Twenty years ago, a reader looking for taboo sex in print had to slink to the back of the bookstore and make whispered inquiries. Today, kinky books make up an established genre, one that shares front-table space with other major releases and possesses its own classics and conventions. This robust menagerie encompasses pulpy household names, including E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, which in 2011 vaulted BDSM onto the New York Times fiction best-seller list. It has a literary canon—Marquis de Sade’s Justine, Pauline Réage’s Story of O—and elevated LGBTQ smut standards such as Patrick Califia’s Macho Sluts. Over in the nonfiction aisle are more practical selections, a hefty cascade of volumes that explore kink from all angles: how-to, history, philosophy, psychology, memoir.
二十年前，寻找印刷中的禁忌性爱的读者不得不将书店的后面滑到书店的后面，然后窃窃私语。如今，Kinky Books构成了一种既定类型，它与其他主要版本共享前表空间，并拥有自己的经典和惯例。这种强大的Menagerie包括E. L. James的五十度灰色灰色阴影，其中包括2011年的BDSM进入《纽约时报》小说畅销书列表。它有一个文学佳能 - 玛奎斯·德·萨德（Marquis de Sade）的贾斯汀（Justine），波琳·雷奇（PaulineRéage）的故事，并提高了诸如帕特里克·卡利亚（Patrick Califia）的男子气概荡妇之类的LGBTQ SMUT标准。在非小说类的过道中，是更实用的选择，这是一系列巨大的级联，从各个角度探索扭结：How-To，历史，哲学，心理学，回忆录。
The expansion of the genre tracks the broadening acceptability of erotic inclinations that were previously pathologized (and, at times, criminalized). The 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) hastened this shift by redefining certain practices, including “BDSM, fetishism, and transvestic fetishism (a variant of cross-dressing),” as behaviors rather than illnesses, according to an Atlantic article: “Consenting adults were no longer deemed mentally ill for choosing sexual behavior outside the mainstream.”
这种流派的扩展跟踪了以前病态（以及有时被定为犯罪）的色情倾向的扩大可接受性。2013年的诊断和统计手册的精神疾病手册（DSM）通过重新定义某些实践，包括“ BDSM，恋物癖和跨性别恋物癖（一种交叉穿刺）的变体，而不是疾病，而不是疾病，这是“不再同意的成年人，则不再是善良的态度，因为态度不再是行为不再是行为，这是行为不再是行为。
As stigma recedes, the subculture meets the marketplace. While fiction continues to revel in fantasy and the forbidden, nonfiction is bending toward demystifying and normalizing BDSM. The latter form tends to emphasize the community credo of being “safe, sane, and consensual.” It also participates in a broader project: staking out a claim to legitimacy by assuring the public that deviance is, paradoxically, normal. Redefining the transgressive as conventional might feel self-contradictory, but the pursuit of acceptance is as strong a human impulse as the appetite for risk. Call it a respectability kink.
随着污名的消退，亚文化符合市场。尽管小说继续陶醉于幻想和被禁止的，但非小说却弯曲着脱神经和正常化的BDSM。后一种形式倾向于强调“安全，理智和共识”的社区信条。它还参与了一个更广泛的项目：通过向公众保证偏见是正常的，提出合法性的主张。重新定义侵犯的传统可能会感到自相矛盾，但是对接受的追求就像对风险的兴趣一样强烈。称其为尊敬的纠结。
Fiction still offers more freedom to roam outside the bounds of propriety, and the most ambitious kink novels venture beyond titillation. The author Brittany Newell sails over the guardrail between fantasy and reality with her second novel, Soft Core, by centering it on a protagonist, Ruth, and a setting, San Francisco’s sex industry, that are both lively and deeply believable. Ruth is known as “Baby” at the strip club where she works, an ever-chugging factory of arousal in which wigs and fake names and alternative personas are accessed on the fly to suit customer caprice. All this quick-change artistry offers her a welcome distraction from her existential fears, including the anxiety that her master’s thesis, on surveillance, ghosts, and reality TV, was a waste of time. Having started out as something of an accidental sugar baby at 24, she is now 27. “Youth made my general aimlessness cute,” she thinks. “Without it, I was just a bad investment.”
小说仍然提供更多的自由，可以在礼节之外漫游，而最雄心勃勃的小说小说冒险超越了滴定。作者布列塔尼·纽维尔（Brittany Newell）以她的第二本小说《柔软的核心》（Soft Core）的身份以主角露丝（Ruth）和旧金山的性爱行业的环境为中心，在幻想与现实之间的护栏上航行，它们既活泼又深深地令人信服。露丝（Ruth）在她工作的脱衣舞俱乐部被称为“婴儿”，这是一家不断挑战的唤醒工厂，假发，假名以及飞行的替代性格适合客户caprice。所有这些快速变化的艺术性使她对自己的存在恐惧感到可喜的注意力，包括她的硕士论文，监视，幽灵和真人秀电视的焦虑，都是浪费时间。她现在是24岁的24岁，最初是一个意外的糖婴儿。“没有它，我只是一项糟糕的投资。”
As someone with professional knowledge of Bay Area strip clubs and dungeons—having worked in them during that same phase of my own life—I understood that although Ruth is haunted by many things, chief among them is the ticking of the clock. Slipping from Ruth to “Baby” at the club gives her both an escape hatch from her Saturn-return blues and a whole new set of problems.
作为一个对海湾地区脱衣舞俱乐部和地牢有专业知识的人（在我自己一生的同一阶段，在其中工作了），我知道，尽管露丝被许多事情困扰着，但其中首席是钟表的滴答声。从露丝（Ruth）滑到俱乐部的“婴儿”（Baby），这使她从土星返回的蓝色和全新的问题中脱颖而出。
Read: BDSM versus the DSM
阅读：BDSM与DSM
Strip clubs aren’t really on the kink continuum, but I’d argue that the customer-dancer dynamic is its own form of advanced, high-stakes role-playing. BDSM is definitely an element, for instance, in Baby’s relationship with her client Simon, a lonely cipher who PayPals her $800 a month for outré sexual indulgences, then later beseeches her to delete him from her phone.
脱衣舞俱乐部并不是真正的扭结连续性，但我认为客户舞者动态是其自己的高级，高风险角色扮演的形式。BDSM绝对是一个元素，例如，在婴儿与客户西蒙的关系中，他是一个孤独的密码，每月为她的续集性放纵，付出了800美元，然后恳求她从手机中删除他。
Newell’s gifts for sensory details (a dancer “smelled like crème brûlée”; a woman’s mouth is “like a Slurpee: endless, red and wet”) and for tracing the wavy contours of human connection make her work feel like that of a glitter-bomb David Lynch. Things get wavier still when she wakes one morning to find that her ex-boyfriend Dino, a dashing, fastidious ketamine dealer who loves his dogs and lounges around in elegant women’s lingerie, has vanished from the Victorian flat they share.
纽厄尔（Newell）的感官细节礼物（舞者“闻起来像奶油般的布雷”；女人的嘴就像是“像一个sl亵：无尽，红色和潮湿”），并且要追踪人类联系的波浪轮廓，使她的作品感觉就像是闪闪发光的戴维·林奇（David Lynch）。当她有一天早晨醒来时发现她的前男友Dino是一位破旧，挑剔的氯胺酮经销商，她爱他的狗和在优雅的女性内衣中闲逛时，事情仍然会变得不断变化。
Within a week of Dino’s disappearance, the gamine and eerily familiar Emeline starts dancing at Ruth’s club. Like a pampered duckling, Emeline imprints on Ruth, even hunting down her signature perfume—the titular Soft Core, which, as a besotted customer once gushed, makes Ruth “smell like a library in ancient Egypt.” Newell’s story begins to simmer with noirish detail: mysterious notes appearing in Ruth’s belongings; bizarre anonymous emails materializing in her inbox; fast drives on twisty streets; fog rolling in and out, an enigmatic character unto itself. Ruth keeps thinking that she spies Dino everywhere. But does she?
在Dino失踪的一周内，Gamine和非常熟悉的Emeline开始在露丝俱乐部跳舞。就像宠爱的小鸭一样，埃米琳（Emeline）上的印记在露丝（Ruth）上，甚至追捕了她的标志性香水 - 名义上的柔软核心，正如曾经被散发出来的顾客一样，露丝（Ruth）使露丝（Ruth）“闻起来像古埃及的图书馆”。纽厄尔的故事开始逐渐淡化不可思议的细节：神秘的笔记出现在露丝的财产中；怪异的匿名电子邮件在她的收件箱中实现；快速行驶在曲折的街道上；雾气滚动，是一个神秘的角色。露丝（Ruth）一直以为她在各处监视迪诺（Dino）。但是她吗？
To fill the empty hours without Dino, Ruth takes on an additional hustle as “Sunday,” a dominatrix for hire at the Dream House, which is not so much a dungeon as “a pea-green four-bedroom house in a quiet cul-de-sac.” There, she broadens her client base as a compassionate consort to men who prefer to indulge darker fantasies. These include Albert. In front of Ruth, he takes on an alternative persona, named “Allie,” who claims that Albert is her sugar daddy. Ruth doesn’t remark on the irony of tending to an affluent sex-work client who is cosplaying as a sex worker.
为了在没有恐龙的情况下填补空荡荡的小时，露丝（Ruth）将额外的喧嚣作为“星期日”，这是一个在梦中租用的Dominatrix，这不是一个地牢，而是“一个安静的Cul-de-sac中的豌豆绿色四居室房屋”。在那里，她扩大了自己的客户群，作为富有同情心的人，他们喜欢沉迷于黑暗的幻想。这些包括艾伯特。在露丝（Ruth）面前，他扮演着一个名为“艾莉（Allie）”的另类角色，她声称阿尔伯特（Albert）是她的糖爸爸。露丝（Ruth）没有评论倾向于作为性工作者角色扮演的富裕的性工作客户的讽刺。
Ruth assumes—incorrectly—that she can take Dino’s disappearance in stride by overworking, given, as she puts it, her “native ability to absorb any trauma like it was just one more step in my skin-care routine. Wake up at five, wash face, stare into void, moisturize.” (I snort-laughed in recognition.) She learns, as the days pass, that dissociative endurance is not necessarily a positive attribute, and that sadness can seep into any space—VIP room, dungeon chamber—as if rising through the floorboards.
露丝（Ruth）认为 - 不可否认 - 她可以通过过度劳累来大步走动，正如她所说，她的“本地吸收任何创伤的能力，就像我的皮肤护理程序中又一步一步。（我在认可中苦苦挣扎。）她得知，随着时间的流逝，分离的耐力不一定是一个积极的属性，而悲伤可以渗入任何空间 - vip房间，vip室，地牢室，就像在地板上升起一样。
Read: Consent isn’t enough: the troubling sex of Fifty Shades
阅读：同意是不够的：五十度阴影的令人不安的性别
Although her rootlessness and sorrow originate from experiences that predate her lover’s departure, Ruth wonders if these haunting feelings are exacerbated by her profession. “Maybe my work was partly to blame,” she thinks. “I’d been method-acting as a dream girl, and now I couldn’t touch back down to earth.” Newell skillfully renders the exhaustion of sex work, especially the weird repetitiveness of trying to keep things exciting and new for clients. Years ago in Los Angeles, one friend of mine, a kink impresario who was winding down from a draining day of video shoots by sorting through a rucksack full of black and red leather floggers, sighed to me: “It’s not the sex; it’s the work.”
尽管她的无根和悲伤源于早于爱人离开的经历，但露丝想知道她的职业是否加剧了这些令人困扰的感觉。她认为：“也许我的工作部分是归咎于的。”“作为一个梦想中的女孩，我一直在做方法，现在我无法抚摸地球。”Newell巧妙地使性工作疲惫，尤其是试图使事情变得令人兴奋和新客户的怪异重复性。几年前，在洛杉矶，我的一个朋友，一个纠结的杂物，他通过整理充满黑色和红色皮革鞭floggers的背包，从一段漫画的视频拍摄日结束，向我叹了口气：“不是性爱；这是作品；这是作品。”
In interviews, Newell has shared that the scenes set at the Dream House are modeled on her own experience. As a Stanford graduate who published her first novel, Oola, an obsessive love story, when she was 21, Newell might strike the reader as a hyper-literate Persephone: equally adept at chronicling the velvety, narcotic appeal of the “libidinal underworld” and the bell-clang wake-up calls that chase off the escapist high. Her admixture of emotion, intellect, and erotic perceptivity achieves what nonfiction writers—sincere sex positivists and edgy academics alike—often fail at: an explication of the psychology of kink that maintains the heat of intrigue.
在采访中，纽厄尔（Newell）分享说，在梦屋（Dream House）设置的场景是按照自己的经验为榜样的。作为斯坦福大学的一名毕业生，她出版了她的第一本小说《奥拉》（Oola），这是一个痴迷的爱情故事，当她21岁时，纽威尔可能会以一种超文字的persephone袭击读者：同样熟练地记录了“ Libidinal Underworld”的柔软，麻醉性的吸引力，并呼唤了埃斯逃脱的呼唤。她对情感，智力和色情感知的混杂性实现了非小说家作家 - 性实证主义者和前卫学者 - 通常失败了：扭结心理学的阐释，维持着阴谋的热情。
Soft Core is more a study in feeling-tones than a tightly plotted thriller. It’s a trippy excursion down the rabbit hole into a particular substratum of culture, maintaining a tether to the “real” world while burrowing out to the misty shoreline where it’s hard to tell horizon from sky. Each subplot sounds a distant foghorn of loneliness.
与紧密绘制的惊悚片相比，软核更是一种对感觉色调的研究。这是沿兔子洞中的一次令人毛骨悚然的游览，进入了一种特定的文化基础，在挖掘到朦胧的海岸线的同时，保持了“真实”世界的束缚，在那里很难从天空中告诉地平线。每个子图都听起来是遥远的孤独感。
As Ruth turns 28, she begins to see that she can’t be sustained by a hail of compliments and cash and evanescent male companions. That’s not a life; that’s a never-ending ghost hunt. This book’s growth arc doesn’t depend on Ruth/Baby/Sunday finding someone or something she’s looking for; it lands on her figuring out what she herself lacks. Transactional fascination pales next to devotion—but you need the eyes to see it.
随着露丝（Ruth）28岁，她开始看到她不能被称赞，现金和逃生的男性同伴所维持。那不是生活；那是一个永无止境的幽灵狩猎。这本书的成长弧并不依赖于露丝/婴儿/周日找到她想要的人或某物。它落在她弄清楚自己缺乏的东西上。交易迷恋偏爱虔诚，但您需要眼睛才能看到它。
Read: Is one of the most-cited statistics about sex work wrong?
阅读：有关性工作最引用的统计数据之一是错误的吗？
Soft Core is also a novel about a city. San Francisco has always been a frontier town—a place to pursue an outlier dream. Before it became, as Ruth observes, a “seasick city of data and drugs” that drew hordes of gentrifying tech evangelists, people came seeking queer liberation and a vibrant leather community. And before that: punks, hippies, Beats, and on back to prospectors panning for gold. Many San Francisco seekers find themselves contending with the sour note of the utopian quest. As a canny cartographer of want, Newell takes her place among the city’s storied sexual intelligentsia. Though at times her eye for the awkwardness of interrelation points to Mary Gaitskill, she’s more a descendent of Danielle Willis, the latex-clad poet whose Zeitgeist Press book, Dogs in Lingerie, gave voice to San Francisco’s spooky, kink-conversant stripper narrators 30-plus years ago.
软核心也是一部关于城市的小说。旧金山一直是一个边境城镇，一个追求异常梦的地方。正如露丝（Ruth）所观察到的那样，在它成为“晕船的数据和毒品之城”之前，人们汲取了绅士化的技术传教士，人们来寻求酷儿解放和充满活力的皮革社区。在此之前：朋克，嬉皮士，殴打和回到探矿者的黄金。许多旧金山寻求者发现自己与乌托邦探索的酸味竞争。作为Want的精明制图师，纽厄尔（Newell）在这座城市传奇的性知识分子中占据了自己的位置。尽管有时她对相互关系的尴尬性表示指向玛丽·盖茨基尔（Mary Gaitskill），但她更像是丹妮尔·威利斯（Danielle Willis）的后代，丹尼尔·威利斯（Danielle Willis）是一位乳胶般的诗人，他的时代精灵新闻界的狗狗狗在内衣上发表了旧金山的幽灵般的声音，几年前，旧金山的怪异骗子的脱衣舞娘叙述者。
Outsiders often deride kink for both its earnestness and its deviance. The same can be said of sex work. In the words of the San Francisco–based sexologist Carol Queen, “Trashing other people’s sexual vision is so common. It’s the highbrow’s lowest road.” But the elusiveness of something (respect, satiety, understanding) often only makes you crave it more, and Soft Core shows us the magnetizing, if at times humbling, pull of raw need. “Nothing lasts forever,” Ruth muses. “Except, of course, longing.” That is a frontier that some of us will always be chasing. I guess some girls are just kinky that way.
局外人经常为纠结而嘲笑其认真和偏差。性工作也可以这样说。用旧金山的性学家卡罗尔皇后的话说，“浪费他人的性视觉是如此普遍。这是高眉的最低道路。”但是，某种东西（尊重，饱腹感）的精神经常只会使您更加渴望它，而软核心向我们展示了磁性（有时是谦卑的话）的原始需求。“没有任何东西永远持续下去，”露丝想到。“当然，除了渴望。”这是我们中一些人总是在追逐的边界。我想有些女孩只是那样的。
