We Hide What Makes Us Interesting

We hide our awkward truths, but deep inside, yearn to be found

A treacherous trap lurks whenever I socialise. In that strange period of awkwardness when the bubbles of two strangers collide, when our sophisticated social survival instincts begin to speed-read each other.

Them: ”What do you like to do?”

Me, proudly: “Oh, I love to write!”

Them: “That’s awesome! What do you write?”

Me: 👀

I’m reticent because erotic writing still seems like such a taboo activity. Whilst a reader can choose their author, a writer can’t choose their readers. Hence those of us who write kinky stories are effectively broadcasting our most intimate fantasies to strangers. Some may love us, but still more may think us super-weird.

So if I do accidentally reveal that I write to a stranger, I might defensively murmur something about spaceships, or robots, or mediaeval fantasy battles between the forces of good and evil. Anything to avoid revealing that what I really write about is folks getting their bottoms enjoyably smacked.

But why is that? Why is sex such a taboo subject? Why are kinks like spanking, which so many enjoy, more likely to provoke scorn or ridicule if we ever dared raise them in conversation, rather than admiration for being so liberated? Why is it considered more socially acceptable to write about magic or murder than masturbation or masochism?

Part of it might be that sex can come across as rather uncanny when put into words. Written sex can feel like an audio-described symphony, something that was intended to be performed, rather than narrated. But I suspect the explanation is more to do with the subtle conventions we human beings have created around intimacy.

In the 2002 Chinese film “Hero” (which is actually pretty good), a central part of the plot is that to protect himself from assassination, the reclusive King forbids anyone from approaching within a hundred paces. Then, a stranger arrives, offering proof that he’s foiled a plot and killed several assassins. He wins the King’s trust, and is allowed to approach closer to tell his story more privately. And I think that’s a pretty good analogy for revealing our intimate desires too.

If a stranger was to approach me in real life and say, “Hi! I love tying people up!”, my initial reaction would be to think: Whoa Mate! Not that tying up is itself weird, I actually quite enjoy it, but having a stranger boldly announce their sexual fantasies out-of-the-blue feels impolite and undignified, bordering on the transgressive.

If someone we barely knew was to suddenly announce: “I love sex!”, our instinctive reaction would be to consider them braggy and rather vulgar, despite the fact most adults do indeed think sex is a Very Good Thing Indeed. The permission to speak intimately is a special privilege, one we grant sparingly, to our closest friends, and online sources we follow and trust.

The social conventions we’ve collectively agreed mean prematurely projecting one’s sexual intent onto strangers is regarded as rather creepy. Some will find it quite intimidating, that’s why sexual boundaries exist. Sex is an act of vulnerability, with an inherent physical threat, the risk of being overwhelmed and assaulted. That’s why consent is protected by law in every civilised society. As social animals we’ve all agreed we can’t just do whatever we want when it comes to intimacy, proceeding further requires the continued assent of others.

Sexual revelations feel creepy when trust has not yet been earned, which is likely the basis of our society-wide taboo on sexual disclosure. It exists because most people in the world are indeed strangers to us, we haven’t earned their trust yet, so they’re naturally unsure of our intentions. But once we allow others to get closer, that taboo begins to disappear. Once we know them well, we can’t wait to see them naked, and get to know their filthiest thoughts.

How much we reveal depends on how much we trust. Hence when we bump into strangers at parties, we are sounding each other out, analysing our conversations for permission to reveal more of ourselves.

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Hide and Seek

I’ve been writing for as long as I’ve been spanking. Whilst other interests in my life have come and gone, these two have persisted. Their longevity has convinced me they’re far more than pastimes, they’re intrinsic parts of my identity.

So it feels like such a shame to have to hide such an important part of me, but social acceptance does matter, and I’m mindful I’ve a mask of professional respectability to maintain too. Absolute candour would be great, but only if everyone committed to it. Until then, wearing a mask allows me to write candidly, and walk into rooms without attracting stares.

Even if you don’t write, we all learn early on in our lives that we exist in a judgemental world, and opening up about ourselves can be hazardous. When I first started writing, I quickly discovered if I wanted to write anything remotely interesting, I’d have to make myself vulnerable first. That was scary.

Yet we also discover a kind of generosity when we write, because words are meaningless unless others read them. In writing, we give of ourselves, sharing ideas, and helping others make sense of the world. Through words we confess who we really are, and confront our greatest fear: that we won’t be loved.

Writing expands the horizons of the possible for whoever happens to read it. It permits us to step into the shoes of another life, not just so we can vicariously experience the joys and sorrows of being human, but every complex manifestation of human sexuality too. Stories help us think, they describe desires, and what might happen if we pursued them. We witness how characters change as their wants are satisfied, and find ourselves wondering.

A rich culture needs writers to dare to record unsayable thoughts. We all benefit when messy feelings and confusing emotions are put into words for others to discover, when we can learn about the joys of sensual pleasure in the privacy of our own heads. But we don’t need to tell others we write, not unless we want to.

I often think of that movie’s scene in the throne room, with the mysterious stranger kept a hundred paces distant.

Do we keep others at a safe distance out of fear of offending them, or because they might discover how imperfect and filthy we really are behind our impeccably curated public faces? Are we wary of others because we fear they’ll damage us, or discover us?

Yet once a secret is revealed, its power over us is broken. When the bitter awkwardness of feeling unmasked fades, it becomes just another fact in our ongoing life story. The revelation may even open up new paths, and unlock new life opportunities. Years later we may look back and wonder why we ever wasted so much mental energy keeping it secret at all.

Remember when we used to play Hide and Seek? It was highly embarrassing to be discovered too easily, so all players tried to avoid that terrible shame. But the real thrill was hiding skilfully, being almost discovered, able to hear the panting breath of the seeker so close, but remaining hidden through your own ingenuity.

But it was also possible to hide too well. To dash so far away that we no longer heard the scuffling footsteps of the searcher, or the excited shrieks of our playmates. This kind of hiding wasn’t fun at all, there was no satisfaction in running away. It just made us feel isolated, waiting alone, worrying our friends might have forgotten all about us. Afraid of losing, we could end up ostracising ourselves.

Perhaps our childhood games intended to teach us an important lesson. That the fun of the game is not in hiding and being forgotten, but in the jeopardy of possible discovery, the thrill being sought, the catharsis of revealing where we were hiding all along.

I have a better understanding of the social waltz we dance with taciturn strangers now. I can see it as a grown-up game of Hide and Seek. Acutely aware of our own imperfections, we hide away, concealing what makes us uniquely special.

We hide the awkward truths that make us interesting, but deep inside, we yearn to be found.

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How to be Discovered

Intuitively, we know the greatest gift we can give someone we love is the key to ourselves. But if you feel you’ve barricaded yourself in with shame and embarrassment, how might you begin to free yourself?

The starting point is saying aloud to yourself something you’d find very difficult to admit. And since you’re reading this, there’s a strong chance that something is an awkwardness related to spanking. Perhaps you yearn to be spanked. Not just you’d like to be spanked, but you have a deep almost visceral need to actually feel your bottom hot and stingy, just like it has countless times in your imagination.

Or maybe there’s someone special in your life that you dream of spanking. Someone you’d love to give the gift of a smacked bottom, someone with whom you’d just love to play kinky spanking games. It might even be admitting to someone close to you that spanking is an indelible part of your sexuality, as important, or even more so, than penetrative sex.

Spend a moment thinking about it. Put your desire into a sentence.

Now write down this secret on a piece of paper. Be specific, so you can see it in words. No one else needs to see what you’ve written, and you can destroy it at any time, but first, it’s important to get your confession out of your head. What can seem so big and overwhelming in our heads can seem so much smaller and manageable on a page.

Once we expand our mental definition of sex beyond crude notions of nudity, fucking, and orgasms, we begin to realise something quite profound. That sex is actually the universal human need to feel desired, touched, and understood. Changing the language we use to think about sex helps change our perspective. We begin to see our sexual side as an entirely reasonable impetus, a necessary catalyst to enable us to get close to other people; not at all the shameful urge it’s too often depicted as.

We’re taught from an early age to experience emotions in moderation, told off for being too sad, angry, or exuberant. Hence intense feelings of shame or arousal make us think there’s something wrong with us. But how many things in your life invoke feelings of such intensity? Shouldn’t those that do be considered extra precious rather than weird?

Whatever your secret desires are, the way forward starts with being kind to yourself. Reflect on why you feel guilty. Then be compassionate. Rather than berating yourself using negative notions like perversion and weirdness, reframe what you’re into as kinda cool. Being kinky doesn’t make you weird, it just sets you apart from the mainstream, it actually makes you super interesting.

Embrace the fact that you and me, and millions of others around the world love spanking! Isn’t that awesome? Welcome to The Tribe! We’re so delighted to have you here! Fist bump!

The breakthrough to being willing to be discovered is accepting there’s nothing wrong with our fantasies. Given what we seek is literally the approval and active consent of others, how could there ever be anything wrong with that? If whoever you tell isn’t into it, that’s perfectly fine, but they’ll still respect to you for being so courageous and candid, and for being so respectful in seeking their consent. No-one will be hurt by your thoughts, but you can cause yourself a lot of suffering by suppressing them.

So that’s the first step, to introspectively examine your own feelings of shame, and challenge them. To rationalise why you feel the need to be so defensive about your sexual beliefs. There’s no reason to feel guilty, because no crime was ever committed.

I think negative emotions, like shame and loneliness, are like runtime errors in the mind. There’s something inside us that doesn’t feel right, that isn’t congruent with who we are, or want to be. These emotions don’t exist to make us suffer, but to warn us. They’re meant to provide an impetus to take action, so we correct our course through life, just like a burning sensation demands we pull away from a fire.

Your challenge is to reframe your erotic desire from something you consider shameful, to something you consider makes you truly interesting. Note how no-one else’s opinion matters here. Just yours. No one else needs to be convinced. Just you.

“Spanking makes me interesting.”

Can you say that aloud, even in an empty room? Even as a whisper? Try it. Try saying it every day until you truly believe it.

For many, this is where they’ll stop. We’ll make peace with ourselves, and resolve to be truer to ourselves. That’s progress, and quite acceptable, we all have the right to keep our own secrets that no one else needs to know. But if you want to be discovered, and play with others, you will have to be found.

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Our Deepest Fear

What’s stopping you is likely to be fear. When surveys ask people what their biggest fear is, the top responses are typically claustrophobia, being attacked, spiders, and heights. But an even more profound fear lurks deep inside everyone, one that’s rarely mentioned: the fear that no one will love us. The fear of abandonment.

This is why revealing intimate details about ourselves makes us feel incredibly precarious. If we stay silent, we know the delicate status quo of our lives will be preserved: keeping the same routines, and the same certainties. But if we reveal our secret, we fear everything might come crashing down. The future becomes unpredictable, even risky. So we hide away, hoping to preserve what love we have.

We know this phenomenon as Loss Aversion - where the pain of losing what we already have deters us from risking everything for the greater joy of gaining something new.

When our partner tells us they love us just the way we are, we interpret that as loving what we’ve revealed of ourselves so far. We fear disclosing any more might invalidate us, like a prospective house buyer looking beneath a carpet and being shocked by the sight of rotten beams, making them walk away in disgust.

But our desires aren’t a rot or a taint on our being. That’s why it’s so important to reframe them as interestingness. If we think our desires are wrong, whoever we confide in is likely to feel awkward about them too.

Remember that those who love us, by definition, want to be kind to us. Often they show us far more compassion and sympathy than we might show ourselves. That’s often why we’re so hesitant to be vulnerable, because we know perfectly well just how mean we are to ourselves when we’re feeling uncertain. But you’re not announcing your most intimate desires to the whole world, just someone who already loves you.

We can be bold and tell them.

We can give them permission to discover us.

One of the strangest things about secrets is that once revealed, they lose their intimidating power. We might feel super embarrassed for a few hours, or days, or maybe even months, but that feeling will eventually fade, until it becomes just another event in our ongoing life story.

Our revelation may even open up new paths, and unlock new life opportunities. In the years to come we may look back and wonder why we ever wasted so much mental energy keeping it secret at all.

One last tip. If you do share a secret, rather than leaving it hanging in the air, awaiting your loved one’s seal of approval, the very best follow-up is to immediately invite them to tell you a secret of their own in return.

Just say: “What have you always wanted to tell me?”

You’re giving them permission to be vulnerable. Promise them you won’t judge them, just like they haven’t judged you. Who knows how long they’ve agonised about opening up, worrying themselves sick that you’d reject them. Now you’ve broken the ice, there’s never going to be a better moment for them to open up too.

They don’t need to even say it right now, promise them you’ll listen without prejudice whenever they’re comfortable to talk. Give them the same advice I’ve given you, gently help them in overcoming their own anxieties if you need to.

This is how we stop hiding.

This is how we allow ourselves to be discovered.

This is how intimacy is built.