ARIEL ANDERSSEN: PLAYING TO LOSE

comfortable wearing pins identifying their kinky identities, but I’d also really love it if people didn’t feel the need to keep their tastes secret from their vanilla friends and families.

It can put you under such a strain, and I’ve met so many people who only ever tell ‘outsiders’ to their lives (like sex workers) about their real desires.

This must be so lonely. I like to imagine a world where people would be able to tell their parents that they’re into BDSM without fear of being seen as in need of help. I know a lot of us are a long way from that though!

FR: Your insight in Playing to Lose into feeling suicidal really brings home how having part of your identity denied can be devastating. Could you have been reached earlier? (Say, if sex education, sociology or literature classes had included a commentary on how people can love or have sex in many different ways?)

AA: I think about this a lot. It was unfortunate for me that I discovered my sexual identity during my first year of doing Sociology A-Level, and we were studying deviance, including sexual deviance.

Studying deviance brought sense of shame

At the time, I definitely got the impression that deviating from the norm was bad, both for individuals and for society. It made me feel terribly ashamed, as though I might cause actual harm to society by being kinky.

And simultaneously, kinkiness was often being shown in mainstream fiction as a kind of shortcut for demonstrating a character’s wickedness or disturbed mind.

You never saw anyone tying someone else up for harmless fun; it was always the bad guy doing it to someone who hadn’t consented. I remember the movie Secretary coming out, and it being the first time I’d seen a dominant/kinky man represented as something other than dangerous.

Positive representation and an acknowledgement that sexual tastes can vary widely among perfectly safe, decent people could be so immensely helpful, I think.

FR: You rather cheekily named your ‘spanking model alias’ Amelia Jane Rutherford after Joseph Rutherford, a key figure in shaping the current practices in the Jehovah’s Witness community! Is there anything you want to say as a final word to anyone reading your book who might be struggling with a religious or otherwise oppressed background?

AA: I’d love to say that there is such joy to be found in honest self-expression, and that if you’re brave enough to try expressing yourself openly, you very likely will not be lonely with your sexuality for very long.

It took me some time to find my courage, but the rewards when I found it were enormous. And when you’re honest with people, they can surprise you by being honest right back. I’ve met a number of wonderful kinky people this way!