Kink: The Hidden Sex Lives of Americans

by Susan Crain Bakos

The former "Superlady of Sex" for Penthouse magazine reveals the bizarre sexual practices of seemingly normal Americans, who enjoy being spanked, whipped, tied up, having their genitals pierced, and wearing leather underwear. Reprint.

Genres: Sexuality

325 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 1, 1995

Reviews

[Craven · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is such a terrible book. I can't believe that someone who doesn't like sex can be a sex writer. Bakos is the sex writer for Penthouse Letters and this is her exploring the world of sexual kinks. From the first sixty pages, she comes off as trite, ignorant, and totally condesending of the people she writes about. She constantly judges the people that she interviews for wanting to go beyond her vanilla tastes. She's stuck on the physical and mostly just wants to talk about how ugly some of these people are or else she gives us her inner dialogue about how hot they are and how she fantasizes about them caressing her bulldog face (glass houses, Susan, glass houses).

Most of her subjects, to her credit, are disgusting going on and on about there wealth and priviledge. I imagine there are more kinky people than a bunch of bored rich fucks. So actually, this just takes another point away from her ability to research and pick up on complexity and deversity. I was trying to throw her a bone there but when I think about it...no.

In the end, in her conclusions chapter, she gets down to being straight up moralistic saying that kinky people are bad for what their doing.
She also says that they are often unattractive and average, unlike the subjects photographed in Madonna's Sex book and models that dress up in leather. Oh really, you mean that they are normal people? Really? They're not all models and superstars? Wow, thanks for writing this book and enlightening us!

Her conclusion about transvestites is that they are fun to dress up with and to go out shopping with but otherwise who needs 'em? She can't even recognize that trans people are queer folks, not just dudes that dress up like women because they can't relate them.

She is so sold on maligning kinky people that she talks to a whole bunch of psychologists and dismisses all of them for being too politically correct to say anything bad about the kink lifestyle. She eventually does find and anti-kink psychologist that agrees with her, which is the only one she cites. Yeah, that's good journalism. Bakos is a total fucking buttclenched loser, the closest she seems to be able to get to open-mindedness is considering herslef a feminist while writing for Penthouse.

[Elizabeth Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dated but a very good insight into kink in the 80s-90s. Great interview material however I find that the author (yes I realize she herself was not a member of the BDSM community) seemed very judgmental at times regarded kinks. Overall a good educational read to understand statistics and lifestyles from real people.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was awful and by no means an accurate representation of kink. I realize this book is 24 years old at the time of my reading but it still pisses me off.

[Isabel Hebenstreit · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is certainly wildly outdated, but to call this approach therapeutic is really not appropriate even for this time