YKINMKBYKIOK is such a mouthful of an initialism that it’s commonly shortened to YKIOK (or sometimes YKINMK). It represents “your kink is not my kink, but your kink is OK”.

It isn’t a foreign concept outside of kink circles. You’ll have heard it as “horses for courses”, “whatever floats your boat”, “different strokes for different folks” or “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” perhaps. They’re similar, but what sets YKINMKBYKIOK apart is inclusion of the phrase – “your kink is OK”. It’s a recognition that we’re all different, and that there’s nothing wrong with that.

It’s not particular or exclusive to the kink world, but like a lot of the other things we harp on about, it takes on a certain significance there.

Quite often, we need to co-exist in the small niche space which we’ve carved out, with many other kinks. So, people who like daddy/little girl play may have to co-exist with pony play, who may have to coexist with shibari, and with watersports, needle play, blood play etc. Clubs aren’t usually open to the whole shebang, but if you go to an online space, you’re almost guaranteed to come across something that is just not your thing. In that situation, the courteous thing to do is to mumble YKIOK and walk away.

And, it’s not just that all these people with different kinks have been crammed into a small (offline or online) space. It’s that people are multidimensional. You can be a rope bunny AND a submissive AND a masochist AND into feet. That means that in any given space you will be exposed to things that are not defined by that space.

Even if we share some similarities, everyone is different. Which is a good thing, because who’d want to be in a room full of people who are all the same?