Reviews and Comments

(Copied from an old twitter thread, Apr 2022)

Oof, this book is a slog to get through. Not to mention the many fundamental flaws.

For example: the whole chapter about how she believes communication is overly restrictive today is written from a place of deep fear of messing up and an inability to read social queues. Thereby doing the thing she warns about in the book: overstating harm.

I can’t say the book is written from a neurotypical perspective because I don’t know that about the author. I would say though it is written assuming a neurotypical perspective and audience.

A lot of the difficulties she describes are common among various neurodivergencies but instead of exploring that she denies these perspectives as overly sensitive.

Her insistence of in-person talking over text communication also shows a generational divide. It’s understandable that she’s not super fluent in asynchronous communication but she doesn’t acknowledge this. Instead she generalizes her perspective and dismisses alternatives.

Another fundamental mistake is the assumption that conflict and abuse are a strict binary and mutually exclusive, as if both can’t exist simultaneously in messy overlaps and interconnections. A lot of the book is built on this assumption and therefore on very shaky ground.

And she continues to bring Israel and Palestine into this, for no good reason really, which I’m not qualified to unpack but the way she uses it and the discourse about it as an example in various places feels contrived at best.

Just like The New Topping Book by the same authors, which came out after this but I read first, this book very much shows its age. It is from a time when online resources like Fetlife were far more scarce than today and someone coming newly into kink would have had real difficulty finding any useful material. That is no longer the case and these books today read like someone did maybe a week’s worth of internet research to compile them.

They cover a lot of the basics quite well, but if you already have some experience, even just a little, and especially if you had even just a halfway decent mentor who introduced you to kink, they don’t offer much new insight.

I’m sure they were useful 20 years ago but I wouldn’t recommend them today.

They also have a few issues that you’d expect to see in books written by cis people in San Francisco around the year 2000: a very limited view on gender, some very obvious cultural appropriation, and a sense of assumed authority on their subject matter. They sometimes like to define things is very stiff terms, which feels very dated today.

I wouldn't consider myself an expert or super experienced in the subject matter (BDSM/Kink) which is why I wanted to read this book, to learn more. However it didn't have much to say that I didn't already know. That might be a sign that I've had good mentoring so far or that the book is quite shallow, or possibly both. It really only touches on basics and spends a lot of time with telling stories of the authors' amazing adventures, which tbh I wasn't really interested in.

Slightly amusing was the way these let's say slightly older authors talk about online culture in terms the "the Net" and "Netfolk". They really could have asked someone who's a bit more at home online to proofread this for them.

What really stuck out was a section where they argue that, as a top, you're supposedly obligated to follow through with dates and play-sessions even if you don't feel up for it. I'm sorry, but that's not how consent works and forcing oneself to do kinky things regardless of how one feels or even want's to do it is a wild thing to suggest. They later contradict themselves about this in the same book but it really made me question their qualification to give advice on these subjects.