Why I Teach Despite Saying I Would Never.

If you have known me for any consequential period of time, you may know that one of the most consistent themes of my life is that I will always have to eat my words. If ever, I deign to take too staunch a stance, I am destined to get to the point where I embrace the opposite of that stance (although, fortunately, this does not extend to my politics). I used to refer to yoga as creative sleeping and now if I don’t do it for over two-days, I cannot sleep. I used to bemoan the protein deficiencies of vegetarians, then I stopped eating meat for almost a decade (because it does make sense). If you go through the archives of my writing here, you are likely to find an essay in which I talk about why I would never be a kink educator and now, well, I am. I had, what I think, were good reasons for not doing it (and a lot of them are still valid). For one thing, it’s very difficult to tell what an appropriate qualification to be a kink-educator is and while there are sex-ed courses available, I am not entirely sure whether even the “kink-aware” ones are taught in a way that actually draw from the experience of actual kink. I don’t really have medical or psychological qualifications either. Also, I have always believed (and still do) that there really isn’t a right way to kink so it is difficult to determine how one would teach at all. Besides, I think, I believed (maybe unconsciously) that as a bottom, I had little skill-based teaching to offer.

Most of that is still true so why do I do it at all, then? I will admit, I really struggled with it. In the beginning, every time someone asked me to teach, I declined and moved on. Even when I was tempted, I reminded myself of all the reasons why I said I wouldn’t do it and placated myself. I almost started teaching at least half-a-dozen times before deciding that I couldn’t go through with it. Once, I taught two classes and then backed off for almost a year because even though they went well, they fucked with my belief-system. There is something I am lacking that I have observed in many kink educators that I have encountered and it is two beliefs they seem to hold:

- People don’t know about this.

- People cannot know about this unless I, in all of my magnanimity, tell them.

I don’t exactly believe that. All of the more mainstream organisations that now wish to get into kink education that now attempt to tap existing educators operate with a kind of moral, virtue-signalling superiority that is window dressed under the word “inclusivity” which leads them to constantly talk about awareness and the fact that the people who will attend these classes don’t know anything so they need to be accessible (and that accessibility is usually explained as the usage of pop-culture and internet lingo so it’s fun and light). I do not believe this at all. I know that there are many people who may not have the language to express their desires, I believe there are people who don’t know it’s okay to want what they want or know it is available, I believe there are people who have practical questions about how some things might work. However, I also know that the majority of people who feel the desire for restraint or power-exchange, know they feel the desire, they just may not know what to call it without using associative language. For instance, back in my sex-work days, I had a friend who loved her police-clients the most when they wanted to be fucked up the ass because she said she liked (read: experienced arousal) that a whore (socially condemned, powerless) was asserting her authority over a cop (socially-feared, systemically powerful). That is a fetish for power/control combined with a response-mechanism to oppression/power-imbalance, expressed entirely is associative social-imagery even if she wouldn’t put it like that. My friend didn’t know the words kink, power-exchange, BDSM or any of it, but she did understand her desire. Most introductory education seems to be designed in a way that assumes its audience has never even met their own sexuality/desire and talks down to the very people they seek to include.

Then there’s the self-aggrandizing, holier-than-thou behaviour of the educators, and of course, you don’t have to behave like, I now know many educators who do not, but from the outside, I really thought that was necessary. I thought it was necessary to be convinced of your hierarchical superiority in a sense. To believe people should be endlessly grateful, look up to you, fawn over you and to constantly keep reminding people how wonderful, amazing and generous you are to be providing this to them. I support self-respect and even some amount of pride in what one does, but what I saw and still see extends far, far beyond that. I see educators who reinforce their infallibility and get to a place where they cease to think critically and genuinely start to perpetuate the one-size-my-size-fits-all narrative. I am not trying to be self-effacing but the identity politics of kink make me deeply, truly uncomfortable in all ways. I do identify as kinky and as a masochist but I work quite hard to keep all value-judgment out of it. I don’t think I am better or more empowered than “vanilla” people. I don’t think I am cooler because of it. I don’t believe I inherently deserve more respect than anyone else for being an educator. Ever day, there are people who could educate, who choose not to who are just as deserving of that respect.

In light of all of that, it does seem strange, and even hypocritical that I would go forth and be an educator anyway, and it was a series of events and encounters that changed my mind on that front. The first was a class, not exactly a kink-class, but a class on using erotic-writing to access your sexuality within the context of society that I taught. It was a great experience and a very interactive class, after which a gender-studies professor at a university who had attended the class said that it would be so beneficial if I taught it to her students because it covered basically the entire structure of her syllabus on sexuality and gender-relations and did it through a compassionate and personal methodology. The second was a book I wrote, called The Masochism Sextbook, which sold more copies than I could have fathomed, and in a conversation about the book with someone I love and respect, two things came up. The first was the fact that choosing not to teach classes did not mean one wasn’t already functioning as an educator. The second was that hundreds of people who read the book shared that it had a genuinely inclusive outlook that didn’t define masochism as one thing but allowed people to access all the things that could apply to their masochism, essentially, it allowed them structure to actually think about things they knew but were too daunting in scope to approach.

This shifted my perspective on what can actually be taught. I don’t teach kink because I am so good at kink, I don’t even think that’s a thing, but I am extremely fucking good at adaptable structure. I can bring structure (not the modern-day understanding of structure as this rigid, unyielding thing, but structure in terms of breaking-down information into an approach that makes sense and makes information manageable) to places that seem impossible to structure and it’s a combination of experience, how my brain is wired, hyperfixation on clarity and (honestly) having been a writer all my life. The foremost issue faced by my writing students and my kink students is actually the same problem, there is this huge mountain of information in front of them and it’s overwhelming to formulate an approach that would allow them to surmount it. It’s structure. In fetishism, I do rely heavily on my experience in it, not because it is the entirety of the available experience, but because it does help with determining the directions in which one could think. For instance, when I was seven-years younger, I thought the need to closely consider drop depended on whether or not you experienced it, and now I think drop is so often subsumed under our existing emotional systems, that my earlier approach would make it so I wouldn’t see it even if it smacked me in the face. There are a million things I learnt from experience but the most important one was to never, ever let myself believe my experience was the definitive position on anything at all. In some ways, it is only when you realise how little you do and can know that you are responsible enough to teach.

That was actually a big reason as to why I finally felt comfortable doing it. Three or so years ago, a set of kink-educators began to crop up around me, I got to know them a little and I discovered that some of them weren’t actually kinky, just sexual influencers (who believed everyone should know about kink and no one should kink-shame and therefore they were qualified to teach somehow), some of them had more marketing skill than experience at what they taught, some of them attended one kink event and decided they had simultaneously found both their identity and their profession in one night and some weren’t even teaching but because they had Instagram and/or Fetlife accounts just felt like they needed to share endless education-sounding updates on how to practise kink. I have never encountered so much bullshit in my life as I have from this wave of creators. Just shallow, down-talking, unaware, irresponsible, self-aggrandizing, dangerous and ultimately hollow bullshit. I don’t think the space of kink-education needs me in particular, but I think the space of kink education does need educators who are under-confident in their ability to know-all, committed to reinforcing differences in approaches, focused on unpacking social influence, open to learning and most importantly, critical enough of themselves that they always ask and contextualise, their ability to address a question.

This bullshit around me is what finally convinced me to do it because I know I will never use my experience as a badge, only as a system to inform myself, and I am never getting on a high-horse. I lead with the fact that I have no qualifications and with the opinion that the nature of kink right now, socially, is that kinky people should be working with professionals to set standards. I am not saying experience is useless. I am saying one can have decades of it but know absolutely nothing useful because they refused to think, reform, use or apply it to their own behaviour through the years. Your experience only has value if its first student was yourself and then it's not the years of it that has value, it's the application of what you actually learnt from it and that shows, you don't have to tout it if you've actually used it. I use my experience to teach, I don't teach because I am experienced.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I teach because I have bottomed all my life and the most erroneous of my assumptions was the belief that bottoms cannot teach skills. I have written about this in detail before but I will just say here that I thought that because we see things that are physically done as skills (stick a needle in me, wield a cane, tie a rope) but we don’t see approach, communication, negotiation, safety, logistics etc as skills. A lot of the things that bottoms regularly do and are responsible for are not viewed as skills and they are super important and make everything better. I don’t just mean as a bottom I bring skill and knowledge to the table that can make things safer, I mean I can make them way hotter too. I teach because the teaching is happening around me anyway, so if I can bring the voice of bottoms to that, I want to. It’s not because I am the chosen one, not at all, I choose it and choose it despite my discomfort with being an authority because ultimately, I think discomfort with being an authority is vital in some ways. I have met people who are way too comfortable in being their authority and most of what I hear is irresponsible, nutrient-deficient, self-propelling, ego-massaging bullshit. I have realised I respect an educator who doubts themselves because those educators are the ones who recognise their responsibility as well.