Cosmopolitan By Cheryl Wischhover Domina Elle is a former escort and current dominatrix who specializes in balloon fetish play. (Its practitioners are called “looners.”) She is also a sex workers’ rights advocate. I like to call myself an adult play facilitator. The type of work I do is much …
Bedford & Bowery BY NICOLE DISSER When I first arrived at the French Institute Alliance Francaise (FIAF) I filed into one of the few empty stadium seats left save for the neck busters at the very front. The place was packed for The Art of Sex & Seduction: Ceremonies of …
The Daily Beast by Kate Briquelet In a clever sting operation, the feds nabbed creeps looking to buy ‘sex slaves’ for their home dungeons. In March 2014, Steven Currence gave undercover agents a grand tour of the dungeon hidden inside his Montana home. The subterranean hellhole contained a heavy …
The Elephant in the Hot Tub By Russell Stambaugh For Kink Aware Professionals. Like everything on this blog, context matters. So if you find yourself acutely uncomfortable with a client’s material, what you do depends on when, where, and how it comes up. Some of these suggestions will not be …
The Huffington Post by Sandra LaMorgese Ph.D. Whenever we hear “sex education,” most people imagine a high school health class teacher outlining the basics: monthly periods, the human development cycle, birth control, and maybe an uncomfortable informational film. However, the topics in these classes barely skim the surface of the …
NY Mag By Matthew Hutson Fifty Shades of Grey has shaped a whole culture’s view of BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism). In that fictional world, a powerful man plays out his sadistic fantasies as a powerless woman indulges her masochistic ones. This narrative demonstrates what’s …
Archer By Renee Glover The wildly varied world of BDSM can provide a safe space to communicate, play, and release the pressures of everyday life. At pre-dawn on a Monday morning more than 20 years ago, two friends and I sped towards a four-hour cleaning job that had to …
Gay Iceland by OLAV VEIGAR DAVÍÐSSON Iceland is the only Nordic country that still lists BDSM as a mental illness. A clear example of thoughtlessness, says the chairman of the Icelandic BDSM association. Members want the government to acknowledge BDSM as normal sexual behaviour. Not categorize it as a sickness. …
PopSugar by Maya Jordan I was once a little girl too with little girl dreams. I wasn’t always a sex-positive, independent diva of the highest order. I just happened to have some divergent imprinting at an early age that suggested that the traditional family dynamic (married to a dude with …
The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom launched the Consent Violations Survey in 2014 to gather details about consent violations in a BDSM context. We asked about: the severity of the violations, who is being violated, where they were violated, the relationship and intent of those involved, the power dynamic at …