Kinky November Day 3: Kink_Bingo

[beta_vulgaris]

This is a post about kink_bingo, and how it helped me work through a lot of my feelings and interests around kink enough to begin practicing it with my physical body and in non-fannish spaces. This is absolutely only my journey and how it relates to kink_bingo and is not a comment on the things anyone else does or should get out of this community, whose members may have wildly different experiences and reasons for participating and following than I do!




This is an example of a kink_bingo card, taken from the communal card post.

I came to kink through fandom. Fanfic may not be the best and most reliable source for accurate information about BDSM (understatement of the year), but exploring fantasies in an environment as rich as fandom, particularly in meta-conversation with other fans via chats, recs, and more, can be hugely empowering and a relatively safe way to begin to suss out one's interests. Participating in creating fanworks, whether that means writing, drawing, vidding, betaing (aka editing and/or cheerleading someone's fanwork), recommending, etc. can be fascinating ways to explore one's own feelings in fiction. Further, discussing kinky fic with other fans helped me to develop my vocabulary around kink and to become comfortable communicating about it, as well as helping me to overcome initial feelings of fear and shame I had around kink.

I've also found fanworks useful in helping me to understand and value kinks I do not share (or don't think I share). Reading peers working through the emotional valence of particular acts/kinks/feelings can be crucially eye-opening for me, and I recommend trying it with an open mind if you think to yourself there's no way you would want to do a particular kink. IMO, that's totally fine and reasonable--if you're not into something or if it may be a problem for you for whatever reason in your personal experience, that's plenty reason not to do something! Reading about and working through the mindset of some kinks has been a way for me to do self-work around respect and valuing people in the community who play differently than I do, and also to help me clarify my own limits and boundaries. Exploration through fiction may not be for everyone (and even for me there are a couple of kinds of kinks I sometimes avoid reading about for personal trigger reasons), but I feel that it has been an important, significant way for me to find my way through kink and work through some internalized misconceptions about the emotional reasons behind some peoples' approach to kink.

One of the major community resources I have relied on within fandom to explore kink through fanworks has been kink_bingo. This fanwork challenge is currently on hiatus to give the mods a much-deserved break. It ran for several years and I followed along as a reader for most of them and as a participant for a couple.

The mods and members of kink_bingo amassed a great deal of information about a variety of kinks in their kink_wiki, which remains a really good resource. They also tagged the main community beautifully, so you can sort and find fanworks of all different varieties that were filling prompts for dozens of kinks.

The format of the event encouraged exploration of kink in a way that I found really valuable, and continues to inform my approach to both fiction and real life kink. I appreciated that the bar for participation was quite low and very forgiving, while still gently nudging one to try something out in a fictional way. The 'bingo card' format was randomly generated from a list of kinks (the list was adjusted each year based on member feedback), and participants were encouraged to create fanworks to fill each space in a line. I might love to write breathplay but have no idea how to approach tickling, but if they were in the same line I'd be encouraged to at least consider it as an option. The focus on fanwork rather than personal kink practice really made experimentation through thought-process work without feeling as scary as if one is being personally asked to participate in something as themself. I still use this groundwork of exploration and evaluation today in my personal kink practice.

The format also equalized kinks, encouraging folks to think about them as different rather than hierarchical--furries/plushies get a bad rap in many fannish and some BDSM spaces, but they can appear side-by-side with vanilla kink on your bingo card and the mods have always been great about requesting participants not to employ kink-shaming language in community conversations, which has made kink_bingo feel safer to me than many fannish spaces for exploring some of the kinks that are less commonly accepted as 'okay' for whatever reason.

All of that said, the fanworks in kink_bingo are largely fiction, and their creators vary in terms of their interest or intent in portraying any sort of 'realism' in kink. Kinky fanwork is often about fantasy rather than practice (though of course that isn't true of all fanworks). Kink_bingo is a great emotional resource for exploring kink. Many fanworks posted to the community may include depictions of kink that are physically impossible by human standards (tentacles!) or violate common community norms of consent or safety in physical practice. I generally consider kinkfic as an exploration, not a guide, and any practitioner of kink is well-advised to seek educational rather than fictional resources for learning how to do it. Kinky fanworks helped me reach for why to do it, and to explore emotions and personal narratives beyond what I would consider working through in a real-life sexual or BDSM situation, and the rest has been a matter of research and personal development.

I guess this post is a major thank-you to all the fans who have created kink_bingo, those who have participated in it, and those various people who have explored kink through frank discussions of fanworks and porn with me on chat, on twitter and dreamwidth, and in person.


I'd love some recs for kinky fanworks in comments! It doesn't have to come from kink_bingo, though it'd be cool if it does. If you feel like describing what about the fanwork appeals to you in terms of its depiction of kink, that'd be great but isn't necessary, either. A future Kinky November post will be fanwork recs, and I'd love to be able to collate recs from more sources than just myself :)

Also, anon commenting is now available on this blog, though there is a text captcha so I can avoid spam. This means you don't need a Dreamwidth account to comment.