I'm currently catching up on all of the podcasts surrounding Off The Cuffs (which, incidentally, is how I found this place). The question they always ask guests on OTC is, "What was your Radioactive Spider-Bite into kink?" It's a good question that encourages guests to introduce themselves and how they fit into the kink world by telling a story about their earliest involvement. The metaphor comes from Spiderman:
Once they've asked one guest that, they'll turn and ask any other guests about their "Gamma-Ray exposure", which I believe is a reference to The Incredible Hulk. But I was more of a Spidey fan during this era, so that's the one that gets the image.
The thing is, the metaphor breaks down for many guests, because not all of us have these kinds of transformational stories. Not all of us had a singular moment that turned us from mild-mannered bookish nobodies into fantastical creatures who can do freakish things.
Perhaps another comic book origin story works best for this:
Often a guest will say "Well I was always kinky, even as a child." That's how my origin story goes, so instead of a radioactive spider bite, I have a Refugee From Krypton tale.
As a tot, I had quite a few "startles" in television film and books. The earliest ones that captivated me all seemed to be about cages.
The images above are the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (I always misremembered that scene as being from Mary Poppins because the children and Dick van Dyke were in both, and kept re-watching it to find the scene), Doctor Shrinker (who seemed to want to shrink the three "shrinkees" just to keep them in cages for no reason), Mister Rogers's Neighbourhood (Bob Dog had a cage on his head as penance for something), The Smurfs (Gargamel was always pictured holding a Smurf in a cage), and that last one if you can believe it was an episode of Mork and Mindy featuring Raquel Welch as one of the alien Necrotons.
Jim Henson had a thing for bondage chairs, possibly because they simplified the puppetry during a perilous scene:
The top row is from the original Muppet Movie, and the last image is from The Dark Crystal.
Finally, I managed to miss the famous Gamesters of Triskelion episode of Star Trek, but I do remember being captivated by this scene from The Cloudminders when I was over at a friend's house. I know it wasn't at our place, because the colours struck me and we only had a black-and-white set at the time.
There's more, but I wanted to stick to the kind of stuff I was exposed to at a very young age. The Dark Crystal didn't come out until I was a bit older, but the rest is about the right vintage that I'm confident I encountered it all by age five.
Yes, that's right: five. This is an important point in my development, because it was around this age that I found myself leafing through the liner notes to a Christian children's record:
In particular, I found the String Song oddly fascinating:
My dad was in the room, so I showed him this bit and said "That looks like fun!":
He looked at me with panicked horror on his face. I immediately worked out that this was not an appropriate way to have fun. In retrospect I think he was probably kinky in various ways, himself. I have only speculations to go on, as he's no longer among the living, but I don't think his reaction would have been so strong if he had been Vanilla, himself.
In the end, though, it doesn't matter much, because this was the lesson I took away from it all:
And so, after many images and perhaps not enough words, that is my Refugee From Krypton origin story in Kink.
