written by Micah Brown

Reflect on the past year and plan for the year ahead with the End-of-Year Workbook.

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As the end of the year gets closer, you probably notice more and more marketing out there asking you to reflect on the past year. Your music apps wants you to reflect on your trends, your local grocery store wants to remind you of the best foods you bought this year, your bank is sending you a end of year report on your finances. All that is well and good, but what about kink? How do we reflect on our kink adventure over this past year? What did we learn about kink and our kinky selves over the past year?

I can give you a rundown of all the things we’ve talked about here at Obedience this year, but I think it’s also important to look at your year and what you’ve learned. I have taught quite a bit about kink this year, but I’ve also learned a lot as well. If we don’t continually try to better ourselves, learn more, and approach kink (and life) with curiosity, then everything can begin to feel stagnant, and the last thing we want is for kink to feel as though it is stagnating.

So, with that being said, let’s look at what we talked about and then let’s have you think about what you’ve learned – not just from the pages and articles here at Obedience.com, but in your own experiences, experimentation, and research.

Let’s start with some of the things we’ve talked about here at obedienceapp.com this year.

New Ways of Talking About Consent

The basics of consent can be viewed as very black and white. The idea of “enthusiastic consent” is valid and helps people learn how to recognize consent in a vanilla context and it’s a good jumping off point to start conversations around consent. I’ve spoken with many folks outside of kink who believed that consent in kink was far murkier and that if you were kinky and submissive, you just had to deal with and accept various forms of assault.

This is not at all the case. Even within CNC scenarios there must be enthusiastic consent prior to the beginning of the scene.

What does this have to do with what I’ve learned about consent this year? Well, when I first began to dip my toes into the world of kink, the saying at the time was “Safe, Sane, and Consensual.” SSC for short. For my part, I always viewed the “Safe” part as meaning “As safe as possible considering the activity.” Many of the things we do in kink are decidedly unsafe and have the potential for some disastrous results if we’re not careful. I thought of it like sky diving; if you’ve ever been sky diving you know they talk at length about safety. Well, jumping out of an aircraft thousands of feet in the air is, by its very nature, not safe. We make it safer by using a parachute, but that is not infallible as there are couple of deaths from failed parachutes every year.

We make our kink activities safer by communicating, planning, and keeping safety measures in place such as safety scissors for shibari and emergency first aid kits for anything involving cutting or piercing.

Considering how unsafe some of these activities are, and the fact that “sane” is going to have a different definition for everybody, the kink community came up with other anagrams for safer kink activities such as RACK (Risk Aware Consensual Kink), PRICK (Personal Responsibility Informed Consensual Kink), and RASH (Risk Aware, Shit Happens).

During my research earlier this year on the topic of safety and the various ways we talk about it, I learned some of those anagrams that I hadn’t known of before, which opened new ways of talking about consent both in my writing and with my partner.

Practicing Patience

Patience is a difficult thing to learn as it is. For somebody who is both ADHD and Autistic, I’ve never been great when it comes to patience. My partner tends to be impatient in her own regard as well. What we have found is that we can use kink to learn patience. I’ve recently started learning Shibari from my partner (who used to teach classes on it) and learning knots and ties is an exercise in patience and practice.

In addition to Shibari, one must be patient when performing artistic cutting so that you don’t cut too deep or make mistakes. While most artistic cutting won’t leave scars unless you mean it to, there is the risk (remember, risk awareness) that you could scar them unintentionally if you’re not careful. I must be patient with each cut, and she must be patient as I am cutting to see the final results.

In teaching my partner patience as a submissive, I end up teaching myself about it as well. I could be very interested in doing sexy fun time with her, but she may have misbehaved or broken a rule and now has a consequence that causes her to wait for sexy times. This means that I must also wait, but more importantly, I cannot display my impatience at having to wait, which by its very nature helps to teach me more patience.

Kindness

My grandmother used to say that we should never be nice but always be kind. She would go on to say that being kind doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re being nice. As an example, the person behind the register at the fast-food restaurant who is being yelled at for something that is not their fault must be nice to the customer if they want to keep their job. When this individual turns to you and demands that you confirm how terrible this employee is because you witnessed the whole interaction, you can be nice and claim you weren’t paying attention and keep out of it, you can be a dick and agree with the angry customer, or you can be kind and stand up for the employee who had done nothing wrong. In being kind, you do not have to be nice to the customer, so feel free to cut them down with sharp words and observations about their behavior.

When it comes to kink, we have to remember to be kind. Being kind means we communicate openly with our partners, even about things that are uncomfortable or potentially upsetting. Being kind means holding a submissive accountable for their actions and following through on whatever punishments they may have earned. Being nice would be allowing those punishments to fall by the wayside because your submissive is feeling tired. Being nice in this instance doesn’t set a good example for your submissive and makes them believe they can escape punishments.

On the flip side, submissives have a duty to their Dominants to be kind as well. That means calling out your Dominant when they aren’t following through on promises they’ve made, when they’re not communicating clearly, when they’re pushing your boundaries without conversation, or on anything else that they need to be pushed back on. This is not an excuse to try and top from the bottom, but an understanding that Dominants and submissives must find enough kindness in their hearts to avoid being nice when the topic demands it.

Appreciation

Too often in this day and age we take for granted what we have and forget to appreciate the things that have come into our lives. The people we have in our lives can often become set-dressing to the movie we make in our heads about ourselves. We can forget that other people exist in the same way that we do. That doesn’t make us bad, just a product of a culture that is continually pushing the next thing you need to spend money on right now.

When you’ve involved in kink, you have to take the time to appreciate those who share your kinky lifestyle. Whether it’s your partner or the folks you see at munches or group of people who always go to the play parties together, we allow them to see a part of ourselves that we often don’t let others see. Many kink events often don’t allow for phones or cameras, opening a door for uninterrupted human interaction. Those moments, even if they are just once a month, have helped me step away from the screen more often to experience and appreciate the world around me and the people who are inside it.

Intentionality

We must be intentional with the activities that occur within kink. Scene planning and discussion is a real thing that takes place before big scenes. We talk about risk, we talk about the what-ifs should something go horribly wrong, we talk about the way in which we approach the scene and what we expect. We reaffirm our boundaries and discuss signals that can be used if a safe word cannot be said aloud (for example, being gagged).

As my partner and I are often involved in sharps play, there must be intentionality behind how we approach it. What will I be cutting or piercing. How many needles will be used? How much area will the cutting take place in? Before we start, we check the first aid kit, and I make certain we have triage materials in the event something goes sideways. When making cuts, I must be careful and intentional about how I’m doing it, how long each line is, how I curve the line, how I add “texture” to the look of the piece I’m creating.

Slowing down and taking the time to do these correctly assures a better experience for everybody involved, and taking those lessons of intentionality with me after leaving the scene helps me to be a better partner, a better coworker, and a better friend.

Starting a New Year

With the New Year about to start, take some time to think about the lessons you’ve learned from your kinky journey. Then think about what you’d like to take into the New Year and what more you may have to learn over the next twelve months.

What will next year’s list look like? What do want to learn this year? How can you take the lessons you’ve learned in kink and apply them to the rest of your life?

Here’s to another year of kinky adventures, learning, and kindness.

Happy New Year!