Finding Freedom in Black BDSM
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Goddess Honey B, who is a professional Dominatrix and is deeply invested in the freedom of Black people, along with Kharyshi Wiginton who is a submissive sex goddess, write in this article, "Having ownership over your body and sexuality is extremely difficult when you are a girl or woman. It’s even harder when you’re Black. When you’re a fat Black woman, you’re made to feel like your body is an inconvenience and your sexuality is nonexistent.
In our communities of Black folks, kinky people were finding one another and creating enclaves of communal practice. Inside these Black kinky communities, we found Black people rejecting white dominant culture’s proscriptions on who was worthy of sexual pleasure, who could rule inside the bedroom, or what it meant to powerfully submit. Here we saw Black people using sex and sexuality as a medium to create new realities and praxes, even for those of us at the furthest margins of society."
Black kink was and is the sexual practice that Black folks deserve. It’s a tool for practicing other ways of being with one another, including an embodiment of consent, grounded conflict transformation, gender liberation, and embodied joy. When practiced by Black folks outside the gaze of whiteness, heterosexuality, and maleness, Black kink—in particular BDSM—offers opportunities for Black folks to create alternate realities. It can allow us to work through traumas and cleanse the residue that racial, sexual, fatphobic, gender-based, and other forms of oppression have left on us.
At the same time that we learned about the possibilities of sex outside of societally accepted norms, we learned that those practices were, with few exceptions, for white people. So even as we both began to explore our own sexual freedom, it would be many years before either of us understood that what we were into was, in fact, kink. It took even longer to recognize that some of those desires were clear practices and tenets of a specific sexual power play known as BDSM (bondage, dominance, discipline, submission, sadism, and masochism). Today, we know that the way we practice BDSM is inextricably connected to our politics and deep longing for Black freedom and autonomy.
More than two decades after first watching that Real Sex episode, conversations with other Black folks have made it clear that kinky sex is definitely not a “white thing.” Black people are (and have been) having kinky sex and exploring BDSM, and, like us, they were finding freedom in the process.
Black kink is about freedom and empowerment, but most of all, it’s about pleasure.
In a world where far too few Black people get to experience the agency to truly decide what happens to and with our bodies, Black kink offers us space where our ‘no’ is respected and our pain is seen and affirmed.
Blackness and Black people have been redefining and leading cultural change for as long as we have existed. Our practice of kink and BDSM is no different. Black kink is a liberatory practice—it is church and sanctuary. It holds lessons for how we show up outside of our play spaces, and also for how non-Black people can integrate a praxis of anti-racism even in their pleasure practices.
To read more of this article by Goddess Honey B & Kharyshi Wiginton, click here