I walked through the door with you
The air was cold
But something ‘bout it felt like home, somehow

I’m not entirely sure why, but as I entered the party I had Taylor Swift’s song “All Too Well” in my head. Considering I had never been to this location or one of these events and I wasn’t arriving with anyone, the lyrics had no relationship to what I was actually doing; attending a members-only intimate party via an anonymous erotica club. Not quite a sex party, although that was certainly available to anyone interested in partaking. It was more of a hyper-flirtatious gathering for adults; consenting, eager adults.

Each party begins with some icebreaker games for the newer members, accompanied by music and live burlesque or acrobatic performances. There are tables with snacks set out, encouraging the seventy or so members to meet and mingle. Behind some doors are the actual “playrooms” where guests can engage in sex, erotic play, or just sit and watch. Ever mindful of my journalistic integrity, and crippling social anxiety, I remained an observer.

It was fascinating to watch the playroom, a room of maybe fifteen people, some in pairs, some in trios or more, all in different positions and various states of undress. As I stood holding up the wall as though it would crumble behind me, I was approached by a beautiful woman in ripped jeans and a crop top with her hair natural and teased out.

“First time here?”

“Yes.” I was certain she could hear the T-Swift refrains repeating in my head.

“Cool. I mostly just watched when I first started coming here. Let me know if you have any questions.”

“Oh, do you work for the club?”

“Nope, just know it can be intimidating at first.”  

She smiled warmly and walked away, the goal not to out me as a newbie but to offer some support in an intimidating scene. I breathed a sigh of embarrassed relief and moved on to the next track from Red, pressing down my skirt as I had decided my inspiration for the night was Kathleen Turner from “Romancing the Stone.”

This type of friendly interaction is not a perk of parties like this, it’s the point. The atmosphere is designed to be a communal, artistic, space. Sex is available if you want it, but it’s not necessarily the end goal, and it’s certainly not the only thing available. It was my maiden foray into a private play party, but certainly not the first event I had attended where enthusiastic consent was a selling point. And that’s becoming far more common for clubs that host these kinds of events.

One of the most popular spots in the Brooklyn scene is House of Yes, a dance club and performance space located in Bushwick that has gained notoriety for its themed parties as well as its guidelines regarding club behavior. The rules are listed on the website, when purchasing a ticket, and are visible on walls throughout the club:

Behave with beauty, connect with intention. We are obsessed with Consent. Always ASK before touching anyone in our House. If someone is violating your boundaries or harassing you, please speak to a security guard or any staff member. We have a zero tolerance policy for harassment. If you feel something, say something, and we will help.

Each night at House of Yes is different to accommodate the different interests of the attendees. A Tuesday night may feature amateur burlesque, followed the next day by an aerial circus and DJ, and an early no-booze-on-the-dance-floor dance party for the nine to fivers. The website is clear that this is a space for anyone wanting to try something different from the norm. Imagine Studio 54 but without a crabby owner outside telling you that you’re not cool enough to come in.

And while clubs like House of Yes put a premium on safety, they are also careful about how they promote consent policies and lay out expectations to clientele. I spoke with Katie Rex, creator of the queer fetish party BOUND, who this year moved her events from exclusively underground to public spaces like Elsewhere.

“I don’t know of any club that markets itself as a safe space. To call a space a ‘safe space’ you would have to screen every single person entering the door and evaluate their behavior while intoxicated before entry. The only proposed safe spaces are completely underground. Clubs are certainly upping the ante when it comes to the priority of safety and how to manage unsafe people, but it would be completely irresponsible for a space to say they can promise none of their patrons will act out of line.”

The application process to the private party I attended is detailed. Currently the club encourages female members who may bring male dates, but has recently opened up selective spots for men who have displayed appropriate behavior at previous parties to attend events by themselves. While the club does not have language directly addressing submissions from prospective non-binary members, it makes clear in the questionnaire that the goal when vetting members is mostly about your vibe.

The questionnaire I filled out had the standard questions, “Age,” “Zip Code,“ “How did you hear about us?” then followed with more thoughtful inquiries like “What made you interested in us,” “Describe your current relationship and what you think [Party Name] can bring to it,” “Do you trust your partner?,” “Do you feel comfortable communicating your needs and desires with your current partner or other intimate partners?”.

This was the first of many surprises when researching this scene; how deliberately it draws a line around what type of members they’re looking for, establishing from the outset that this wouldn’t be an unsupervised fuckfest, but a community of like-minded adults who wanted a place to comfortably explore and experience different parts of themselves, either sexually or creatively.

The atmosphere is designed to be a communal, artistic, space. Sex is available if you want it, but it’s not necessarily the end goal, and it’s certainly not the only thing available.
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This type of vetting is inherent to private parties, and bringing it to a public space like has not been as simple as posting rules on a website as Jacqui Rabkin, Marketing Director, and Consent Co-Director at House of Yes, and I discussed.

“A lot of it is very straightforward. You make a policy, you make it visible, you make a system for reporting,” she says. “You have to know your limits, and know what your knowledge base is and what your capabilities are and if you want to have a safer space … you should build a team, you should talk to other members of the community who are also doing this.”

The other Consent Co-Director is consultant Emma Kaywin, a sexual health writer and activist who works with clubs, private parties, and music festivals, training staff how to manage public play spaces. It’s become a vital part of the House of Yes program, specifically for their House of Love events, which mirror private parties, but with more limits on what can take place.

“The Consent Team and program we have in place is modeled after real play parties. We have active guardians; people walking around the club kind of monitoring,” says Rabkin. “We call them ‘Consenticorns’…[they] have been trained by Emma in de-escalation techniques and bystander intervention, just the basics of how to approach people so you can step in and offer people help without causing a scene or a complication but also they have these light up beacons so someone can find them easily if they need help.”

The queer community has been managing the “safer space” movement for far longer than their more cis-hetero counterparts. The inclusivity and safety of many queer clubs and roaming parties underscore the nuanced language around sex that many marginalized communities developed because of the very real threat of violence that hangs over the head of anyone considered other. Safer spaces needed to exist where people could express the very basic desire to represent themselves honestly, without harassment or judgment.

It’s not surprising then that straight women were attracted to these spaces. When fear polices your daily life, regardless of exactly why you are being targeted, anywhere you are able to simply breathe comfortably is a welcome relief. Moreover, those communities were often required to police themselves to avoid bringing unwanted attention from anyone on the outside.

Safer spaces needed to exist where people could express the very basic desire to represent themselves honestly, without harassment or judgment.
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Self-policing is also a part of the kink community that, while not an apparent physical presentation, labors under a societal stigma that pushes it underground. Kink works only when lines and boundaries are drawn very clearly before physical interaction. Fantasy scenarios are outlined over text or email, safe words are established early, and aftercare is often essential before a play session can be considered “complete.”

These rules are not only important for physical safety, but they also acknowledge that sex and intimacy can be emotionally challenging for any number of reasons. In the current #MeToo era where predominantly cis-hetero men and women are still grappling with dangerous societal gaps in sexual communication, this type of prior consent was bound to find its way into the mainstream.

While these spaces were not and are not free from any form of harassment or problematic behavior, their emphasis on community safety and clarity of purpose is a welcome jolt of change into more public spaces where people have not yet figured out how to communicate desires or boundaries. As House of Yes became more popular and saw its audience expand, they had to make changes to how they approached and enforced their policies.

“When we became really really popular we got this tsunami tide of people who maybe don’t have the best etiquette on the dance floor and the vibe started to change,” Rabkin tells me.

“Too many people, more spectators, they’re not dressed up, they’re not overly friendly and they’re not participating. They just show up to see what crazy shit is happening. If you’re going to survive that you need to be very proactive about trying to orient and educate your new clientele.”

The club initially attempted to combat the changing crowd by instituting a mandatory costume policy, but realized shortly thereafter that such policy was excluding lower-income patrons who may find the need to spend money on a costume prohibitive, as well as tourists who want to attend but may not have packed a feather crown in their suitcase. They relaxed the policy to greatly encourage people to express themselves through their look, as well as providing a costume box for guests to get their make up done, restyle their outfit, or pick up some accessories to signal that they’re excited to participate in the night ahead.   

Combining the inclusivity and artistic expression of many LGBTQ clubs with the rules of consent in Kink culture is a powerful bulwark against sexual inequality, a pervasive and harmful construct that thrives on fear and silence. The only way to combat it is consent and communication, but also to remember that communities are not static. Reimagining and reinforcing rules to meet changing tides is just as important as establishing them in the first place.

Boundaries are there to make sure guests feel at ease, that they know what is expected of one another and how to behave. It’s not just about being safe, it’s not just about saying “yes,” it’s about allowing people the space to express themselves in ways they have been conditioned not to. You can do something, or nothing, and no one is entitled to pressure you either way. Once the threat of violence or coercion is removed, once a true sexual equality is established, the possibilities when exploring that physical and mental space become exciting rather than intimidating.

Last Saturday morning my friend and I were having a WhatsApp debrief on the sex we’d had the night before. As we shared our favorite flashbacks, I was surprised to see a picture pop up in our chat. Of me. And another friend.

“Oh! There are pictures?!” I said.

“Hope you don’t mind!” he replied. Flanked by a smiley face emoji.

Now. I like taking sexy pictures and I like having them taken. I enjoy sending and receiving them, both in anticipation and in retrospect. So no, in many ways, I didn’t mind. But what made him assume I’d be cool with this digital documentation? We had talked about our work and he knew I wrote about sex for a living.

Was it possible he’d taken that to mean I was down for anything?

“I didn’t know you’d taken photos,” I tapped back. “In the future I’d rather you didn’t do that without checking.”

“Of course, sorry,” came the response. “I can delete them if you want.”

“No, it’s OK,” I said. The pictures weren’t really the problem (plus, I liked having them). It was more important to me to set the boundary and have him acknowledge it.

“Overall, I had a really good time,” I added. “Yes,” agreed my friend. “Thanks for being so game!”

Game? I suddenly felt like my response was being read as acquiescence.

This wasn’t the first time my general open mindedness had been used against me. “I thought you were sex-positive?!” one partner had leveled at me when I expressed disinterest in a particular kink. I’d like to tell you I brushed it (and him) off, but I admit it—he made me doubt myself.

For me, sex positivity is about consent and communication. It means being open and informed; it has never meant an obligation to experiment or push boundaries. As far as I’m concerned, the decision not to have sex is just as sex positive as the decision to have sex, as long as it’s done consensually and without judgement or shame.

But not everyone interprets it that way.

The term “sex positive” is attributed to Austrian psychoanalyst Willhem Reich, who hypothesized an alternative society to the prohibitive, “sex negative” culture that dominated early 20th century Europe. In the 1980s, sex positivity came to prominence as a response to the anti-porn campaigns led in the U.S. by Andrea Dworkin and the radical feminist Women Against Pornography group.

The rad-fems argued that, amongst other things, “intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women,” which prompted writer Ellen Willis to question whether the message of feminism at the time was really any different to that of the right-wing abstinence movement.

In her 1981 essay “Lust Horizons: Is the women’s movement pro-sex?” she argued that instead of viewing porn as inherently misogynistic, women could use it to learn about their own sexual desires. After all, she wrote, “the purpose of women’s liberation is to liberate women, not defend our superior capacity for abstinence.”

What she termed “pro-sex” was the beginning of the sex positive movement, which cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin described as “an exciting, innovative, and articulate defense of sexual pleasure and erotic justice.”

These days the definition is broader, but also more heavily debated. The International Society for Sexual Medicine defines sex positivity as “having positive attitudes about sex, feeling comfortable with one’s own sexual identity and the sexual behaviors of others.”

Others see participation as a crucial part. Author and activist Allena Gabosch talks about sex positivity as “an attitude […] that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, and encourages sexual pleasure and experimentation.”

Meanwhile in mainstream media, sex positivity is focused on “improving” and “spicing up” our sex lives.

For people who find sex difficult, dysfunctional, or who are opting out altogether, this message is at best alienating and at worst dehumanizing.

Ginger, an asexual, trans non-binary person who contacted me via Twitter, said: “Most people who use ‘sex positive’ use it to mean ‘sex is a Good Thing.’ This can leave ace people feeling isolated or excluded.”

Dr. Meg-John Barker—academic, activist, and writer specializing in sex and relationships—agrees there is too much emphasis placed on the relationship between plentiful sex and good health:

“People feel pressured to have sex they don’t want and to do sex acts they aren’t really into. That’s a problem for both consent and pleasure because forcing yourself to do something you don’t really want to do is an excellent way of turning you off sex completely.”

Laura, who blogs about low sex drive on her website Sexponential, found that much sex-positive advice is centered around increasing the frequency of sex, something she found counterproductive.

“I was advised to try scheduling sex. But the day would come and I just felt this dread. I felt so much pressure to perform. People see me as an ‘empowered woman’ so they just assumed I was having an amazing sex life. I didn’t feel like I had anyone I could talk to.”

This feeling was echoed by the founders of The Vaginismus Network, a community to support and connect women who have vaginismus, a condition that causes pain during vaginal penetration.

“You feel resentful when people are talking about their amazing sex lives. I used to go to the bar to get drinks or I’d go to the toilet to excuse myself,” co-founder Kat said. “It’s great to be able to talk about having sex and not be shocked. But if someone says actually I hate sex and it’s painful, that shouldn’t shock you either. That shouldn’t be shameful.”

Sex positivity is an attitude that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable.
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Even in sex-positive subcultures, where mainstream ideas of heterosexual, monogamous, vanilla sex are rejected, other kinds of sex often take their place and the pressure to participate can be just as strong.

“Often in queer, poly, and kink communities their approaches seem to be that their sex is good because it is a radical act,” said Ginger.

This is what Rubin referred to as the “hierarchical valuation of sex acts.” But, wrote Rubin, “it is just as objectionable to insist that everyone should be lesbian, non-monogamous, or kinky, as to believe that everyone should be heterosexual, married, or vanilla.”

While researching this piece I was stunned by the stories I heard from my own sex-positive communities. One friend told me about a club where by entering you consented to whatever happened inside. Another told me about declining to have sex with someone at a kinky party only to be told, “you can’t reject me, we don’t do that here.” Yet another talked of being shamed for having a gender preference and told to be “open to different experiences.”

In queer feminist zine FUCKED, one anonymous author explains:

 “Party spaces are never sexually appealing to me. I resent not having the option to opt out of these things and still feel safe, feel like a part of the community.”

Barker says this is not uncommon. “These kinds of spaces can be particularly bad because sex positivity can give people implicit permission to be creepy and non-consensual, suggesting that everybody in those spaces should be ‘up for it.’”

The pressure to be or be seen as sex positive is almost as damaging as the sex-negative messages it is supposed to challenge. So what can we do about it?

“It’s really important that we develop a culture where it is just as acceptable not to feel sexual as it is to feel sexual,” says Barker. This idea is explored in their latest book, co-authored with sex educator Justin Hancock: Enjoy Sex: How, when and IF you want to.

“We’re all supposed to love sex, to be really experimental, and to have incredible orgasms,” they write. “In this book we’re trying to get away from the sex-negative and sex-positive messages to find a kinder way in which we can all approach sex and enjoy it if we want to.”

Sarah Beilfuss is co-founder of London-based sex-positive women’s community Scarlet Ladies. She decided to temporarily abstain from sex after she was raped. She hasn’t had sex with a partner for over a year and sees this as in keeping with sex-positive values.

“People assume sex positive means you have lots of sex. I see it as being empowered to do what you want and need and for me that was going abstinent. In Scarlet Ladies there are several women who’ve taken a step back from sex. Being sex positive should mean that you have your boundaries firmly in place, know what you want, and are comfortable saying no as well as yes.”

Setting boundaries isn’t always easy, but if it fosters better consent and communication, what can I say? I’m game.

When people ask me what I get out of gaming, trauma therapy, or kink activities, my answer to all three is the same: They each provide me with access to a contained emotional experience with a clear beginning, middle, and end that I control.

Whether I’m engaging in a role-playing game—my most recent favorite being Witch: The Road To Lindisfarne— wrapped in rope at the hands of a play partner, or sitting across from my therapist, similar needs are being met for me as a trauma survivor. And the access to the emotional spaces that those three experiences provide are essential to my growth and healing.

In his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk explains how trauma reshapes the body and brains of trauma survivors. In discussing the ways in which our minds are altered by the psychological contusions trauma creates, he cited a study wherein combat veterans were asked to submit to a standard pain test while watching scenes from movies.

Seven of the eight veterans kept their hands in painfully cold water 30% longer during graphically violent scenes than other media.

The reason that they were able to do so is that witnessing those fifteen minutes of a combat movie created a certain amount of analgesia — a blocking of the body’s response to pain — that was equivalent to an injection of eight milligrams of morphine.

The strong emotions created by exposure to violent content were able to block pain in the body, leading Van Der Kok to state that, “for many traumatized people, re-exposure to stress might provide a relief from anxiety.” When moderated well, the stressful scenarios brought about by gaming, trauma, and kink activities can make space for re-exposure to stress that feels safe, moderated, and contained.

CK* is a therapist working in the Philadelphia area who specializes in therapy dealing with, among other things, trauma and PTSD. Their approach to trauma therapy begins with neurobiological responses to trauma and focuses on rebuilding survivors’ trust in their bodies.

In talking with them about their thoughts on consensual kink and its usefulness to trauma survivors, they referenced the work of traumatologist Peter Levine, whose stated belief is that the moment of trauma happens when there is immobilization coupled with fear.

According to CK, this is why there is something powerful to be found in consensual kink for sexual trauma survivors:

“The physiological response in our brain toward the end of a really intense kink scene is a stress response. And the experience of having that response without the fear is something that, in terms of the neurological processing, is super powerful.”

The self-discovery and rebuilding of trust in ourselves to make decisions about our bodies and the process of finding humans with whom we can safely explore the depths of kink experiences are deeply powerful processes for survivors. Additionally, the language around consent and boundaries can be very healthy and self-affirming as we navigate our way through the shoals of healing from trauma.

It is believed that trauma happens when there is immobilization coupled with fear.
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Kink, gaming, and therapy all have tools at their disposal which facilitators can use to create potent emotional settings that in turn allow people to feel safe enough to bring forward their whole selves in those spaces—that element of facilitation is vital to trauma survivors who may be seeking out safe spaces in which to have emotionally intense experiences.

When it comes to facilitating emotionally intense role playing games (RPGs), Kate Bullock is an expert. As a person who has been facilitating RPGs for 18 years and specializes in creating games with high emotional impact play, Kate Bullock believes that choice and transparency are the ways in which gaming facilitators can get their players to buy into games with high emotional risk:

You have to play vulnerable. You have to be willing to be open yourself as the facilitator. And you have to get player buy-in at the start… being really honest and having integrity around our game space is important. You have to have tone conversations and content warnings and safety tools and say: “Look at how much we are caring for each other, here.”

In terms of safety tools, the gaming community has a lot of them at their disposal. It has become culturally normative in gaming spaces to use content warnings, but many gaming spaces also make use of mechanics such as lines and veils and the X-Card. The X-Card is a mechanic that allows players and facilitators to simply stop whatever is happening in a particular moment by placing their hand on the card. Like safe-words in kink, this stops whatever is happening in the game. Lines and veils allow players at the table (and facilitators) to state what themes or content they do not want to deal with at all (lines) and what they would like to deal with, but not see explicitly played out in front of them in a game (veils).

I sit down at a table to begin facilitating a game of Witch. To start, I address the players.

“This is a game about gendered oppression, violence, and making decisions concerning a woman’s life. That said, are there any themes or scenarios that you would prefer to not deal with at all during the time we are playing?”

Two players inform me that they would prefer that we not deal with sexual assault or animal abuse at all during the course of the game. I write those things down on a card in the middle of the table under the header “Lines.”

“Great! Now, are there any things which you don’t mind us dealing with, but would prefer not to touch on directly? In movie terms, these are themes or scenarios in which we will fade to black in game, but we will all know they are happening.”

One player lets me know that she would prefer we not see sexual activity directly. Another informs me he would like to have child abuse veiled off. I wrote those things on the card under the heading “Veils.”

These safety tools, when coupled with the skills and openness of a good facilitator, allow people to explore intense themes without fearing that players will have to keep going if they become uncomfortable and upset. For trauma survivors, this can provide us with the ability to experience the stress response associated with trauma without the fear coupled with it.

In therapy, there are also opportunities to experience stress response without the attendant fear. Through a process called titration, trauma therapists encourage their clients to add material “a drop at a time,” thus preventing their clients from re-traumatizing themselves while simultaneously building up their tolerances to the feelings that trauma creates. Therapists like CK are always aware that their clients may have to “tap out,” and rely on informed consent at the outset of their therapeutic relationships to allow both themselves and their clients to feel safe bringing their trauma into the room.

Kink, when done well, provides the same outlet. With warm ups and the natural rise and fall of a scene, tops can bring their bottoms to areas of deep physical and psychological endurance. Safewords and good negotiation give the bottom a sense of safety and trust that allow them to fully give themselves over to the scene and find anything from cathartic release to the depths of their ability to endure pain or obedience.

Through a process called titration, trauma therapists encourage their clients to add material 'a drop at a time.'
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Storytelling plays a large role in both gaming and therapy as a means for trauma survivors to find healing. CK focuses on walking their clients through the body’s responses to trauma in order to find a sense of trust in the body’s response and in our ability to protect ourselves:

“Because we are cognitive beings, we shame ourselves for not reacting in a way that is self-protective or that we feel we should act. Learning about what your body actually did in those moments is super powerful. Maybe you weren’t able to stop this person, but you made a little motion or something. That’s your body’s instinct to protect. You couldn’t do it, but the instinct was there.”

Through this process of discovery in therapy, survivors can be guided by their therapists to build up trust in their bodies and minds and re-narrate the story away from helplessness and defenselessness and towards a trust that we have the intelligence and the strength to defend ourselves.

In gaming, sometimes our characters are confronted with traumas that we ourselves have experienced. Like narrating our stories in therapy, this can give us the opportunity to experience those emotions again with the added impact of further storytelling.

According to Bullock, experiencing previous traumas in a game through the perspective of your character can give players a bird’s eye view of how they responded to that trauma themselves; it allows the space to process the situation in a new way.

Perhaps the character deals with the fallout better than you did, or at the very least, they offer a different path forward. Exploring trauma from this secondary level of distance and imagination can allow players and survivors to feel empowered in those moments in ways that weren’t when those events initially occurred.

It is important to remember as facilitators for both gaming and kink that we are not health care professionals and that our scope of care is not the same as that of a trained professional therapist. However, in tandem with therapy, good communication and boundaries in place, kink and gaming can be healthy outlets and places that foster safe exploration of trauma as we heal and grow on the other side of our traumas.

*Due to the nature of their work, CK asked that I use a pseudonym for them in this article.

Content note: discussion of sexual coercion and violation

Why do I have to see violence in my porn?

The housemate who asked this in a conversation about kink was upset that a feminist porn series she liked included scenes involving slapping.

On the one hand, I empathize. I’m more into textual porn than visual, but I don’t like being surprised by elements I find upsetting: luxuriant body-worshiping oral sex, characters crying out “I love you” at the point of orgasm, the ickily clinical m-word. It’s not the frustration at encountering unwanted content I object to. It’s the characterization of slapping as violent, and the implication, by contrast, that other kinds of erotic touch are nonviolent.

My teenage sexual abuse was painstakingly gentle. Soft kisses, soft touches, and afterwards, a round of obligatory moon eyes and gushing about how beautiful the thing I hadn’t wanted in the first place had been. Expect gentle touch from me, or touch without a power dynamic, and I’m back in my high school girlfriend’s bed, waiting for a sign that I’m allowed to stop, steeling myself to be held after. When I say gentle touch can be violent, I speak from experience.

What makes an erotic act become nonviolent isn’t the type of act; it’s whether the parties involved consent to it.

In a sense, this is consent 101: Consent is what distinguishes sex from assault. But the belief that gentle, power-neutral sex is a sort of erotic default muddies the waters.

When I say gentle touch can be violent, I speak from experience.

A few years ago, I found myself alone with a date. I was interested in playing with her, but I hadn’t yet ascertained whether she was kinky. When she kissed me without asking, before I could start a conversation about what sort of things we were each into, it became clear that we were on different pages. We had come back to my apartment from a bar on what turned out to be a pretext. “I’m sorry,” I’d told her after she’d kissed me some. “I don’t think I’m awake enough to have the conversations I would need to have to keep going.”

Not awake enough, not sober enough, and, given what I’d already seen of her approach to consent, not confident enough that a conversation about kink would end anywhere near where I wanted it to. But somehow — my memory fuzzes as to why — our night didn’t end there. Making out with her, detaching already from my body, I found myself silently bargaining. Maybe if I’m on top, I can still want this. Maybe if we play with pain. “Can I pull your hair?” I asked. She agreed to this, but as soon as I started, it became clear we weren’t on the same page there either.

“No,” my date said, looking up at me every bit as doe-eyed as my high school girlfriend in those endless numb afters. “Gentler.”

For anyone invested in consent, it seems obvious that my date could consent to gentle erotic touch but not to something rougher like hair-pulling.

What is less intuitive, I think, is that I might consent to rougher touch but not to gentle.

Particularly not as a top. I let go of my date’s hair and steeled myself to go mutely through with whatever she expected. Maybe I could have stopped things then — though my earlier attempts had been unsuccessful — but I was held back by the fear of how my no would sound: I only want to have sex where I hurt you*.

There is an oppressive idea I’ve internalized, something that makes my withdrawing consent in itself seem somehow predatory, and I’m trying to put words to it. Maybe it’s that I’d “led my date on” by not clarifying sooner that I wasn’t looking for normative sex, and wanting dominance or sadism instead seemed like a kind of bait and switch. Maybe taking gentle sex off the table seemed like a disingenuous tactic designed to manipulate my date into doing something kinkier than she’d ordinarily choose. Or maybe it’s just the simple idea that it isn’t fair to expect someone to be into the things I’m into.

Why I’ve Turned To Kink, Therapy, And Gaming To Heal From Trauma

I agree it wouldn’t be fair to expect my date to be into what I was into. But I’d add that it’s also not fair to expect someone to be into the things my date was into. I’d add further that expecting someone to be into anything is the wrong approach entirely.

What I had wanted to do, what I had gone into our date intending to do, was negotiate. I wanted to state what I was interested in and ask my date what she was interested in. If we wanted compatible things, we could do those. If not, I’d have been disappointed, but far less disappointed than if we’d gone forward with an erotic encounter that one of us didn’t want. I had gone in open to hearing no — maybe even expecting a no, even if I hoped otherwise — and to respecting that no when I heard it.

My date, on the other hand, didn’t even frame gentler as a question. She simply gazed up at me, her voice pitched soft and sultry, and purred a word that maybe, to her, seemed intimate and romantic. I don’t think it occurred to her that gentler might make the difference between an act I could enjoy and an act that would cause me harm.

I didn’t tell her. Maybe because she hadn’t responded to my saying no earlier. Maybe because my high school relationship had taught me that the sooner I resigned myself to going through the motions, the sooner I could get out of bed. But at least partly, I think, because of the idea my housemate had expressed in our conversation about feminist porn: What my date wanted was normal, and what I wanted was violent. Pain play might fly in some late-night dungeon, but here in the real world, where gentle was a sweet nothing in a lover’s ear, where we kissed without asking because there was nothing to ask about, what I wanted was monstrous. Maybe more than anything, I made myself have gentle sex with my date as a kind of penance for ever having hoped she’d consent to me hurting her.

Expecting someone to be into anything is the wrong approach entirely.

In some ways, what happened with my date is a classic sexual assault story: e were intoxicated; she initiated touch without my consent; she didn’t listen when I said no. Even without a kink framework, what my date did was harmful.

But I find it additionally valuable to read this story through a kink lens. Internalized shame about my desires, and the internalized belief that I should want to touch an erotic partner gently, made me more able to be coerced. On my date’s part, assuming that gentle sex was something everybody wanted, and that if I had desire for her, that my desire must encompass gentle sex, made it harder for her to realize that her actions were, in fact, coercive.

I’ve spent this blog series exploring why it’s important to talk about kink, and the story of my date offers another, somewhat grim, reason. The more we recognize that there are no universals when it comes to desire and erotic expression, that not everyone is erotically compatible, and that all erotic acts have the potential to be unwanted, the less effective this kind of coercion becomes.

No erotic act is inherently nonviolent. But the belief that some acts are violent, while others are normal and universal, leads to violence — particularly, to sexual coercion. A kink-aware consent framework helps push back. We need to approach potential erotic encounters with the understanding that different people experience desire differently, and that one set of desires is no more valid — and no less violent — than another.

*Or at least, that’s how I would have formulated it at the time, though now I’m not sure I would have wanted sex either way.

Originally published at circumstanceandcarefulness.com on December 7, 2017.

Recently, I came across a fascinating article about “the end of cash” in the New York Times Magazine. Written by economist John Lanchester, the piece examines taxes, the central bank, and something called the “zero lower bound,” drawing a conclusion I was surprised to agree with.

“Cash is one of the few ways in which ordinary citizens can enjoy a tiny taste of the freedom, privacy and security that the rich take as their due,” Lanchester wrote. Wow, I thought to myself. He sounds like a feminist FinDom!

“Financial domination is when money is given by a submissive to someone in a dominant role. The transaction is the turn on,” explains Lorelei Lee, a porngorapher, writer, and self-described cash fetishist. When we podcast on the subject, she emphasizes that the nature of the relationship between the players — be it sex work or marriage — is superfluous to the central eroticism of cash, credit card payments, or valuables like jewelry changing hands.

I wanted to have Lorelei on Why Are People Into That?! to talk about financial domination in part because of the sex work we’ve done together over the years, from the dungeons of the East Bay to the porn palaces of San Francisco.

LORELEI LEE: CASH PART 1.

LORELEI LEE: CASH PART 2.

She’s arranged for me to have more dicks to suck so she can cut me the biggest check possible, and I’ve talked countless men into splurging on a double so she and I could torment them side by side. Lorelei is a femme like a mysterious pink cocktail, a fizzy sweet lip-smacker with a strong deep spirit that will fuck up your brain if you underestimate its power. (Or actually even if you don’t.) I knew that she would share a profound analysis of money as an oh-so-slippery metaphor, as well as offer insights on the gleeful pleasure of deserving cash.

Lorelei has experience in the online world of “findomming,” where “cash pig” submissives are treated like “human ATMs.” As we podcast she easily slips into a demonstration of this language: “You exist only to prop me up. This is the entire reason you go to work. You might as well sign over your check to me.”

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The transaction is the turn on.
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Sometimes there is a Robin Hood aspect to this approach, as you will see scrolling through the emotional labor reparations hashtag #giveyourmoneytowomen. I get a heady thrill seeing so many women acting confidently entitled to being given money by men simply for being female in a patriarchal society.

As politically-minded a person as she is, for Lorelei the thrill of cash is visceral, instinctive. Growing up poor, she rarely experienced abundance. Although 17 years of sex work has given her financial independence, it’s come with the cost of stigma and discrimination—her erotic life has become bound up with the power of dollar (and hundred dollar) bills.

“The thing that’s thrilling me is having cash accumulate around me, rubbing it on my body, smelling it,” she says. “I love to fuck on it. I love to throw it around the room. I’m owning it, controlling it, stepping on it. I feel like I’m receiving power when I receive that money, power that I specifically felt the lack of at many times in my life.”

A previous Why Are People Into That?! guest, Princess Kali, devotes an entire chapter of her erotic humiliation book—Enough to Make You Blush—to financial domination.

She suggests a sensual approach:

“Open up your wallet so I can see your cold hard cash. Wider. Wider. I want you to spread that wallet wide open. Good, I want to see all the money. I want to stroke it with my fingers. Mmm do you mind if I stroke your money for a second?”

She also gives suggestions for using money as a tool of erotic D/S. Your partner might put you on a controlled budget with sexual positive reinforcement for good behavior. Your submissive can present cash at the same time every month, either to pay for something practical like a utility bill or something luxurious like designer shoes.

This kind of economic theory made me very uncomfortable until recently. I’ve been trying to grow the hell up about the role money plays in my life, aided by the support of several financial advisors who speak directly to me as a queer, anti-capitalist punk straddling several worlds. Raised comfortably middle class, I have been independently working-class my entire adult life, including many years working in various underground economies.

In particular, the coaching of my friend Damien Lux of Ride Free Fearless Money has helped me to realize I had done myself a disservice: by not educating myself about wealth, savings, or investment, I was actually internalizing the corruption I was trying to undermine — the messages that said that as a queer female artist, I don’t deserve stability, that self-sufficiency would always involve constant strife.

I had confused my true punk values of community sustainability with an empty “No Future” nihilism that actually came from fear. I was allowing money to mean the things I didn’t want it to mean, instead of realizing that I had the power to make it mean whatever I wanted.

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By not educating myself about wealth, savings, or investment, I was actually internalizing the corruption I was trying to undermine.
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I’ve made money from sex for a very long time, but it was the gleeful fetishism of FinDom sex workers that inspired me to think of my money as sexy. When I find something sexy I lust for it, yes, but I also want to talk about it, think about it, read about it. I think other women roughly my age are paying attention to this in new and refreshing ways.

Another previous YAPIT guest Alana Massey is writing a book about women and money. I’ve been getting advice about prosperity altars from the Money Witch. I can’t get enough of Bad With Money, a podcast by queer YouTube star and writer Gaby Dunn, which is as emotionally resonant as it is educational for me.

Why Are People Into Shame?!

I send the “GIF Guide to Getting Paid” by Ann Friedman to anyone I know who is about to tackle salary or contract rate negotiations of any kind: Even re-reading it, I find myself cringing at the awkwardness of expecting money, followed by shame that I’m not more assertive about what I deserve, which is only soothed by seeing these incredible women struggle with the same issues.

Financial domination is just like any other form of BDSM: It’s a practice that harnesses the psychological power of a social taboo for erotic purposes. This reminds us that the thing we trust with basic needs—like security and pride—is just so many pieces of paper. If wealth makes the rich powerful, then those of us who are not (and may never be) can take pleasure in the un-surveilled power of the cash that we earn.

As with many other aspects of my life, I am able to embody confidence by invoking the spirit of kink. In other words? When I turn something into a sex game in my mind, I’m usually better able to intuit the hidden rules of the game—and win.

Getting tattooed is a sadomasochistic experience for me. I don’t mean that I need to be sexually attracted to my tattoo artist, nor do I book appointments in public body art parlors with the intention of creaming my pants and loudly orgasming from the pain. My process of sitting for a tattoo artist and their needle is a cerebral — more than overtly erotic — form of kink for me. I’m obsessed with the sting puncturing the barrier between my insides and the world, making my skin vibrate like a trampoline.

One of the most annoying of the many annoying questions that tattooed people get asked is: did it hurt? While some places on the body hurt more than others, pretty much all tattoos involve a painful ceremony. Things that are meant to last always hurt.

A tattoo machine sends a needle slicing through layers of your epidermis between 50 and 3,000 times per minute, all while you have to remain very calm. In reaction to this stress, your adrenal glands start pumping out excitement hormones. Endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin create a sense of focused euphoria. The mind over matter experience of sitting quiet and still while your body’s fight or flight symptoms kick in, responding to this unusual penetration, puts you in a certain state. You have to both concentrate on the hurt and let it go. For me, this state can be similar to what kinky people call subspace, or the transcendence of a masochist’s role in a scene.

The elevated heart rate. The sweat. The flow state. It all sounds delightfully like a great fuck, doesn’t it? This simple physiological parallel is one of many reasons I suspect people find tattooed bodies so attractive. One look at a tattooed person, especially a heavily tattooed person, and you know this is someone capable of consenting to and processing intensity. On some level, I think we know that a person who welcomes discomfort is more prepared for the complicated and unpredictable agony of being alive.

From the minute I met Tamara Santibañez, I knew she was someone who understood the overlap between body art and erotic pain. An accomplished tattoo artist specializing in classic Chicanx style as well as explicit fetish imagery of hoods and whips, she is also a painter who creates leather landscapes and an indie publisher who crafts darkly sexy books.

Tamara is one of those people who appears in person as a manifestation of her own art. She constantly fiddles with sleek dark hair using her equally long painted nails. She likes oversized heavy metal t-shirts and witchy jewelry. Every square inch of her skin is adorned with skulls and weapons, intricately locked together, harsh and graceful. She has my favorite combination of elements — a punk rock dark queen fuck-off look with a quick smile and generous manner.

We sat down on my couch with microphones one afternoon this December to explore the alluring language of the body, and the erotic potential of getting and giving tattoos.

Without hesitation, Tamara lists off the parallels between BDSM and tattooing. She points out that a medical play scene and a tattoo station don’t look all that different, with the black latex gloves and intimidating instruments. Then there’s the element of humiliation and vulnerability: The tattoo artist, like a dominant, is in full control of a compromised and vulnerable body. While she says she’s never met someone with a specific fetish for getting tattooed, she has certainly given “Daddy” or “Owned” tattoos, something that accentuates an existing dynamic.

We discussed the image of the “alt girl,” the porn trope of the otherwise conventionally attractive performer who happens to display “edgy” body mods. Besides a tendency toward more of a wild defiant attitude, alt porn mostly tends to reflect the ways that tattoo culture has been appropriated for mainstream understanding.

As tattooed ladies who know what it’s like to be treated like our bodies are available for consumption, Tamara and I could also really dig into the paradox of permanent adornment. Tamara sees getting tattooed as a way of claiming agency, creating and insisting on your own iconography. In some ways, a tattooed body declares, “look at me, read my symbols, admire my beauty, I am a work of art.” And of course at the same time, a tattooed body says, “Screw you, don’t you dare look at me! I laugh at and welcome pain! I don’t fit in, you cannot interpret me on any other terms than my own, and by the way I am tough as shit and you do NOT want to fuck with me.”

Tamara sees getting tattooed as a way of claiming agency, creating and insisting on your own iconography.
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After the U.S. election late last year, I realized in a moment of clarity that I wanted a pink triangle tattoo on my middle finger. The pink triangle, the symbol used by the SS to designate homosexuals in concentration camps, was reclaimed by ACT UP as part of their Silence = Death campaign in the late 1980s. Tamara happily agreed to mark me with this symbol of defiance. As I watched her dip her machine into a small plastic pot of hot pink ink and delicately take my hand, I knew that this thorny pain was nothing compared to the oppression my queer family has suffered in the name of love.

I felt grateful to be tattooed by someone who doesn’t shy away from darkness, who understands how to harness pain for a purpose.

Listen to Tina’s “Why Are People Into That?!” podcast chat with Tamara Santibañez, a painter, indie publisher—she founded Discipline Press (I am in l-o-v-e with the kinky neo-noir aesthetic)—and tattoo artist renowned for coupling Chicano and fetish imagery here.