We shouldn't leave young kinksters out in the cold

Clarisse Thorn posts (with permission of the author) an email from a 16 year old young woman who, with her boyfriend (also 16) is taking her first steps into kink, and who says she has known for a long time about her desires but:

...I don’t enjoy labelling myself, but I suppose you would call me a submissive.

As I’m sure you can relate to, this poses some problems for me. I’ve always thought of myself as a strong, independent young woman.

...

It’s very difficult for me to come to terms with this other side of myself, that, while it was always there, never really intruded on my actual life, if you see what I mean. Now it does. I’m saying these things I’ve thought about a lot of my life, and doing some of them too. There’s a level — well, two, the rational level and the physical one — where I’m completely OK with it, but another part of me — I suppose the emotional part — is entirely disgusted. If it was just the pain, I could deal with that. It’s this desire for submission that makes me feel sick about myself.

...

All I’m after is a sense of personal integrity. Perhaps in the end that can only come from myself, but, it would be nice to be told I’m not completely mad!

This person's message to Clarisse is a plea for a supportive environment in which to learn about what it means to be kinky. Clarisse has replied as best she can, but it seems that the resources aren't quite there when they need to be. For fear of the social (read: tabloid) outcry that might ensue, kink communities shy away from welcoming those under the age of 18. Even as we send out these positive messages of "consenting adults in private", the young becoming-adult people are locked out even as they are first coming to grips with what this stuff means, and for all the positive messages it still leaves people whom society is busy telling, "you're sick and wrong" to fend for themselves in coming to terms with those negative messages and how they stand in relation to themselves. To find, as the email writer says, "a sense of personal integrity". Lord knows, those messages caused me enough pain before I finally found the BDSM community and got that.

Ideally, I would like to see kink-positive sex education in schools, teaching kids it's as okay to be sub or Dom as it is to be gay or straight.   I don't think that's going to happen soon, though.   Equally, I don't think the tabloid obsession with smut, scandal and sensation is going to change any time soon, so the threat will still hang over the kink community if they reach out to younger folks openly.   And yet, something needs to be done because people like Clarisse's correspondent don't deserve to suffer the angst that is so eloquently expressed in that email.   And, it's far better (especially given the risks, physical and emotional, inherent in many types of kink play) if teens who are eager to explore this side of their sexuality, have somewhere that they can go and ask, and get personal, specific-to-them, answers.   Advice that will help and work for them.   I needed it aged 26 when I first started exploring this for real, and teens no less so, I'm sure!

I don't know what the answer is.   One of my more pie-in-the-sky thoughts is having a parent/kinkster evening where young kinky folks can drag their parents along and both learn together what it's all about and parents can see nothing untoward is happening to their growing-up-so-fast babies (somehow I think that would not actually work out very well, but I dream of a world where most parents are accepting enough for that to be of some help!)   I suppose I think of Scarleteen and wonder if a kink-specific version would be helpful - although the email writer says, "[Clarisse's] blog, as I’ve said, has been a great help, but reading something like that, wonderful as it is, isn’t the same and doesn’t have the same power to reassure as a more personal dialogue."   Which is a fair point.

I don't know what the answer is.   I don't like the idea of older kinksters pushing 16-18 year old kinksters under a bus just because we're afraid of the tabloids and so on, but at the same time, the "moral panic" phenomenon can be very dangerous still for our community.   But an answer should be found - must be found, surely?