30 Days of Kink: Misconceptions

Day 17: What misconception about kinky people would you most like to clear up?

I sort of put answering this one off because it was a little hard for me. There are tons of misconceptions made about kinksters/fetishists by vanilla people that I just find to be absolutely absurd and horrible. I once came out to someone as being a full-time Dominant, and they thought that I was going to go "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" on them. That's a little out of line, even for me, and almost offensive. It makes me upset, and makes me understand just why people are so afraid of the kink community—they just don't understand it, whatsoever. There was actually a discussion on Eden Kink (my good friend VieuxCarre's group) about this very thing: misconceptions.

The one misconception that I believe needs to be addressed the most is that people who are into kink are all messed up in the mind and are secretly psycho killers. I'm sure that this may be true for some individuals who are into kink, as it's true for people who are vanilla as well. But that doesn't mean that every single one of us is a certified psychopath. I think that the reason why people think this way about most kinksters/fetishists is because BDSM just isn't something that they're used to. They see people being beat, cut into, made to cry, and put into states of humiliation and think that it's wrong because they don't see it the way that people into BDSM do. It's like tons of other things in the world that were shunned out of being misunderstood, including people of different skin tones, sexualities, and genders.

Though I'm sure that a lot of people would disagree with me and say that it simply "isn't the same," but I feel that it certainly is. Discrimination is discrimination, and most people who think that others are crazy or insane for being who or what they are is because they are discriminatory. If people were to look at it through that view, they may stop feeling that what people who are into BDSM do is so "crazy" and "insane." They might not ever be into it, and I don't expect them to be, but they may at least see that it's acceptable and alright to practice such things.