Ultimate Guide To Kink

Like most anthologies, this book varies wildly in quality from chapter to chapter. The majority of the content in this book is well-written, informative, and empowering, but there are a couple of real stinkers that either are clunky on the sentence level (Chapter 3 is a slog) or present some really pejorative and unhelpful information (Chapter 7 in particular says some really awful things about people with BDP!!). You lose nothing by skipping the horrible chapters, and ultimately those written by Midori, Taormino, Wolf, and Sloane are well worth the price of the whole anthology. Regardless of the disparate quality between chapters, I felt I learnt a lot from reading this book, and I definitely discovered some things about myself I wasn’t expecting to.

A fair warning: because this anthology was written in 2012, it certainly shows its age regarding its relationship to gender. Binary pronouns are EVERYWHERE. While very few of the authors make any heteronormative assumptions about what gender tops and what gender bottoms, the overwhelming narrative throughout the entire book is you are either a man with a penis or a woman with a vagina. I’d either attack this book with a pencil or skip it if you’re non-binary. I’ve definitely encountered worse gendered language, but enbies deserve better than this.