Is the Kink Scene Ageist Against Young People?
Judging a kinkster’s knowledge and skill based on their age or how long they’ve been active in the community can be problematic.
I had an online chat with an acquaintance recently and I realized I've had the same discussion many times before. The guy I was chatting with is an attractive, smart, and savvy younger kinkster who feels that his predilection toward dominance is often discounted due to his age. I think he's correct.
Not only do I think his belief is accurate that his dominant credentials are constantly in question, I think our entire kink scene feeds into this notion. We need to correct it when we can.
One thing we often do in the scene is worship at the altar of longevity as though being around the scene a long time somehow magically bestows upon you wisdom and skill. It does not. In fact, it often does not. This seems to happen more frequently in the subset of kinksters who strongly identify with leather and the leather community, but I’ve witnessed this phenomenon in all sectors of kink.
I know many 20-somethings who are far wiser and more skilled than people with decades more time in the scene than they have. I long ago started to refuse to use age or length of time hanging out as an avowed kinkster as a yardstick by which I measure someone's competence or wisdom.
Yes, it's true that a bit of mileage can be a good thing. If someone is consistently open to learning and growing, some extended time hanging out in a community can be extremely beneficial. But I've seen just as many people hang out in the scene for the same length of time who are no more wise or skilled than they were when they first entered it.
Perhaps the power dynamic factor in our kink world feeds into this notion because we often operate under the false assumption that older folks who have been around the kink world a long time know by default more about that style of play than their younger counterparts. I don't see this playing out in reality much of the time. So many of my younger kinkster friends seem to have more interesting sexualities, more balanced perspectives, and operate from a far less judgmental mindset than many of the older kinksters.
When we so often toss around terms like “elder” (and yes, I know I'm often called one), I wonder if we don't simultaneously send out the message that older is somehow better, that wisdom and skill are something you can't really truly acquire unless you simply wait it out until your timeclocked credentials kick in.
Add into all this the troubling notion that somehow dominance is something that requires wisdom and skill while submission does not. That's a quagmire of discussion our scene needs to have as well and perhaps a topic for another future post.
Let's try to assess people on their own merits, not some yardstick that is a dubious metric at best by which to judge people.
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Good healthy kink relationships require clear open and honest communication. And let's face it, our younger kinksters are on the whole way better at communicating than our "elders" ever were. As a society, we have made incredible advances in our understanding of mental health, trauma, toxic masculinity, gender, shame, etc. etc. Younger kinksters have grown up with the benefit these deeper understandings. They don't equate dominance with stoicism and toxic masculinity the way many of us did. They don't equate showing emotion with weakness and shame. And that leaves them much better equipped to engage in healthy kink relationships.
Of course I'm painting with a broad brush here. There are plenty of examples of wise older kinksters with high emotional intelligence (Race Bannon for one!), and there are plenty of young folks who are perpetuating toxic behaviors. But on the whole, younger folks today have higher emotional intelligence than I did at their age, and us older folks have plenty to learn from them. And yes they have plenty to learn from us as well. Intergenerational learning is beautiful, and absolutely necessary if our anachronistic community is going to survive. It's also a two-way street. Older folks and younger folks have so much to learn from each other.
I'm 53, and in a long term (nearly 5 years) dynamic in which I sub to a Dom who is 28 years old. I've learned so much from him about how to engage in kink and power dynamics in a healthy way. He is much more skilled at this than I was, when I was a Dom to younger subs in the past. And if I have the privilege of taking on subs again in the future, I will be MUCH better at it, thanks to what I've learned from my much younger Sir.