“I’ve been kneeling here about ten minutes in the sheer black blouse, the crotchless panties. I don’t dare get up long enough to check my makeup. My back is straight, and my palms and cunt are trembly. The motion-sensor light outside the house blinks on, and then the door swings open.” So begins a scene from “Emotional Technologies,” by Chris Kraus, one of the fifteen stories rounded up in “Kink,” a new anthology of literary fiction. The book mostly interprets kink—nontraditional sexual preference—to mean B.D.S.M., with a smattering of polyamory (and, puzzlingly, liaisons between trans or fluidly gendered people). “Literary fiction,” meanwhile, is a publicist’s phrase. Here, it nods to the reputation of the volume’s editors, R. O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, and to the prestige of its contributors, who include Alexander Chee, Carmen Maria Machado, and Brandon Taylor. (Skimming the table of contents conjured, for me, the entrance to some publishing gala where place cards inscribed with gold calligraphy rest on white tablecloths.) In an introduction, the editors write of their hope to address kink as “a complex, psychologically rich act of communication” that raises “questions of power, agency, identity.” The stories, in other words, should do more than titillate. They should edify, challenge; they should buy you dinner.
That’s the goal. In reality, the tales sit at various intersections of smolder and technical accomplishment. Many do exert an indirectness or subtlety that bends the straight line from longing to gratification. Of these entries, some are arresting—the characters precise, the language invitingly lush—and some are inert. Several contributions evoke erotica, and a few manage to be both sexy and illuminating, although too much thoughtful interrogation can diminish the sex, like explaining a joke. What becomes clear is that a perhaps irreconcilable tension exists between a good story about kink and a good story about what kink means.
Consider Kraus’s entry, which I loved for the way it presses the hard edge of theory against the body’s soft surface. Dom-sub performance is “a bit like what Ezra Pound imagined the Noh drama of Japan to be,” she writes, “a paradox in which originality is attained only through compliance with tradition.” Kraus argues that sadomasochism takes the rituals of courtship literally: “How many times have I, has every heterosexual female in this culture, spent evenings mooning around our houses and apartments, psychically stripped bare and on our knees while waiting for ‘his’ call?” But if rote or prescribed gestures can paradoxically confer freedom, they also brighten the challenge of crafting “literature” out of kink. For Kraus, the sadomasochistic encounter represents a “mythic text,” in which psychological dynamics become externalized: “everything’s direct and on the surface . . . the master and the slave, the monster and the slut.” Stories that cut, as many of “Kink” ’s do, in the other direction—toward metaphor, subtext, an interior world—conform to our idea of good fiction, but they also seem to waste an opportunity to explore kink as an aesthetic.
Of course, there are myriad sensibilities that might read as kinky, just as there are myriad ways to define kink. But the book doesn’t offer precise definitions of its subject, and so its aesthetics are also imprecise, defaulting often to a diligent seriousness. Mainly, the book bestows visibility: on unconventional desires, on the authors who depict them. Here is a married couple—an ex-Catholic woman and her vanilla husband—who arrange a session with a dominatrix; here is a sex worker, with her “long, black, dark, and lovely wig,” and the boyish client who calls her “Ma’am” before he sucks her cock; here is a divorced gallery curator who, wooing his girlfriend at a KinkFest convention, conceals a history of experimentation with his cousin. You might secretly wait and hope for the acknowledgment of your own proclivity—who wouldn’t—but it’s also pretty clear that part of the book’s allure flows from what could (charitably) be called curiosity, or (uncharitably) voyeurism. This isn’t unique to “Kink,” of course. On some level, to read anything is to press your face to the keyhole of other people’s fantasies.
What you see, in this case, is how kink can be used to connect, invent, play, or hide, to deflect real vulnerability with a staged submission. The collection’s strongest stories, remembering that sex also takes place in the brain, twist the mental and the physical into a Möbius strip. In “The Cure,” by Melissa Febos, a depressive character releases herself from worrying about her lover’s comfort, unceremoniously sending him away whenever he uses poor kissing technique or expects too much tenderness. The scenes of intercourse are spare and efficient. It is not until afterward, when the woman is alone, that a warmth and lyricism enter the prose: “the orgasm was deep and silent, the kind that opens a room in the body and then fills it with light.” Taylor’s story, “Oh, Youth,” seems almost to glisten with physical craving. It’s set in a place of manicured beauty, with pools and lawns and terraces, and the narrator is alert to both his and his friends’ bodies, noticing their nostrils, nails, sacra, the fine hair on their forearms. But, as with Roxane Gay’s similarly sensual contribution, the story’s real drama is psychological. Both authors explore the humiliation of loving others, and what patience and privacy those others are owed.
The obligations that intimacy creates form a surprising through line in “Kink.” For all its raunch, the book is very much a study of trust. Greenwell’s story, “Gospodar”—which also appears in his novel-in-stories “Cleanness,” from 2020—speaks from the wreckage of that trust. After the narrator meets up with another man, the interaction careens, at first imperceptibly but then unstoppably, from stimulating to predatory. The story’s work is to show how blurry the edge between appropriate and inappropriate behavior—an edge defined entirely by consent—can seem from without, and yet how undeniable its violation feels to the lover, who is now, also, a survivor. But Greenwell’s narrator—his survivor—does not settle for long in this new identity. Having escaped, bleeding and weeping, into the street, he uneasily imagines the moment in which his boundaries will again disappear: “I felt with a new fear how little sense of myself I have, how there was no end to what I could want or to the punishment I would seek.”
Greenwell demonstrates how the extremity—the perceived borderlessness—of sadomasochistic practice can be used to justify harm. But, reading “Kink,” I started to think not just about the perimeters of acceptable actions but about the perimeters of authorized feeling. For centuries, literature has been considered a realm of exquisite and epic emotions: love, hate, joy, grief. In her 2005 book, “Ugly Feelings,” however, the critic Sianne Ngai argues that contemporary fiction deserves recognition for evoking such “unprestigious feelings” as irritation and anxiety. “Kink” almost reads as a continuation of this project, a bid to add lust or arousal to the suite of celebrated “literary” responses. (In this, the editors honor a long lineage of writers, from the Marquis de Sade to Mary Gaitskill.) The point is not to perfectly elucidate kink as a concept but to lower the drawbridge of literary value—to the unapologetically porny “Best Friendster Date Ever,” by Chee (which previously appeared in “The Best American Erotica 2007”); to the prickly, seductive “Safeword,” by Kwon (which was published, in 2017, in Playboy); to “The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror,” by Machado, a tale as indebted to bodice rippers as it is to the velvet butcheries of Angela Carter.
In some cases, the recognition is overdue. And yet I would be remiss if I did not mention that several of the stories in “Kink” are abysmally bad. You can pursue the causes, consequences, and metaphors of B.D.S.M. so studiously that the acts themselves become domesticated. (Also, several entries are rife with cliché—and not the liberating kind.) It’s curious that the collection declares its subject to be kink, not sex; doing so embeds the gathered work in a firmament of norms and identities rather than one of hungers, sensations. But maybe this is by design; as the reader’s mind tracks back and forth between bodies and definitions, she begins to see those definitions’ flimsiness, and to wonder about the unexpressed depths that live in each of us. Cultural judgments are never fixed, and the imprecision of the word “kink” in some ways echoes the imprecision of the word “literature,” which depends on a superfluity of truth or beauty that is impossible to pin down. In that way, at least, art is exactly like smut: you know it when you see it.
