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Contemporary literature has yielded plenty representations of kink, from 50 Shades of Grey (sigh) to R.O. Kwon’s Exhibit. But if you’re searching for deeper background on the cultural norms we’ve built up around BDSM and its myriad modes of expression, sex educator, dominatrix, and Lambda Literary fellow Tina Horn’s new book Why Are People Into That?—which cites everything from Catherine Opie’s art to Lillian Fishman’s writing to the TV show Portlandia—is most definitely for you.
Vogue recently spoke to Horn about making the shift from podcasting to writing a book, gathering inspiration from the likes of Samuel Delaney, Carol Queen, and Madonna, finding nonjudgmental and kink-positive resources within the queer community, and embracing the prerogative to identify as a “mega-slut.”
Vogue: What did the origins of this book look like?
Tina Horn: Well, I guess the origin of the book is working in the industry as a professional dominatrix and pornographer. In 2013 I started making a podcast where I was basically trying to bring in a lot of the conversations that were happening in the underground and counterculture and informal economy spaces; I felt that so much not only education, but political conversation and storytelling and philosophical psychological explorations of human desire were happening there, and I wanted to record an archive and broadcast a lot of those conversations. I knew so many people who were already comfortable and confident talking about this stuff, so I wanted to make the podcast as a bit of counterprogramming to so much media and so-called education that was very bogged down in respectability politics or shame projections from people who are supposed to be creating education and community culture around human sexuality. With the podcast and now with the book, I wanted to show that explorations of human sexuality can be intellectual, and that those things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. I did podcasts totally independently for a decade, and then a literary agent reached out to me about turning it into a book. I have a creative nonfiction master’s degree, and I love the form of the essay, so instead of just making an adaptation of the podcast, I wanted to make a book that sort of took the same premise that I had created for the podcast—exploring human desire by exploring fetish culture—and flex my my prose-styling craft. [Laughs.]
Who are some of your favorite writers and artists who deal with sex, in any of its millions of manifestations?
I wanted to put all of them into the book, but there’s only so much space! One of my favorite books about sexuality that I’ve read in the past five years is this book called Deep Sniff, by Adam Zmith, that I quote in the book. It’s a book about poppers that really transformed my relationship to the idea of making risk-aware assessments when it comes to pleasure. Deep Sniff took me from someone who was like, Oh, I don’t know about poppers, do we need those? Can’t we just stay hydrated?, to buying a leather poppers necklace I’ve been walking around and wearing to the function. This is a slight tangent, but when I had a Zoom call with the lawyer my publisher hired to do a legal read, she asked me what a butt plug was, and I was like, “If you think I’m not going to tell you all about the marvel of design and engineering that is the butt plug, and the physiological reasons that it’s such a fantastic thing, you are barking up the wrong tree.” So I did explain the virtues of butt plugs to her, and then she was also like, “You know, in the section about poppers, you quote this book Deep Sniff and make poppers sound really appealing, and I’m a little worried about that.” I was like, it’s not my fault that amyl nitrates create a brief sense of euphoria. [Laughs.]
Anyway, in the orgy chapter I also quote this wonderful zine called Make the Golf Course a Public Forest, which is an incredible anthology I read last year that’s a great combination of fiction and nonfiction. The epigraph of that book is from this book by Carol Queen, who’s a huge hero of mine, called The Leather Daddy and the Femme. That book is erotic fiction, and the characters will fuck and then, in the morning, they’ll have coffee and discuss the theoretical implications of what their sex meant. That book had a huge influence on me as a young person in terms of getting me out of the realm of just reading about this stuff; I was so hungry for experiences that I was like, I gotta get out of my head and get up in other people’s guts. Then there’s Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, and Madonna’s Sex book…I could go on and on.
What kind of effect do you think the #MeToo era has had on the mainstream understanding of kink?
That’s a great question. The tension within feminist discourse between the fight for liberation and the world of fantasy and desire has been there since the beginning of feminism, particularly in the second wave. #MeToo was founded by Tarana Burke and then, you know, [had] its widespread, sort of zeitgeist explosion, and I think it’s really important that we remember that the movement is about consent, but also primarily about sex and work. If you think about supervillain Harvey Weinstein, he was exploiting his power in the workplace. My background in understanding human sexuality comes from working in the industry, and my very privileged experience in the industry was one where the learning, the structure, and the ethics of BDSM negotiation and BDSM communication and the primacy of consent were incredibly appealing and exciting to me, starting in my early 20s.
There’s a whole chapter of the book about this kink that is called “Consensual Nonconsent,” which you can just tell from the name reveals this inherent paradox in consent and desire. I think that the problem with discourse about kink is when people see kink—and this very much includes porn, and this also includes, you know, kink aesthetics at Pride, for example, which is a debate that always comes around this time of year—they read it very literally, and that is a problem of a lack of comprehensive pleasure-based education. People need to understand that you don’t have to be into anything that you would consider kinky in order to respect other people’s rights to decide on the terms of their own consent. So as long as there are people who identify as feminists and are fighting for what they see as feminist causes who do not make space for the realities of human desire and the complexities of human desire, I’m going to be infiltrating their space. Myself and my comrades are going to be infiltrating those spaces and, like, persuading them by any means necessary that feminism needs to include BDSM. It needs to include sex work, it needs to include different forms of queerness. And, people, you don’t have to understand other people’s identities or queerness in order to respect their right to express those identities, and not have those identities compromise their civil rights.
Are there any resources you recommend for BDSM or kink-curious people who might not see much representation of their desires in their daily lives?
Well, there are as many different styles of BDSM as there are people. You know, one thing that I talk about in the book is that sexuality is often siloed in its representation. I see people struggling to appreciate that someone’s taste in sexuality can be as varied and adaptable as their taste in music or movies or food or sports or, you know, any hobby or interest, and I make a lot of effort within the book to make allegorical comparisons to other things that people are interested in. I think that “church and state” and medical institutions, particularly mental health institutions, have kind of created this binary of normal and abnormal that is just really shackling people and preventing them from feeling like they can explore their desires in their own way. My recommendation is to seek out podcasts and books and fiction and nonfiction in all mediums about sexuality, and also, if you find one thing and it’s not to you tastes, it’s really sort of like dating and compatibility, right? If you go on one date and, you know, there’s no chemistry with that person, for the most part, people do not just abandon the prospect of finding a connection. Keep hunting, and keep being open-minded and curious.
Something that I document in the book is how I spent a long time in my youth reading a lot, and being really up in my head and overthinking, but everything I know that is useful and that I can impart to people in my work comes from experience. It comes from in-the-flesh experience with people, and it’s everyone’s prerogative to do that in their way and in their own style. Not everyone has to be a mega-slut, as I am and have been. [Laughs.] But it’s like, just start! First, do no harm, but have experiences, make mistakes, build resilience, and talk to your friends, because you have these resources of humanity all around you. Become the friend that instigates conversations about sexuality with your platonic friends; you need to be able to talk about the things that are pleasurable, the things that are weird, the things that feel great, the things that don’t feel right. You need to be able to check each other’s heads, and if you don’t already have that, please hear me now and believe me later: Instigate that among your friends, because it’s going to make everybody’s lives better. Also, 7 Days of Domination and Kink Academy are great sex-worker-created online fetish education resources, and Kink Out and Hacking//Hustling are political, artistic, and community-building resources that I love.
