They're sitting in the Atrium eating lunch. She's enjoying a bread bowl, a salad and an apple. He went for a cold-cut sandwich, a salad and fruit yogurt. Passers-by and students enjoying their lunches don't look twice; they don't have a reason to. From the outside it's a typical lunch in a typical Atrium setting on a typical Sunday afternoon with two typical people.
The typical ends with appearances. He is Paul Starr and she is Jesica Martindale, and they are the founders of the Kinky Cardinals. They're the people responsible for the campus signs proclaiming "Bondage: You're only truly free when you're completely bound," and "BDSM: It's the best four letter word," among others. If you haven't seen the text-driven, white-on-black posters, maybe you noticed the one with the half-naked woman, ball gag in mouth, with "Kinky Cardinals" on the right side.
Those are the taglines. Talk to the Kinky Cardinals and you'll find out what the group is really about. It's in the posters' fine print, which reads "Kinky Cardinals is a BSU based forum (munch) whose focus is educating students about the safe and fun practice of BDSM. To learn more about the Kinky Cardinals, including discussion times and locations, e-mail kinky.cardinals@gmail.com." It's obvious Starr had something to do with the posters when he describes the Kinky Cardinals out loud.
"Kinky Cardinals is what, in the kink community, is called a munch," he said. "Which is just sort of a casual get-together in public with food. You sit and you talk about kink, the weather, whatever politics or whatever comes up."
Starr and Martindale use the words kink, kinky and BDSM interchangeably. These words represent the definition of BDSM: bondage and discipline, domination and submission, or sadism and masochism. The Cardinals are quick to point out that the group isn't about practicing any of the sexual techniques included in BDSM. Starr said the group is similar to a group of people who get together to talk about sports or video games.
"It's a very low-pressure, public location. People aren't dressed up in crazy gear or anything," he said. "If you didn't specifically know what to look for or were invited you would have no idea what was going on. It would just look like a group of people sitting together eating food and having a good time."
Starr and Martindale found each other like many others today, with the help of the Internet. Martindale said she and Starr met about 16 months ago because of a classified ad on craigslist.com.
"I put an ad up saying 'I want sex. I don't want a lot of people. I'm not trying to rack up numbers. And these are the things that I think I'm interested in,' and those were things like biting and hair pulling and stuff like that," she said. "And he responded and we chatted."
Martindale said that even though they were chatting, there were communication issues and Starr even "flaked out" at one point. Each has a different story on the particulars, but they both agree when Martindale said that they reconnected through a different classified on craigslist.com.
"And so anyway, he offered to make it up to me with a cup of coffee," Martindale said. "And we went and we hung out and he tied me up that night."
Neither Martindale nor Starr thought the relationship would go much deeper than the kink, but they were wrong. They ended up being compatible in more areas than the bedroom, and they eventually started thinking about what they could do with their lives. Both had finished high school, but neither was enrolled in college.
Starr said he received the nickname "Paul the Video Guy" when he was shooting video for the local roller hockey team in Indianapolis. If people weren't calling him PVG, they were invariably telling him he should go to school to learn how to shoot.
Meanwhile, Martindale was thinking about going to school for fashion design but wasn't convinced yet. She said the idea of residence halls and living with strangers who were her age but might not be at her maturity level were big deterrents. After he decided to enroll at Ball State, Starr said he told Martindale she should consider going to school as well.
"And then Ball State was the only school for a long way that had the program she was looking for," he said. "So in much the same way it just made sense for me, it just made sense for her. Tada! We're at Ball State."
Both were treated as though they were regular freshmen right out of high school despite the fact that they were both non-traditional students. Starr said he was placed in LaFollette Complex and Martindale said she was moved into a modified study lounge in Noyer Complex because of a lack of housing. Both said they were honest and open with their roommates about their past experiences, including kinky sex.
Aside from the roommates and living situation, things didn't seem to be much different from Indianapolis at first. Martindale said the first change they noticed was that residence hall bunk beds lent themselves to bondage better than regular beds.
Then the Cardinals noticed something else: The kinky community that was thriving in Indianapolis seemed to be missing in Muncie. Starr said he thought there was a munch in Muncie before he moved, but he couldn't find it when he arrived.
"So we got here and I thought, 'We need to connect with other kinky people.' It was one of the priorities for me was to connect to people with a similar mind-set," he said. "And we were kind of putting out the vibe and nothing. Just nothing."
To fill the void, the couple decided to take matters into their own hands. Starr said he was convinced there were at least a few kinky people on the 20,000-plus student campus. One of the main concerns from the outset, and the primary reason for starting the group according to Starr, was the fact that those people might be engaging in kink that was unsafe.
"The sort of archetype for a person who gets into kink is they try some things early, and nine times out of 10 there's some kind of safety issue," he said. "They get into some kind of trouble with it because they haven't done research or whatever. They're just kind of trying what feels right and sometimes that gets you into trouble."
The Cardinals said the initial response was pretty slow. Starr said the first meeting had a few people, but then things really took off. The second meeting had 16 people, which Martindale said was higher than the average one in Indianapolis. The attendees aren't necessarily the same people from week to week, however.
"Literally every week somebody new gets a hold of us or has heard about it from somebody or whatever and they show up," Starr said. "And they don't always stick around if it's not for them. It's not for everybody."
The Cardinals said the people who come back on a regular basis form a type of community. The meetings are at the core of the community. If you ask Starr or Martindale what the meetings focus on, they'll have one word for you: Safety.
"Essentially education is what we're getting at," he said. "A lot of people who come to the group for the first time don't really have a good sense of what BDSM is. Maybe they've had an experience or two that was just on the fly or whatever. Or they've got these fantasies of being tied up or tying up or whatever. Or, 'Oh I know I really like my hair pulled but I can't convince my boyfriend to do it' - that kind of thing. And they want to know more. And so consent, we talk about consent constantly."
The idea of consent goes along with the idea of safe words. According to Starr, everyone engaging in kink should at the very least have a safe word for stop. There are other systems that can be put in place as well. This way, Starr said the consent can be continuous. The consent should also be informed, which means people should talk about what they are and are not willing to do before anything happens.
The discussion topics at meetings vary from week to week. The Cardinals said the meetings have covered basics like how to talk to a vanilla partner (someone who doesn't know what kink is) about trying new things. The meetings also cover less personal topics, such as mainstream movies that contain kink themes. Starr said most of the meetings don't focus on specific techniques or demonstrations because of the number of new-to-kink people in the group.
"I want to make sure that they've got the basic ideas, the basic tenets so to speak," he said. "Safety, sanity, consentuality - these kinds of things. They've got the SSC - the safe, sane, consensual - down really well before we start doing things on 'Here's a demo on whatever.' The big exception to that I can see coming up is a first aid demo. I would love to have an EMT come in who knows the basic nature of the group and do sort of a kinky first aid training."
Sometimes, the people and not the topics make the meetings interesting. Sophomore nursing major Taylor Pallatin is one of the core members of the group and makes it to Kinky Cardinals meetings regularly. Pallatin said she and a friend first found out about the group from one of the posters on campus. She said the expectations she had for her first meeting weren't realized.
"I kind of expected to have a really huge group of people all kind of shifty eyed," Pallatin said. "But when I got there I ran into some of my friends and I was like 'Hey I know you, we were in English!' and it wasn't as intimidating as I had anticipated it being. They have square tables lined up next to each other and everybody just sits around the table and has food or drink. And they just talk to each other. It's not nearly as daunting as I had envisioned."
Pallatin said she was very vanilla before she joined the group. Instead of going to a meeting with the desire to learn more about something she liked, she had to figure out if kinky sex was appealing. She said she ended up staying because of an interest in BDSM and the community aspect.
"I really love the community they have. The past few meetings we haven't really talked about anything kinky-related at all," she said. "It's just been getting to know each other, telling stories. The last meeting was just telling stories about our break and the shenanigans we got into and stuff. I just really like the people so I like going back for them."
Along with the people and community aspects, Pallatin said she's learned about kink as well. The lessons she remembers from meetings are in line with Starr and Martindale's primary concerns for the group. Pallatin said the discussion she remembers best from her first meeting is when Starr told the group about the cardinal rule of kink: Everything should be safe, sane and consensual.
Members of the group are there by choice, and Pallatin said most people respect that choice. She said her friends don't consider her a kinky person, so the initial reaction is usually surprise when she talks to them about it. She said most people probably have the wrong impression at first.
"I think my initial vision of it was that it was going to be like show and tell and they would bring in all the instruments and they would just be there on the table, like whips and chains and all this stuff," she said. "And I think a lot of people probably think it's like that. But it's not like that at all. The only thing that's on the table is food, soda and people's various gloves because of the winter."
The discussion group is just that, and even though it isn't well defined by topic, there are certain things people shouldn't expect from the group. Martindale summed it up when she said the group wasn't about people finding sex partners.
"I mean, is there a chance that somebody is going to find someone that they're really interested in? Yeah," she said. "But we are not matchmakers, we are not there to hook everybody up and have great, big, giant orgies. That's another thing people shouldn't expect. It's not a swingers club. We don't go have orgies every Saturday night at 11:30 at so-and-so's house."
The Kinky Cardinals may not be matchmakers, but they are more than just discussion leaders. Last semester, Dr. George Gaither invited Starr and Martindale to speak to a psychology class about BDSM and the group. The class, psychology of sexual behavior, is one of four sex-related classes offered at Ball State. Gaither said he uses guest speakers like the Cardinals to help teach the class but not without checking them out for legitimacy first.
"I think they're very knowledgeable in a lot of ways. They don't at all come across as what people might think of as stereotypical, that she's really super submissive and he's really just a total ass, and all that kind of stuff and really aggressive," Gaither said. "I asked a lot of different kinds of questions to get a sense of is this kind of a passing thing in their life and they're passing off a lot of bad information. Or is it really that these people know what they're talking about? I have no reason to believe they don't know everything."
Gaither happened to invite the Cardinals to speak to his class on a day when the topic was originally supposed to be sexual assault. He said there was one student who was surprised by the topic and guest speakers, but overall students just asked a lot of questions. If the Kinky Cardinals hadn't talked to the students then most of the topics they discussed wouldn't have been a part of the class.
Gaither said the textbook for the class has a section about sexual deviation that explains how some people enjoy different sexual experiences without any problem because it's consensual.
Gaither said there's a difference between somebody who is consenting and somebody who is not, and that difference can lead to the diagnosis of a psychological disorder. The American Psychiatric Association publishes a book called "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" that is used to for diagnosing and treatment of disorders. Gaither said the book outlines different paraphilias, or abnormal sexual activities, such as the practice of sadism.
"For sadism, for instance, they're interested in inflicting pain on somebody else - not imagined pain, but real pain, without the person's consent," he said. "And that's what differentiates clinical sadism from what the Kinky Cardinals do, that they're agreeing to it."
Most people in the kink community aren't being diagnosed with psychological disorders. Gaither said tracking the prevalence of deviant sexual behaviors is almost impossible because of how hard it is to find a reliable way to survey the general public. People generally don't want to talk about kinky sex to a complete stranger, so it's hard to determine how many people might be practicing some form of BDSM. On a broader note, Gaither had one thing he said was important to remember.
"There's a lot of different theories for how people develop these kind of interests but the reality is we just don't know," he said.
Regardless of how it is formed, the interest in kinky sex has a new home on the Ball State campus. Pallatin has some reassurance for anyone who's simultaneously curious and apprehensive about the Kinky Cardinals.
"You don't have to be worried," she said. "Nobody there is scary. Everyone has their own unique identity. But no one is outright like, 'Oh my God this guy is a creeper.' Everyone is very open with each other, very honest, very comfortable. It's a very homelike environment. They try to bring all people in and establish that comfort level really early on so that everyone is willing to share more."
Read More
Three Air Jam teams take home the win
October 12, 2012Nineteen teams shimmied, shook and flipped for a sold out John R. Emens Auditorium on Thursday night during the 25th annual Air Jam.
Bill Clinton Speaks at North Central High School
October 12, 2012Former President's Speech Could Have Effect on State Senate Race
