Kink and Intrinsic Inclinations
How our deepest desires can drive us to some pretty weird places
Every once in a while, people will try to write an article that explains why kink happens. Kink is, to put it a bit simply, a bit weird and remains hard to understand. Why do people even do it?
Lots of mechanisms have been proposed by various people who have written on this subject, but one of the things that I love about the intrinsic inclinations model is that it explains kink by accident.
Fundamentally, the intrinsic inclinations model says that people have inbuilt inclinations (which I have sometimes called programming for brevity, but isn’t quite that). These intrinsic inclinations encourage them to behave in certain ways and form identities. These are the building blocks that inform our sexual orientation, gender roles and sex identities, among other things, and the combination of intrinsic inclinations we have adds up to a person’s intrinsic inclination set.
The key thing with intrinsic inclinations is that you have to express them to be mentally fit and stable and to be happy. To that end, we’ve developed a lot of guidance and baggage about how to safely and sanely express intrinsic inclinations for the two most common sets, those of man (heterosexual masculine male people) and female (heterosexual feminine female people).
Of course, not everyone fits into these two very common sets and the level of variety can be quite large. However, for this particular article, we’re going to focus on only two groups of sets: those who lack some type of expression (for example, they may lack a sex identity, a group that typically includes non-binary and asexual people), and those who have all the sets but whose expression varies in some way from the two common sets I mentioned above (for example homosexual people have a varying sexual orientation while transgender people have varying sexual identity).
When we have a society that is tailored chiefly to the two common intrinsic inclination sets, both groups suffer but in slightly different ways. One group keeps being forced to express things they just do not feel by society, the other is outright being stopped from expressing how they really are and made to express the opposite. Both of these things lead to problems but in different ways and where kink starts to enter the discussion is that it becomes a solution to this problem under certain circumstances.
Let’s start with the first group (people missing an intrinsic inclination), for which we’ll use the example of the people without a sex identity. People without a sex identity just don’t have any intrinsic inclinations in the brain tied to sexual identity, leading them to not engage in all the behaviours that are tied in with sex, which involves the having of children and sex as procreation (sex as intimacy still counts).
For people living in a society where nearly everyone else has a sex identity and is thinking about sex a lot, that can be problematic. Such people can and will form spaces where sex isn’t a big thing and intimacy can still be had, but without the icky parts of sex. Examples of this can involve tying your partner up or using corporal punishment to prevent “natural” behaviours.
If you’re more of a normal person with one of the two common intrinsic inclinations sets of man and woman that I talked about earlier, the idea of enacting intimacy without sex would be a little bit weird, probably wrong, dare I say it, even kinky. If you’re not, though, (and you’re in the first group) then these types of things can be great coping mechanisms for living in a world that seems to have gone mad. And this is where we get to the start of how intrinsic inclinations links with kink.
I used people without a sex identity as the main example, but there are other versions of intrinsic inclination sets in this group too. Two other important sets would be people without a gender role identity, and people without a sexual orientation. I’m afraid I’m not very experienced at how people without an orientation work, but people without a gender social role are fairly straight-forwards. Gender social roles are associated with intimacy and romance in relationships and with masculinity and femininity in society. So you’re looking at people who just don’t see the point in being anything than sex objects and to hell with all the other relationship stuff stuff around that, leading to things like primal animal based play or master/slave dynamics.
Again, to a normal person from the two common intrinsic inclination sets of man and woman, removing all romance from a relationship in favour of just the sexual parts would be a bit weird, often labelled as abusive behaviour and again, dare I say it again, kinky when desired.
In this way, we can see where the kink in kinky comes from, in the sense of “a sharp twist or curve in something that is otherwise straight”, where the presumed straightness is the normalcy of the common intrinsic inclination sets.
Now let’s talk about the second group, the one which has sets with all the intrinsic inclinations present, just not quite in the normal way society is geared up to when it’s mainly designed to cater to the two common intrinsic inclination sets of man and woman.
In order to function in society, people in this group who choose not to come out must instead actively try and conform. Whether you are a gay male married to a woman, a feminine man who has to take a masculine role in life at work or a transgender person who has not transitioned, you are not just not expressing your intrinsic inclinations, you’re also expressing the wrong ones, which can really mess you up.
Since expressing intrinsic inclinations is necessary to good mental health, and expressing an opposite intrinsic inclination leads to worse mental health, this causes, to put it mildly, severe problems for the people involved.
This is where we get other parts of kink we haven’t mentioned yet. Our married gay man goes cottaging to survive and has random sex with other men in parks, our feminine man hires dominatrixes to have the feeling of not being in control and submitting to someone else and a transgender woman who has not transitioned can express some of her forbidden sexual identity through cross-dressing, forced feminisation and simulated rape play.
The key thing all of these forms of expression share in common is that they are incredibly extreme. It’s like saving up all of your intrinsic inclination expression and doing it in one massive go, like binge drinking versus having a bit of alcohol now and then. As with binge drinking, it can be incredibly liberating and necessary for the people involved to keep an even keel mentally, but it’s also dangerous. In many ways people who repress intrinsic inclinations are very vulnerable and can be taken advantage of and trying to then express repressed inclinations safely in an extreme way, even with an understanding partner, can be a challenge.
The “sharp twist or curve in something that is otherwise straight” here is, instead of the absence of something of the first group, it’s the absolute, bonkers, self-destructive nature of over-expression beyond the normal presumably straight-forwards path. In our examples above, random sex with men carries AIDs risks, being dominated by a dominatrix opens a person up to financial and emotional abuse and what does consent even mean to someone who has so limited their sexual expression that rape looks actively fun? Surely no sane person would do these things, yet these are the things people must do to stay sane.
As you can see from these two different groups, kink becomes a coping mechanism for living in a society that is not set up for intrinsic inclination sets that are outside the two most common ones and the solution to this problem is to allow people sensible expression.
To go back through all our examples, a non-binary person with no sex expression will be happy with another similar person and trying to understand such a relationship in sexual terms won’t help. For a gay man, marriage to a man presents healthy opportunities for sex. For a feminine male person, an domestic relationship as a house husband to a loving gender variant wife works wonder and transition helps transgender people express more consensual sexual relationships. All of these things are probably why we have become more accepting of kink as a society and even cease to avoid looking at some things as kinky at all.
The ideas developed here, though, don’t just stop at the two groups I’ve mentioned, but also apply back to the two common intrinsic inclination sets of male and female. When the environment or circumstance interferes with development that helps express intrinsic inclinations, we also see that lead to incredibly weird, dare I say kinky, behaviour.
To write about that deserves an entire separate article of its own, but two really simple examples of the same kind of extreme repression/expression dynamic as in the second group can be seen in the stereotype of religiously abstinent women who absolutely go off the rails as slutty devils the minute they cross a certain age and then in male sexual players who are used to meaningless sex and fall hard in love when encountering intimacy in relationships for the first time.
And even “normal” people vary from the mean, such that we have stories of couples who love sex so much they will swap partners, while others are much more romantic and will prioritise activities together over sex.
All in all, I hope I’ve shown the fun link between intrinsic inclinations and kink and the way thinking about intrinsic inclinations often helps explain kink. As part of my closing remarks, I’ll just say, remember to take care of yourselves and express your intrinsic inclinations as safely as you can, whatever the limits of your circumstances are.
