when kids are growing up, I think. I mean no kids are out there stumbling across instruction manuals for BDSM. They see the cartoons with everyone getting spanked, the old sitcoms with wives getting punished.

Then you have the more modern shows where both men and woman get spanked, but usually now in sexy situations instead of discipline. Maybe they see some spankings in old kid’s books, or read stories about it happening—and that’s how they find out that there is something weirdly compelling about all of it.

It’s weird being kinky as a kid because you can literally hate being punished—and avoid it at all costs, but then… seeing someone else get punished is just completely enthralling and you don’t know why.

Read more: Growing Up Kinky: Finally Finding Some Non-Fiction Information on BDSM.

You find yourself looking up words like ‘spank’ or ‘whip’ in dictionaries. You search up the word online, and this is all long before it does anything for you sexually— If it ever does. Remember you can be asexual and kinky. You can also be into BDSM without it connecting to sex.

I was aware of being fascinated by anything spanking related from the time I was six and watching cartoons about anthropomorphic taxi cabs and beavers who disappointed their parents and got punished. It wasn’t sexual then, of course, it was just very exciting mentally.

If anything like that came up on the screen, I would be rapt. I even remember introducing spanking in the games we played in the neighborhood. Whenever we played school, someone always got spanked. When we played house, someone would end up standing in the corner or waiting until dad came home.

Mind you, that wasn’t even a situation I experienced at home. It came straight from the old sitcoms and for most people they were perfectly normal, innocent scenes. But for a few of us, those images took on a whole different vibe.

I have never thought that the need for kink was inspired by anything kids see or don’t see growing up. And I definitely don’t think it has anything to do with being spanked or punished as a child. In every poll ever taken in kink forums (and there are a lot) the results tend to come up pretty evenly split between people who were spanked as kids and people who weren’t.

We all still ended up here anyway. I think it’s just something you’re born with, so we notice it very early on when we see it.

It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I connected spankings (or any other kind of physical punishment) with sex. That was about when my body started to react differently to seeing or hearing about it too. I wasn’t especially into romance until I realized some of them had spanking scenes.

It always involved the heroine doing something wrong. Usually she had to be saved or rescued, and then the hero would spank her for doing the dangerous thing. Or in some cases he’d spank her just for being rude to him. Either way I was hooked.

And I’ve talked in other posts, about my earliest fiction adventures with romance, sci-fi, and my first real BDSM and erotica novels. That’s because those were my introduction to kink. It was a long time before I realized that there were non-fiction books about the subject too.

The main reason is simple, they were hard to find. Romance was everywhere. You could find Johanna Lindsey in every grocery store or bookstore, and all her books had spanking. Robert Heinlein, Sharon Green, and others were found in any library, Borders or Waldenbooks, and you could grab one of their novels and find a spanking scene without looking too hard.

But non-fiction? I just never saw it around. I was a teenager when I finally came across something in the bookstore that related to kink in a non-fiction way. I was in the sexuality section… which was basically two shelves, high up, above the self-help books. That was where I had found the Marketplace and The Beauty Trilogy, even though they were fiction, and I was looking for more of the same when I found…

The Bottoming Book.

That’s bottoming BDSM style, of course. Some people get confused because the term is also used in gay relationships to indicate who gives and who received during sex. It’s not a coincidence that the terms are similar– most of the BDSM terms we use came directly from the gay leather men who first built the community.

Now, I tried to look the book up for this article, to pin down the year that I had found it, because I believe it was new at the time, but I’ve had trouble finding information on the original. I know the ‘New’ Bottoming book that came out in 1994 talks about the old version but it only mentions it as being in the early 90’s and isn’t definitive.

To the best of my recollection I was still in high school and maybe around sixteen or seventeen when I found it. It was moderately life changing. I mean… not only was it a how-to manual on everything kink related, but it implied that this lifestyle wasn’t just fiction.

People—adult people, actually lived their lives doing things like this. It was the first confirmation I had that I wasn’t a freak or a weirdo—and that I wasn’t alone.

And, just to point out that since everything I’d learned up until then came from fiction, and most of it was grab n’ spank punishment scenes. This was really my first time seeing things from a consenting angle.

In fact, as I recall, Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton (the authors, although I think they used different pen names on the original) weren’t really keen on punishment at all. They felt that punishment wasn’t something an adult should be looking for. (I disagreed with that then, and still do—but let’s save that for another time.)

That meant it was wholly different from anything I’d seen in fiction. Most fictional kink/spanking scenes, as I mentioned were punishment. And most weren’t consensual, although the Heroine sometimes realized afterward that they liked/needed it.

So, yes, it was eye opening to read things coming from a totally different angle. I followed that up with the very few other books I could find about kink, or specifically BDSM. The Topping Book was one of them—by the same authors. I found that less helpful because of my own orientation, but it was still exciting to read, and I learned a lot that did come in handy later.

Eventually I also found the Sexually Dominant Woman. As with the Topping Book I ended up learning a lot. It’s interesting to read about things from the other side of a dynamic because it helps you understand where they are coming from, but by then I’d also started to branch out beyond my submissive role.

I never expected to top people. I had always identified as submissive and hadn’t really considered that I could be both. When I started exploring other roles, it was as a service Top. There are always more subs than Tops around, so it was natural for me to extend myself to fill the needs of people I knew.

The Topping Book and The Sexually Dominant Woman were both really useful tools in figuring out what I was doing. And things came full circle a couple of years ago when I reconnected with Janet Hardy on Facebook and was able to become a beta reader for the new version of The Sexually Dominant Woman. Really an amazing opportunity to have some small influence on a new edition of one of the first non-fiction kink books I ever read.

I’m still a little giddy over it.

I’m not sure people under thirty quite understand how much things have changed the kinky world. My access to computers as a teen was spotty because we were broke and didn’t have one at home. The school and library computers were monitored so all the interesting sites were blocked, and I was never really able to use them as a resource.

I had to rely on physical books and there just weren’t many of those around that focused specifically on healthy BDSM. Fiction yes. Non-fiction not so much, because until 2010 it was still considered taboo and even a mental disorder to be interested in those things.

These days of course, finding real information is easy. Kink has exploded into mainstream, and you can find it everywhere.

There are tons of books on Amazon that cover every kink, every orientation. There are blogs too—like this one, where you can get a more informal perspective about how kink works in the real world.

As a result, it’s a lot easier for the newer generations of kinky people to learn from real sources early, instead of relying on fiction to form your ideas of the Lifestyle. You have a wide selection of books you can purchase that will tell you everything you need to know. If you can’t afford them, that’s fine, because there are tons of blogs and articles out there for free, and I envy all that readily available knowledge at your fingertips.

Please take advantage of it. Read and learn as you explore. Don’t rely on what you’re told by people in the scene, because not everyone will have your best interests in mind. And although the books have changed quite a lot from when I first read them, I can still recommend The Bottoming Book, The Topping Book, and The Sexually Dominant Woman as excellent beginner resources.

I would like to add that there are a lot of ways to do kink and a lot of ways to do BDSM. These books may not suit your exact needs, because you may have a different path in mind, and that’s okay. There were things in them that I didn’t agree with, as I said, but many things I did.

So take what you can use and leave the rest is my advice for books, and for blogs too— including this one. I try to be inclusive and use all my experience in the scene when I write, but it’s still mostly my opinion and my path. If you don’t agree with all of it that’s perfectly fine.