I started reading Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink because of this blog post, am 1/3 through, and cannot imagine a book that could more appeal to me while also belonging to a genre that will say, “What [this book] is presenting to you here is … a witchy, tricksy, feminine path to enlightenment that’s quite a bit different than the more publicly vaunted, masculine routes of asceticism, contemplation, and yogic saintliness.”
The ultimate operation the book is trying to perform on the reader, assuming the reader has preexisting masochistic tendencies they can amplify, is to get them to notice the pleasure they can potentially take in the most uncomfortable moments of their lives and reframe it as pleasure.
The worldview/aesthetic the book tries to impart:
[I thought,] “God is one kinky-ass motherfucker. God—the divine—whatever He/She/IT is—creates this world, and this world is a gonzo horror show of war and rape and abuse and addiction and disaster. If God is running the show, God must like it this way!” Now, you might guess that a thought like that would lead to some kind of terrible nihilistic breakdown. But for me… actually, it didn’t. Instead, it made me smile—perversely—and gave me a feeling of lightness, play, and possibility. …
Well if God is a kinky freak and I’m a part of God like all these “spiritual” people say, maybe deep down I’m a kinky freak too. And maybe I can get more in touch with my divine nature by giving myself permission to like all the scary stuff in life, instead of just resenting it. …
I propose that all our suffering and stuckness in life comes from forgetting that we’re divine sparks playing a wild kinky game and that great miracles can come forth in our lives when we reverse the process of forgetting by deliberately reclaiming the pleasure of the game.
(Re: divine sparks playing a wild kinky game – see these two pages from this book, which are my favorite part)
The title is well chosen! The book is trying to get the reader to treat life itself as one big BDSM scene that they can lean into if they want.
Which, this is a weird sell, but it happens that I’m totally into this and have been doing it on my own1, so having someone dump a whole framework of doing life that extends this is delightful and intellectually stimulating.
The author describes “orgasmic meditation” where she lies down for a time-limited period, focuses on the sensation as someone rubs her clit, and does not attempt to change the kind of stimuli she is receiving. There are obviously strokes she likes and strokes she is less into, and part of the point is to expand the range of things she can enjoy – going from “oh, not this one” to “yes, even this one”. And you can apply this same process to, well, life:
This practice of “getting off on every stroke” can, by analogy, be extended beyond the context of Orgasmic Meditation (or sex) and be applied to life, wherein one considers everything that happens as a “stroke.” As in, comments that other people make to you—those are strokes. Surprising situations that arise—those are strokes. A critical monologue from some inner voice—those are strokes.
Also very congruent with how I (would like to) think of life.
I would never recommend this book broadly. Either you’re open to being expansively masochistic like this appealing or you aren’t. But man is it good at articulating a cohesive is+ought framework that, if you could lean into it, can get you to do this top-down reinterpretation of more experiences as pleasurable.
Addendum a year later, 2023 May 22:
I’ve been experimenting with “identifying as stupid and lazy” and it’s going pretty well. This month I went to a Javascript meetup with the explicit goal of being slightly stupid there, got into an AI conversation, said a few coherent things, and then mentioned I just didn’t want to put in the work into understanding e.g. transformers. Also I said as a simplification that I’d flunked out of linear algebra in college which isn’t true (I got an A in linalg but flunked out of the ML course where linalg was heavily in use) but felt. WEIRDLY. pleasurable to say.
Existential Kink invites you to notice how much of your life is shaped to bring about outcomes you supposedly hate, and how you secretly take joy in those outcomes. This seems false for the majority of things one tries to avoid, but leaning into it sure is interesting to try out! And I’m finding it is surprisingly true for “coming off as stupid”.
There’s something absurdly joyful/thrilling about deciding to go to a meetup and presenting as a moron. Some years ago I would have gone NOOO at the thought, and now I feel like an adrenaline junkie being invited to a new type of gambling event or weird sex thing.
I fully expect to tire of “identifying/presenting as stupid and lazy”, but when I move on from it I expect to be more integrated or whatever. Less afraid of being stupid and lazy because I’ve just gone and done it openly.
One of the stupid things I said at the Javascript meetup was that I hate using libraries in almost full generality. I’m too lazy to read docs or troubleshoot my calls to other people’s code. Someone recced me a different meetup for people who roll their own tooling, but warned me it was all male, because he knew I’d found all-male programming contexts stressful in the past.
In college I tended to not even really notice if a lab or a team was all male, because I was a top-half student and just felt totally secure about being in class. But I became phobic of it in jobs because I’m usually the worst dev in any remotely selective workplace, and being the worst dev AND the only woman sucks. I was ashamed of being bad at my job, obviously, but I was mortified at being the entity that diversity posters and mandatory trainings point at to say “if you think women are like that you are a terrible person and causing problems in society”. But… I am like that. I guess for society’s good I need to hide this as hard as possible?
(I solved this by going to a much less selective workplace and almost explicitly saying “I will be kind of a bad programmer, but I come cheap”. I am pretty happy now.)
So, given that I got twisted up by that employment record, current me is delighted at the thought of being openly dumb at an all-male CS meetup. This wouldn’t be good for the men (some of whom Want To Unlearn Sexism, etc) nor for Women In Tech, but it would be good for ME. Time to abandon class consciousness and defect on women for my own gain.
It is, well, yeah, existentially kinky to imagine going to this meetup and cheerfully asking dumb questions & occasionally responding with “I don’t think I’m ever going to understand that, sorry, you should stop explaining that because I don’t want to waste your time”.
Footnotes
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I used to be normally socially anxious where I just felt awful, but these days when I’m uncomfortable because I said something stupid or cruel, or someone’s pushing my boundaries, 50% of the time I notice and go, “whoa, I’m uncomfortable, that’s interesting and nice in a way”. I do this simply because it’s better to feel nice and interested than awful. Raw misery is hard to spin this way, but anything complicated where there’s some human nuance in it provides a launchpad for this transition. ↩