OUT OF THE DUNGEON One student group works to fight misconceptions about kink. BY CARTER SHERMAN
T
he students look as motley and unremarkable as a macro discussion section. Though one guy rocks a pair of crimson cowboy boots, most sport the normcore uniform of baggy sweatshirts and Converse. If you happened to wander past this Annenberg classroom, you would never guess that these students are here a meeting of the NU Kink Education Society. After about 30 minutes of talking, laughing and eating Chips Ahoy, a man with a mop of brown hair shuts off the music. The topic for the hour-long meeting is consent and negotiation, the best ways for people to set sexual boundaries and
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limits on what is and isn’t acceptable, and Erik*—the group’s co-founder and co-president—is ready to get started. “Generally, [you] have to ask someone for consent if you’re gonna have sex with them,” Erik starts to say. One girl wearing a baby blue fleece jumps in with an amendment: “Uhh, 100 percent of the time,” her fingers tracing the digits in the air with an assured swoop. Everyone laughs, and plunges in. The NU Kink Education Society, or NUKES, is not for everyone. The club, which first met last May, seeks to educate and build community for students interested in kink. Such
clubs are far from unusual; in fact, Northwestern’s embrace of kink lags behind schools like Harvard University and Columbia University, which have had kink-centric clubs for several years. NUKES aims to help Northwestern catch up, to dispel—or at least illuminate—the misconceptions and debates over kink’s motivations and acceptability that remain rampant on campus. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid 50 Shades of Grey, the meaning of “kink” might be a little murky, but it generally refers to any sexual behavior that society deems unconventional or beyond the norm. Fetishes, or objects that cause sexual desire
in some individuals, fall under the kink umbrella. So does BDSM (Bondage/ Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sadomasochism), which embeds sex with power exchanges of varying intensity, from handcuffs to practices like “blood play.” (It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like.) Not everybody who likes kink likes BDSM, and not everybody who’s into BDSM is into every kind of play. “[Kink] doesn’t always have its expression in sexual ways,” says Bruce,* who runs the Chicago-based kink convention Kinky Kollege and often speaks to university kink clubs. “That is one of the wonderful things about
