Should Kink Be More Insular?

Cultures, including leather and kink cultures, can fall prey to the fate of becoming a relatively lifeless monoculture if we’re not careful.

A few months ago, a gay men’s leather book and reading discussion club used a long-dormant blog post of mine titled “Are We Too Inclusive?” as their discussion material for their monthly gathering. I hadn’t looked at that post since I wrote it in 2013.

When I read what I had written many years ago, a few thoughts came to mind.

The first thought was that some of my thinking back then is now a bit dated. Over the past 11 years I’ve shifted my opinions and thinking about the topic.

The second thought was that regardless of any nuance or middle ground the original post might have attempted, some people will likely get upset even discussing this topic. I’m a big believer in writing that can spawn civil discussion, and that’s why I plan to republish a revised version of that old blog post here eventually. But in the meantime, I was reading something today that perhaps made me shift my thinking a bit more.

In “Insularity can be a good thing, for creatures and cultures alike,” evolutionary biologist Antone Martinho-Truswell discusses the concept of allopatry, “when two species, or groups of species, evolve to become different from each other as a result of physical separation.” Species that developed on standalone islands are used in the article to illustrate this concept.

I contend that much of leather, kink, and fetish culture developed as “islands” of sorts and that’s why originally they felt so different and are now homogenizing into forms that often look more alike than they do different.

Is this a good or bad thing? That’s what I want to ponder here.

Allopatry is an evolutionary phenomenon, which means it is a consequence of selection. And like all phenomena that are consequences of selection, it exists both in the natural world among species, populations and clades, as well as in the realm of culture, human interaction and memes. Like marsupials and monotremes, some cultural ideas can survive in allopatry but break down in the face of dominant ideas from far away. Insularity provides allopatric protection for culture just as it does for species.

Martinho-Truswell uses the example of Japan as a culture that developed in isolation. It wasn’t until 1853 that foreigners were allowed to visit Japan and citizens were allowed to leave.

The result is a culture, which persists today, that fascinates outsiders for its very uniqueness. The insularity in which it developed during that period resulted in various aesthetics, conventions, manners, foods, art, mores and more that were grown, refined and integrated internally. When Japan opened to foreign trade and influence, the result was a cultural earthquake, with rapid changes to society and a sudden clamour to cope with the influx of the outside world, which threatened to change everything.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like when certain members of the various leather and kink communities complain that their culture is being infiltrated by outside forces that are changing the culture they hold dear?

I’m not placing a value judgment or taking a rigid stance here. I’m fully aware that cultural appropriation and the blending of cultures, especially in our modern hyperconnected world, is inevitable. To resist it entirely is folly.

However, might it be wise to consider a happy medium when possible because there are significant downsides to declining kink cultural allopatry even while there might also be upsides.

…it also poses a threat to culture. The cultural ideas (what was originally meant by ‘memes’) that are most suited to global dominance crowd out cultural ideas that developed locally and have deep meaning to the communities that created them.

If one navigates within what’s typically referred to as a leather culture, whether it’s the original gay/queer-origin flavor or that co-opted by other orientations and demographics, you’ll often hear talk of a “leather culture.” Shared cultural norms, values, garb, identities, rituals, artifacts, and stories bond a culture together and that was the case for leather culture from its earliest days until perhaps the early 1990s when a concerted effort was undertaken to begin blending the different leather and kink factions under a larger umbrella.

One tipping point event was the first National Leather Association’s 1991 “Living in Leather” conference that sought to connect under one roof a wider spectrum of LGBTQ and heterosexual kink players (mostly of the BDSM variety). Perhaps I consider this a pivotal moment in the leather scene because I attended the first Living in Leather conference and can’t recall any other efforts of any size that tried to blend these factions together so consciously prior to that event.

Because I attempted to socialize and play among a broad cross section of kinksters for many years prior to that 1991 conference, I witnessed some stark uniqueness between gay, lesbian, and heterosexual communities, BDSM players specifically because those were the people with whom I most interacted. I’m told by other non-BDSM kinksters that they witnessed such unique differences too in their own corners of the kink realm.

Alluding to the plight of New Zealand flightless parrots who developed in isolation but that then found themselves vulnerable to outside non-local creatures who were introduced to the island, Martinho-Truswell points out the downsides to the sort of robust cultural blending that’s taking place today.

Social media, easy travel, a global mindset and international corporations have let the cats loose in our cultural islands. The meticulously crafted culture of a people bound to a place can no more survive this change than flightless parrots can cope with mammalian predators. I am not saying that these things should be abolished (except social media, I am saying that). But they have downsides. They destroy even as they create, just as all evolutionarily successful species must build their success on the graves of the species they outfoxed.

Please remember this post is supposed to be food for thought, not a directive to take any specific action. But I do think it’s incumbent upon those of us who care about our various subsets of leather and kink cultures to decide how much of it we want to share with other factions within kink as well as with the outside world.

To reference Martinho-Truswell’s using cats as the herd-thinning predator that nearly decimated the flightless New Zealand parrots, perhaps we need to consider whether to let metaphorical cats into our cultural sanctuaries, or do we construct insular mechanisms to keep them out.

If the cats loose in our culture cannot be contained, then sanctuary is the next best hope we have. We need a resumed insularity that protects something of the local and distinct against the prevailing avalanche of monoculture. We need to find ways to put up borders around the communities that matter – not physical borders, but cultural, memetic ones. This requires a mindset of insularity.

To use an incredibly common example from gay men’s culture, how often do you hear complaints about gay men’s spaces no longer feeling like gay men’s spaces? If you’re gay and live in any dense urban area of the United States, you’ve heard this complaint about opening up our spaces to a wider patron audience.

I’m not going to argue one way or another here, but I think it’s worthwhile to consider whether sometimes those complaints have some merit when we take into account this phenomenon of destroying existing cultures to make way for a more homogenized and generalized monoculture in its place.

Some related posts of mine you might find interesting are “The Need for Erotic Affinity Spaces” and “Kink Is Balkanizing.”

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