The Downside of Setting Kink Goals

Sometimes kinksters might consciously or unconsciously set goals for themselves that detract from the experience they ultimately seek.

Over the course of much of my life I was compelled to set goals. Obsessively. Compulsively. I bought into the ubiquitous fetishization of goal setting that so many of the self-help and productivity guru types have espoused since the genre emerged into the popular ethos.

Since having mostly abandoned my goal setting compulsion, I’ve written about the topic extensively. In “Stop Dangling Carrots” I wrote about why I avoid setting goals these days and some of the downsides.

One of the biggest problems with goals is that we often choose the wrong ones. We parrot the goals we’re taught to want by family, friends, and society. We also set the groundwork for our goals when quite young, a time when we probably know little about what we’re going to want to do or be as adults.

Currently, I’m reading an excellent book by Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine (paid link), and he also points out the downsides to our cultural focus on goal setting.

So we establish a goal, which may well be misguided, because we tend to make incorrect judgements about what makes us happy. What then? We now strive towards that specific, planned-out success, and here we encounter our second problem with the fetishising of goals. We invest too much and too specifically. If we stay true to our plan, we will need to sacrifice other aspects of our life to reach our intended destination. We forget that nothing happens in life independently of other things.

Since this newsletter is focused on sexuality and relationships, how does this relate to my audience here?

Over the past few days, I’ve had conversations with several people within the kink and leather communities. I use both words here since they are both the same and quite different identifiers in many ways, but for the purpose here let’s consider them the same.

What’s come up in many of these recent conversations is how many goals leather and kink community people set for themselves, consciously or unconsciously. I’ve realized that in many instances those goals might be getting in the way of them optimally enjoying their erotic lives.

During one conversation it was quite clear the person was hyper focused on finding someone to collar them. If the concept of collaring is unfamiliar to you, I wrote about it in “The Allure of Collars.” This person seemed so focused on acquiring collared status that it felt, at least to me, that they were ignoring all the wonderful things they have or could experience along their erotic journey.

In another conversation, someone who I consider quite experienced in BDSM play was bemoaning that they didn’t feel they had the necessary advanced rope skills to play within the rope play community. They were avoiding attending any such events or parties because they felt their skill level just didn’t match up to the highly visible complex rope restraint configurations that now prominently populate the kink imagery zeitgeist.

I could recount several other conversations in which it felt to me like a kinkster was setting for themselves a goal that they sensed was required for them to fully enjoy themselves, be accepted, be considered authentic or “real,” or otherwise align themselves with a perceived community standard. That is unfortunate. And unnecessary.

A friend and I took some heat a while back from some kink community members when we suggested we could teach the average aspiring kinkster enough information and technique in about a day to provide them an entire lifetime of enjoyable play. Most kink players don’t want or need to know complicated techniques to play in that realm. Most kink players don’t need to endlessly dissect their motivations or relationship dynamics by attending a multitude of classes, panels, or discussion groups.

Is there anything wrong with kink classes, workshops, panels, or discussion groups. None at all. In fact, they can be incredibly useful, interesting, helpful, and inspiring. But at the same time, they are not required to have a perfectly lovely erotic kink life, at least for the average kinkster who isn’t looking to constantly up their skill set or community credibility.

What I think sometimes happens is the plethora of information and instruction available about kink leads many to believe that learning or experiencing “all” of it is somehow an ultimate goal to which kinksters should aspire. I think most highly experienced kinksters eventually settle on the stuff they like doing while being entirely comfortable not engaging in the rest of the stuff they leave for others. But I think sometimes newcomers and the less experienced among us see extensive kink skill and knowledge attainment as a necessary goal for full acceptance. They might do this consciously or unconsciously, but I contend it happens often. At least often enough to be concerning.

What I’m getting at is that perhaps this kink goal setting isn’t always helpful. Maybe like Brown suggests we sometimes invest too much and too specifically in our kink goals, sticking to a rigid plan of sorts that might end up resulting in us sacrificing some other aspects of kink play and community that we would enjoy even more if we weren’t so focused on constantly upping the kink ante.

Put another way, apart from learning the basics of safety and consent, which isn’t particularly complicated for most of the types of play or interactions the average person might want to explore, everything else should be taken in as part of the natural flow of one’s kink life and not seen as a required curricula or idealized goals of constantly escalating kink credentials.

In other words, maybe drop the goals and instead just live your kink life with curiosity and integrity and let it flow as it does naturally.

Alluding to my quote from my “Stop Dangling Carrots” post, I think sometimes newcomer kinksters set their goals based on what they see others do rather than how they might personally want to express their kink. And much like younger people setting life goals before they have the wisdom of adulthood, sometimes newcomer kinksters set their goals before they have any lived kink experience to know what they really do and don’t want to be or do.

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