An attitude — and increasingly a clinical standard — that treats consensual kink and BDSM as valid sexual expression, not deviance to be diagnosed or cured.
Kink-positive is the flip side of a long history of filing anything past vanilla under "symptom." For most of the twentieth century, psychiatry treated consensual kink as deviance — something to explain, manage or fix. Being kink-positive starts from the opposite premise: that wanting rope, power, pain or a collar is a legitimate way to have a sex life, not a red flag.
The word rides on "sex-positive," and it's more than a vibe. In 2013 the American Psychiatric Association drew a hard line in the DSM-5 between a paraphilia (an unusual interest) and a paraphilic disorder (one that causes real distress or harms someone who didn't consent). Consensual BDSM between adults stopped being a diagnosis by default. Kink-aware therapists and sexuality educators now build their practice on that shift: the question moved from "why are you like this" to "are you safe, consenting and okay."
In practice it's a stance you can hold whether or not you're kinky yourself. It looks like not flinching when a friend mentions their dynamic, like a therapist who doesn't treat your fantasies as the problem, like a scene where consent and negotiation are just the baseline. The opposite isn't "vanilla" — plenty of vanilla people are kink-positive. The opposite is kink-shaming: reading someone's consensual wiring as proof that something's wrong with them.