Container #007: Your Belly is Sexy

Lessons on Kink from a Temperance Decade

I love fat on bodies. It’s not something many people want to talk about. Our society is so conditioned to hate fatness in all forms (which is essentially just racism & fascism dressed up in wellness gaslighting and body shame) that my love and desire for tender fleshiness is somehow subversive to many people. To be clear, when I say I love fat on bodies I mean I love all forms of thickness on bodies regardless of overall body size. This is not a fetish for me, but instead a way of finding pleasure from my own body in the experience of others'. I’m turned on by the pockets, secret places of fat people carry on otherwise lean bodies. Only visible when they are fully naked. I’m into thick thighs that I can grab onto. I want to feel the gentle mound of a belly or the curve of a hip. I love these places of excess. They turn me on because enjoying fatness is meant to be forbidden. I love them because fat is where our softness lives. It’s where we can sink our teeth in. When I touch these places, I’m met with the sensual feeling of the body not resisting but instead receiving me. Fatness is a form of abundance. The cells in our bodies have ripened, plumped to give us shape in new ways. It is these vulnerable places that feel most alive on another’s body. When I am with someone else’s pleasure, I want to feel where their hard bones give way to their erotic pulp. This is why I love breasts and asses, not because of the sexual objectification of those places on bodies, but because they represent something free and uncontrollable, no matter how hard we try to contain them. For me, it is what grows naturally: the hair, the cellulite, the scars that I find most alluring. These are what make us individuals, what make us ourselves. And it is deeply sexy to me when someone is fully themself.

I’m not sure if I would call this a kink, but being attracted to the fleshy softness of others is something I have had to kink myself into accepting about me. This is the implicit link between kinking and queering, we have to change things in ourselves and our beliefs to let emerge what is already inside. Typically, kink is the practice of queering your sexual life. Both kinking and queering require us to question what we’ve been taught so we can locate what is more true for us. I’ve found that, along with more commonly known kinks like cravings for pain or voyeurism, I have a list of not-so well known kinks that often slip by quietly. Things that are socially taboo or improper but that spark desire in me for reasons I can’t quite understand. Being turned on by others giving me shit, wanting to rub my body against rocks or trees, fantasizing about all the mean things I’d say to someone who humiliated me. These are more subtle forms of kink that, though definitely shared by others, aren’t always as celebrated in community or pop culture. We all have forms of the taboo that turn us on, regardless of if we allow ourselves to know them or to ever act on these desires. Being kinky, to me, is less about how we express what we want and more about how we accept what we crave. Since kinks can walk the line between what is and is not ethical, we have to accept what turns us on before we ever act on those desires so we do not harm anyone in the process of letting our perversion out to play. This is why consent is foundational in kinky exchanges.

The first experience I had with kink culture was through a good friend of mine in my 20s who was a Domme and a Sugar Baby. We had been friends since elementary school, so I had the privilege of witnessing her evolution into these identities. Along with kinkiness she also introduced me to polyamory, a kind of kink in itself. As she dove deeper into BDSM and exploring power dynamics, we had many conversations about how feminism fit into this play and what it gave her to embody these roles. I met her submissives & sugar daddies, took nude photos of her in my shower for her fetlife profile, watched her sissy clean her house, and heard about all the ways she would torture these (mostly) cis-men with sensual creativity. In many ways, she was wildly free and equally trapped. No one else in her life knew about these experiences beyond me. The risk of rejection, shame, and serious consequences was too real for her to share this part of her life openly. We had contingency plans for what I would do if something happened to her and she needed specific items removed from her home. The dangers, both physically and socially, were very real to both of us. It was exhilarating for her and also difficult.

Though she gave me a form of intimacy with kink, I’ve never directly been so deep in the scene. My play has always been personal, with myself or between me & lovers/partners. More psychological and less physical. The real appeal of kinkiness to me is in the tension that it builds over time. The prolonging of pleasure and creation of anticipation that become more pleasure in themselves. An electric kind of power lives in knowing what I want, knowing I will get it, and also not knowing when it will come. This is true for all the ways I play with kink regardless of which form it takes. My kinks, like my relationships, are more about exploring what feels good within what is unfolding. If it turns me on to be submissive, then I can be. If the energy between me and another invites my dominance, then I bring that forward. I switch easily depending on what is happening relationally and I like this kind of fluidity within my play. Of course, with the dominant LGBT+ discourse focused on service tops or Daddies/Zaddies, sometimes the queerest thing I crave is sex without power dynamics. The act of how we pleasure each other being non-hierarchical is an exceptional kink in itself. Over the last 10 years of my life, my 30s specifically, I have learned more about what kink can be for me and how I want to engage with it. Throughout this timeframe, I’ve explored and expanded the definition of my kinks and let myself risk the vulnerability of trying things out with others. From role playing to rope bondage, receiving pain to denying pleasure, my sexual appetites have been expanded or satiated by experimentation. This does not mean I have done all the things I am into, which does make the possibilities of my 40s even more enticing. But I have had the courage and connections to let what I want sometimes be spoken and experienced.

I credit this opening to my 30s being stewarded by Temperance. The fourteenth card in the major arcana bookended this 10-year span for me, being my card of the year for both 2015 and 2024. Temperance is often depicted as an angel holding two cups pouring (sometimes water, other times fire + water) into each other. This card’s energy is alchemical and focuses on the ways we transmute our own power through the divine. Temperance is a queer card for me. A card that reminds us that we are transformational beings, and therefore, we are always becoming. Who we have been is both within us and shed as we evolve into a more complex version of ourselves over time. It is commonly spoke about that The Devil in tarot is a card related to our kinks. Though I obviously see the connections (The Devil deals with all the ways we restrain/harm ourselves based on what society has told us we should be), it feels much more interesting to me to hold Temperance as a card of kink as well. If The Devil is about the more animalistic and control-oriented ways we get free through our kinkiness, then Temperance is the transformational element available to us through hedonistic and erotic pleasure that is in itself divine. It is the evolving force that we generate in ourselves when we allow what is sacred in our desires to guide our growth. Temperance then becomes the pleasurable nature of kink while The Devil holds the painful ache of it. Both are needed in order to fully gain what our kinks are giving us. Lucky for me, my 40s are bookended by The Devil. 😈

When we feel into what we are drawn to that has been, for whatever reason, not allowed; we are pushing our own limits and opening ourselves up for more. This does not have to be sexual, even as kinks in general are seen through that lens. For me, the reason why we don’t often utilize kink in situations we see as unrelated to sex is because sex can often offer an altered sense of consciousness that allows us to be slightly (or much) more uninhibited at times. Of course, this is not true for everyone, and yet acts of pleasure (when the pleasure is strong enough) help us to release our inner judgements and fears just enough to experience something new. Similarly to using certain drugs or breath work (also something our bodies naturally do during sex, thanks arousal response 😉 ), when we can quiet the parts of our brain that use fear to control us then we can stay present with what it is we enjoy and want to experience. One of the most powerful no-sexual kink-related insights I had in the last decade was connected to the book Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott. Though this book does connect to sex (in unexpected ways), there are some exercises in it that can help us to lower our inhibitions around non-sexual things we desire as well. Google “deepest fear inventory” or “existential kink operating instructions” for more on this. (A warning about this book though, if you are not ready to do existential kink then it will feel impossible to understand what the fuck Elliott is talking about 😅).

Similarly to what Existential Kink offers, our ability to kink things in us can also be used to find new ways to respond to painful experiences. In the last decade, I have found the pleasure of this through learning how to kink my jealousy. In my 20s and early 30s, I was often possessive and emotionally reactive regarding my partners being desired by or desiring others. I now understand this as a closeted projection response from the non-monogamous parts of myself that I was struggling to keep quiet inside me. Much like homophobes are often cruel when they see others experiencing what they secretly want, I would feel deeply insecure and scared whenever my partnership was “threatened” (I use quotes here because the threat was me more than anyone else). Later in my 30s, I was able to find a different way to respond in my fantasy life. Internally while having solo sex with myself, I allowed the intense feelings of jealousy I had to come forward and be transformed into want. Because, honestly, in the end that was what these feelings were. I wanted to be in control, I wanted to feel good enough, I wanted to be chosen. In these fantasies, I would witness the person I was with being seduced by someone else and as the fears came forward I let them become pain that felt good. (side note: it is amazing to remember that pain and pleasure are just heightened sensations and therefore the same thing in our bodies if decide not to label them as bad.) The hurt of rejection and humiliation from what I witnessed became extremely erotic for me. Yes, it helped that voyeurism was already something I dabbled in, but stay with me. The burning intensity in my guts when jealousy flared up became a kind of temptation in my body, a dare. Could I enjoy that fire? Could I use that desire to feel in control of my own pleasure? The more I practiced this transmutation in my fantasy life, the less I found myself being jealous or possessive in my external world. The more I was able to accept how non-monogamous I had been all my life already. Doing this work doesn’t mean that jealousy never comes up now, but when it does I know what to do to help myself move through it. Orgasms definitely help with this kind of transformation.😉 Kinking my jealousy is about accepting and feeling it fully so that it can be what it really is. Not something scary and overpowering but something human and insightful. My jealousy reminds me that I want to be important while also reminding me that I want to be free. I can be both of these things regardless of who my partner desires or who desires my partner beyond me. I can enjoy the fact that my partner is sexy and has desires of their own. Because I am sexy and have desires of my own too. Letting myself be with this bigger truth instead of allowing my fears to limit my knowing is what kink has given me. A hotter way of coming back to myself.