“Digital kink obscurity: A sexual politics beyond visibility and comprehension”

Researching digital kink and an ethics of obscurity

David: Well, rubber is not the most insulating material!

It was cold out that day. As the pandemic had turned physical intimacy and closeness into physical distance, the in-depth interviews I conducted with members of the Swedish digital BDSM, fetish and kink platform Darkside had to take place on screen instead of face to face. For the interview with the founder of Darkside and its longtime webmaster, David Jatko—who due to his public role is the only one appearing with his real name—we both made an effort to look nice. He was in full fetish wear, head-to-toe in a gorgeous black, shiny bodysuit of rubber. Given his consistent rubber presence in social media, I suspected as much from him and was respectfully wearing a black silk shirt. The black silk had a deep shimmer in the zoom window, accentuating and propping up his shiny being and lively presence. It was the first interview for the project, and I felt I was off to a good start.

It may seem like a digital platform would be the ideal object of study in the midst of a pandemic, as if digital worlds are not affected by that kind of viruses. But to be hidden behind and protected by screens also takes something important out of the encounter, making digital spaces rather anemic, especially over time. Considering how digital worlds in general—and online kink communities in particular—are deeply interlaced with physical bodies and locations, it is evident that the digital is also deeply affected by a physical distance between bodies (Sundén et al.,2022). As the scene of club nights and play parties came to a standstill, it was almost as if Darkside, too, held its breath for a while. No matter how tailored for digital existence and experiences, such spaces also need flesh and blood and skin and warmth. Nobody seemed particularly inspired, even if this community was better prepared than many others. There are, for example, well developed safety measures around risky sexual practices, such as routines for disinfecting tools and surfaces. There is a decent supply of not only face masks, but full-on gas masks. There are also habits of engaging in erotic powerplay from a relatively safe, physical distance. How long is your whip?

My study has the shape of an interview-driven ethnography with a number of components: platform analyses to sense and make sense of platform governance, ethos, interface and features; participant observation on the platforms; and in-depth interviews with users as well as the founder. All interviews were conducted in Swedish, and the direct quotes in this article translated by me. One of the interviews was conducted face to face before the second viral wave hit Sweden, but the remaining fourteen were performed online. Most of them on zoom with video, but 2 on the phone with audio alone. It was up to the participants to pick an interview setup which, given the circumstances, had the right balance for them between safety, disclosure, and partial anonymity. Such layers of revealing and concealing, of showing oneself without showing everything, or even a lot, are in line with how the platform is equally layered in allowing users to decide what to show, in which ways and to whom. Do you want the bruises you wear as a trophy to be on proud display for the entire platform to admire (and possibly a much wider circle given the permeability of platforms)? Or are these pictures only for the viewing pleasures of those on your friends list, or even just for yourself as a kink diary of sorts chronicling your experiences and the marks they leave?

The question of safety is vital, not only in kink practices but also in research on kink. Although “sadomasochism” was de-pathologized in Sweden in 2009, it is far from destigmatized, which makes encounters with a researcher potentially risky. My own belonging to a queer BDSM community helped in establishing trust, as did the fact that while I used to be part of the more public scene, I had with time become more of a private practitioner. They could then take comfort in knowing that I was one of them, while not currently co-existing with them in semi-public venues. Interviewing at a distance probably also helped in creating a sense of safety, as they could talk to me from the privacy of their homes. Our rooms and bedrooms were interlinked and formed an interview space both intimate and, to a degree, anonymous. I have come to think of my interplay with them as operating with an ethics of obscurity, one which moved between disclosure and concealment. Although I was clear to them, my identity and general purpose revealed, I provided them with layers of protection. Most of their family names are unknown to me, as are their nick names on Darkside. As my focus was on their experience, understanding and use of the platform, I did not ask them to identify professionally, or even sexually (beyond the fact that they were Darkside members and part of a kink community), but many volunteered this information.

The study started out close to home, with a firm focus on queer women, trans and non–binary participants, strategically composed to discuss not only sexual expressions on social margins, but also to the kinds of sexual norms that are created when moving beyond “vanilla.” For example, they spoke at length about the dominance of straight cismen in the world of kink and on the platform, why I found it reasonable to also give voice to a few men. At this stage, the study involves 15 participants: 8 queer women (where two simultaneously identify as non–binary), 1 pan-sexual woman, 2 gay men, 1 bisexual man, and 3 straight men. The question of community on Darkside is tricky as the participants both feel and do not feel that they belong to the same kink community. Depending on gender identities and sexual orientations, their primary belonging may be to a separatist community of queer women, trans and non-binary people, or a community of gay men, or one catering to the pansexual, straight-leaning crowd. Although there are some overlaps between these contexts, as some have multiple and more fluid belongings, they are also rather distinct (cf. Simula, 2019: 10). Then again, as the interviews circle around their use of the platform, they did mark belonging to the platform as an overarching Swedish kink community. For many, this is a community riddled with tension, depending on their proximity to straight, cis-male norms. But it is also a place where they feel at home as well as a comradery of sorts with fellow Darksiders vis-à-vis the outside world.

All of the participants are white, most are middle-class and most of them live in urban regions. Such privileged positions are reflective of the compositions of kink communities in a number of other studies, showing how marginalization and risk-taking in BDSM may be mitigated by race and class privilege (Bauer, 2020; 2014; Carlström, 2018; Weiss, 2011). They are born between 1967 and 1990, but with an obvious majority in the 1980s and thus coming of age sexually when the user-friendly Internet was young. For many, their discovery of kink and of themselves as kinksters was simultaneous with a more general sexual awakening in ways that made sexuality and kink—and to some extent the digital—inseparable. In terms of kinks, they indulge in everything from shibari, age play, needle play, and puppy play, to bondage, spanking, mental dominance and discipline, to leather culture, latex clothing, and diaper fetishism. They often use the terms BDSM (as a compound of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission and sadism and masochism) and kink interchangeably, but where kink is also understood as a broader umbrella term for sexual practices, fantasies, and desires beyond vanilla, including the object-oriented dynamics of fetishism. I am grateful for their participation and for what they shared with me in pandemic times of partial self-isolation, which forced many to distance themselves from physical encounters, yet keeping the flame burning in other ways.

Rethinking the closet

Sexual minorities have been early adopters of digital media as these technologies provide spaces for community and belonging, making early Internet studies rich in accounts of sexual subcultures (Campbell, 2001, 2004; Correll, 1995; Rambukkana, 2007; Wakeford, 1996). Founded already in 2003, Darkside has an interesting temporal trajectory which spans all the way from an era of early online communities with a distinct underground texture, to a time of large social media platforms and an increasing kinkification of mainstream culture. This can be compared with FetLife, the large, Canadian-born transnational social networking site for kinksters (“Like Facebook, but run by kinksters like you and me”) with millions of users, which has been in operation since 2008 (cf. McCabe, 2015).

With its approximately 200.000 members, Darkside is one of few national digital platforms that has not only survived but continues to flourish in an era of big social media. But in contrast to large corporate social media platforms, Darkside is virtually non-profit and as such offering an independent platform for non-normative sexualities. Created and run by the same webmaster for close to 2 decades, it has gone through a series of transformations and upgrades as the social media landscape has been shifting, yet retaining a clear community feel. As David puts it:

Darkside is a site which has developed out of a need, out of a wish for something, that I sense in myself and have seen in others. … If you belong to a minority, and that minority is not visible, it’s difficult to know what to make of this burning thing inside of you, wanting to get out. … Darkside was an attempt to create both a free zone for safe socializing, and a collective sense of standing up for each other. A place where we can stand tall.

In research on kink and BDSM, the importance of belonging to a community of practitioners is often emphasized (Bauer, 2014; Carlström, 2016; Newmahr, 2011; Weiss, 2011). Running through the interviews is the view of Darkside as a vital place where it is, as the participants put it, easier to breathe, to be brave, to feel kinky, to feel sexual, and to feel normal. Darkside was created when “sadomasochism” was still bound by a psychiatric diagnosis in the Swedish context, but following lobbying work from activists and educators in the BDSM group at the Swedish Association for Sexuality and Education (RFSU), among others, the diagnosis was eventually lifted in 2009. But as Charlotta Carlström (2016: 25) points out, even if the diagnosis has been removed, the stigma is still lingering.

The ways in which BDSM practices are haunted by stigmatization have shaped and continue to shape (partially) closeted lives. The closet is a contradictory space, a space of homophobia and kink phobia which supposedly hides sexual identities and desires turned into secrets that can be revealed and thus known. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990: 67-90) delineates in Epistemology of the Closet, the closet has had a shaping presence in gay and lesbian lives post-Stonewall as an impossibly paradoxical space suggestive of wider social discourses of secrecy and disclosure, privacy, and publicness, riddled with uncertainty. While “in” the closet, it is impossible to know if the secret it protects is intact, a secret which at the same time can never be completely and utterly exposed. There is also uncertainty in terms of the kind of knowledge that the closet is supposed to obscure. For what does knowledge about sexuality and desire entails? And what can we really know if, as Sedgwick argues, “‘Closeted-ness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by … silence” (Sedgwick, 1990: 3).

The kink closet is not identical to the gay closet Sedgwick describes, but not entirely different either in its logic of secrecy and concealment. Among the participants, a select few are public BDSM activists and educators, but for most such openness is not an option. And even among those who are more public about their identities and belongings, they make a distinction between being publicly associated with BDSM and a more detailed and vulnerable rendering of the shape and directions of their desires. As Klara puts it,

Being open as a BDSM practitioner has not always been obvious to me, but I was involved in being outed about ten years ago. When I was at parties and met new people, it happened that people said something like: “Oh, are you the one who …?” and I understood that they had these ideas about me and my sexuality. I then had a choice, I thought, to either wait for the story to fall into oblivion or somehow seize its power and use it for something that felt important. So then I started to write openly about BDSM. I think it sometimes makes people think I’m completely relaxed with talking about my desires, but that’s really not true. If it’s about what I would like to happen to me, here and now, I easily get very embarrassed.

The closet is commonly understood as a space of concealed desires, shame, and longing, a deeply private architecture of loneliness where sexual expression is secret, and identity is hidden. Sedgwick (1990: 68) insists on the closet as something which shapes and constrains queer lives, but also draws attention to the dangers of this argument: “There are risks in making salient the continuity and centrality of the closet … [this] will risk glamorizing the closet itself, if only by default; will risk presenting as inevitable or somehow valuable its exactions, its deformations, its disempowerment and sheer pain”. Although there is very little glamor or value as such in how closeted lives are restricted and restrained, the closet can also be something more vibrant, a place for intensity and desire to take shape and develop. It can be private, yet shared, providing a temporary safe space and a form of shielding from public witnessing and normative regulation.

In Opacity and the Closet, Nicholas De Villiers (2012: 6) expands on the epistemological uncertainty of the closet in Sedgwick, while also lingering in the closet itself. He does so, not by accepting its binary logic, but rather by refusing it, exploring the queer potentials of partial disclosure. By simultaneously idealizing and deconstructing the closet, he uses “opacity” as a conceptual device to break down the binary opposites which shape the idea of the closet, such as visibility and invisibility, privacy and publicness, secrecy and openness. His “closet positive” analysis advances a practice he terms “queer opacity” “as an alternative queer strategy or tactic that is not linked to an interpretation of hidden depths, concealed meanings, or a neat opposition.” Queer opacity, here, is rather a set of tactics which by refusing transparency and visibility as that which legitimizes queer identities invent new forms of illegible sexual expression (cf. Uibo, 2021: 156-185).

Although governed by activist visions of proud openness, Darkside similarly takes shape through tactical investments in obscure, partly concealed, but nonetheless proud forms of kink expression. It provides an opening for shared vulnerabilities and collective forms of secrecy reminiscent of what Clare Birchall (2021) calls “radical secrecy,” which grants both privacy and degrees of public kink visibility to its members. Depending on privacy settings, texts and images can be shared in smaller or larger circles; for your eyes only, for your friends, or for the platform at large. To be visible for the entire platform constitutes a form of public kink visibility within the community, a way of becoming real to others, but without breaking down the walls to the outside world. Then again, these walls are permeable, and the users are highly aware of how content posted on the platform may leak and end up elsewhere, inserting measures of caution in processes of content creation.

Obscure faces, obscure identities

The face as a surface of identification is a contentious issue for the participants in my study. Martin, a straight man with an exhibitionist inclination and a penchant for photography, talked to me about secret or concealed forms of exhibitionism in volatile online venues. As platforms are never completely stable and secure, and the risk of nonconsensual image sharing imminent, many take precautions to protect themselves from involuntary outing.

Martin: I know that everything ending up online will stay there in one way or another. And everything can spread. My girlfriend and I have talked a lot about this in relation to the pictures we post, of her, or of us, in terms of privacy. “Is it possible to identify you in this picture and does it matter?” Worst case scenario, “okay what would happen if your parents were to see this picture?” And then we only take things as far as we feel comfortable. You must have some kind of risk analysis all the time.

Concealed exhibitionism may seem like a contradiction in terms, but Martin and his partner take pleasure in putting some things on display—like a naked body in restraints—while concealing others, such as a recognizable face. To in this way, move beyond identification does not reduce the pleasure of being seen, or of seeing one’s partner being seen. Quite on the contrary, it becomes a way of playing with angles and modes of cutting or cropping the picture to obscure the face and other identifiable features, while laying the body bare, or partially bare. Martin speaks of his satisfaction in seeing her on display as a form of secondary exhibitionism, which approaches the position of the voyeur, while also being actively involved in creating the picture and feeling a sense of pride to watch her being on display for others. He also enjoys taking pictures that are obscure in the sense that they are difficult to grasp.

A sexual politics of opacity builds on a kind of unknowability or unrecognizability which exceeds categories of identifiable difference and transparent otherness, allowing for “the possibility of nonmeaning and nonknowledge as ‘queer’ strategies” (De Villiers, 2012, 15). De Villiers (2012: 22) uses opacity as something which challenges binary oppositions, since “[o]paque and transparent – taken to their limits – don’t work as opposites, since for something to be fully transparent it would be invisible, and for something to be completely opaque would mean a complete blockage of vision altogether, another invisibility.” I still find it quite tricky to fully dislocate the concept from how it derives its meaning as an antonym to transparency. As a way of theorizing an ambivalent sexual politics of digital kink, I therefor suggest the interrelated and possibly more flexible concept: obscurity. Similar to the term opacity, obscurity suggests a lack of clarity and lucidity; something obscure can be both difficult to make out clearly as well as difficult to fully comprehend. To be less than visible, or visible in subtle or otherwise strategic ways thus allows for a degree of freedom of kink expression under the radar.

Kink practices of opacity and obscurity are particularly interesting in a time when large social media platforms keep careful track of their users’ identities and movements for the sake of algorithmic capture. To then refrain from visibility and identification can be a radical act (cf. Birchall, 2021; Blas, 2014, 2018). In his work on “informatic opacity,” Zack Blas (2014, 2018) asks questions about who (or what) we make visible to technology by considering concealment and camouflage as acts of resistance to data-driven surveillance technologies (Birchall, 2016; De Vries & Schinkel, 2019). Concealing the face as a political strategy to negotiate visibility, identification and control has a long activist history (e.g., Guerilla Girls and Pussy Riot). To cover the eyes with a blindfold, or to mask the entire face also resonates with BDSM play in registers of sensory deprivation, more directly linking masked practices and partial concealment to kink cultures.

Although the platform activist ethos clearly speaks to the value of openness and outness for the sake of sexual justice—indeed, users are encouraged to show their faces in their profile pictures—it is up to them to position themselves on a scale from public visibility to more veiled or anonymous forms of presence and sexual expression. Such partial anonymity is then balanced with a system of “verifications” by others on one’s friend list, signaling a different kind of authenticity.

Leo: Whether you have met people in real life is a very important function, based on the fact that many have anonymous profiles of various kinds. If it’s like, you don’t want to show your face. [The platform] has found a very good balance as it’s possible to verify people, that they are real and that you’ve met them, while it’s also a very open space. You don’t have to show all of yourself. Or you can be very much yourself, but you don’t have to show… Some feel that it is difficult to show who they are because of their work. […] There are many ways to create possibilities for inclusion in the community, without having to risk people’s privacy.

In line with discussions of the value of anonymity and pseudonymity in digital cultures in general (Hogan, 2012; Marwick & boyd, 2011; Van der Nagel, 2017; van der Nagel and Frith, 2015), and in queer digital cultures in particular (e.g. Cassidy, 2013; Dhoest & Szulc, 2016), such tactics of obscurity provide a form of resistance to dominating regimes of visibility—while importantly also limiting the reach of recognition. Or as Zach Blas (2018) argues with respect to the paradoxical nature of informatic opacity, “it is both liberating and oppressive. As informatic identification is linked more and more to governance, mobility, and freedom, becoming informatically opaque can have excruciating political consequences, such as the loss of basic human rights. In spite of this, informatic opacity makes a more utopian gesture to exist without identification.” To fly under the radar often also means a lack of rights. In the Swedish context, the law does not, for example, recognize BDSM as a form of sexual orientation, which means that it is not protected by laws regulating discrimination. At the same time, Darkside also operates in line with the utopian gesture Blas refers to, to exist and resist beyond identificatory transparency in a space where belonging (at least partly) takes anonymous and pseudonymous forms.

The right to not make sense

Discussions of opacity and obscurity across queer and digital media theorizing owe a great dept to postcolonial thought. In Poetics of Relation, the postcolonial Caribbean writer, poet, and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1997: 194) insists on “the right to opacity for everyone.” Opacity has for Glissant the radical potential to challenge relations of imperial power and control by refusing an understanding of the other through the logic of transparency. He argues that the basis for understanding the other, and thus of acceptance of the other within Western thought, is transparency measured against an ideal, normative scale which inevitably reduces the other. He refers to theories of “difference” as vital which have “made it possible to take in, perhaps, not their existence but at least the rightful entitlement to recognition of the minorities swarming throughout the world and the defense of their status.” (Glissant, 1997: 189). In other words, making difference visible can be an important step towards acceptance and recognition, while there is always a risk that such difference is reduced to transparency, simplified in its multiplicity and diversity. The right to opacity, then, is an ontological right of the oppressed to be allowed to be non-transparent, non-categorizable, not fully understood and simply exist as different.

Glissant’s right to opacity is a form of resistance to surveillance and imperial domination, a powerful alternative to a politics of visibility and identity which challenges Western epistemological desires to transform opaque subjects into transparent objects of knowledge. Although Glissant writes through the specific postcolonial conditions in Martinique, his way of thinking opacity in ontological, ethical, and poetic terms has a clear echo in the worlds of other minorities and marginalized groups. For what if sexually marginalized people—such as kink communities—demanded acceptance without understanding, to exist as different without being fully visible and as such somehow graspable?

Opacity and obscurity conceptually move in an incongruous borderland of ambiguity and ambivalence, as well as suggests certain darkness which has resonance in the world of kink. Kink communities exist to a large extent in spaces of dimness, darkness, and incomprehensibility, partly removed from public view and, importantly, from public understanding. Kink certainly enters the bright daylight of public visibility and comprehension in some ways. Circulating through the popular imagination for centuries (considering for example the 18^th and 19^th century literary roots of sadomasochism in the works of Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch), previously more hidden images and narratives have increasingly entered into a more general cultural consciousness and debate, most recently through the explosion of E.L. James’ (2011-2017) Fifty Shades trilogy and its subsequent cinematic adaptations. But as, for example, Margot Weiss (2006: 105) argues, while an increased exposure of BDSM imagery allows people “to flirt with danger and excitement,” these forms of public visibility tend to be conditioned by sexual norms which ultimately reinforce the boundaries between hetero-normal and deviant sex (cf. Beckmann 2009: 4).

To be clear, kink practitioners on and beyond a platform like Darkside are by no means immune to what counts as legitimate desire, or to what constitutes desirable subjects and bodies within mainstream sexual cultures. In the interviews, the participants speak of internal sexual norms on the platform, and how when moving beyond vanilla, a range of other norms are established instead. High status practices on the platform tend to be those that are visually striking and “photograph well”—be it artful, Instagram compatible shibari, or sexy leather and latex imagery which does not get flagged by algorithms regulating nudity. Such visually striking practices also coincide with the kind of images that are most likely to cross over into mainstream cultures.

Linda: The latex people are among those who are absolutely at the top. That’s the cool thing. And then you have people who are fond of scat, they are still very stigmatized. Things that others simply don’t understand at all, like yarn and wool sweaters are probably not very high on this list either. So it’s definitely a scale.

BDSM-relationships that are less than visible (and visual) may not only make limited sense through the lens of mainstream culture, but also to the majority of Darkside members, considering how the platform is regulated by visual sexual norms and hierarchies. The site has gone through several makeovers over the years, but its aesthetics of dark surfaces and allusions to leather and latex fetishism speak most clearly to BDSM practitioners with a penchant for bondage and discipline, for physical impact play, as well as to fetishists in the domain of dark, shiny materials, rather than those driven by practices that are not as easily visualized—such as mental dominance—or fetishists drawn to, for example, colorful, knitted sweaters. In comparison with such an immediately recognizable BDSM aesthetics with broad, visual appeal, relations and practices that build on challenging mental processes are harder to show, harder to turn into images, and may therefore exist on the edges of otherwise marginalized sexualities. They come to occupy a partially invisible undercurrent in an image-centric social media landscape, as well as perhaps a sexual undercurrent in the world of kink.

There is thus a sliding scale between intelligibility and unintelligibility which regulates the community on Darkside from within. Then again, this community is also bound together against the outside world, for example through the kink ethos “your kink is not my kink, but your kink is ok” (less than conveniently abbreviated YKINMKBYKIOK in Internet parlance). In support of difference and diversity in the community, and as a way of safeguarding the community from stigmatization and kink shaming, YKINMKBYKIOK is an indication that even though you may not “understand” someone else’s kinks or desires, you support their right to express and practice them. This principle moves very close to, if not coincides with Glissant’s (1997: 193) right to opacity and how it translates as a form of solidarity across difference, and a right to not make sense: “I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him. It is not necessary to try to become the other, nor to ‘make’ him in my image.” Indeed, there is something unknowable and truly incomprehensible about how desire works, something which tends to become heightened in the realm of kink as non-practitioners may struggle to understand. But as the YKINMKBYKIOK ethos makes clear—if and when it works across sexual norms that regulate desirability and intelligibility within kink communities—acceptance of sexual otherness, or even solidarity with the (sexual) other, does not need to be grounded in an easily graspable understanding of the other.

To sum up, in this article, I have explored how a sexual politics of kink obscurity could be useful in insisting on obscurity as a form of refusal of the logic of both visibility and comprehension as the basis of sexual legitimacy. I discussed Darkside as a collaborative kink closet of sorts, not of isolation or hidden, shameful desires, but of shared vulnerability and intensity, as a temporary safe house which partly protects against public visibility and normative regulation. I considered how the face as a surface of identification is a contentious issue for the participants in my study, but also how various tactics of concealing or hiding the face in pictures do not exclude possibilities for community and belonging. The question of visibility for sexual minorities takes on new meanings on digital platforms governed by sophisticated means of user identification and algorithmic capture of intimate data. Even if a platform like Darkside works with a different kind of ethics, respectful of anonymous and pseudonymous forms on online presence, everything posted on a platform can potentially end up elsewhere which adds a fraught edge to otherwise pleasurable forms of digital kink expression.

By building on the work of Édouard Glissant, I also argued that tactical uses of the digital kink platform Darkside not only turn away from public visibility, but also in a sense from public understanding, echoing Glissant’s ontological right to opacity as a right to not make sense. YKINMKBYKIOK here becomes code for solidarity across difference, solidarity despite difference, to live and let live beyond comprehension. To move beyond intelligibility in this way also resonates with how BDSM scholars have discussed desire and perversion in terms of “the unspeakable” (Cruz, 2016a; see also Langdridge, 2007). For Samuel R. Delany (1999: 65), “desire lies like a bodily boundary between the everyday and the unspeakable.” Delany thinks the unspeakable as forms of racial and sexual excess present in scenes of transgressive or dangerous sexual relationality. Cruz (2016a) similarly speaks the unspeakable to address unspeakable pleasures in pornographic race play and black female abjection. But seeking to speak the unspeakable, or comprehend the incomprehensible does not merely render desires and pleasures at the limit of intelligibility intelligible, but also quite powerfully demarcates a domain which escapes the very grasp of comprehension. By letting go of and accepting the unintelligibility of desire could work against the tendency to reduce and normalize sexual otherness by understanding and instead open up for other kinds of obscure and liminal sexual expressions.