My kinky world.

With only a few sharply-delineated exceptions, I live in a sexy little bubble. There is not a single friend I see regularly who isn't kinky and pretty firmly entrenched in the sex-positive, enthusiastic-consent, gender-liberated, social-justice-for-people-who-fuck-funny mindset. I spend a lot of my time in an apartment where all the roommates are kinky, I go to parties where everyone is kinky; hell, I play board games where everyone around the table is kinky. If I knitted, I'm sure I would be in a kinky knitting circle. It's a god damn way of life.

The funny thing is, it's gotten to the point where I have a bit of culture shock in the real world. When I go to work or talk to my family, the social rules are different--and not just in the "whether it's okay to talk about your cooter" sense, but in the entire way people interact. The unkinky world is simultaneously more reserved and less polite, if that makes sense; there's more concern about being obscene and less about being intrusive. (Also, I think my coworkers don't understand why I jump three feet when they casually lay a friendly arm across my shoulders.) They talk a lot about "men do doobidy do, women do daddidy dah" and I always grit my teeth a little, because I suspect that my own thoughts on gender would be just as annoying to them. I don't want to lay all this on "I'm so much more enlightened;" in many ways, I'm just acclimated to a different set of social expectations.

I'm glad to be a part of the kink community, although in many ways, I could get the same benefits from being part of the Albanian-American community, or perhaps an Elks Lodge. It's a circle of closely interconnected friends who meet regularly, include each other in their social events, and have just a little more warm feelings and trust for "one of ours" than we do for "an outsider." The group, while by no means a fair demographic sample, has some people from just about every walk of life. There's little sub-cliques and people who are "big fish in a small pond" types and people on the fringes of the group. We don't all like each other, but we definitely know each other. And even with all the intra-group gossip and grudges and micro-wars, that's a warm happy thing.

Really, there's only one major downside to the whole kink community thing: If you're an Elk, you can tell people about it. (Although, in fairness, if you're an elk, you cannot.) The particular warm happy community I belong to is one that's considered obscene by a lot of outsiders and dangerous by quite a few. So when I try to say "I'm a member of a lovely group of friends," what comes out sounds more like "I'm sexually aroused by human suffering." For good and ill, this makes the kink community even more insular, because there's a lot of things--things as big as our committed intimate relationships--we only feel really comfortable talking about with each other.

Still, I'm glad to have this community. It's good to be part of an "us," it's good to have a little prefab pool of friends, and I'll take it over the Elks any day, for one simple reason: I never got nearly this many screaming orgasms from an Elk.