How Do You Know if You’re Kinky?

How I Went from Vanilla to Beige to “Well… Fuck. I’m a Sadist.”

How does someone know they’re kinky? Like really kinky. Not “I own fuzzy handcuffs from Cirilla’s” kinky. I mean the kind of kinky where one day you wake up and realize, “Oh. This is not a phase. This is a fully integrated part of my sexuality.” That’s a real question.

Especially because while we’re slowly working on the stigma around BDSM, there absolutely still is one. And for women specifically, there are still circles — especially religious ones — where female sexuality is treated like an obligation instead of something we genuinely enjoy. If you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing you already know that’s bullshit.

The truth is, we still know shockingly little about women’s pleasure, arousal, anatomy, fantasy, and desire. We’re honestly still in the discovery phase. Which, depending on your personality, is either terrifying or exciting as fuck. For me? It became both.

(Mother — stop reading here. Nothing you don’t technically already know, but somehow this still feels like too much information.)

Like a lot of women, I became sexually active in my teens. I grew up in a very sex-positive home in the 1980s, which honestly was pretty rare. Purity culture wasn’t really happening in my house, though I was definitely aware of it through friends and peers in the 90s. People knew I was having sex. Which meant I was either the sluttiest slut that ever slutted… or the person everyone secretly came to for advice behind closed doors. Funny enough though, despite my reputation as some kind of “freak,” I was actually incredibly vanilla.

Like… beige. Like “sex in a semi-interesting position” was enough for me to think I was adventurous. I didn’t even have my first orgasm until adulthood. And somehow people still thought I was wild. I honestly don’t remember how I first got introduced to BDSM. I know at some point people I slept with started calling me “kinky,” so maybe I looked into it because of that? But what I do remember very clearly is my first reaction:

Absolutely the fuck not.

I saw whips. Chains. Leather masks. Handcuffs. People tied to furniture. Giant boots. Those vinyl hoods that look like a sleep paralysis demon designed them. And I remember thinking: “Why would someone want this?” But I also couldn’t stop thinking about it. Which should have probably been my first clue. I became fascinated in the way people become fascinated with things they swear they would never do. I told myself I was researching BDSM so I could avoid getting mixed up in it somehow. As if kink was quicksand.

Like one blowjob and suddenly I’d wake up chained to a damp stone wall in the basement dungeon of an abandoned warehouse while someone named Viktor called me his little pet. Which, honestly, is still kind of what vanilla people picture when they hear the word BDSM. But the curiosity stayed. And looking back now, I understand something I didn’t understand then:

Curiosity itself can absolutely be part of kink. Novelty can be a kink. Taboo can be a kink. The forbidden can be a kink. The emotional charge around something can become part of the arousal. That’s the piece I think people miss when they think BDSM is just about pain or leather or getting tied up.

Kink is often emotional before it’s physical.

For some people it’s about surrender. For others it’s anticipation. Or humiliation. Or worship. Or being wanted so intensely that another person loses control around you. For some people it’s about finally being allowed to stop holding everything together for five fucking minutes. And underneath all of that are what I call core desires — emotional experiences our nervous systems become deeply attached to over time.

We want what we want. And most people do not consciously choose what turns them on. At one point as an adult, I found myself in some situations where consent became… questionable. Not necessarily because someone violently crossed my boundaries, but because I had absolutely no idea how to advocate for myself inside BDSM dynamics.

I thought being submissive meant enduring things. I thought being “good at kink” meant not ruining the mood. I thought if I hesitated or changed my mind or admitted I didn’t like something, people would think I wasn’t actually kinky enough. So I overrode my body.

Repeatedly.

And because I didn’t know women could really be Dominants — not in a real way, not outside of some porn category designed for men — I assumed the only role available to me was submissive. I fucking hated it. And honestly? That messed me up for a while. Because if THAT was BDSM, I clearly wasn’t built for it. Except the curiosity still didn’t go away.Neither did the fantasies.

Neither did the emotional pull toward power, intensity, anticipation, tension, control, teasing, and psychological play.

That stayed. And once I started really understanding core desires and nervous system responses, something clicked for me in a huge way. I realized I wasn’t failing at submission. I was never submissive to begin with. In my normal life, people naturally follow me even when I’m not trying to lead them. People tend to feel safe around me. I stay calm in chaos. I take control naturally. I protect people instinctively. I can hold intensity without collapsing inside it.

In BDSM, those traits translated directly into dominance. Not performative dominance. Not “step on me mommy” internet dominance. Actual dominance.

Attunement. Leadership. Emotional control. Responsibility.

And eventually I trained with a professional Dominatrix in San Francisco who taught me how to shape those instincts into skill. I learned How to build scenes, and create psychological tension. How to read a submissive’s body and hear the thing they aren’t directly saying. How to understand desire underneath behavior. I believe that understanding core desires and how they become a part of us, is how I am able to not feel shame and to not judge others. She also taught me how to safely push emotional edges without losing connection.

She also taught me that there are many different flavors of dominance. And somewhere in there I had a realization that genuinely made me laugh out loud because life is apparently committed to irony. I’m a sadist.

Holy shit. THE thing that terrified me when I first learned about BDSM. The thing I judged the hardest. The thing that made me go, “Absolutely not. Could never participate in anything like THAT” That IS the thing. AND of course it is. Because sometimes the parts of ourselves we fear the most are the exact parts holding the key to who we actually are.