fear

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?

Yes Yes Yes And: Fear is Your Friend

Kate Sloan

Sometimes I feel like this blog is ultimately just a slow reveal of all my nerdy quirks. Like a striptease, except instead of my naked body, you get to see more and more dorky facts about me. Like how I love Sherlock fanfiction, keep statistics on my sleep cycles, and think speculums are cool.

One of my more impassioned nerdy interests is improv. I studied it for years in high school, played on a competitive team, and even coached a troupe for a year. I don’t do much ‘prov these days, though I do still go to shows and fangirl in the improvisors’ general direction.

Lately I’ve been listening to the Backline podcast and it has reignited my improv obsession in full force. And as I listen, I’m increasingly aware that my improv training has actually helped me out sexually, in more ways than one. So I’m launching a little blog series called Yes Yes Yes And, to dissect the parallels between improv and sex. (If you’re wondering why the hell this feature is titled that: it’s a dumb improv joke that makes me smile. “Yes, and” is the guiding principle of improv, and “Yes yes yes!” is, uh, you could say, a guiding principle of good sex.)

Sexprov lesson #1: fear is your friend.

If you improvise, you will be scared. There’s no way around it. My coach used to tell me, “Jump into the fear.” Rob Norman says, “The fear never goes away; you just start to like it.”

Not only do you start to like it; you also learn how to improvise through your fear, instead of panicking or freezing up. You get better at being in the moment and staying present, so that even if adrenaline is flooding your system, you can still string sentences together, follow a narrative, listen to your scene partner, and generate new ideas as you go along.

Fear helps you grow. It pushes you. It keeps you on your toes. It shines a spotlight on your struggles so you know what areas to try to improve upon. It’s not inherently a bad thing; it’s just a signal, a tool. Frank Sinatra once said he probably wouldn’t want to keep performing if he no longer experienced stage fright, because what would be the point?

When it comes to sex, obviously, there are situations where fear is bad. You should never have sex that genuinely scares you, because that wouldn’t be consensual. Sex should feel positive and exciting.

But sometimes, fear is just excitement with the brakes on. You can feel the difference between “good fear” and “bad fear.” If it’s bad, your whole body and your deepest intuition all scream “NO” – but if it’s good, some part of you feels exhilarated and intrigued. Your apprehensive adrenaline rush is accompanied by breathless what-ifs and desperate wishes. The needle on your internal meter trembles a little closer to “Fuck yeah!” than it does to “Hell no!”

I know from firsthand experience that getting over sexual fear is worth doing. There was a time when even the thought of touching a penis made me want to vomit from anxiety. But when I actually started to do it, I realized it was lots of fun. And from there, I came to recognize that if I could get over that fear – a terror that had, at various times, made me cry, panic, and consider a life of celibacy – then I could truly do anything.

Doing scary shit gives you a “fear reference” for tackling bigger and bigger challenges. Any time you encounter a scary new situation, in or out of the bedroom, you can remind yourself, “Hey, I did [that terrifying thing], and it turned out great. I can do this, too!”

You will often be surprised at how delicious it feels to do shit that makes you nervous. Once you buck up and do it, you feel like a goddamn superhero. And you’ll probably have a hell of a lot of fun in the process.

Have you ever overcome a sexual fear? Have you embraced fear as a positive motivator in your life, sexually or otherwise?