The cut, the cut, cut, cut, cut, the cut. The cut. Lately, there have been some truly salacious stories in the news about powerful celebrity men who've crossed some lines with women they were dating, and these have been sort of aftershocks of the Metoo movement where these new accusations I'm thinking of Armie Hammer and the allegations of abuse and cannibalism or Marilyn Manson's rape room brought back this important conversation on the ways that power and fame can be abused.

But the fascinating thing this time is the way these celebrities have responded to these accusations, because the reply has essentially been, oh, no, you don't understand, that was consensual. We are kinky.

Kink is one of those things that's hard for people to understand, myself included, because I think for a long time I was like, whatever you have your shit you do behind closed doors and that's your business. I don't really feel the need to interrogate it too deeply beyond a basic sort of understanding that I shouldn't shame anyone else's kids, you know. And so when the Internet seized on the gripping details of Army Hemmers supposed cannibal fetish, I was like, should we even be lampooning this?

Is this a legitimate kink? Would there be a right way to do this?

But then I realized everyone was talking about what a wild fixation this cannibalism thing was supposed to be. And there was much less focus on what Ami Hammer's accusers were actually saying about their relationship, which was fetish or not. Their relationship started one way and then it took this turn. We at the cut believe these women who are making these accusations and we believe that the men they were involved with are hiding behind the mantle of kink, because kink isn't an excuse for abuse.

But in order for us to understand where the lines actually get crossed as a culture, we're going to have to engage with the ideas of kink much more fully in all of its richness and deep, deep complexity.

We understand that, like, you can be like vicariously like excited by violence, even though real violence is disgusting and you don't want to actually hurt people.

But it gets framed in this way where it makes it sound like if somebody is kinky, they're beyond criticism. And that's not what it means.

This is Luks Alstrom and I am a longtime sex educator and an abuse survivor and someone who thinks a lot about abuse and kink.

I think people think like, oh, the kink is choking people and kink is like leaving bruises on people. And it can be, but that's not really what it is. So what is kick?

Everyone I talked to had a different way of explaining it.

What it means differs for different people. Well, it's a very specific subset of the erotic and it can mean a lot of things.

If one feels that one is kinky, then one is kinky.

For Lux from Kench is very much about consent. In a kinky situation.

It might it might look like the DOM has all the power and control, but the real control lies with the submissive person because it's not the purest iteration of like safe, consensual kink. Unless you can say no or say you're safeword or say whatever and make it all stop immediately.

This is a very clear dividing line, right, for Armie Hammer. The women said stop and he kept going for Marilyn Manson. It was an entire lifestyle where if you said stop, you're punished more.

But just like in all, consensual sex.

Kinky or not, there's a lot of nuance in negotiation that needs to happen between the people involved.

And it's all within this context of wanting to be giving.

There's so much pressure on you to be compliant, to please your partner to do all these things. That's like.

It has nothing to do with kink, but when you are in a kink environment, that can be taken to the nth degree because so much of kink is about exploration, about going into unknown or taboo terrain.

So you have to be on the same page.

There's these moments where I'm like, oh, or like I would be like surprised with a thing that I had never expressed interest in and maybe didn't want to do it. I don't think there is this like bright dividing line between abuse and kink.

You know, all all of this stuff is just just like there's no, like, three step guide for like doing this or there is. But it's like talk to people have conversations like be willing. It's like the easiest thing in the hardest thing. To hurt the ones you love. To act out scenarios aren't normally like you.

To play with power, it's playing with fire, really, and yet culturally, kink doesn't get talked about with gravity until something goes horribly wrong and either gets whispered about as the super freaky, unspeakable thing, or it has this reputation of being a kind of dorky form of adult Dungeons and Dragons, you know, like something couples try to spice up their marriage after reading 50 Shades of Grey.

I think it's almost jumped straight from being something that's forbidden to being a cliché and being a joke.

And we skip the part where we look at it as something to be taken just as seriously as everything else we do as humans.

And I think that was part of what we were hoping to do with this anthology.

Author R.L. Cohen. She coedited a collection of stories called Kink. It just came out this month. Her co-editor is poet Garth Greenwall.

I would say King creates an occasion for investigation of elements of ourselves that in other aspects of our lives we may be, to me, may be too frightening or too dangerous to investigate. So that to me is part of the great value of king and of literature around King Kink.

Like any kind of sex, like any kind of intimacy is quite simply another way of looking at how people interact.

It's not all good and it's not all bad. So our Oaklawn and Garth Greenwall have curated this collection of stories that show, yes, how kinky can be fun and safe and how it can also go wrong and be unpleasant. And it can also just be kind of like one of the things that our book does not do.

Is try to present kink as like a pure sort of stream of positivity.

Garth Greenwald's story in the anthology is called Gospel DA, and it's about a murky, quite scary, kinky scenario and in it it takes place in Sofia, Bulgaria. And the narrator is an American high school teacher who's lived for some years in Bulgaria and who is meeting for the first time, a man he's chatted with online heeding Greet me or invite me in, but turned without a word and walked to the center of what I took to be the apartment's main room.

I didn't follow him. I waited at the edge of the light until he turned again and faced me. And then he did speak, telling me to undress in the hallway, take off everything he said, take off everything and then come in.

It's an encounter that begins consensually and then very slowly, kind of degree by degree, moves toward violation of consent and becomes something very scary.

I cried out in a voice I had never heard before, a shrill sound that frightened me further. That wasn't my voice at all. And I choked it off as I twisted away from him, not thinking, but in panic and pain, using all my strength. Maybe he was frightened to by my cry, I wanted to dramatize a kind of failure of fantasy and desire where someone discovers that what he thought he wanted, he, in fact, does not want.

I wanted to dramatize something that I don't think is super uncommon. Which is the extent to which we are mysterious to ourselves. I think there's an unknowability that we never exhaust and that's actually a really important component of love.

And I agree with that. And I also feel that there's almost nothing more loving we can do for one another than to than to really see each other. And there's almost nothing more trusting we can do for another than to let someone else see ourselves and that sort of attempt to see the unseeable and someone you love.

That's what our second story is about in the anthology. It's called Safeword, and it's about a couple who goes to visit a dominatrix in a dungeon still holding hands.

They followed the dominatrix down the long haul. Then they were in a dim room, flashing mirrors and contraptions.

And it turns out one partner is way more into the experience than the other.

He was tired, his right shoulder hurt. He didn't want to hit Julie anymore. He wanted to get out of here. He wanted to untie her and take her home, soothe her and have sex with her, his wife, whom he loved, but he kept going.

Part of what's going on in the story is that there's an asymmetry of information and the far kinkier person has been thinking about this has, of course, like read about it has much more of an idea of what she wants.

And the narrator who's being introduced to this world doesn't he hadn't even realized he'd been hoping that somehow all this would go away, that they'd have their little excursion into the foreign land in which he was expected to beat his wife. Then they'd come back to their cosy, normal life in which they took care of each other. But the dominatrix was still talking. The striking thing about this story and many of the stories in the collection is that the characters aren't always able to define their precise terms and boundaries in advance, because over the course of the Kinki encounter, the characters are experimenting with what they want.

They're discovering likes and dislikes that they weren't anticipating. They're surprising themselves.

You know, this is another way in which kink, I think, is an aesthetic act, that there are fictions that allow us to get to the truth in a mask or in a costume or in a new persona with a new set of norms and a new set of rules that exist only between you and your partner or partners.

You're creating a new culture. A new set of circumstances to operate within, and this can help you more clearly see the sexual norms that we're used to operating within instead of taking them for granted.

I mean, also, who knows what what is normal?

I might argue that on the face of it, a heterosexual missionary sets where like assists man is ramming something into the body of a woman over and over again does not seem like definitely loving and like definitely affectionate.

And this is one of the most loving things I can do for each other.

So much of what is considered normal or healthy or good is the way it gets framed and talked about if I'm having sex with a guy who spits in my face, that is not mean.

You know, that is that guy contributing to my pleasure. You know, when I think about the really good sexual experiences I've had, my even sexual experiences that involve consensual violence or consensual degradation, I mean, my feeling is one of great gratitude and tenderness. You know, and what interests me about literature as a way of exploring King is that it allows us to approach it as the complicated thing it is to not try to iron things out into cruel or tender or mean or nice, but instead to acknowledge the complex, dynamic thing that human relations really are.

So the complexity of kink is a double edged sword. It can cause harm and create rifts and unearth unknowable parts within someone you thought you knew, including yourself.

But also can can be a way to heal from trauma. After the break, author Roxane Gay talks about her relationship with King and her story in the anthology. If you're having trouble meeting your goals or focusing at work or you're feeling stressed and having trouble sleeping, better help is here for you. It's not a self-help class and it's not a crisis line. But our help is secure online professional counseling with licensed therapists who have tools to help you feel better.

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This episode is sponsored by Better Help and listeners of the Cut get 10 percent off their first month at Better Help Dotcom Slash. The cut gets started today. I better help dot com slash the cut because it better help dotcom the cut and join over one million people who have taken charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced, better help professional.

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Complications still come up and a lot of times when you read about King, you read about it in the context of sort of exciting encounters with strangers and play parties and oh, that's good. But I'm old. And so what does it look like in a marriage?

I enjoy tormenting my wife, Sasha. I do it because she lets me Sasha lets me torment her because she enjoys it. We play little games, share mutual interests, and so would a couple that was sharing this kinky dynamic.

Like what would that look like and how would it look like in the sense of erotica? And so that's the story I wrote.

I stopp. Push her away. It's a rough, unkind gesture, still holding the end of my belt, I start walking away when there's a tug, she starts to crawl after me tentatively at first, then faster to keep up.

Well, it's a very specific subset of the erotic and it can mean a lot of things. But I think it's like we're a catch all term and it's a catch all term for people who are interested in dominance and submission and alternate forms of sexual expression.

To a degree, the definition of kink, as you said, is like big and all encompassing. And to what degree could one argue, like, we are all a bit kinky?

I mean, I think people would love to say that, just like we're all a little bit queer. But the answer is no, we are not. I think that anyone can be interested in spicing things up and trying new things. And some of those things might be related for sure. And I would hope that everyone has a capacity for kink, but I don't think that's the case. I think that there are people who who prefer things to be very traditional and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

And like there are some people who are like, you know what, I want to eat peanut butter and jelly every single day. And I love it.

Although I feel like if you eat peanut butter and jelly all day, every day, like, goes full circle into being like a crazy cake, I, I can see, quite frankly, that's a lot of peanut butter.

Sasha wants me to take us somewhere, a place she has no vocabulary for, a place neither of us has been.

I can hear it in her cries when we're fucking or I'm stretching her limbs out across the bed or we're crammed into the antiseptic space of a train bathroom.

I can always tell when.

Not quite there yet. It creates tension between us.

Roxanne's story is all about that unknowable tension that still exists between this married couple and the way that kink lets them exist in that void, knowing that they can't really unravel the mysteries of each other and the mysteries of themselves.

And honestly, they're not trying to.

As Garth and Rob, the editors of Kink point out, looking for a reason for a root cause of kink is so not the point.

I think I personally am uninterested in looking for a cause, because I think that once you start looking for a cause, it can be very easy to start wondering if there is a cure.

And I'm extremely uninterested in the idea of a cure.

Yeah, and I guess I would say, you know, I agree with R.O. that, you know, any time you start looking for an ideology of something, you're on the road to pathology, isn't it? I don't know where the impulse comes from. I don't know where the form comes from. I don't know where the desire comes from. But some of the content through which those desires are worked out, I think it is interesting.

Kink is a way of constructing a trellis of rules and agreements.

And so the process of figuring out what you want and what you don't want, of trying different scenarios can make kinks sort of a laboratory of desires.

And for this reason, Roxann has found kink to be healing. I mean, for the uninitiated, it seems kind of fascinating that one could use BDM as a way to heal from trauma. How does that work?

Well, it just depends. I don't think it's for everyone. It's definitely something, especially in my early 20s, that helped me understand consent because I had dealt with sexual violence and was carrying quite a lot of trauma. And when I stumbled into the community, I found a framework for consent where I could be sexual and be safe at the same time. I think when you are 19 and 20 and you're carrying all this trauma in your body and you're scared of men and scared of being touched, and you find that there's a language that you can use and that there are things called safe words and that you can negotiate an encounter before it ever happens and you can choreograph the entire thing.

It's safe. You know, whatever happens, what I'm afraid of is not going to happen. And that can be very reassuring.

Kink is a way of dramatizing things to which one may have been subjected. It's a way of taking violence that one has suffered and to transform that violence into an occasion for pleasure. I mean, that's an incredibly powerful thing that kink and other kinds of sexual practices can do. I mean, the ways in which we eroticize sort of questions of oppression, like the way in which I, as a gay man who grew up in the American South, have eroticized the word faggot like that is not a choice I made.

I think that is a mechanism by which I survived. But what can be a choice is to script an encounter in which I take control of that word and how that word is used against me.

And therefore that word can give me access to a kind of rapture that nothing else can. It seems to me like a not entirely separate impulse from the ways in which we can turn our personal life problems, trauma, suffering loss into literature and into art and into writing. It's turning pain into flowers.

The weird sort of gray zone that exists within kink is its appeal and its beauty. It straddles the liminal space between love and anger and all the unknowable parts of yourself and the unknowable parts of another, it can be, as Garth Greenwall put it, a technology of transformation, although it is a powerful and sometimes dangerous technology.

And this all underscores the gravity of the accusations made against these high caliber celebrities. Imagine how hard it must be to explain to a rigid legal system, to a media landscape that thinks in black and white that a line was crossed and to have the courage of your convictions, to know, to feel, to understand that nuanced yet definite boundary. Between pleasure and pain. This episode was produced by Bob Parker, Alison Barrenger, Jasmine Aguilera and me executive produced by Stella by the Nishat, Koloa and Hanna Rosin, Mixed and scored by Joel Rabie.

Special thanks to Jen Gane and thanks as well to the extremely sexy dulcet tones of Oliver Blank, if you'd like to hear more of his beautiful voice, but also maybe cry a bit, check out his podcast, The One Who Got Away. We are production of The Cut, a New York magazine subscribe today to support all of their work at the cut dotcom slash subscribe.

I'm a very tough woman. Thanks for listening to.