Our Biggest Mistakes in the Kink Scene

Today I wanted to write about trust. I wanted to share the importance of intuition when you’re choosing play partners, but this post wouldn't cooperate with my goals.

Let me start at the beginning.

A few days ago, I asked you to tell me the biggest mistake you’d made in the scene. Some people said they’d treated play partners like toys rather than responsibilities. Some had played drunk. A lot of you had used the wrong lube, tied the wrong way, and failed to practice using your rope sheers.

I have numbers, for I am a Totally Legit Scientist Who Isn't Really a Scientist. Of the 240 people who responded, 18 had made technical mistakes and four had failed to negotiate for what they needed. Five had made selfish mistakes, and eight had tried to be someone they were not. Fifteen had made communication errors and five had their brains fried during frenzy.

Nothing to see here, folks. Just a regular list of regular mistakes that ordinary people make in the kink scene every day, but I also got comments like this:

My biggest mistake was, as a completely fresh kinkster and a newly out trans woman, being willing to entertain dangerous men longer than I should have. 

Assuming someone else is safe because they were safe with your friends. 

I believed and stuck around too long because I liked the fairy tale [this person] created for me.

Remember how technical mistakes accounted for 18 comments? Well, they were the second most common error. Trusting someone over your own instincts accounted for 141 comments. Think about that for a second.

18
141
240.

That’s more than half of the responses, so I felt compelled to write a red flags post. I’ve done it a thousand times before, usually with a link to The Gift of Fear

I count misplaced trust as my biggest mistake, too, but that number kept buzzing around in my brain. It felt like so much guilt. It felt like shame and self-blame. All 141 people were betrayed. Many had been victims of actual crimes that come with a 20-year prison sentence, but none of us were holding them accountable in the thread.

Nobody pointed out the mistakes or flaws of their rapists. Nobody even expressed anger. Guilt and anger don’t coexist easily, and most of us feel guilty for failing ourselves…

But we aren’t the ones who committed the crime, and could we really have predicted our assaults? Sure, some had a gut feeling, but failing to trust our intuitions is minutiae next to the unforgivable crime of assault. Besides, why are we still listing that as our biggest mistake years after it happened?

I think I can answer that question: I count it as my biggest mistake because the destruction destroyed my life for 20 years. I’m taking responsibility for the severity of the chaos instead of looking at the diminutive size of my own mistake, and it is diminutive. There’s no moral failing in trusting too easily. It belongs on the "Small Mistake Shelf next to forgetting to buy the milk and going out without an umbrella. I’m building my guilt on the size of a rapist’s moral failing instead of my own completely moral error.

I’m the first person to encourage people to trust their intuitions, but the number 141 feels so incredibly heavy. Yes, you should read The Gift of Fear, but if you’re looking at your assault in retrospect and pinning your guilt on the sheer size of the damage, you deserve more. We all do.