Shameful Reviewers

Alta Hensley, my co-author in the Human Surrender box set received an email from a reader saying she needed to find Jesus. This was just a few days after someone–perhaps the same person–sent the same message to another author in our genre, Maren Smith.

You can read Alta’s FB post about it here–some of the responses had me chuckling. 🙂

All joking aside, though, reconciling kink with spirituality can be as challenging or more for people as reconciling it with feminism.

I’ve noticed there are a number of reviewers who read book after book in our genre and then give them all one stars, saying the D/s is “abuse” or “sick”. At first this annoyed me. Why do these people keep BUYING our books if they hate them so much? And then I recognized it for it is: SHAME. Their own kink compels them to buy the books and read them cover to cover, but their shame over their interest in D/s makes them lash out at the author, because they can’t accept it in themselves.

I wish them all the peace in the world and hope they will someday shift out of shame and into acceptance. I remember my big “aha” moment in figuring out how my kink fit with my spirituality. The article below is what I wrote several years ago as a result of that moment.

Spirituality and the Sexual Kink

As far as I can tell, I was born with a sexual kink. I consider it an orientation vs. an interest. I am what the fetish community refers to as a “spanko.”

It’s a secret I kept closely guarded for most of my life. At first I hid it simply because it was embarrassing to me, because of the shame and confusion I felt for being turned on by something that was considered painful and humiliating to most. It is the sort of interest that spawns many jokes. As I matured, I not only hid it, but I did my best to suppress my thoughts and fantasies of being spanked. It seemed to me that they were unhealthy thoughts. They were not normal.

I would go through periods of time when I allowed myself to indulge my kink by daydreaming long, intricate plot lines involving domination and submission. During these periods of time, I found myself feeling and acting more submissive around male authority. For example, I would freeze up around male bosses, or be unable to demand what I needed from a male doctor.

For these reasons, I believed that indulging in these fantasies was detrimental to my psyche. I would exert my will-power and completely shut them down. I noticed that the times when I was not allowing myself to indulge in these thoughts, my sex drive was very low and when I did have sex, my body’s responses to it were less than enthusiastic. The times when I did allow myself my fantasies, my sex life was most interesting. I was not anywhere close to acting on these fantasies, but they were feeding my general interest in having sex and my ability to easily achieve orgasm. This observation only added to my distress. Why could I not be normal?

When I first began writing romance, I suppressed the spanking scenes that naturally appeared in my imagination. It wasn’t until I discovered there was an entire market for spanking romance, that I was able to let go and explore my plot lines fully, thrilled that I’d found my niche. But as I started putting my fantasies down on paper, my brain nearly imploded from the conflict within myself. I sat down to meditate and I asked the question, why am I so submissive? Why do I have this kink?

The words came plainly into my mind: Submission to God. Whoa.

I was stunned. I had never considered there might be a higher purpose to submission! It’s the “God in Everything” theory. There is divinity in all things. There is divinity in the writing of this article. There is divinity in sex. In all of its shapes and forms. There is divinity in learning to submit to a sexual partner, just as there is divinity in learning how to dominate.

Around the time I finished my first spanking romance novella I worked up the courage to ask my husband to spank me. The fresh romance that has sparked between us as a result has been incredible. An expression I often read on the blogs is “I wish we started this sooner.” That is exactly how I feel. I find the expression of dominance and submission to be a beautiful balance of energies– a divine union. The yin and yang, masculine and feminine – in a gender neutral kind of way. It’s an exquisite dance that fulfills me through the sheer beauty of its expression.

Sexual kinks come in all varieties. What I discovered is that accepting and embracing my kink has allowed a more honest expression of my true self, both as an author of fiction, and as a wife and sex partner. I would encourage anyone with an unexpressed kink to talk to their partner about it. If you don’t have a partner, there are online communities to help you find someone with similar interests.

PS- I have a secret Facebook group where we discuss things like this. If you’d like to join us,friend me on FB (it’s a hoop FB makes me jump through) then send me a message to add you. If you don’t hear back right away, shoot me an email–sometimes I miss FB messages.

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