“The Ultimate Guide to Kink” Erotic Reading Review
The Ultimate Guide to Kink is a new Cleis Press book that teaches different aspects of BDSM. It is 446 pages long, and it includes 20 different chapters about different aspects of BDSM. Some famous names are included including Sarah Sloane, Midori, Mollena Williams, Tristan Taormino, and many, many others – each chapter has a different author. The book has large font, and it’s about the same size as an average “book” – but it’s much thicker due to all of the pages.
The Ultimate Guide to Kink covers a lot of different ground. It covers: Terms, Principles, and Pleasures of Kink; Spanking, Caning, and Flogging; How to Train your Sex Slave; Vaginal Fisting and BDSM; Bondage for Sex; A Little Cock and Ball Play; Kinky Twisted Tantra; Piercing Scenes; Playing with Rough Sex; The Ins and Outs of Anal Fisting; Erotic Role Playing; Erotic Human Animal Roel Playing; The Art and Philosophy of Female Dominance; A Personal Manifesto; How to Expand Limits and Increase Desire; Inside the Mind of a Sadist; Age Role Play; The Lure of Taboo Role Play; The Dark Side; and Mindfuck.
Despite this book covering a lot of information, I don’t think I would consider this a fantastic book to pick up for your first book about kink. I definitely, definitely think it’s a great book to pick up if you know the basics about kink, but if you’ve never thought about kink before and want something to ease you in, this book doesn’t seem to be it. With the theme Tristan was going for (a weekend Kink Conference), you probably wouldn’t attend a kink conference if you didn’t already have some interest and experience in kink, would you? For that reason, I recommend you keep this book as a much larger reference of great kink topics for after you’ve explored and learned some of the basics through other basic kink books (Like SM 101 or others).
The Ultimate Guide to Kink, while not huge-mongous, is much larger than most sexual education guides. It does have relatively large font, so the reading goes much faster than you think it work, but the book itself will defintiely take awhile to read. If you are only interested in certain aspects, I recommend skipping around in the chapters to read those things that interest you the most.
Unlike most BDSM/kink instructional books, this book is written by multiple authors. It’s like an erotic anthology book that Cleis Press would make – Tristan Taormino put together and edited the entire book, but each one of the sections is written by a different author. In her description over the book, Tristan was going for the feel of what you’d get if you attended a Kink Conference where you can go to different classes about different aspects of BDSM. She was trying to make it so those who are very experienced in their specialties would be presenting the information to you, so each “chapter” is written by a different author.
I think that this book really did get the “feel” that Tristan was going for. Instead of feeling like a from-the-ground-up BDSM 101 book like most kink books feel like, it feels like it really is a convention about kink-related topics. There isn’t that normal “progression” of difficulty of activities that most books follow, and instead of explaining each and every thing, it talks about odd things people may be interested in but may not be usually included in a guide like this (like Mindfucks). I don’t know if I’d call it the “Ultimate Guide” to Kink, but I would definitely say it’s like attending a kink conference in a book.
Kink conferences tend to have that “knowledge you never would have gotten out of a book or really “thought” about learning but you wanted to learn it” feel to it, and that’s what I really feel like I get out of this book. I never would expect a basic BDSM book to include information about vaginal AND anal fisting as well as Human Animal Role Playing, but that’s exactly what The Ultimate Guide to BDSM does – it includes a very large and varied breadth of information that really helps make it feel like a kink conference.
Each one of the chapters really has its own “feel” to it because a different author wrote it. I liked some of the chapters and subjects more than others, but each chapter was still very well-written and very easy to understand – no matter who wrote it.
Overall, while I wouldn’t recommend this as your first BDSM how-to book, I would definitely recommend this as a BDSM book to pick up if you have some experience with kink already. It’s going to widen your area of knowledge with kink, and it really helps you learn things you may have never even have thought about learning. Tristan Taormino did a fantastic job of editing this, and it was very enjoyable to read through. Thanks to Cleis Press for sending The Ultimate Guide to Kink book for review.
The Erotic Reading Review is a regular column written by Kayla. This column brings you reviews over erotica, instructional, and other types of sex-related books.
