During a rope performance at a kink conference in Las Vegas, Star, a renowned and highly esteemed female rope performer, is nonconsensually fingered by XY before their audience as she is suspended in elaborate rope arrangements.

During a club night in London, Melody, a female ‘sub’, is nonconsensually punched in the vagina by Orpheus, a well-known club night organiser and prolific member of the UK kink scene.

Both women swallow the violence acted against them which, for over a year, remains private and unspoken. Then both, separately, are provoked by a further act of violence by their abuser. XY contacts Star to ask her to help clear his name as he was struggling to get work now (a request that provokes her distress again); Melody is non-consensually pushed to the ground by Orpheus in the consensual non-consent room of the club night he organises. They both, again separately, tell their stories, and denounce their abusers on social media. From that moment, the treatment that they both receive at the hands of the community that encounters their complaints could not be more different: people are quick to rally around Star, while Melody is reprimanded and shunned.

Disruptive sexual stories

In previous chapters we have explored the body as a container, an image, a protest, and a spectacle. In this chapter we move towards analysis of the political relations that emerge out of specific bodily sexual practices, which have been considered deviant, but which are implicated within mainstream discourses around sexuality, desire and rape culture. In this chapter, I explore the potentiality of kink as a disruptive practice that is bound up with, and implicated in, a majoritarian capitalist commodification of sexual desire in which desire is objectified and spectacularised. I do this first, by interrogating how far kink disrupts the mainstream of sexual practice by exploring the tension between kink and the so-called ‘vanilla’ or non-kinky world. Second, I explore disruptions occurring in kink itself and how those disruptions are dealt with. Analyses of kink and other non-normative sexual practices provide us with a crucible, or a lens, through which to glean how sexual practices that occur within public spaces compose, or contest, contemporary rape culture. Within kink, sexualised practice is explicit, it is foregrounded, it is ritualised, and it emerges in a communicative and enthusiastic manner within the community.