Julia Shaw

And that is wild to me, because if you look at research on

sexual fantasies and kinks, a lot of people have at least one.

So a lot of people, BDSM being the most common, are engaging in or interested in BDSM.

So things like choking or things like restraints or being degraded or doing the degrading of other people in bed, consensually, of course, that is something that a lot of people fantasize about and a lot of people engage in.

And so these

kinks and these fetishes, they are much more commonplace than we sometimes think about them as.

Now, on the other hand, we obviously need to be careful not to assume that because in pornography, BDSM is almost ubiquitous, it feels, that that means everybody wants this.

That is absolutely not the case.

But we also don't want to marginalize it and say it's almost nobody.

It's somewhere in between.

And the main thing is always just to ask and to have open conversations about what it is that people actually want in bed and to make sure you have things like safe words.

So

putting in the restraints to make sure that these interactions are safe and consensual, and then being able to explore.

And I mean, there's everything from pup play, where you dress up as a puppy and you engage in either just general frolicking or sexual behavior, to other things like blood play, which is when you pierce the skin to release some sort of blood that can be scratching, that can be cutting, that can be of yourself or your partner, that can be this...

idea of, you know, I don't know, it's this taboo thing you're doing together and it's sexy in its own way.

And so everybody has their own versions of what they find attractive and rubbing up against people, you know, sort of unsuspecting, pretending that someone's sleeping.

There's this wide range of things.

And I think people also feel often deeply ashamed about the things that they are interested in.

And I think that is also really sad because it makes it more likely that people are going to not be able to live that part of themselves and also that they think there's something wrong with them.

And that can spiral into things like, am I evil?