I often feel that kink is a mindset, perhaps even more than it’s an activity or an interest.
Let me explain. Once the “thought technology” of kink infects your brain, if you’re a certain type of nerd, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. I watch stand-up comedians and think about how they’re “topping” their audience for laughs, optimizing each joke to squeeze out maximal reactions, like a tickling top testing their tied-down partner’s limits with a feather duster. I watch politicians give speeches and note their verbal rhythms, perfectly attuned to how the human brain will hear and feel their words, like a masterful emotional sadism top. I watch couples flirting at restaurants or in parks and pick up on body language that spells out “dom” or “sub” or, occasionally, “closeted foot fetishist.”
Sometimes this paradigm is a way for me to avoid uncomfortable feelings – for instance, when watching a casually abusive romantic relationship in an old movie, I’ll sometimes assume/pretend the couple in question is actually in a D/s dynamic, if I’m just not feeling up to mentally processing the actual abuse on screen. (As a survivor of emotional abuse myself, sometimes I’m just like… nah.) I feel similarly about the Daniel Bedingfield song “All Your Attention.”