Three Perverted Days in Portland
What it’s like to attend Kinkfest
My childhood best friend and I have chosen very different paths in life.
She stayed rooted in the midwest, works for the county, is on committees at her church, and has sincere freakouts about how to get her son’s baseball uniform clean. (To be fair, it’s an insane proposition: how is it that we expect children to wear sparkling white athletic pants for a sport involving sliding in the dirt?)
Meanwhile, I moved to one of those liberal coastal cities, have a sexual orientation most people would need to look up online, and own an entire bookcase of books about forms of erotic expression.
Despite all that, we still adore each other, talk frequently, and visit each other when we can.
Last month I told her I was going to attend a conference called Kinkfest and she timidly asked, “Tell me about Kinkfest. Like, who goes, and what happens, and… what’s it like?”
Her question felt sincere but uncertain to me — she wanted to know, but wasn’t sure she could tolerate the answer. I’m going to do my best to describe what it’s like, but my friend might bail out when we get to the implements for sale at the marketplace, or when I describe the forced orgasm workshop, or when I talk about people treating others like property. If none of that scares her away, the dungeon might finally do it. Or maybe she’ll make it all the way through!
The Crowd
Kinkfest is, according to their website, “an annual three-day event celebrating sexual diversity and the BDSM, fetish and leather communities.” It’s held in Portland, Oregon. There are many other events like it around the world; it’s not even the only con in the Pacific Northwest. I am not an expert on these things. I’ve only been to Kinkfest twice and have not attended the other big kink cons at all, so I lead this tour as a wide-eyed newcomer myself, not a jaded regular.
Kinkfest is held at the Portland Expo center, a dingy facility north of the city. Don’t think of a sterile downtown conference center with sparkling escalators and a food court. Think instead of a giant echoing warehouse space that could reasonably house a state fair or a 4H competition.
Check-in is mundane but for the people you see around you. The crowd is not out of central casting for a Hollywood movie set at a kink convention. Despite the cover image I generated for this letter, the bodies are not all tall and sleek and encased in shiny rubber. Instead, you see the same variation in body size, shape, and function that you’d see at the grocery store, except that they’re wearing a lot more black, rainbows, dyed hair, tattoos, and decorative D-rings than usual, even by Portland standards. You see vinyl, leather vests with patches, patent-leather platform stiletto heels, lace, fishnets, feather boas, and rope. You see some people wearing cat ears, others wearing dog masks, and some people leading others on leashes. You see a hell of a lot of collars.
At registration they put painter’s tape over your phone’s front and back cameras, but even given that, you have to put your phone away before you go inside. To preserve the privacy and anonymity of the attendees, no photographs or recordings are allowed.
Inside, some people are naked, but they’re not just walking around nude and unadorned. This year I see one attendee, apparently unconcerned with the risks of chafing, wearing shibari ropes for the entire day. Alas, I don’t see an especially attractive person I remember fondly from last year, who was wearing a butt plug with a fox tail attached to it and not much else.
The Marketplace
The marketplace is like every street fair you’ve ever attended: Lots of booths in orderly rows, merchandise spread out on tables, shopkeepers eager to talk to you about their goods. The wares are a little different from what you’ve seen at your annual holiday craftapalooza, unless the craft fairs in your town are more perverse than mine.
The goods are mostly for dressing up (corsets, chainmaille, leather); tying up (handcuffs, harnesses, rope); and beating up (canes, paddles, floggers). A lot of the goods are artisinal, made by the vendors at home, one at a time: they turned the handle for your cane on their lathe, they poured the resin for your paddle; they hand-carved the wood for your nipple clamps. They will do the last bit of custom work for you on the spot, in the booth: you can try on a new collar and then have them punch just-right holes into the leather so it will be comfortably snug around your neck.
There’s a duality to these products: they wrap the promise of painful sensation in an aesthetically pleasing package. You see a resin paddle with cheerful flowers and sparkly glitter in it and realize the little heart cutouts will raise heart-shaped welts on your ass. You see a tough-looking studded bra and discover that it has spikes on the insides of the cups. You wonder why someone has mounted a folded-over metal slinky on the end of a handle and realize the coil is electrified. This is Portland, so environmentalist-masochists will feel right at home: you can get your rope in hemp, your rubber recycled, and your leathers vegan.
The Workshops
While the marketplace is open all day, there are also six classroom areas, each running simultaneous workshops. Because this event is run by literal sadists, they put all the best presentations in the same time slot. You have to make an agonizing choice among your six favorite topics at 11am but then there’s nothing for you at all at 2pm. So it goes.
With no devices allowed, I’m taking notes at these workshops by writing on paper with a pen, so I’m only going to describe two of them.
Forced Orgasms
For a lot of people, orgasms are like standoffish cats. You have to create ideal conditions to invite them out from their hiding places. You must be patient and indifferent, as if you’ve got all day. They can tell if you want it too badly; they stay stubbornly out of reach.
You can’t force a cat to come to you.
But maybe you can force a person to come, whether they want to or not?
The Forced Orgasms workshop is taught by Switch Jake and his assistant, Bree. Jake stands to the left of the stage and gives off an air of Competent Nerd. He would look just as at home at a USENIX conference as a kink event, except the patches on his vest are all from leather cons. Everything about the presentation is clearly planned, practiced, and buttoned up. His heavy duty latching equipment cases are sturdy enough for a war zone; his A/V tech all on point and under remote control.
Meanwhile, Bree is up on the dais, completely nude, getting herself situated astride a menacing contraption like a low-slung mechanical bull, but if the saddle horn were a little further back and penetrated you. Once she gets her hips and pelvis organized, she ties back her long hair and leans forward onto a box in front of her, so she’s resting on her forearms and her breasts are pooling in the crooks of her elbows. Jake comes over to fasten some restraints to keep her from standing up or falling off.
“Ready?” he asks.
“Yep.” she says.
He pokes his phone and the contraption starts to hum. She smiles and wiggles further down onto it and closes her eyes.
He turns to the audience.
“Welcome to Forced Orgasms.”
The slides for the presentation are in Comic Sans, a font guanteed to generate sensation in viewers, and features a lot of pornographic images. With porn on the big screen and a live naked woman riding a Motorbunny on the stage, it’s hard to know where to look. Jake’s assistant is not the only one receiving superstimulus.
The first few minutes of the talk are breezily pseudoscientific, featuring suspiciously regular-looking graphs of pleasure and pain responses to stimulus over time, with descriptions of hormone and neurotransmitter fluctuations. The data has to be speculative. I don’t think there’s much robust research data on this topic as nobody’s going to be able to get a forced orgasm study past an institutional review board. Killjoys.
Jake’s main point is very simple: just keep applying stimulation, pushing through times of discomfort and oversensitivity. You’ll create an oscillating pattern of pleasure and pain. It’s only slightly more complicated for victims with penises because of the post-orgasmic refractory period. You give them a fifteen minute break after orgasm so you don’t waste any effort, but then you start up again, ready or not.
So now it’s mainly a matter of exploring all the ways to apply stimulation for a long period of time without doing a lot of work. In other words: using restraints, vibrators, and fucking machines. Really this was a talk about mixing automation and engineering with sadomasochism. It’s certainly inspirational when my special interests juxatpose like that.
While Jake is talking, he periodically increases the vibration on the Motorbunny. Bree starts out smiling and cracking jokes but as time goes by she closes her eyes in concentration and starts to whimper and moan softly, dots of sweat appearing on her forehead. I can’t tell when she has her first orgasm; she isn’t loud or showy about it. Instead, she goes deeper and deeper into her trance. She squeezes her hands into fists and then splays her fingers. Eventually it dawns on me that, halfway into the talk, she’s probably already had dozens of orgasms.
It’s a very effective advertisement for the Motorbunny, though the presenter swears he didn’t get any kickbacks. Missed business opportunity if you ask me.
Forced orgasms as presented at the workshop are an impersonal form of sadomasochism. Jake is talking to the audience while Bree trances out, and I get the impression it works much the same way when he does it at home. He talks about elaborate rigs of camera equipment for remotely torturing and monitoring his bottom from another part of the house, or on one occasion, from the grocery store.
The detachment, the idea that you’re on your own in your body and no one is going to save you from the endless torture, has a certain appeal — but to me it doesn’t promote a connection or a bond.
Thinking back to our standoffish cat, the detachment of automating orgasms feels pretty important actually. You create ideal conditions with plenty of stimulus, and you then create an atmosphere of indifference. The top doesn’t personally force their partner to have orgasms; they just set up the machine. It’s an external, impersonal force, and the inflexibility is part of the magic. There’s nothing bound up here in pleasing or wanting to please, there’s no way to perform well or fail, the orgasms just come whether you want them or not. And in that rigid structure, the body is set free to respond — over, and over, and over.
24/7 Conflict Resolution
The conflict resolution workshop is not so showy: no nudity, no orgasms, no powerpoint. Just an owner and his human property, up in front, talking about talking.
Polar and kate are a couple in a long term authority transfer relationship, meaning that Polar “owns” kate and can tell her what to do. Many people outside the leather community have an immediate, visceral repulsion at this idea and believe it must be inherently abusive. I hope you can set that aside for the moment and start from the premise that kate is in this relationship voluntarily and enthusiastically, and that she is deriving a lot of value from it.
Some people transfer authority temporarily: the dominant1 can boss the submissive around for a few hours, but then they go back to having equal rights. Others keep the power structure in force all the time. These are called “24/7” relationships. Polar and kate are 24/7.
While some people enjoy fantasizing about obliterating the personality and the will of the submissive partner, that’s not the typical setup. The submissive retains their own thoughts and feelings. And so, necessarily, couples like this can still end up in conflict.
You might think the conflict would be over quickly. Isn’t the entire point of power exchange that the dominant gets their way, the submissive complies, and they both get a tingle about it? The solution is built right into the relationship structure. And indeed, that is often the way it works for small issues.
But for bigger issues, that doesn’t work. As Polar explains, “kate is much smarter than me. She has more letters after her name than I have in my name.” If Polar consistently squashes everything that kate cares about, disregards or is unaware of her point of view, he’s going to come up with ineffective solutions, and kate will come to resent him.
So, then, when a tricky subject arises, why not suspend the power dynamic and talk about it as equals? To regular people who don’t play with power, this probably seems like the only sane and reasonable approach. But then you’re no longer 24/7, you’re something else, and a great deal of the magic is lost. Authority is a construct: it’s a way of seeing your relationship, not rose-tinted glasses but power-tinted ones. If you take the glasses off, they don’t work as well anymore when you put them back on again. If the dominant only has power until the submissive feels upset enough, that creates unfortunate incentives. And if the submissive can only rely on their dominant to be stronger until a big enough problem comes along, it is hard for the sub to relax into the dominant’s protective embrace.
So we need a third way, a new piece of relationship tech: a way for the dominant to become aware of and honor the submissive’s thoughts and feelings while keeping the power structure intact.
The answer is not exotic at all. The dominant has to master themselves before they can master anyone else. They need to find their own stable center, and then lead the conversation. The general principles apply to any conversation with a power differential: parent and child, professor and student, manager and employee. The principles Polar and kate were teaching would not have been out of place at a corporate training on effective leadership.
But here’s where it gets kinky.2
Imagine Polar standing above kate, who is kneeling in front of him. “I can see that you’re upset,” he says evenly. “Tell me every resentful thought you’ve had. Don’t hold any back.”
She does, meekly at first, but picking up steam as she goes, more and more anger in her voice.
“Sounds like you’re pretty pissed off.”
“Yeah! Pissed off and hurt!”
“You should have told me sooner. You know that. You’re not to hide it from me when something’s wrong. Do you understand?”
This is only part of the interaction; they’ll need to go on to figure out how to mend this situation and prevent similar issues in the future, but it illustrates how they’ve woven together the important elements: keeping the power dynamic intact, while truly inviting the submissive to speak up.
Even though the subject matter is much more dry, the content of this workshop feels much more intimate and personal than the other one. Forcing someone to tell you they’re mad at you is far more connecting than forcing them to come.
The Dungeon
Playing in the dungeon is the culmination of the event, where the attendees come together in a crescendo of sensation. You could, of course, play with your new toys and skills in the privacy of your home, and that’s what many people do. Not all kinksters are exhibitionists. But there’s something special, I think, about engaging in kink in community, in plain view of hundreds of other like-minded people. It brings a stigmatized form of eroticism out of the shadows and into the very dim light of the dungeon. Unleashing your inner monster, with witnesses but without repercussions, feels nourishing and connecting.
When I think of a medieval dungeon in a castle, first and foremost, it’s subterranean. It’s dank, it’s dark, it’s got rats and bones, and the torture starts with the stench.
Kinkfest’s dungeon has absolutely none of those things.
It’s a vast open space, another repurposed warehouse, clean and dimly lit, with clear accurate signage everywhere. They’re playing the Smiths’ “How Soon is Now?” at a reasonable volume, in deference to the sensory processing issues of the aging neurodiverse crowd.
There’s a courteous urgency to the crowd when the dungeon opens, as kinksters in six-inch patent-leather platform stilettos speedwalk across the cavernous dungeon floor, hurrying to claim space and equipment. The pairs and small groups of play partners are unfailingly polite when there’s contention for a St. Andrew’s cross or a suspension station; nobody wants to create a scene in the process of creating a scene.
In addition to the big metal frameworks from which you can dangle your partner and violate them, there are a variety of vinyl-covered padded pieces of furniture like massage tables. There are cages. There are a few areas that have boundaries around them, in case you want to use something like a whip without accidentally lashing a bystander in the process. There’s a separate, designated area with padded dental chairs where you are allowed to use needles or other things that break the skin. And there are cleaning supply stations everywhere, just like at the gym.
The command and control station is staffed by volunteers called dungeon monitors, or DMs, who are there to help in case of accidental injury, reports of consent violations, or anything else that might go wrong. There’s a medical table with first aid supplies. There are snack tables, in case you find that your salt and sugar humors are out of balance.
And there’s a wide path for walking around the whole thing, so you can stroll with your party, like the promenade by the river in Regency London, seeing and being seen.
And what do you see, while you stroll?
You see mostly pairs, some larger groups, especially for more complicated suspension play. You are allowed to watch other people from a respectful distance, so if there’s something particularly captivating, it’s okay to stop strolling and observe.
At first glance, it just looks like people hurting other people. In other circumstances, you might want to intervene or call the police. But you watch the care with which the tops systematically restrain their partners, the way they carefully apply the flogger or the cane in a rhythmic pattern. This is not the out-of-control rage of a beating. This is precise, calculated to create a specific effect. The tops are in a flow state, engaging in artistry.
And then you look at the faces of the people being hurt. They sometimes grit their teeth or cry out, but mostly you see focus, concentration, serenity. It’s meditative.
Do you try it yourself?
If you’re my uncertain midwestern friend, probably not. Kink is not for everyone, and as far as I know, it’s not for her.
But maybe this tour has helped demystify something that previously seemed too dangerous to look up. Or maybe she stopped reading back at the resin paddles! I’ll find out next time we talk.
I’m calling the partners in the 24/7 relationship “the dominant” and “the submissive.” There are many other terms: owner/property, master/slave, top/bottom, etc.; the terms are not at all interchangeable but I don’t want to get too far into the weeds at the moment.
This did not happen in the workshop, and is not a verbatim example they taught. This is a mashup of an anecdote they told from their relationship and the principles they were teaching.