Long Answer to a Short Question: "Is sexual kink something you are born with, something to do with your experiences?"

An open question posed by the administrator of the Robust Leather Fan Page on Facebook. The following is my reply...

I was born with it, but there is no early trauma I could associate it with. I liked to wrap myself up tight in my blankets and found that the sight of Daisy Duke getting tied up on TV made me feel weird in a sort of shameful way. I thought "if my family wasn't watching this with me, it would be waaaay better." The same goes for the sight of women with pretty, well cared for feet. My fetishes developed from there, but it seems that the seed was already present. My more traumatic experiences came later on.

Just as I was getting comfortable with and more open about my mild perversions the BTK killer made the news and threw my social identity into a tail spin from which I am still recovering. My girlfriend had recently bought me a leather hood which I loved. I never thought I'd have the confidence to play with something like that. Shortly thereafter one of my closest, dearest friend (who happened to have many direct ties to law enforcement) said to me "I understand being tied up, but when people get into leather masks and hoods...well, don't you think there's something wrong with them?" I'll never know if that comment was personally directed at me, but it felt like it. I simply replied that I thought "whatever consenting adults did in the privacy of their own home was their business" but I already sensed my closeness with that person deteriorating into awkwardness. I felt my self loathing return worse than it had ever been and as the BTK trial dragged on I simply withdrew and shut everyone out and my recreational drug use began to take on a darker tone.

Part of me knew I was about to go spiraling over the edge, but the rest of me couldn't think of a damn thing to do about it. I began to fear the very real possibility that I had been born simply to self-destruct.

I can't describe the feelings of having an integral part of yourself that you are only beginning to understand be suddenly associated with a heinous serial killer, but I will say that you begin to wonder if there is the same sort of monster inside you as well. You start to wonder all sorts of horrible things. Does a person KNOW if they are going to become a killer? Do they simply think they're normal, the way I had convinced myself I was normal? Do crazy people know they're crazy or do they think they are the same as everyone else? Was I crazy and simply didn't know it? If I sought help with the wrong doctor would I be branded for life or worse, institutionalized? So began my descent into a personal hell that would be my existence for years to come. During that time not a minute went by that I didn't think about killing myself.

I am now coming out the other side and have realized one thing. I am not crazy, I am simply a veeeeery deep thinker. Give me a good situation and I will think about how to make it better. Give me a bad situation and I'll think about how to make it worse. And on top of that, I am a perfectionist. All these things added up to the construction of my own inescapable personal hell. My ego is the only thing that saved me, the stubborn will to convince myself that if I was the one who constructed this psychological torture chamber than I was the only one who could deconstruct it. Defeat would mean death and dishonor. Victory would mean freedom and glory.

I buckled down, got clean, and started to deconstruct my trap one piece at a time...

For added overtones of paranoia feel free to check out my previous note regarding the conservative government's use of the Patriot Act to link images of bondage and sadomasochism with terrorism which was occurring around this time as well. - KAJ

Source: http://krisallanjohnson.blogspot.com/2010/08/long-answer-to-short-question-is-sexual.html