David Kowalski

Before I wrote a single review I spent about fifteen years teaching in the German kink community. Rope, negotiation, impact fundamentals, the boring but important stuff about consent, aftercare, and the difference between an edgy scene and a reckless one. That teaching background is inseparable from how I approach editorial work now. I write for readers the same way I taught workshops — with the assumption that people deserve honest, unpatronising information and that the fantasy of “you’ll figure it out” is how people get hurt.

I came onto the editorial board in 2015 as the first editor with a formal remit for kink and BDSM coverage. The category had been treated by most publications as either a punchline or a specialty aside. Neither approach was serving readers. I wanted to write the coverage I would have wanted at nineteen, when I was first working out that this was going to be a significant part of my life and there was almost no reliable adult education about any of it.

My beat covers equipment reviews, technique guides, community reporting, and the ongoing ethical conversations about safety practice. I try to be catholic in my coverage — I write for absolute beginners and experienced practitioners in equal measure, and I try never to gate-keep. If you’ve picked up a piece I’ve written and it’s your first exposure to any of this, you’re welcome here, and I’ve tried to write in a way that assumes you know nothing and treats that assumption with respect rather than condescension.

I’m particularly interested in the material and engineering side of the gear. Leather grade, rope fibre and construction, buckle metallurgy, quick-release mechanisms — these things aren’t trivia. They’re the difference between a piece of equipment you can rely on for a decade and one that fails when a failure is genuinely dangerous. Good gear journalism in this space is thin on the ground and I’ve tried to fix that.

Outside of editorial work I still teach occasional workshops, mostly on negotiation and aftercare. I live in Kreuzberg with two very demanding cats.