BDSM RTV MEDIA NEWS!!!!



19 march 2010




Kink: A Straight Girl's Investigation(book)

Reader rating:
None yet.
Genre
Relationships/Sexuality
Author
Stephanie Clifford-Smith
Publisher
Allen & Unwin
Year
2010
Pages
295
RRP
$29.99


Source: www.smh.com.au  - Sydney Morning Herald - Australia


IT'S possible that as you read this review, Martin is enjoying a squirt of alcohol into the eye of his penis, Kelly is writhing under the tongue of her dog and a hooded, naked woman is tied onto a bed having studs punched into her labia. These are just a few of the suburban sex secrets exposed in Kink - and not the most eye-popping either.


Stephanie Clifford-Smith explains that the book arose out of her curiosity about “how kinks affect relationships and how does one person suss another one out”, and even about “how you cope with the laundry when you want quantities of messy substances involved in the act” (lots of plastic sheeting).

Clifford-Smith is usually a food writer in Sydney, albeit one with a degree in psychology and years in medical publishing. She placed an ad in a paper asking for interview subjects with unusual sexual interests and received an astonishing number of replies - mostly from men, predictably. It's impossible to know how many she winnowed out but the line-up starts to pall about halfway through, after she has relayed her intimate chats with Bruce, Dean, Pierre, Gary, Keith, Jimmy, Sacha, Kiree, Graham and Rita and sat in on the aforementioned Martin's sex sessions.

I had trouble believing in Martin. His Catholic mother dressed him up as a girl until he was five; he saw a psychiatrist who thought he might be a woman (despite his “rhinoceros”-like physique) and put him on hormone therapy without explaining the side-effects; and he has weekly appointments with a GP during which they “swap patient/doctor roles using her surgical equipment”. Clifford-Smith knows he is not lying because he says that his penis is small: “Liars scale up, not down.”

Martin enjoys mild torture, so Clifford-Smith dutifully attends several of his dominatrix sessions during which his penis is stretched with a rope and pulley and whipped.

Reading this stuff made me feel like an incredulous voyeur, not helped by our doughty investigator's humorous take. Clifford-Smith is an engaging journalist but the breezy, confidential tone undermines the book's already frail, morally dubious purpose. Are we simply getting our jollies and testing our own proprieties, or trying to comprehend what makes amputee fetishists tick? Or why some people indulge in scatological afterplay?

Clifford-Smith zealously introduces people of every unimaginable peccadillo in 34 short chapters with punning titles, alternately chuckling and trying to be insightful, though there is precious little of this in the excerpts about fellatio from The Textbook of Psychosexual Disorders and a joke about Hugh Grant.

A couple of shrinks come on board in the last chapter. One tells a story about a man who loved his wife for her hair. “She just didn't understand that her hair was part of her for him, and without it there was nothing left.” No one even attempts to explain why Bob with the “sensitive government job [who] can't afford to be recognized in a harness and chastity belt” wants to spill the beans to a journalist.

I'm tempted to be charitable and say that my “vanilla” background might occlude apprehension but to hell with that: good writing can convey anything. Certainly, at the end of this book, I felt no wiser.