Open Up: Kinky Open Relationships
Posted at 2:43 PM May 26, 2008
Long-time Village Voice sex columnist Tristan Taormino has a new book out this month called Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. Here on Naked City, she'll be publishing weekly posts about non-traditional relationships throughout the month of May. These stories won't be found in between the covers of her book, but they should whet your appetite for more.
So many people who are into BDSM are also in some kind of open relationship that it’s difficult to find a monogamous leatherperson these days. (I said difficult, not impossible.) In my experience, people who practice BDSM are more likely to also practice some form of non-monogamy for a lot of different reasons. When someone recognizes his/her BDSM desires, it’s often a process similar to a gay, lesbian, or bisexual person coming out. During their coming out process, kinky folks have confronted their own shame, guilt, and other feelings over being “not normal,” and come to terms with those issues in order to embrace their alternative desires and identities. Because their sexuality is already outside the norm, it seems fitting that they are willing to explore relationship structures outside the norm as well. In addition, many kinky folks see their BDSM as ‘play’ and want to share that play with multiple people. In the context of a BDSM community, playing can be a social activity is some of the same ways that sex is a social activity for swingers: a way to meet someone, connect, and get to know them.
When someone becomes part of a BDSM community, they are exposed to its culture, and non-monogamy is a part of BDSM culture. BDSM newcomers have the opportunity to watch non-monogamy in practice, see how it can work (and how it can’t), and ask questions of people who are actually doing it; this greater level of exposure may increase their willingness to consider it for themselves. There is also a great deal of mentoring that happens in the BDSM world. When someone enters a BDSM community as a novice, she often wants to learn or experience a particular activity. She may play with an experienced kinkster in order to do this but doesn’t want to necessarily have a sexual or love relationship with the more experienced player. Because communication, negotiation, and consent are some of the most important tenets of the BDSM community, kinky folks have an advantage when it comes to creating rules and boundaries for non-monogamy; however, kinky open relationships have their own unique challenges, too.
One of the really cool aspects of kinky open relationships is the idea of “role exclusivity.” Because roles like Dominant, submissive, Top, and bottom are clearly defined, it gives each person a specific set of expectations. When a non-monogamous person structures their relationships around role exclusivity, who everyone is to one another is clear and very distinct. For example, as a Dominant, Jimmy has a boy, Jay. Jimmy may play with other submissives and even other boys, but no one else is his boy. This in turn gives Jay a sense of security about his specific, special place in Jimmy’s life: “I’ve found that by defining the relationships in some way distinct from other relationships, there’s a greater sense of safety and comfort. Jay as my boy is the boy, the only boy. There are times when other people serve me, there are times when other people do any of the things that he does for me, but they aren’t mine. He is the only one that I call mine in the capacity of being my boy. And yes, it is a commitment… that the relationships be life long…I am committed to not having another boy, and he’s committed to not having another Sir.”
--Tristan Taormino
Read more about Tristan Taormino’s new book Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships on OpeningUp.net
If anyone is well-qualified to talk about the relationship between religion and the sex industry – it’s certainly Carla. Her first book, 
For this installment of my four-part series Sexiness, Next to Godliness, I interviewed two women, Bowie Snodgrass and Lia Scholl, who are allies of sex workers and have created community-building projects for people who work within the sex industry. But despite being devoted to their causes, neither woman is overly focused on bringing the word of God to sex workers. Instead, community building takes precedence.
It was with this foundation that eight members of Transmission, along with an equal number of sex workers and local artists, conceived of the idea of 
Lia spoke effusively about this point, and throughout our conversation she stressed that one of the major things that sets her ministry aside from others is that, “Many ministers don’t believe people can be right with God and be a dancer, but I don’t buy that. I don’t try to get women to quit, but I think women should all have choices – women should have free agency.”
This is part one in a four-part series called Sexiness, Next to Godliness, which will run on Mondays through the end of April.
In 1834 a group of these middle class ladies founded the New York Female Reform Society, with the goal of keeping women out of prostitution and assisting those who were in prostitution in becoming more respectable. This group was very much a religiously-driven effort, and around this same time other reform groups opened prostitute asylums to cure sex workers of their wicked ways. Though certainly some of the prostitutes welcomed the help, others probably resented the way they were being preached to and treated as though they were mental defectives (which is pretty much how popular medical literature referred to them).
