It’s been almost four decades since I went to a university freshers’ fair, but I can still remember my joie de vivre ebbing away as I perused stalls for the Socialist Workers Party, beagling, Tiddlywinks, netball and Scottish dancing. I can only begin to imagine how delighted I would have felt if, among their ranks, I’d found a Kinkster Society. Yet, according to reporting this week, the lucky students at Anglia Ruskin have exactly that option, offering “a vibrant and inclusive community dedicated to exploring and celebrating the diverse world of fetish and kink”. Nor are they alone: other campuses including York, Warwick, Sheffield and Nottingham have active societies dedicated to BDSM.

Unsurprisingly, the self-appointed Sex Police are aghast at the news of fetish flourishing on Britain’s green and pleasant campuses. Lucy Marsh from the Family Education Trust declared that student unions (the bodies that promote and approve societies) are charities “which exist to advance the education of students, not to promote dangerous sexual fetishes as normal”. I’m not sure that Marsh comprehends that sex, in all its complexities and manifestations, is as much a part of a young person’s education as their curricular activities — but also complementary to them.

An environment where one can openly explore the intertwined dynamics of pain and pleasure, as well as mastery and submission, is invaluable for students of English literature. Such discussions help illuminate the forces driving Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, where both Cathy and Isabella Linton are drawn to Heathcliff’s violent and magnetic nature. And it’s absolutely essential for students of French literature diving into the deviant world of the Marquis de Sade — Justine is still on reading lists, not yet swept away by the trigger-warning crowd. There’s also a strong case for arguing that the PPE contingent will never properly understand the Machiavellian impulses — let alone the private party world — of Westminster if they’ve never examined spanking.

But, above all else, the world of fetish is a blessed haven for many neurodivergent students. It’s long been observed that people who have some sort of autism diagnosis — or who might easily warrant one — are particularly drawn to the highly-structured world of BDSM. For what the Mary Whitehouse brigade don’t tend to know — due to their distaste for non-vanilla practices — is that kink clubs flourish on order and rules, where participants have already agreed to strict boundaries and safe words, and have discussed the limits of their fantasies. They also involve a fantastic array of equipment, which makes for geek heaven. I have witnessed several, fascinating conversations about the best kind of leather for a small flogger (the size you can hide in a briefcase), alongside which manufacturer makes the best latex gimp suit and where to buy a Wartenberg Pinwheel.

In fact, when you think about it, who is really surprised that the kind of people who study metallurgy, physics and pure mathematics — who adore Star Trek, The X Files, Larping and Minecraft — like an organised space in which you can rationally discuss urges that normies find disconcerting? The late Stephen Hawking was rumoured to have made repeat visits to Freedom Acres, a Californian sex club where anything goes and techies hang out. This makes sense. People with huge, supremely rational minds are interested in the scientific exploration of their bodies’ limits.  Although, having said that, plenty of classicists — all that Catullus — and divinity students understand the close relationship between agony and rapture.

Nobody is stopping more traditional students from establishing their own purity club. The new gamut of genders and sexualities offers plenty of scope for celibates, asexuals and demisexuals (people who are only turned on after they have formed a romantic attachment, i.e. poets). At a time when freedom of speech and ideology on campus has never felt more under threat, we should support student kinksters’ right to find likeminded deviants.

---

Rowan Pelling is editor of The Amorist and a comment writer for the Daily Telegraph. She edited The Erotic Review magazine for eight years (1996-2004)

RowanPelling

---