So back in the days of my stay-at-home dad career, when online forums like Compuserve and Usenet were current and blogs were still a gleam in a few pioneer’s eyes I used to hang out on a couple of parenting and home-life forums. Topics ranged all over the map, obviously, but some of them were pretty recipe intensive.
I’ll never forget* a short thread on, I think, meatloaf or meatball sauces for spaghetti where one poster said her sister in law was “a real gourmet” because she used French onion soup mix instead of regular onion soup mix in her recipes. She said it in a way that implied she was slightly admiring, slightly intimidated, and maybe slightly unsure the extra effort would be worth it.
Anyway, the other day in conversation one fairly staid (as far as I know) friend mentioned to another that a particular camisole could be worn under a jacket as a blouse. (Or maybe a blouse could be worn like a camisole? Either way it seemed pretty darn innocuous.) The other friend’s eyes grew wide and she laughed and said, with what sure seemed like sincerity to me, “you really are a little kinky aren’t you?”
So what can you say to that anyway? Is French onion soup mix gourmet in a way that regular onion soup mix isn’t? More to the point, is French onion soup mix on the same continuum with Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top (with or without spam) in some way that plain onion soup mix isn’t?
Well, similar problems present themselves with “kink” then don’t they? It’s not that there’s no such thing, any more than there’s no such thing as “gourmet.” It’s that if French onion soup mix can be gourmet and wearing a camisole as a top can be kinky then there’s virtually no such thing that can’t be “gourmet” or “kink!”
And in the case of “kink,” the intense self-restraint that must be imposed in order to avoid any hint of “kinkiness” at all is restrictive enough to constitute a kink in its own right!
* Ok, I guess if I can’t remember if it was meatloaf or pasta sauce I eventually will forget, but I won’t forget the “real gourmet” remark. —fl
“I like mine a little extra
Submitted by colorlessblue (not verified) on Mon, 2010-04-05 16:36.“I like mine a little extra twisted. Sure, looks kinky at the first sight, but give it a hot bath to relax and a good whack session afterwards and it’ll behave.” > real quote from a conversation on spinning yarn.
On the one hand, I get
Submitted by jfpbookworm (not verified) on Mon, 2010-04-05 16:48.On the one hand, I get annoyed at all of the “kinkier than thou” attitudes I perceive out there; on the other, I always snicker when Rick James sings about how “incense, wine and candles” is “such a freaky scene.”
Re the French onion soup example – I think it can be placed on a spectrum of “gourmet.” Just because there’s little observable difference from the perspective of the preparer of Lobster Thermidor (who is likely coming from a very different background and income level) doesn’t mean there’s not a difference, and that the person who starts out experimenting with soup mix won’t go on to experiment further with their recipes.
I think in the long run both “gourmet” and “kink” are far more about states of mind than practices, and policing the terms on a practice level is just pointless.
I hope it was meatloaf.
Submitted by chingona (not verified) on Mon, 2010-04-05 20:05.I hope it was meatloaf.
Firstly, it doesn’t seem to
Submitted by SnowdropExplodes (not verified) on Tue, 2010-04-06 05:37.Firstly, it doesn’t seem to me that the point is that the regular-vs-French onion soup mix is the point, but rather, that the care and attention to detail in preparing whatever the recipes are that require onion soup mix, is what marks someone out as a gourmet as opposed to just someone who likes cooking stuff. I suppose the fact that I insist on certain ingredients when I make my spag bol could be counted as a “gourmet” attitude, in that I MUST have proper Italian parmesan to go on it; I won’t these days use tomato purée but a decent-quality passata, although the wikipedia entry suggests that real chefs would see it differently! (it also says that what I call “purée”, in American English is called “paste”) But I definitely fall down when it comes to my choice of wine (which goes in the sauce as flavouring) because I just go for the cheapest Italian I can find.
Although I like to get things just right when I’m cooking, I wouldn’t consider myself “gourmet”, though possibly to the poster I would be.
Similarly with kink. A camisole used as a blouse doesn’t strike me as kinky, but I suppose to someone who’s very clear that it’s an undergarment only, it would be similar to saying that you could go outside in nothing but your undies and a long coat – which might very well conjure a mental association of kink. Of course, the remark as reported (“you really are kinky, aren’t you?”) implies there are other reasons for thinking this person kinky (though you say she’s “fairly staid”, that doesn’t mean a lot in terms of assessing kinkiness in a person, IME). So it sounds to me like this is a case of the term/concept of “camisole” having a particular mental image for the second friend that the first friend didn’t have.
So it’s not about self-restraint to avoid being kinky, but rather that one’s natural associations lead one to see certain things as kinky because one doesn’t generally go there. To the right person, almost anything can be seen as “kinky” or “outside the norm”. This doesn’t render the term “kinky” meaningless, but rather, it says something about the sort of ways in which people identify themselves and others when they use it.
Also, as someone else mentioned I think, and as the “gourmet” remarks I made illustrate, “practice” may not be what defines “kink” (or “gourmet”) but “attitude” instead.
***
There again, maybe she thought it was a camisole in the clinical sense...
[As Kaija says, below, the space for experiencing both food and sex are multi-dimensional, of which attitude is almost certainly only one! Thanks, SDE. —fl]
Just goes to show you that
Submitted by Kaija (not verified) on Tue, 2010-04-06 05:53.Just goes to show you that tastes vary widely in food and sex (two basic drives…a coincidence? I think not) and that one’s opinion is relative to the individual frame of reference. The trouble is that many people try to define their particular position in the parameter space (I’m going multi-dimensional here because I think sexuality exists on more than a linear continuum and because I’m a female with spatial ability and a mathematical/analytical mind…tres kinky, no?) as the center of the coordinate system around which the rest of the world should revolve instead of seeing their own practices as one possible point.
[Oh yeah, very nicely said, Kaija! Yes, there are multiple dimensions instead of one continuum. Yes, it’s a mistake to imagine one’s (current) location as the norm against which all else should be measured. And yes, at my personal (but highly recommended) intersection of dimensions the (large percentage of) girls with spacial ability and mathematical/analytical minds are hawt! :-) Thanks. —fl]