The Neuroscience of Kink

Before I jump right into this amazing content, I want to take a moment to briefly introduce myself to anyone that may not know me! I am a 30-year-old PhD student at a very esteemed university. While I can’t directly mention the field/subfield/research area I am working in, I have been working in neurobiology, neurochemistry, and neuropsychological research since I was 18 – this means that I have an ungodly amount of knowledge that may or may not be useful! I love being a STEMinist and have so much fun doing research and collaborating with different universities across the country to better understand the world we live in and share.

What is Neuroscience Anyway?

Neuropsychology looks at how the brain influences how we function on a day-to-day basis, meaning how our brain influences our thinking and behaviour. This is different from psychology because psychology, in general, doesn’t care about what’s happening in your brain – yeah, it cares about your thoughts and behaviours but it doesn’t look at what is happening biologically. Psychology may or may not care about what happened to you in the past to make you have a certain kink, but neuropsychology can look at the structure of your brain and compare it with other people to see if there is a biological and chemical connection. Cool, right?

Neuroscience takes EVERYTHING into account – psychology, biology, physics, and chemistry are the most important aspects of neuroscience. They help us know how the brain works in general. Without any of those pieces, we have no clue what we are talking about.

Introduction to the Brain

Everyone has a brain, obviously, but that doesn’t mean we all know about it. Some of us have useful skills like being a plumber or carpenter, those are amazing professions that are worthy of respect but there’s no reason for them to know the foundations of the brain. So I will lay it out for you so that moving forward everything is crystal clear.

The brain has 2 lobes – the left and right – that are connected by fibres called the corpus callosum. This is important because things like feeling pleasure and movement are processed through this because it is such a complicated process. Even though the rest of your brain continues to grow, this is done changing at 12 years old! This means that you learn how to process things you like to feel around puberty. This makes sense! How many of us have had our kinks since we were in our teens? I’d venture to say most, if not all, even if you didn’t discover it till later!

The brain has 4 lobes: the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital. These lobes are on both sides of the brain.

The frontal lobe is responsible for helping you pay attention – for example, you are more likely to pay attention to sellers with listings that turn you on because we tend to pay attention to things we like.

The parietal lobe is responsible for feelings things – for example, you feel your dick get hard when watching a video of a seller smashing food with her feet because the nerve endings in your penis send that information to the parietal lobe.

The temporal lobe is responsible for language and memory – things like sexting and remembering your favorite sellers are learned using this area.

Finally, the occipital lobe – this is where you visually understand things – I don’t think I need to provide an example about what you might be looking at ;)

How We Learn Our Kinks

It seems silly to think that pain can cause pleasure, they seem SO opposite from one another… but our brains are complicated creatures and both of these things are incredibly important for our survival! Without pain, we would make mistakes that could destroy our relationships with other people or kill ourselves but without pleasure, we are not motivated to do things that would make sure we live long lives and continue the human race hahahah!

But we can’t ignore the role of emotions in pain and pleasure! Emotions exist for a reason besides to drive us crazy and provide profit to pharmaceutical companies.

Usually, when we are in pain we experience negative emotions like being scared of what will happen, sad we can’t do something anymore, or angry that someone hurt us. So how do we feel better? Our body makes more dopamine, oxytocin, opiates, and endorphins!

These are involved in the pleasure and reward areas of our brain, but when we are hurt they work to decrease the pain which makes you feel better in the end. These chemicals are super addicting – we use cocaine to replicate dopamine, runner’s high is caused by endorphins, heroin connects to our opiate receptors, and MDMA releases oxytocin.

The most addictive drugs work in our feel-good centers – it isn’t magic that they work, just some incredibly brilliant people who knew how to make themselves feel amazing realized they could replicate their natural experiences.

But human nature is complicated and we want to know why we love dirty socks or sniffing panties! Brains are not easy or straightforward, everyone has a unique brain makeup.

My brain is different than yours and yours is different than anybody else’s in the world! This is because of what we experience. Our brain is always changing with new experiences, no matter how small they might be.

One really small example, you might buy new light bulbs and realize you don’t like how bright they are, your brain then creates a new connection to help you remember not to buy those anymore. Our kinks are learned the same way! We experience something and it gets processed through our brain and we learn that it releases all the feel-good chemicals, even if we don’t realize it.

Why Does Pain Become a Kink?

Did you know that social humiliation and physical pain are processed the exact same what in the brain? No? Well, now you do!

Even though you may love being spanked you may not love being publicly humiliated, why is this? This happens because of what we have been exposed to in the past. If you were told as a child that you were worthless, but a parent apologized to you and gave you ice cream later, your brain processed the insult as something that gets you other good stuff.

I am not saying this is definitely what happens but it is possible! Another reason that pain and pleasure often exist together is because of how the brain is set up.

There is a famous saying that goes “neurons that fire together wire together.” Students in psychology 101 hear this saying over and over because it’s true!

While sexual arousal, aggression, and fear are all separate experiences physically and emotionally, they are also very similar! We experience our heart racing, sweating, anxiety, and pupil dilation during all these experiences. We already talked about painful experiences becoming something we fear because we want to avoid that, but sometimes the signals become connected. This means if someone was mean to you while you were already horny, your brain then connects being horny with someone being mean to you.

Normally if someone was mean to you, you might become angry but now that you have experienced someone being mean to you while you were turned on, you can become turned on by someone being mean to you.

Interesting right? The connection is made because you are already experiencing a dopamine and oxytocin rush – the new memory becomes very important to your brain to become aroused.

Final words

We don’t make these decisions consciously - brains are so crazy and complex. Once you have had the experience of someone embarrassing you or inflicting pain on you while you were turned on, if your brain makes the connection it is unlikely that this will change. What’s done is done!

If you enjoy sniffing socks, think about the first time that you got away with it. You probably felt successful that nobody caught you and your brain released reward signals. Ta da! Now you developed a kink.

Because everyone has a unique brain, we all develop kinks differently than one another. My fetish of men in grey sweatpants likely comes from seeing my ex-boyfriend hard in them which told me that he thinks I’m attractive. Seeing a hard penis in response to me triggered sexual around (that’s basic reproductive system!) but the grey sweatpants didn’t mean anything to me before that experience. Now, when I see grey sweatpants on men I am ready to pounce!