The internet can sometimes seem to be a garden of fleshly delights, with every click uncovering a new fetish or kink. But does discovering a new fetish mean you'll find a sexual awakening that revs up your inner dominatrix?
Not exactly.
It’s pretty much accepted that for most of us, sexual tastes are established fairly early in life and they're not easy to change — just look at the failed "ex-gay" movement.
What's more likely, as we've seen a rise in open and frank discussions about kinky sex, is that the people who have an interest in things like BDSM and pegging are more comfortable exploring them. As Erin Kennedy, a sex educator and long-time BDSM practitioner who blogs at Sex For The Rest, told Vice, “Sex has always been kinky.” She thinks vanilla sex — that missionary sex you think your parents have — is a myth.
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Kennedy told Vice that the 2008 launch of kink social networking site FetLife had a huge impact on the normalization of kink. While people were using dating sites to connect with like-minded kinksters for sex, the networking site offered a sense of community. People were talking about their kinky sex and finding that many, many other people enjoyed it, as well.
“It’s not that nobody was [kinky],” Kennedy said. “It’s that we didn’t know anybody was doing it, because everyone was doing it in their bedrooms and not talking about it."
All of this talking about it gives the impression that we, as a society, have gotten kinkier. In fact, we've just gotten more comfortable talking about it — and anytime people are talking about sex, they're going to be having better, most satisfying sex.