‘Kink Con’, an annual event that brings together members of the kink community and allies from across India, became two editions old in September 2024. As in the first edition, it provided a forum for members of the kink community, along with feminist and queer activists, gender and sexuality educators, academics, and artists to strengthen the community and deepen the understanding of taboos around diverse erotic desires as well as consent.
The importance of such an event lies in addressing highly stigmatized expressions of adult sexuality. Though taboo desires involving playing with power and pain are highly common, there is a striking silence around them in India, even in queer spaces. Therefore, understanding safety and consent negotiation around such desires are only possible in curated safe spaces. ‘Kink Con’ makes possible a safe, empowering space for members of a highly marginalized community, which today stands precariously where, perhaps, the queer communities were decades ago.
Kink has much to offer, particularly in terms of ways of understanding and practicing consent. The presence of activists, academics, and artists outside of the BDSM community was vital to ‘Kink Con 2024’ because there is so much that they learned from the kink community in India and much that the kink community took away from the shared space.
The significance of ‘Kink Con 2024’ goes beyond even kink, since it speaks to an acceptance and destigmatization of diverse adult, consensual sexual, erotic, and intimacy practices, and promotes the human rights, dignity, and respect for all people whose desires are socially tabooed and subjected to shame.
The highlights of the discussions at ‘Kink Con 2024’ were access to pleasure, inclusion and diversity, acceptance, patriarchy, and the intersections between kink, arts, and activism.
Acceptance of kink and mental health
The conversations around acceptance included the implications of lack of social acceptance on the mental health of practitioners of kink as well as the question of whether even within the kink community, there might be less acceptance for certain kinds of desires than others. This also led to the interesting subject of ‘disgust’ – does it give us a right to censor and stigmatize other people’s practices?
Patriarchy and kink
The discussion on patriarchy looked at the importance of increasing awareness about gender norms because it is only when we understand their reality that power play is possible in kink. In the absence of such awareness, there is simply an ‘acting out’ of gender and other inequalities rather than ‘playing with them’ and in a way questioning them.
Intersections between kink, arts, and activism
Exploring the intersectional nature of kink and its relationship with broader social issues – this was the theme of a talk show that featured renowned guests like film director and activist Q, sexuality educator and author Leeza Mangaldas, sex worker rights advocate Meena Seshu, and theatre and performance artist Malika Taneja.
Many popular forms of artistic expression have, in the past, caricatured and stigmatized kink further. The panelists dug deeper into today, what can art forms like theatre and film learn from kink and how can these art forms take forward engagements with issues of kink into the public realm in ways that reduces the stigma around kink.
Release of report on sex work and kink
A groundbreaking report of a workshop organised by NGO Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP) and the Kinky Collective in 2023 was released during ‘Kink Con 2024’. The workshop delved into how sex workers navigate kinky desires and consent in their work. The report Kink and Sex Work: A VAMP Institute Report was jointly released by Meena Seshu and Aarthi Pai, also a renowned sex worker rights advocate, and by representatives from the Kinky Collective. They spoke about the significance of the collaboration between sex workers and kink-affirmative activists, as well as how the sex workers’ movements and the kink movements can inform and support each other toward a more inclusive future.
Sex workers are stigmatized as a community, they are told they are immoral. Similarly, kink practitioners face stigma when they share their fantasies and desires. In both cases it is about a person having enough agency over their own body to decide not to toe the normative line. It is about asserting one’s ultimate prerogative to decide what purposes one’s body serves.
One of the biggest takeaways of this conversation was how sex workers normalize the kinky desires of their clients: “This too is normal.” The other was the expression of the sex workers’ own kinky desires. For many, it was the first time they were speaking about their own fantasies, and living the taboo desires. A third takeaway was the recognition of a niche client market that the sex workers can tap into, once the taboos are challenged.
Meena emphasized the need for cross-movement alliances between groups stigmatized by society, such as lesbians, trans individuals, kink practitioners, and sex workers. The shared experience of being ‘outside the norm’ can unite them in their struggle for dignity and recognition. Aarthi drew parallels between the rights of sex workers and kink practitioners, advocating for the recognition of sex work as legitimate work, free from stigma and judgment.
As Meena and Aarthi put it during the release of the workshop report: “We work with people who do this every day – they come out, admit what they do, and demand that what they do is their right. That’s what kinky folks do too – come out, admit, and demand that what they are doing is their right, and society owes us the dignity for doing what is our right. This is what brings us together, this is the common war cry!”
Meena and Aarthi also acknowledged that there is a lot that the kink and consent movements can share with the sex worker rights movement. There is a lot about sex work that is contested, for instance, society says how can the vagina be used as a site for work? It is okay as a site for desire, for ownership, for patriarchy, but how can it be used for work? So, that is what the struggle is about – do you own your vagina enough to use it for profit?
On the other hand, it also was a learning experience for the members of the Kinky Collective, the main organizers of ‘Kink Con 2024’. A key myth in the urban kinky spaces is the idea that kink and the language of kink are inaccessible to people from rural, non-English speaking spaces. However, as the sex workers talked about the diversity of desires their cisgender heterosexual male clients come to them with, it became very clear that kink, in fact, does exist in rural spaces, and that people do talk about their fantasies and desires in whatever language they speak.
Is it disgust, pleasure or both?
‘Kink Con 2024’ aimed to touch upon and invite a closer examination of that which disgusts us and that which brings us pleasure. The first day of the event focused on acknowledging that disgust and pleasure could exist simultaneously and can exist on a spectrum.
The purpose of this discussion was also to examine one’s own disgust. When we see something that disgusts us but also strangely interests us, it is not ‘that thing out there’ causing the disgust. It is the inner turmoil of asking ourselves “If I accept this, who am I?” To cope with the conflict, we project that turmoil outwards, resulting in ‘othering’ people or desires. In the process, we disown parts and pieces of our self. The stigma against sex workers and kink practitioners, to a large degree, is a result of this process playing out in the larger system.
As the conversations around kink, sex work, and kink in sex work continue, it is hoped that the performance and bodies in sex work and kink will find more validation, and these practices will no longer be taboo.
About the main photo: Launch of the report Kink and Sex Work: A VAMP Institute Report at ‘Kink Con 24’ – from left to right: Kink-affirmative psychologist and report co-author Pompi Banerjee; an anonymous member of the Kinky Collective; feminist activist and report co-author Jaya Sharma; sex worker rights activist Aarthi Pai; theatre artist Mallika Taneja; sex worker rights activist Meena Seshu; and sex educator Leeza Mangaldas. All photographs courtesy Kinky Collective
