kink

Review: BeMoreKinky BDSM app for couples

Kate Sloan
idk why this one made me laugh so hard but it did, and now it’s the lead image in my review, lmao

What is the BeMoreKinky app?

Available for both iOS and Android, the BeMoreKinky app is designed by and for kinky couples. It’s meant to be a hub for sexual communication between you and your partner, via features like BDSM quizzes, scene planners, end-to-end encrypted chat, guided intimacy exercises, a habit tracker, and a punishment wheel.

You can use it solo to gain self-knowledge about your kinks and desires, but it works best when used with a partner. You can invite them via a special link or code, and you’ll be able to interact through the app, see each other’s list of kink activities you’re open to, and more.

Things I like about the BeMoreKinky app:

  • Conversation-starter: As someone who wrote an introductory book on kink that was meant to kickstart a dialogue between partners, I’ve heard from many readers about the value of an external kinky conversation-starter, especially early on in one’s sexual self-discovery. It can be hard to bring up the things you’re into, and playing with this app together is a low-stress way to raise these topics. You could narrate aloud while one of you does a quiz on your bondage preferences, for example, or discuss your favorite titles/honorifics as you fill out your profiles together – and then just see where the conversation takes you.
  • Lots of kink inspiration: Human sexuality is so vast that there’s always more to discover, and this app is crammed full of kinks, fetishes, and activities for you to peruse and discuss. If you feel like your sex life is in a rut, but you don’t know quite how to shake things up, this app could definitely inspire you in that regard. For instance, lately I’ve been pondering what femdom-y honorific I might like to be called by a new person I’m seeing, and it was interesting to scroll through BeMoreKinky’s list of suitable titles (mistress, goddess, empress, etc.) to see what struck me.
  • MojoUpgrade-style activity matching: Anyone else remember MojoUpgrade, the classic internet quiz that shows you only the activities that both you and your partner said you’d be up for? It’s a great communication tool, and one of the core features of BeMoreKinky is something similar – once you and your partner have both rated several kink activities (which admittedly can be a decent-sized time investment), the app shows you all the activities your partner rated highly, as well as the ones you both said you like. This is a helpful starting point for planning scenes together, particularly with newer partners whose sexuality you’re less familiar with and less comfortable directly asking about.
  • “In the mood” status indicator: In the app’s “profile” tab, there’s a slider where you can indicate to your partner whether you’re “in the mood” or not. This didn’t send me any kind of notification when my wife activated hers – I had to seek it out myself by looking at the “partner” tab – but still a potentially useful functionality for people who struggle with sexual communication.
  • Encrypted chat: The built-in chat feature is end-to-end encrypted, so you can rest assured that your kinky convos are safe and secure. Sure, the same may be true for whatever app(s) you currently use to text with your partner in everyday life, but some people may prefer having a separate digital space for sexy chats, especially if you’re doing some kind of roleplay that benefits from that type of digital compartmentalization. (Sexy tech-support agent roleplay, anyone?!)
  • Tracks habits & rewards: Lots of kinksters enjoy dynamics where one partner monitors the other’s progress in achieving certain goals, whether those are directly kinky (e.g. “shine Mistress’s leather boots once a month,” “edge yourself 3 times before coming”) or more quotidian in nature (e.g. “read a book per week,” “go for a walk every day”). BeMoreKinky has a feature that allows you to assign and track the completion of habitual tasks like these. There are other apps that can do this, sure, but how many of them are built right into the interface you’re already using for kink negotiation and sexy chat? It’s cool to be able to do it all in one place. This feature was admittedly somewhat buggy when I tested it out, but hopefully it’ll get ironed out in future releases.
  • Polyamory features (in beta): There’s a huge degree of overlap between the kink community and the consensual non-monogamy community, so I was glad to see that BeMoreKinky has a “multi-partner mode” in beta currently. You can switch between multiple partners (up to 5!) without any of them being able to see each other’s quiz answers. While this doesn’t cover every possible non-monogamy configuration, it nonetheless makes this app much more polyamory-friendly than most of the comparable apps/sites I’ve seen.
  • Sleek design: It’s a good-lookin’ app, I must say!

Things I don’t like about the BeMoreKinky app:

  • Buggy: I unfortunately encountered a lot of bugs while trying to use this app – chat messages would randomly vanish, new habits didn’t appear until I’d closed/restarted the app, sometimes the app would randomly switch to a different tab without me selecting that, etc. My wife is a software developer so I sympathize with the struggles involved in making an app like this, but these types of issues are particularly frustrating when you’re trying to get into a sexy/kinky mood and would rather focus on flirting than troubleshooting!
  • A.I. integration: There is A.I.-generated stuff all over this app – some of it disclosed, some seemingly not – and it’s characteristically mediocre. Granted, I’m biased ‘n’ bitter, as a human being who writes about kink professionally and has been (shoddily) replaced with A.I. by some of my past clients – but I still find it sad to see A.I. being used for things like kink scene planning. Half the fun of kink is communicating about it – the negotiation, the flirtation, the mutual discovery – and if you use an A.I. tool to do that stuff, you’re denying yourself and your partner the opportunity to get to know yourselves and each other better, and all the delicious intimacy and vulnerability involved in that process. Naturally, I’m also against the usage of A.I. for art/writing/etc. because it takes away work/pay from skilled human creators who could’ve done a better job.
  • Poorly written quizzes: Probably related to the above point, I found many of the quizzes in this app to be confusingly written, repetitive, at least partially inaccurate, and ultimately not all that illuminating. For example, a quiz titled “Are you a giver or receiver?” mostly asked about dominance and submission – a separate concept from giving vs. receiving, as most kink educators could tell you – while a different quiz on impact play essentially just told me that I’m into impact play, which I already knew, rather than offering any insight on how I might explore that further or what specifically draws me to impact.
  • Overwhelming/excessive at times: This app is packed full of so many features that I think it could easily scare off some nervous newbies. I know from working in sex shops that BDSM beginners often feel overwhelmed as-is, because they’ve already battled through layers of shame and stigma just to be able to admit they might be kinky. The sheer number of features in this app could make them feel out of their depth, instead of encouraging them to dip a toe into kinky waters. It also annoyed me that the app only saves the activities you rate if you rate an entire category of activities (e.g. the “strict femdom” category contains 40 activities), so if you have to stop midway through, none of the activities you’ve rated to that point will be saved. This makes the app even more intimidating, because you can’t “microdose” it by just rating a few activities here and there when you have time – you have to commit to going through a long list of them before they’ll save.
  • Not good for trans people: Upon downloading the app, my wife filled out her basic profile, including indicating that she only wanted to be referred to with feminine terms. Shortly thereafter, we tested out the A.I. scene planning feature, and it immediately misgendered her(!!) and made erroneous assumptions about our sexual anatomy. As-is, I would recommend that trans and nonbinary people avoid this app for the time being. I hope better guardrails are put into place in the future, because (needless to say) this type of unnecessary technological misstep could ruin someone’s scene/night.

Final thoughts

I think the BeMoreKinky app is an admirable effort to make kink more accessible to the masses – not everyone is as comfortable yapping about their deepest sexual desires as I am(!), and sometimes an external resource, like an app or a book, can be immensely useful in jumpstarting these conversations.

That being said, I worry about the perils of bringing A.I. into the bedroom with us. Even setting aside more extreme or existential concerns like A.I.-induced psychosis and environmental impact, outsourcing your scene-planning to a robot robs you of the opportunity to practice thinking (and kinking) for yourself. It distances you from your partner in an intimate arena that can otherwise feel soul-affirmingly connective. It introduces the possibility of boner-killing awkward errors, like misgendering your sweetheart or yourself due to a coding oversight. And in this case, it does all this without adding much value that couldn’t be equally gleaned by just having the guts to talk to your partner about sex.

I feel similarly about BeMoreKinky as I did about the Fifty Shades series, which is to say: I’m concerned about damage it may do and misconceptions it may propagate, but at the same time, I’m happy for the people it may help to discover themselves and their sexualities, and I deeply hope that the good ultimately outweighs the bad. Sometimes we have to make such trade-offs in our continuing efforts to, uh, be more kinky.

 

This post was sponsored, meaning I was paid to write a fair and honest review of the app. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

7 Reasons My Book Makes a Great Valentine’s Day Gift!

Kate Sloan

My first book, 101 Kinky Things Even You Can Do, has been out for over 5 years, but I still hear from people regularly that it’s changing their sex lives for the better! (And yes, I do still cry every time I receive one of these emails… What can I say; I’m a sentimental pervert who loves helping other perverts become even pervier!)

Valentine’s Day is coming up real soon, and I know there can be a lot of pressure to buy your partner(s) the perfect gift. You could always go classic – flowers and chocolates, anyone? – but if you’re looking to get your sweetheart(s) something a little spicier, might I suggest 101 Kinky Things? Here are 7 reasons it makes a great Valentine’s Day gift!

1. It’s a conversation-starter

People are always asking me for advice on bringing up kinks with a seemingly vanilla partner. That leap of faith can be super scary, because of the risk of judgment or rejection – so why not let this book do the heavy lifting for you?

If you want, you can even mark certain pages with sticky notes so your partner knows exactly what you’re most curious about when they flip through it. And then you can ask them, “Which kinks appeal to you in this book?” There’s a wide range of activities, from mild (kissing, sexting, massage) to wild (electrostimulation, hypnosis, figging), so just about every reader will be able to find something in here to get excited about, regardless of their level of kink experience.

2. It’s full of actionable ideas for spicing things up

Does your sex life feel like it’s stuck in a rut? Not all ruts are bad, per se – sometimes it’s comforting to have a sex life built around acts you both reliably love! – but more variety often leads to more excitement. There’s an actual neurochemical reason for that: as anthropologist Helen Fisher explains in her book Why We Love, trying new things promotes more dopamine production in the brain, which can juice up your libido. Fun!

It’s a real point of pride for me that Kinky Things isn’t just a theoretical treatise on kink – three specific scene ideas are listed for each and every “kinky thing” in the book, so if you read about something that intrigues you, you can try it pretty much immediately. You don’t have to be a kink expert or do a ton of research for most of these activities, so it’s easy to get started, even if you’re a nervous newbie.

3. It’s fun to read together or separately

Some couples have told me that they enjoy leafing through 101 Kinky Things together, discussing each kink and whether it’s something they’d be willing to try. Some other couples have told me that they’ve each read it separately, maybe marking pages they wanted to ask their partner about, or making notes to discuss together afterward. Either way, this book can be a helpful communication tool and intimacy-booster!

4. It’s far more safety- & ethics-focused than Fifty Shades, etc.

Look, I love kinky erotica as much as the next literary perv, but there’s no denying that Fifty Shades promotes some pretty problematic ideas about kink. Consent contracts, creepy stalker behavior, non-consensual toast-eating… It’s a bit of a mess, ethically speaking! Erotica isn’t necessarily obligated to be ethical – it’s just fantasy, after all – but it can become an issue when (as often happens) someone views sexy media as an instruction manual, when it’s very much not intended as such.

To that end, I think 101 Kinky Things would be good to include alongside any kinky erotica you’re buying for your sweetheart. It addresses the ethics and safety considerations of each kink listed therein, and also contains good general information about basic kink concepts like negotiation and aftercare.

5. It adds to your kinky cachet

Look, I’m just saying… There is a certain type of sex nerd whose eyes would light up if they saw this book on your shelf, either because of its glamorously saucy aesthetic, or because they recognize my name from my podcast or somesuch. So if you buy a copy for your (non-monogamous) darlin’, maybe they can impress their other dates with it, you compersive cutie, you!

(On that note, I once saw a man on Tinder who was reading 101 Kinky Things in one of his photos. Obviously I SCREAMED and asked him out! He turned out to be a very good kisser, as you might expect… and I was struck by the socially intelligent move of “flagging” as kinky by including that photo on his profile!)

6. It’s beautifully illustrated

All these years later and I’m still swooning over the gorgeous illustrations Ewa Żak did for Kinky Things. They show a diverse range of body types doing all kinds of sexy stuff, and they set exactly the right tone for the book: classy-yet-depraved! Some of my faves are the ones for submission, medical play, and corsets… What are yours?

7. You can use it for impact play!

I love a good spanking, so naturally I was excited to try out Kinky Things as an impact implement as soon as the first proofs arrived in my hot little hands… and it turned out to be pretty awesome for that purpose! I’d recommend holding it by the outer edge and hitting someone’s ass with either the front/back of the book or its spine, so as to avoid pokey corners. It’s delightfully thuddy – my fave! Could be the perfect end to a romantic Valentine’s date… or maybe just the beginning? 😉

 

You can buy 101 Kinky Things on Bookshop.org or wherever you get your books! Thanks, babes, and I hope you have a rollicking good Valentine’s Day no matter how you spend it 💖

5 Ways to Ask a New Partner About Your Favorite Kink(s)

Kate Sloan
Or you could do what I do and just flag your kinks/sexuality on your leather jacket… (Photo by mb)

The best advice I ever got was from my late grandmother, who used to say to me: “You don’t ask, you don’t get.”

The more time that has passed, the more useful and true I have found this to be. How could I have known, without pitching them, that the Magic Wand company would happily commission me to make a podcast miniseries about their product? How could I have known that the “Twitter admirer” I later married indeed wanted to make out with me on our first date, if I hadn’t asked her? How could I have found beautiful apartments to live in, rad new publications to write for, or new friends in improv classes, if I hadn’t had the guts to reach out and ask for what I wanted?

I think this advice applies across the board in life, but of course, as a sex-&-relationships nerd, I’m most inclined to implement it in those areas. It’s especially useful to ask for what you want in bed when you’ve just started talking to someone new – whether you met them through mutual friends, over social media, or on the best dating app for LGBTQ in USA – because it can help you quickly filter out people you’re not compatible with, thereby being able to move onto more suitable prospects sooner. No sense in dragging out a doomed connection, if you ask me!

I know asking for what you want is hard as fuck, though, so here are 5 of my favorite tried-and-true methods of raising a beloved kink with a new person:

“Have you ever tried ___?”

I like this because it’s simple, effective, and direct, without being like, “Do you want to ___ with me right now?!” which runs the risk of scaring people off, even if they might otherwise warm up to what you’re asking. When you inquire about someone’s experience level with a particular kink or dynamic, you might learn that they’re horrified by the very idea, or you might instead learn that they’ve tried it several times and have very specific thoughts on how they’d like to do it next. Again, you never know until you ask!

“Have you seen [insert media property here]? What did you think of that scene where ___?”

One of the many joys of consuming great media (and sometimes even subpar media): it can be an easy gateway into conversations we want to have about sex and relationships. Whether you’re ascertaining a new beau’s stance on spanking by citing Secretary, sleuthing out a partner’s feelings on lifestyle D/s by invoking Fifty Shades of Grey, or assessing someone’s views on polyamory through the lens of Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, media references are a fabulously low-pressure way to dig into the conversations you want to be having.

“What do you think some people find hot about ___?”

This one is best utilized when talking to a sex nerd, someone who seems inclined to puzzle through the mysteries of the human sexual psyche with you. You can parlay a theoretical conversation about kink motivations into a more direct and personal conversation about your own kink motivations – if they don’t recoil at the very thought of the kink you’re pondering, which unfortunately can happen sometimes. This is also a good way to gauge someone’s general sex-positivity and empathy toward those with different sexualities from them.

“Would you ever wanna ___ with me?”

A bigger (and scarier) swing than a lot of these more indirect approaches, for sure, but sometimes the moment calls for that! I like this particular phrasing because it’s less urgently pressurey than “Do you wanna ___ [right now/tomorrow/next weekend]?” and it’s bolder and clearer than a vague “How do you feel about ___?” This phrasing also leaves the door open for them to raise any concerns or caveats they may have: “You know, I’d love to, but only if we [keep the lights off/pre-negotiate our aftercare needs/have experimental jazz blaring in the background]!”

“Can I show you a hot porn clip where ___? Then, if you want, you can show me a video you like!”

You’re definitely gonna wanna ‘read the room’ on this one, since some people would be aghast at the mere mention of watching porn with a partner, let alone kinky porn… but if your sweetheart seems open-minded, a co-curated smut screening can be a good way to open up to each other about your desires, without having to use your words. (Although, ideally, you would then use your words when negotiating the specifics of what you want to do together.) And naturally, porn is meant to arouse, so it functions as great foreplay for whatever comes next!

 

What are your favorite methods of bringing up kinks with new people you’re seeing?

 

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

One of the Hottest Things a Dom Can Ever Say to Me…

Kate Sloan

There are plenty of things doms have said to me over the years that reliably send a shiver up my spine. “That’s an order.” “Did I say you could move?” “Good girl.”

But one that I’m thinking about a lot these days (because a wildly hot person has said it to me a few times lately) is: “Duly noted.” Let me explain…

With all the discourse these days about whether A.I. chatbots and porn video games are suitable replacements for human companionship (IMO: no, but you do you!), I find myself frequently pondering: What makes humans uniquely sexy, much sexier than any cheap simulacrum rendered in ones and zeroes?

The answer I come back to again and again is desire. A robot cannot want me. It can perhaps convincingly pretend to want me, but whenever I recall that its desire is constructed, my proverbial boner deflates in an instant. Mutual desire is the bedrock of any sexual encounter I’d want to be a part of, and the whole shebang feels hollow and flimsy without that foundation.

For similar reasons, it’s incredibly hot when a dom says “Duly noted” (or variations thereof) in response to me dropping some info they might want to implement later – like that I enjoy having my hair pulled, or that I sometimes burst into cathartic tears while being praised during a spanking. It demonstrates their desire for me, their desire to make me feel intense feelings in optimal ways – and it also demonstrates their desire to know me better, to understand what makes me tick sexually. I can’t think of many things I find hotter than that.

A robot, by contrast, may well remember things you’ve told it, but its own desires aren’t a factor in deciding what to “duly note” about you. And so I don’t really give a shit what a robot chooses to remember about me. If fucking me is like an adult video game, I don’t want to be ‘played’ by a robot that’s calculating its route based on probabilities; I want to be a fun challenge for a smart, focused human who brings their own turn-ons, talents, and ambitions to the table. (There’s a reason I adore the ingenuity of human speedrunners on Twitch but refuse to watch tool-assisted speedruns, which I find boring by comparison!)

The moment when someone actually employs information they previously “duly noted” – says the exact right thing at the exact right moment, touches the exact right spot in the exact right way – is one of the hottest moments that can ever happen during sex/kink, if you ask me. It communicates, all at once: 1) I pay attention to you and remember things you say, 2) I am astute, clever, and resourceful, and 3) it turns me on to make you feel good. I mean, what could be sexier than that?!

Now, doms, I know I’ve given you a powerful tool here, but don’t go around dropping this line left and right like it’s some kind of secret password… It works best when used judiciously – because, unlike a robot, your brain doesn’t just store information indiscriminately. Your brain picks and chooses what’s worth “duly noting,” and when to put that knowledge into action. And that sharp discernment is what makes you irresistible to subs like me, who want to see you ‘win the game’ fair and square: no cheat codes, no algorithms, just your gorgeously imperfect human body and brain, doing what it does best.

 

Fellow subs, do you also have a weakness for this particular line? Any standout memories related to it? Feel free to sound off in the comments!

 

This post contains sponsored links. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

An Underrated Way to Expand Your Kink Palate…

Kate Sloan

Ever feel stuck in your kinks, like you’re just looping the same fantasies in your head every time you jerk off/have sex, unable to break free from your own patterns?

Trust me, I’ve been there. While I’d never advise you to shame yourself for your desires, sometimes it’s not shame so much as boredom and monotony that make us want to expand our kink palates and palettes. Humans thrive on novelty, after all, and even your all-time favorite treat might leave you wanting more at times. (A lady cannot live on chocolate cake alone, as much as she might want to…!)

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that you can liven up your kink life by playing with people whose kinks differ from yours – ideally people with whom you have some overlap, but plenty of differences, too. As a fetishist friend of mine once put it (while consensually threatening to do a knife-play scene with me!), “I mean, we aren’t looking to be life partners here. Maybe just learn some stuff.”

This resonated with me deeply because, for me, so much of kink is about learning: it’s a lens through which to continually discover and rediscover what interests you, what excites you, and what you’re capable of. And in kink as in the rest of life, we often learn the most from people who are very different from us – because they inspire us to try things we otherwise wouldn’t have considered, and therefore to reveal new facets of our sexualities and selves.

For instance, if I hadn’t met my now-wife, whose biggest kink is erotic hypnosis, I doubt I would have fully realized how much pleasure I get from flow-state-esque headspaces like trance and subspace. Trance allowed me to explore alternate forms of bondage, too – ones that constrained me using the power of my own mind, instead of ropes or chains, which was cool and hot in totally unexpected ways.

It was also through my wife’s love of hypnosis that we discovered my fondness for dollification, bimbofication, and other forms of “intelligence play” – which have been surprisingly healing endeavors for me, as someone whose smarts have long been the load-bearing center of her identity and who sometimes needs a break from carrying that mantle.

So, this week my advice to you is: Find a way to expand your kink horizons by connecting with someone whose tastes are way outside your wheelhouse. Could some new friends at a munch introduce you to your Next Big Thing? Could a random, exhibitionistic Omegle video call free your mind by letting you play a role in somebody else’s fantasy? Could filling out a Yes/No/Maybe list with a current partner lead the two of you down entirely new paths together, that you wouldn’t have stumbled onto without discussing not only your similarities but also your beautiful differences? Only time will tell… and you won’t know until you try! 😉

 

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.