Episode 367: Five Things Everybody Can Learn From Kink
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This is the Sex and Psychology Podcast, the sex ed you never got in school and won't get anywhere else. I am your host, Dr. Justin Leigh Miller. I am a social psychologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author of the book, Tell Me What You Want, The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. Whether you consider yourself to be kinky or not, there's a lot that all of us could stand to learn from the kink community that could be beneficial to our sex lives. So that's what we're going to be talking about in this episode.

We're going to explore five things that everyone can learn from kinksters that can help you in cultivating safer, healthier, and more pleasurable sexual experiences, including how to unburden yourself from sexual shame, how to improve your sexual communication, and how to bring more playfulness into sex. Along the way, we're also going to dispel some common myths and misconceptions about kink.

My guest today is Claire Pearlman, a queer Jewish sex therapist and educator living and working in the Bay Area. Her work with clients, workshops, podcasts, and social media focuses on making sex education more accessible and normalizing sexual pleasure and play in people's lives. You can find her at Sex Clarified on all platforms and at sexclarified.com. This is going to be another fascinating episode. Stick around and we're going to jump in right after the break.

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Hi, Claire, and welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for joining me. So we're going to be talking all about kink today, including things that all of us can learn from the kink community. So it seems like a good starting point would be to first clarify how you define kink. So as a sex therapist, what does the term kink mean to you?

Yeah. So I think it encompasses anything that is unconventional or maybe taboo type of sexual practices. And that can range from power play, impact play, role play, a whole host of other types of play, basically anything that is kind of non-normative.

Yeah, so kink, I like to think of it as a very broad umbrella term. It encompasses, of course, BDSM, but it's not only about BDSM. It also includes fetishes and lots of other things as well. So when we're talking about kink, it's a pretty big term, but it's also a pretty subjective one, right? Because what's kinky to one person might seem pretty vanilla to the next, right?

Yes, that is one of my favorite debates is where do we start in what kink is? I had this debate the other day about like pegging. Where does pegging go into or even anal sex in general? And some people would find that very, very kinky. And other people think, oh, yeah, that's no big deal. You know, they featured pegging on Broad City and now it's mainstream. So it's no longer kinky.

Yeah, I think kink is also one of those terms that kind of evolves. You know, what is considered to be maybe more of a fringe activity or a non-mainstream activity can become pretty mainstream over time, right? And then that sort of shifts the boundaries and definitions of what we're talking about when it comes to kink. So yeah, it's a big, fluid, and flexible term.

Yes, and that's kind of why I love it so much. So I wanted to ask if you could share some things that people get wrong about kink. So for a lot of people, kink immediately conjures up certain images that they've seen in the popular media, maybe what they've seen or read about in the Fifty Shades of Grey series, which can give the impression that kink is always this very dark and brooding activity and that every kinky person has this big-ass dungeon in their house, which is far from reality.

So what do you see as some of the biggest myths and misconceptions about the world of kink? I think one of the biggest myths is some of the ones that you mentioned, but also that like it has to do with pain all of the time and that it's just kind of whips and chains and as you said, dark and brooding. And I think that one of the things that people miss about kink is that it actually can be really playful and it can be...

a way to release a lot of shame, actually, that you might have around whatever sexual act you're interested in. And it can also be a corrective experience because you can replay sexual things within the boundaries of kink, within a

healthy, consensual, agreed upon, you can stop any time container. And I think that people don't consider kink as a way to heal. So I think that that's one big misconception and that also it all has to do with pain. I know a lot of really kinky people who don't like pain at all and they are still huge kinksters. So I think that that is a really important piece of it.

Yeah, I completely agree. And even for people who might incorporate pain into their sexual play, oftentimes the pain is very symbolic as opposed to being, you know, very intense, right? So, yeah, that's definitely a big misconception. And, you know, some of the other ones that come to mind for me would be the idea that if you're submissive, right?

in a kink context that that necessarily means that you don't have any power, right? I think people often make that mistaken assumption when they're thinking about what it means to take on a dominant or submissive role. And I think, you know, some of the other things too would be that there's often this assumption that anybody who's into kink necessarily has a history of trauma. And while some kinksters do have a history of trauma, you don't have to have a history of trauma to be into kink, right? So yeah, lots of things people get wrong here.

Yeah, I actually think that's such a good piece of it is that anyone can be into kink and that it doesn't, it also doesn't mean that like you're super weird in some way. I think of kink as a,

an adult playground. I mean, I think of sex as an adult playground, but I think that kink just incorporates even more play. So I think it really puts us all at a disadvantage if we think that kink is only available to people who have like had challenges sexually or otherwise.

Yeah. Kink is for everyone. And if my research on sexual fantasies has taught me anything, it's that we're all a little bit kinky in some way. And even if you don't identify as kinky or think of yourself as kinky, odds are you probably have fantasized about something kinky before at some point along the way. Yes. Or it hasn't been available to you. I know that

I have spoken with people who like very strictly identified as vanilla, like not into kink at all, which is totally great. And then when they were offered a style of kink that they were interested in, they were like, oh, actually, maybe I could be into that. And then we're able to grow from there.

Yeah, you know, as I've said on the show many times before, sometimes you don't know what you like when it comes to sex until you try it or until some new opportunity comes your way that maybe you hadn't thought about trying or exploring before. And it can also depend on who your partner is at that particular point in life. They might introduce you to something.

activities or things that you might try together. So yeah, your sexuality is something that can evolve and change significantly over the course of your life. And you might grow from being somebody who was very vanilla into being somebody who's pretty kinky, but it can also go the other direction. You know, people can start out very kinky and they can become less kinky over time. You know, sexuality goes off in lots of unpredictable ways.

Yes, 100%. I think the last thing that I just thought of that is a big myth around kink is that everyone wants to be tied up. When I talk to people about kink, they think immediately of shibari, which is about ropes and being tied up. And I do not think that you have to be into ropes or being tied up in any way to be kinky.

Yeah, and I completely agree with that as well. Yes, some people who are kinky are very much into rope play and bondage, but others aren't. You know, again, kink is a big term, means a lot of things. Yes. So let's talk about things that everyone can learn from kinky people about how to have better sex. So you published a list of five things that you wished everyone knew and would apply in their own approach to sex. So let's go through them one by one.

The first one on your list is negotiation. So break this down for us. What do you mean by negotiation and what does that look like in practice? Okay, so this is one of my favorite topics. I am so excited we're talking about it. I think that what makes negotiation

The way that people approach kink really special that everyone can benefit from is that when we are doing it in a safe way, we are being very intentional about it when we're approaching kink scenes. So the session, the playtime. And

I want everyone to be this intentional and be able to think about their sex in a more expansive way, which I think kink does for us. That's not saying that you have to have a sit down two hour conversation before every time that you have sex. But I think that a lot of these pieces we can learn from the kink community and the way that people approach kink. So the first one is negotiation. And what I mean by that is kink.

Sitting down and having a discussion about what you are excited about in the play, what you are not excited about, what the hard limits are, what the boundaries are, and how to achieve what you are both excited about and where that Venn diagram kind of overlaps.

And the reason that this is so important in kink is that we are working with things that potentially can be dangerous, right? Or that can go into a harmful territory. And so to be really safe and hold that container about it, we want to make sure that we know where the limits are and what people are excited about within those limits. And I think that vanilla sex is not

given to us as we should be discussing it. Like there's this myth that vanilla sex should just like happen and that it should just feel really good without even discussing it. But one of my favorite things to tell people is that we should be discussing sex and it should be outside of the bedroom so that you're not doubly naked.

And so when you're discussing sex with all your clothes on outside of the bedroom, it can be a really playful, fun conversation about what you're excited about. So that's what I think that negotiation, like that piece is so important and can be brought into any kind of sex that we're having.

Yeah. And I think all too often there isn't any of this negotiation outside of kink contexts, right? There's sort of this assumption that, you know, you're going to be mind readers and you're going to know automatically what the other person is into and you don't need to discuss things beforehand because you're not doing anything.

wild and crazy or kinky or anything like that. But the reality is that we all need to establish our boundaries. We can't just assume that we know what our partners are into and what their hard limits are and what it is that they enjoy. That's how sex can kind of go off the rails and how we can have difficulty establishing positive, pleasurable experiences, right? You need that communication piece. It's absolutely essential. That's how we can guarantee a bad time.

without having any communication about it. And so I think what happens is with kink, people want to be really careful. And so ideally we're having those negotiations and they are clear and they continue to happen even if you've played with that person before, right? Or even if you've played with that specific dynamic with that person before. But I would love for people to bring this into their entirety of their sex life, even if they're kinky, to do it to their non-kinky sex as well, to negotiate about it.

Yeah, and I think one of the things that sometimes holds people back from having this negotiation or this discussion beforehand is sort of the worry that just by virtue of talking about it beforehand, that you're going to take all the fun and passion and excitement and spontaneity out of it.

But I think that's the wrong way to look at it, you know, because you can still have very fun, pleasurable, exciting sexual experiences that you've discussed beforehand, right? It doesn't have to sap all the fun and energy out of it. It just makes it so that it's going to be safer and more pleasurable for everyone involved.

Yeah, I fully agree. I think about it as going to a really nice dinner and I will consistently tell my clients, like, you probably talk about the really nice dinner that you're excited about to go to, right? You're talking about what you're going to wear. You're talking about when you're going to leave, what you're going to order, what I'll

What non-alcoholic drink you're going to order with it. And did that take away any of the sweetness of that experience? Probably not. It actually probably made it better because you knew what to expect and you were gaining that anticipation about it. That's a great way to think about it when people have a little bit of resistance around negotiating sex prior to having it.

Yeah, I think building anticipation is a great way to frame this. And also another way that you can think about this as well is that when you're discussing things beforehand, you can also potentially use that as a form of dirty talk, you know, a way to try and build arousal and make the sex that you're going to be having even spicier than it was otherwise going to be. Yeah.

So the next thing on your list is checking in throughout, which I think is a really important one. So, I mean, a lot of us have heard that kinky folks pre-negotiate everything they're going to do in advance. So they might assume that this means you don't need to check in because everybody's already agreed to everything. But that's not the case. So just because you've discussed something in advance doesn't mean that anything is fair game. So tell us a bit about the importance of checking in.

Yeah, so I think that checking in throughout has to do with the fact that consent is ongoing and that even if we consented to something prior to the sex,

If when it's happening, we get a different feeling and we decide that actually that is not feeling good or where I thought my limit was actually isn't there and it's coming up faster than that, that is really essential to having a great time in kink. And there are actually traffic light systems within kink, the red, yellow, green system. And people do this differently, but you can use those traffic light names to

the colors to tell your partner how much further they can go with whatever boundary they are hitting, not physically hitting, maybe sometimes physically hitting, but metaphorically. And, and,

That is a system that is built into the idea of playing and kink. And I think that it could be so beneficial for everyone playing because things can always shift throughout having sex. What you thought might feel really good that day might not feel really good that day because you had a big meal or your body is just rancid.

working differently or you actually really need to pass gas. And so that position doesn't feel good. And I think that being able to have a clear flow of communication throughout sex can make it so much more pleasurable.

Yeah, this has me thinking about something I've said many times before, which is that I don't think safe words are only for kink and BDSM activities, right? I think it can be helpful to have safe words for any kind of sexual activity because it's a way of clearly communicating and expressing to your partner that something has exceeded your limits and that you want to stop. And the benefit of safe words is that sometimes it's very hard to say the word no immediately.

And sometimes it's easier to invoke a safe word or people sometimes feel more comfortable doing that. And I think that this can come in handy in all kinds of sexual situations. Like, for example, let's say you and your partner are going to engage in a threesome or some other kind of group sexual activity.

Having a safe word can be a very helpful thing in that situation because oftentimes when people aren't very experienced with group sex, they have this fantasy in their mind of how it's going to go and what it's going to be like, and they think it's going to be great. But then they get into that situation and they start feeling all these emotions that they didn't expect to feel. Like maybe they feel intimidated or anxious or they start to get jealous or insecure, right? So

All kinds of things can come up, and this can be in any kind of sexual encounter, not specifically just in the context of, say, threesomes or group sex. But yeah, having some kind of exit strategy or safe word can be a very helpful way of navigating sex and making sure that your boundaries are respected. A thousand percent. Do you have a favorite safe word that you encourage people to use?

I mean, I have heard so many different safe words over the years. And I think it's ultimately about sort of like what feels comfortable to the individuals involved. Like, for example, I have some friends who are swingers and their safe word is lasagna, right? Because I love that. It's a word that's just otherwise not going to come up in the context of sex for the vast majority of people. Right. So it makes it pretty clear how your partner is feeling if they start saying lasagna in bed. Yeah.

I love that. I had an ex whose safe word was just safe word. And I really appreciated that. I thought that was pretty funny and also on the nose. So number three on your list is aftercare. So what does aftercare mean? And can you give us some examples of what this might look like in practice?

Yes, aftercare might be one of my favorite points on this list because I think that it is a highly missed step both in kink and in any other kind of sex. And aftercare is really just what it means is checking in with someone once the sex is completed. And that doesn't mean once someone has had an orgasm necessarily. It is once the scene is finished, once you are

finished playing with whatever that ending is. And it might just be once you look at each other and say, okay, like, do we feel like we're ready for a pause here and want to stop? Maybe we'll get back to this later. Maybe not. And I think that in those moments, especially when you're doing kink, because you can have this like really intense scene, maybe you are beating each other up consensually, you want to be able to connect.

And you want to be able to remind that person how much they mean to you, how much they are a human and not just someone you are beating up consensually. And it can also be so important after having any kind of sex, vanilla sex with a long-term partner, with a one-night stand, because all kinds of feelings can come up when we're having sex with people. And to be able to check in with someone and say,

how they felt about it, just connect with them in a kind of like calmer way than however you were having sex can be so, so beautiful. I once had a partner who loved to do a sexit survey and

And I thought that was a great way of doing aftercare. And so they used to ask, once the sex was finished in the aftercare, we were cuddling and they would do this with all their partners. They asked, you know, what did you love about that sex? What would you like less of next time? And is there any other feedback that we want to talk about with the sex?

And it was so nonjudgmental and just so compassionate and also made the rest of our sex life better because we would consistently talk about the sex that we had to then continue the rest of our sex and just make it that much better. And I loved that. So I think a sex survey as an aftercare is great. I think also cuddling is

cleaning each other up, taking a shower together, maybe eating a snack together, maybe holding hands, maybe watching TV together, whatever feels connective and just kind of like calming to finish out the whole scene, I think is a great way to do aftercare.

Yeah, so aftercare can look like a lot of different things. And I love this idea of a sex it survey, right? Because it's a great time to really continue your conversations about sex and to figure out, you know, what went well, what didn't, what can we do differently next time. And it's a way that you can start to really try and maximize everyone's pleasure because it's a natural prompt to really talk about it and how you might want to approach things differently in the future.

Now, number four on your list is self-acceptance, which I think is so important no matter whether you're kinky or vanilla. In my own research on sexual fantasies, I find that a lot of people struggle with self-acceptance around their sexual interests and desires. And it doesn't matter what they're turned on by, it's a common issue in general. And what seems to be key is thinking that what you fantasize about is uncommon.

So I actually asked people in the research to estimate how common they think their fantasies are in the population. And what I see in the data is that the rarer people think their fantasies are, no matter what that fantasy is, the more shame, guilt, and embarrassment they feel about it. So tell us a bit about self-acceptance of our sexuality. And I'd also love to hear if you have any some tips on how we can start down that journey of self-acceptance.

Yeah, I think those are such good points because I see this in my office with my clients all of the time. And I love to tell my clients before we even start working together that nothing scares me. And I have probably seen it before. And part of that self-acceptance journey is understanding that what you're into, probably a lot of other people are into. And

if it is accessible to look up porn around it, you can probably see that there is a lot of themed porn around whatever you are interested in. And that to me is very normalizing because it's,

That means if you're interested in it, someone else was interested in it enough to make porn around it. Other people are consuming it. And so therefore, it is a pretty normal fantasy or whatever you're interested in. And even if there's not a lot of content on there about it, that doesn't mean that people aren't interested in it. That might just mean that it hasn't become mainstream enough to get into the porn worldview. But...

Self-acceptance, I think, goes such a long way in any kind of sexual activity and really in engaging in any kind of life. I think that we could all use a large dose of self-acceptance because when we are being so vulnerable with people by sharing our body with them, our emotions, our deepest fantasies, and the things that turn us on,

That can be so difficult to do if you are then layering shame on top of that or layering self-criticism on top of that. And so if we are able to come into the sexual arena celebrating ourselves, or if that doesn't feel accessible, just feeling neutral about ourselves. But the thing I want to emphasize the most is that

criticizing ourselves is not going to make for a pleasurable sexual experience, no matter what kind of sex you're engaging in. And I know that

Everyone in my office has struggled with it. I have. Everyone I know has struggled with it because that's just part of our culture. I mean, we live in a very sex negative culture. And so it's hard to get out of teenage hood without feeling some kind of shame around sexuality. But if you can, my best advice is to release that as much as possible. And I'm

I think one of the best ways to do that is just reminding yourself that whatever you are into is totally okay. And just like your work with sexual fantasies, that it doesn't necessarily mean you have to engage in it just because you're into it. Mm-hmm.

And that if you're into it, most likely someone else has also thought about it. We are so different and unique in so many ways. And we are also so connected as humans. And I really believe that most of us have crossed paths on some kind of connective level. And that might be the thing that we fantasize about.

Yeah, you know, and also odds are, even if let's say you're in a relationship and your partner doesn't share this fantasy that you have, there's a good chance that there are other fantasies that you can both be into. You know, most people don't have just one fantasy. And so that's not necessarily the end of the road. And something else I often like to recommend is if, you know, you're talking to your partner about your fantasies and they're not into it.

but think about building a custom fantasy together. So take the fantasies that you have and strip them down to their core erotic themes. Like what are the emotional needs and sexual needs that are being met by this fantasy? So what is it that you really want and need sexually? And then once you've identified those themes,

You can then take them and put them together and build them in a way that's going to meet everybody's needs in a custom scenario. And it might not necessarily look like the exact fantasy that you picture in your mind, but it can still tap into those deeper needs that you have. I love that. Build a fantasy, TM. That's where we're going as adults instead of Build-A-Bear. Okay, I'm going to open the Build-A-Fantasy store. I'll go.

So the final thing on your list is playfulness. And this goes back to my earlier comment about how a lot of folks think that kink is always this dark, brooding and serious activity. But as a previous guest on the show, Stephanie Gerlich once said, kink can also be very light and colorful and playful.

And I also like the way my friend Midori describes kink and BDSM. She talks about it as joyous childhood play with adult privilege and cool toys, right? So playfulness is a fun way to think about it. But tell us a little bit more about this idea of playfulness and why you think it's important for all of us to make sex a little more playful.

Yes, I am obsessed with all of those quotes. That is exactly how I think about kink and also how I think about sex in general. I really think that sex is an adult playground and sex being our adult playground, we're

means that we get to bring our most joyful, playful selves to it. It also means maybe we have been on the playground and we've gotten hurt before, we've fallen off the slide, we have gotten into a fight with another person on the playground, and that can kind of make the playground not feel as good. However, we return to the playground because we know that

it is worthwhile to engage in this play. And I think if we were all able to take

take a deep breath before engaging in sex and understand that if we're going to approach it as play, that means that we're allowed to make mistakes. That means that things are allowed to sometimes not turn out the way that we had hoped. And while we're sliding down the slide, it's too hot of a day and then our thighs get a little burned and that didn't feel as good as we thought it was going to, or it didn't feel as good as it did last week when it was less hot outside. If we're able to take that kind of more flexible approach, then we're going to be able to make mistakes.

We will all have a much better sex life. And I think that in kink, because you are often trying on these other roles, you are doing role play, you are playing within a different scenario, you are engaging in specific power play or dirty talk or using toys, you

That already creates a sense of playfulness and lightness that other sex is not necessarily bringing into it as concretely. But I think that we can take those benefits from kink and apply them to the rest of our sex lives and make it all so much sweeter.

Yeah, I completely agree with everything you said. And I think you came up with a really great list here of things that everyone can learn from the kink community. But in preparing for this show, I thought of one additional one that might be good to insert in this conversation, which is the concept of risk-aware consensual kink.

And the idea here is that kinky folks recognize that no sexual activity is 100% safe and that it's crucial for people to fully understand the risks. So from this perspective, there's no such thing as safe sex. There's only safer sex.

And I think this is a view we would all benefit from adopting because all sexual activity carries some risks, whether it's physical or emotional. And I think the emotional risks are often unacknowledged and something we don't talk about nearly enough. But I wondered if you could talk for a moment about this idea of risk-aware consensual kink and how adopting this view more broadly could help all of us to have safer and healthier sex.

Yeah, I love that addition. I think that's really, really important. And I think that that brings kind of all the concepts together, that part of why it is so important to intentionally engage with all of these concepts

is because there is an inherent understanding and an agreement that sex does not always go as planned and that life doesn't always go as planned. And so if we're able to hold that and understand that, we can give ourselves more grace around that

the difficulties, the challenges that happen within sex, any kind of sex, kinky sex, vanilla sex across the spectrum. And we can give our partners more grace around the challenges that come up.

And I think that when people are engaging in kink, they understand that they are raising the potential for challenges to arise more easily, more excessively, more often. And I think that there is a myth that vanilla sex doesn't include challenges or difficulties. But if we could all take that approach and if we could approach our vanilla sex, any

have some sort of risk attached to it. And most likely it involves some sort of risk potential. We would benefit from having the discussions upfront about what we might want to do if things don't go the way we had hoped and how we want to be cared for afterwards and how our partner wants to be cared for afterwards.

Yeah, I think this is all amazing information and I appreciate you sharing it. And I'm really looking forward to continuing our conversation in the next episode and busting even more sex myths. Thank you so much for this amazing conversation, Claire. It was a pleasure to have you here. Can you please tell my listeners where they can go to learn more about you and your work?

Yeah. Thank you so, so much for having me. It was really lovely. You can find me at sex clarified spelled normally with a D at the end on all platforms. My website is also sex clarified.com. I have a sub stack, which is where all of these articles live. And if I sound like a type of therapist that you want to work with, I would love to work with you. If you are based in California, that's where my license is. And you can find all that info on my website.

Great. And I'll be sure to include links to all of that in the show notes. Thank you again so much for your time. I really appreciate having you here. Thank you. Thank you for listening. To keep up with new episodes of this podcast, visit my website, sexandpsychology at sexandpsychology.com or subscribe on your favorite platform where I hope you'll take a moment to rate and review the show. If you listen on Apple podcasts, please consider becoming a sex and psychology premium subscriber to enjoy ad-free listening for just $3.99 a month.

You can also follow me on social media for daily sex research updates. I'm on Blue Sky and X at Justin Laymiller and Instagram at Justin J. Laymiller. Also, be sure to check out my book, Tell Me What You Want. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.