anxiety

Beating the Stigma: Whipsmart Thoughts on Kink and Mental Health

Kate Sloan

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It’s funny to me that many people think of kink as dark, dangerous, and edgy. It can be all of those things, of course. But for me, it’s not scary or mysterious. It’s a key part of how my brain works and how I relate to other people. It’s a sexual interest and also a non-sexual paradigm. And sometimes, it’s a boon for my mental health.

Earlier this year, I entered the last semester of my four-year journalism degree, and found myself unable to cope with the challenges it brought. Newsrooms are an anxiety-provoking place to begin with, and I was also experiencing one of the worst anxious and depressive episodes of my life – so, as much as I wanted to be up to the task, I just wasn’t. Two days in the newsroom were enough to convince me of that: the real work hadn’t even begun yet, and already my heart pounded, my mind shouted self-hating epithets at me, and I found myself thinking everything would just be easier if I walked out in front of a speeding truck.

I spoke to one of my instructors, and she – blessedly – was sympathetic to my cause. We discussed possible accommodations and arrived at the idea that I’d get my final credit by creating a journalistic audio series on a topic of my choice.

Over the preceding months, I’d found that my bad mental health days could sometimes be turned around by an intense spanking, a service-submission BJ, or various other acts of kink. Giving up control to a partner made me feel, ultimately, more in control of my life. So the intersection between kink and mental health was front-and-centre in my mind at that time, and I pitched that as a topic for my audio series. My prof loved it, and so I began.

I spent the next six weeks producing Beating the Stigma. Several local sweethearts volunteered for interviews, and generously lent me their time and energy to discuss this topic on tape. Our conversations ranged from intense to funny to mindblowing, and were often all three. I’m so so grateful to my interviewees for being candid and clever every step of the way.

You can listen to the whole series by clicking here, or you can skip to specific chapters below:

Chapter 1: Introductions

Chapter 2: Pain

Chapter 3: DD/lg

Chapter 4: Dominance

Chapter 5: Safe, Sane and Consensual

Chapter 6: Trauma and Recovery

Chapter 7: Sex 2.0

Chapter 8: Aftercare

I hope this series sparks some thoughts and feelings for you! The process of producing it certainly brought a lot to the surface for me.

No Moment is Unendurable, & Other Life Lessons I Learned From Getting Spanked

Kate Sloan

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Gaining life experience makes me better at having sex, but also, gaining sex experience makes me better at living life. It’s a two-way street.

I’ve talked to you before about the similarities between sex and improv, and one of those similarities is that they’ve both informed my life philosophy. Massively.

Recently I was trying to describe to a friend how I feel when I’m getting spanked – the times when I’m really in the mood for it, braced for it, craving it. I reach a point where the painful rhythm no longer feels like a series of individual impacts: it becomes a wave I’m riding. I feel in control of the ups and downs of my experience, even though I’m bottoming and therefore have given up my power in the context of the scene. I feel how I do when I’ve been running for a while, or gotten into the swing of an intense badminton game, or been kissing someone for so long that my mind goes blissfully blank.

That’s an endorphin high. And it feels like a meditative zen high, too – something like what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” It’s part of what keeps me coming back to the act of spanking, especially when I’m stressed and need a release. Like Jillian Keenan says, yes, spanking feels painful, and difficult, and in some ways unpleasant, but it also feels necessary.

When I first began experimenting with spanking, I would wimp out as soon as it started to actually hurt. I’d tell my partner to stop, feeling like I’d reached my limit, and we’d move on to other things. Over the past few months, I’ve explored this kink more and I can now handle vastly longer, meaner spanking sessions than I could when I started. But it’s not so much that my pain tolerance has increased; I just understand now that pain is okay. My world will not unravel if I experience pain. Some moments will be difficult, sure, but those moments will end. And I will still be okay when they do.

This is also a lesson I’ve had to learn in relation to my anxiety. A favorite mantra of mine (courtesy of author Susan Jeffers) is “feel the fear and do it anyway.” This is one of the simplest, scariest, hugest messages I’ve had to drill into my brain: that most of my fears aren’t based in reality and exist only in my own head. My amygdala might tell me that talking to a cute stranger at a bar or walking into a big party full of strangers is a lion-stampede-level hazard, but it is absolutely no such thing. In the vast majority of cases, I can safely ignore my fear. It’s tricky as hell, and my body and brain will fight me the whole time I’m doing it, but the exhilaration of going through with it is worth the risk, and it’s never, ever as bad as I think it’s going to be.

Alexandra Franzen said it better than I could: “Are you willing to feel temporarily uncomfortable so that you can accomplish something that is permanently amazing?”

When I push through my pain aversion during spankings, I reach that endorphin high – that top-of-the-mountain, good-kink buzz that quiets my mind and pleases my body. I impress my dom, and I get to rest easy knowing I’ve earned it when he tells me I’m a good girl.

When I push through my day-to-day anxieties, I get what Alex Franzen calls “glitter-bombs exploding through my veins.” I feel infallible, badass and brave. I gain a new fear reference, a confidence power-up, and whatever rewards await me at the other end of that courageous thing I did. (A date with a hot new acquaintance? A radio show hosting gig to put on my resumé? A hilarious story to tell at the next TMSG?)

Being brave is the hardest thing I ever do, and it’s also the thing that pays off the most. It’s terrifying, but it’s worth it. It feels impossible, but it’s worth it. It’s painful and awful and risky and reckless, but it’s worth it.

Now, what brave things are you gonna do this year?

12 Days of Girly Juice: 2 Fears Defeated

Kate Sloan

I wanted to write about fears, because anxiety is a big part of my life. It affects me when I’m writing a difficult exam or performing music in front of a crowd, so of course, it affects me when I’m gettin’ sexy, too.

But this was an interesting year of forcing myself out of comfort and into discovery. I try to do that every year, but 2015 was a year where I really felt like I succeeded. Here are two fears I confronted headfirst in 2015…

 

1. Being watched during blowjobs

Oh, I know. I’ve talked your ear off about this before. But it really was major.

In 2011–2012, I went from “crying and hyperventilating at the very thought of giving a BJ” to “enthusiastically going down as long as the recipient had their eyes closed or a blindfold on.” And it was only in 2015 that I finally felt able to give a BJ without caring if the recipient was looking.

Of the five (!!) men to whom I gave blowjobs in 2015, only two received my spiel about “hey, I have a weird thing where I don’t like to be looked at during BJs; would you mind turning the light out/closing your eyes/looking the other way?” And both of those times were first times with the partners in question, so it was normal for me to be nervous.

I even caught myself slyly looking up at a partner while his dick was in my mouth recently, and as basic as that is, I can’t recall ever doing that before. The thought of it always previously gave me sooooo much anxiety about how I looked while giving head (slutty, silly, whatever). It felt like a massive step forward to even be able to exchange those two seconds of eye contact.

And hey, guess what? 2015 also brought the first time I ever gave a blowjob with spectators. Our cuddle-pile and emergency threesome at Playground involved me blowing someone while 1–2 other people looked on. And honestly, it didn’t freak me out at all. I barely even thought about it. I was just excited to have a cute boy’s cock in my mouth.

 

2. Threesomes

I had two threesomes in 2015, which is apparently enough that I now warrant the nickname “Threesome Girl.” (Seriously, someone called me this. People are strange.)

Recently I got into a discussion with some coworkers about threesomes, and one of them said, “I don’t think I’d ever have one. It doesn’t seem like it’d be fun.” This amused me because that’s what I used to think, too. Sex with more than two participants just didn’t seem up my alley. I thought it’d feel less intimate, more scattered, and that one person would inevitably feel left out of the action.

I also questioned whether I’d ever find two people who I was actively attracted to, who were also both attracted to each other. It seemed like a longshot at best.

Both of my threesomes thus far were very impromptu, each happening within a couple hours of being suggested, and I think that’s the only way they would’ve worked for me. Given advance notice, I would have panicked and talked myself out of it. “There are too many ways this could go wrong,” I would have thought. But everything went blissfully right.

There was none of the detachment or awkwardness I had feared. Both experiences felt shockingly intimate – sometimes even moreso than sex with only one person. I felt close to the action even at times when I wasn’t directly involved in it.

And though I had long denounced any threesomes where all three participants weren’t scaldingly attracted to each other, that part was actually fine too. Me and Bex don’t have sex with each other or even kiss, and that was perfectly okay because we were both so into the guy we were boning. Me and Georgia don’t have a particularly sexual connection either, but she nonetheless went down on me like a champ, and we both enjoyed it. I’m learning that there are a lot of complicated factors involved in making a sexual experience feel fun, and white-hot attraction isn’t necessarily mandatory (at least, not for me).

 

What sexual fears did you face in 2015?

Permission to Be Gross: 7 Deeply Unsexy Confessions

Kate Sloan
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Possibly the worst selfie I have ever taken.

I imagine it’s exhausting to be a flight attendant, or a car show model, or any other type of person who has to smile and be pleasant for hours at a time. Being that personable takes tons of energy, and I admire the work that goes into it.

In much the same way, working in the sex-positive field often comes with expectations that you will be “sexy” all the time. I feel a lot of pressure, in both my personal and my professional interactions, to put on a foxy façade even when I don’t feel so foxy.

While I love and admire women who are unafraid to be gross and strange – like Amy Poehler, who famously responded to a criticism of her “unladylike” comedy by snarling, “I don’t fucking care if you like it” – that’s just not me. I don’t have that kind of confidence, I guess. Feeling gross and unattractive makes me feel… well, gross and unattractive.

But I’d like to get more comfortable with that feeling, so that maybe it doesn’t bother me so much when it comes up in the future. So here are 7 very unsexy things about me, posted here with intense vulnerability and blushing and nail-biting but for good reasons. I encourage you to make your own list!

 

1. While I mostly like the way my vag smells and tastes, certain foods affect it in kind of gross ways. Eating sushi – one of my favorite foods! – gives it that strong “fishy” flavor that 1990s hack stand-up comedians so often joked about. I avoid sushi before dates for this reason…

2. I have psoriasis, a hereditary skin condition. Lucky for me, mine is fairly mild. I have it on my scalp, ears, underarms, and a random spot in between my eyebrows (why?!). I use a couple of prescription creams and a tar-based shampoo to keep it under control, but sometimes I’m still flaky/itchy. It ain’t cute.

3. I have a tendency to obsess over people I get romantically and/or sexually involved with. I’m able to keep it under wraps for the most part, so these people typically don’t know I’m thinking about them a lot or looking at their social media pages on the daily, but internally it is a problem and I wish I could fixate less. I think it’s linked to my anxiety.

4. I used to be really sexually selfish and sometimes I still am. I like giving pleasure, but I often don’t unless specifically told/asked to, either because I’m too anxious to initiate it or it just doesn’t occur to me because I’m distracted by my own pleasure. I’m working on it! I want to give more BJs, y’all!

5. I strongly dislike my body most of the time, despite being an advocate of self-love and self-acceptance.

6. I don’t eat well enough or get enough exercise, and I make excuses about both of those things constantly.

7. Sometimes I worry that a lot of my submissive sexual identity actually just stems from sexual uncertainty and insecurity. When you’re paralyzed in fear and worried about what your bedfellow thinks of you, it can be easier to just give up control and let them boss you around; at least then you can feel like you’re “doing something right” instead of fucking up spectacularly.

 

Are there any “gross” or “unattractive” things about you that you’re too embarrassed to talk about? Want to share? It’s kinda cathartic, I promise…

A Tale of Three Blowjobs: Getting Over Penis Terror, Continued

Kate Sloan

My very first post on this blog was about something I termed “penis terror.” Maybe that doesn’t bode especially well as a kick-off to a sex blog… but at the time, it was the main sexual issue occupying my mind.

See, when I was a youngin (by which I mean age 15–18), penises – and men in general – made me very, very nervous. I had a plethora of anxieties and neuroses about male sexuality. I believed men were hard-wired to be sexually aggressive, to put their own sexual desires above women’s, and to judge women’s sexual performance against impossible pornographic standards. And that shit terrified me.

It’s so embarrassing and strange to recount this now, but in my first sexual relationship with a cis guy, I literally cried the first several times his penis was brought up in sexual conversation. I was so fucking nervous and I can’t even explicitly identify, in retrospect, what was making me so nervous. It was just a fear of the unknown, I guess.

I worried I would be bad at pleasing penises, and that my boyfriend would judge me or leave me for it; I worried that touching penises would somehow make me “slutty” or “tainted,” even though I intellectually knew these are bullshit concepts; and, maybe most frighteningly of all, I worried I wouldn’t like penises. I was petrified that I’d turn out to be biromantic but homosexual – because I knew I wanted to date and kiss and cuddle with men most of the time, but I didn’t know if I also wanted to fuck them. And that was a scary, dicey question hanging in the air.

 

But my feelings about penises have transformed monumentally over the years. I crave them, I appreciate them, I write them love songs and gratitude missives. They’re kind of one of my favorite things.

There’s no clearer barometer of my penis-comfort than my attitude about performing oral sex on them. So, for your amusement: a tale of three blowjobs.

 

1.

My journal entry for July 5th, 2011 begins: “Today will go down in history as the first time I ever put a penis in my mouth.” A tad dramatic, perhaps, but it really did feel that significant to me.

I was nineteen years old. My very non-scientific Twitter poll indicates that this makes me a relatively late bloomer. What can I say? Willies gave me the willies. But when I did finally get around to it (with some very gentle prompting from my then-boyfriend), it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be.

Granted, he didn’t come in my mouth that first time, which definitely made it easier to handle. But, overall, I considered it a huge step forward and an even huger relief. I had a major fear reference; I felt invincible.

“Throughout all of this penis stuff,” I wrote in my journal, “I have learned that there are two things I need in order to comfortably jump into a fear: a supportive, loving, respectful environment, and a little push.”

 

2.

After the aforementioned First Penis In My Mouth (and its owner) exited my life, I started to wonder if the same fears would rear their head again when I got another dude into my bed.

I broke a long dry spell by romancing a cute guy from the internet. During the proceedings, he very politely asked if I’d go down on him, and I immediately did, and it was good.

It wasn’t until a couple days later that it occurred to me: Huh. What took me literal months of waffling and wailing with my first serious boyfriend only took one respectful request with a hook-up. I guess I really am over that fear at long last.

The one fellatio-related anxiety that lingered for me, though, was being watched while going down. Maybe it’s linked to my fanaticism over blowjob porn and some shitty internalized ideas about “sluttiness,” or maybe it’s just insecurity about the way I look, but I’ve always hated being watched while giving a BJ.

I explained this to Adorable Internet Hook-up and he seemed to have no problem with it whatsoever. We turned off the light and all was fine and good. But, well, you hear a lot of things about how the visual of a BJ is almost as important for men as the actual sensations. Obviously preferences vary from person to person, but as someone who loves watching, say, Heather Harmon inhale a dick, I totally get the appeal. And I was bummed I still couldn’t be looked at while my mouth was full of cock.

 

3.

Shortly thereafter, I had sex with a… uh, how do I even put this? A friend who I also now like to kiss and have sex with? (Um, obviously I am new to this whole sex-outside-of-relationships thing, but, semantic difficulties aside, it is fucking great.)

When a blowjob became imminent, he grabbed his glasses off the nightstand where he had set them during our makeouts. I asked him what he was doing and he said, “I want to watch.”

For some reason I didn’t even think twice about this. I guess I was preoccupied by the prospect of a cock in my mouth. (Cocks!!!) As before, it took a day or two for my brain to properly process the magnitude of what had happened. I had let someone watch me blow him! And this had previously been one of my biggest sexual insecurities!

As we were putting our clothes back on afterward and getting ready to leave, the guy even said to me that he thought I’d look hot giving him a beej on my knees, and instead of reacting with terror, I just giggled with delight. Because, yes, this is a thing that I would like to do…

 

Did you have any anxieties or insecurities to deal with when you first started giving oral sex? How did you overcome them?