negotiation

4 Ways to Tell Your Partner About Your Kink

Kate Sloan

I’ve answered hundreds, if not thousands, of questions about kink in my career as a sex writer and educator – and one of the most common ones, without a doubt, is: “How do I tell my partner about my kinks?”

It’s an understandable thing to wonder. The seemingly obvious answer is “Just tell them,” but if it were that easy, people wouldn’t be asking the question in the first place. What they really mean when they ask this is: How do I conjure the courage to tell my partner about my kinks, given that I know they might react badly?

My best friend, sex educator Bex Caputo, would say: Don’t make it a big deal. If you tell them about your fetish with the same foreboding tone you’d use to tell them you got cancer, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Humans take a lot of cues from each other socially and psychologically, on both conscious and unconscious levels, and so if you disclose your kink in a way that’s fun and flirty instead of scary or self-flagellating, you’re much likelier to get a good response.

But there are a lot of different ways to do that. Let’s talk about some of them. (And please keep in mind that all of these suggestions are just ways to ease a disclosure and start a conversation – not finish it. You should always do some sort of negotiation before trying a kink that’s new to either of you, to make sure you’re on the same page about basic stuff like what’s going to happen, who’s going to do what, what your safeword[s] or safe-signal[s] will be, and what kind of aftercare you’ll each need.)

 

Fill out a Yes/No/Maybe list. This is a classic kink negotiation tool that’s especially useful at the beginnings of relationships when you don’t know each other’s tastes yet, or in established relationships when you’re in search of a sexual shake-up. Basically it’s a list where you both categorize a bunch of different kinks into 4 categories:

  1. Yes, Into = Yes, I enthusiastically want to try this thing
  2. Yes, Willing = Yes, I would be happy to try this thing if you wanted to try it, though I’m not 100% enthusiastic about it myself
  3. Maybe = I might be willing to try this thing under some circumstances; let’s discuss further
  4. No = I absolutely do not want to try this thing

Once you each complete your list, you can compare notes and see where there’s overlap and where there decidedly isn’t, and then go from there.

There are digital tools that make this process easy, like Old.MojoUpgrade.com, or you could pick up a copy of my book and go through it together, adding each kink to your list as you go.

 

“So I had this dream…” If you’re prepared to tell a little white lie to kick off a kink chat with your partner, you could always just say you had a sexy dream about [insert kink here] and then ask a question like:

  • Doesn’t that sound hot?
  • Have you ever tried that?
  • What do you think about that?
  • Would you ever want to try that?
  • Ever wondered what that would be like?
  • Does that seem like something we’d do?

This gives you a bit of plausible deniability, so that if (god forbid) they get judgey or freak out, you can say, “Well, it was just a dream.” (And then maybe decide whether you want to end the relationship and move on, ’cause… yikes.)

 

Porn, erotica, or live cam shows. If you have the type of relationship where the two of you consume sexual media together – whether as a prelude to sex or just for entertainment purposes – then this can be a good way to guide a conversation toward your particular interests.

You could, for example, suggest that the two of you each curate a playlist of 2-3 porn clips that you’ll watch together, or 1-2 erotica stories you’ll read together, alternating back and forth between theirs and yours. Maybe you set a theme, like “things we want to try,” or maybe you both just pick things you like to jerk off to when you’re alone. This is especially great because, when both partners are committed to the exercise, each of you ends up being bravely vulnerable in a way that makes it easier for the other person to do the same.

Sites featuring live webcam models, like FetishCamSites.com, can also provide a media-based jumping-off point for kink discussions. Maybe seeing a cute camgirl spank herself on-screen with a paddle could get your partner curious about paddles, for instance…

 

Sex shop visit. Now, don’t get me wrong: I would not recommend buying a flogger/enema/Neon Wand/whatever for a partner who has never expressed any interest in owning or using one. It’s presumptuous, financially risky (depending on how pricey the item is and whether its retailer has a good returns policy), and can make your sweetie feel pressured to say yes even if they don’t want to.

But, visiting a sex shop together can prompt some productive conversations about sex and kink. It’s easy to make up an excuse to do this, like needing to pick up some condoms or lube, or just walking past a sex shop and saying, “Hey, wanna check this place out?”

If your fetish is equipment-based – e.g. chastity, whipping, pegging – then you can locate that equipment in the store (you may need to check their stock ahead of time if it’s a specialty piece) and then ask your partner one of the questions I recommended in the “So I had this dream…” suggestion above. If your fetish isn’t related to any particular paraphernalia, you could instead pick up a kink book that you know mentions it (perhaps mine!), flip to that page, and ask the same sorts of questions.

 

Of course, there are more ways to communicate a fetish to a partner than just the ones listed here. What methods have worked best for you? How would you want a partner to tell you about their fetish?

 

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

Intimate Intercourse: Hypnokink (Part 1)

Kate Sloan

Hello! Intimate Intercourse is a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who goes by Super Sleepy Dude, about various topics related to sex and kink. Previously we’ve talked about phone sex and Daddy Dom/little girl kink; this time we’re discussing erotic hypnosis! I’ve split this interview up into 3 parts, which will go up over the course of this week. This first part is about how my partner got into hypnosis, what he finds hot about it, and the basic components that make up a hypno scene. Hope you like it! P.S. We’re not getting into the basics of hypnosis very much in this series, and we would recommend that you read the book Mind Play by Mark Wiseman if you want to know more about how to actually hypnotize someone. Content notes for this post: hypnosis (obviously), brief mentions of bondage and impact play.

Kate Sloan: Are you excited to talk about hypnokink?

Super Sleepy: Yes, always! It’s my fave kink!

KS: Okay. So, what is hypnokink, and how does it differ from erotic hypnosis?

SS: Oh, gosh. I don’t know that it does. Hypnokink, erotic hypnosis, recreational hypnosis, are all phrases that are thrown around by similar communities, and there’s a Venn diagram of overlapping people that participate in each of them. It seems to me, from what I’ve read and participated in, that “recreational hypnosis” generally refers to people who do hypnosis for fun, not for therapeutic reasons, but it’s not always sexual. “Erotic hypnosis” is obviously sexual; people doing it for sexual reasons. And then “hypnokink,” I think, is pretty interchangeable – but the distinction between erotic hypnosis and hypnokink seems to be that some people identify with erotic hypnosis as somewhat of a vanilla sex act, and people who identify as hypnokinky, or hypnokinksters, tend to recognize that it is a kink.

KS: Interesting. Tell me about how you originally got interested in it.

SS: Okay. Happily! When I was a kid, I would watch cartoons and movies and stuff, and there’s a lot of ‘80s and ‘90s cartoons and Disney movies – like Scooby-Doo and Aladdin and The Jungle Book – that have hypnosis as a plot device. And always, during those moments – I remember it the most with Aladdin – I would feel very, very intensely interested in those things. Like, I didn’t have the vocabulary for “I am getting turned on,” and I don’t think my dick was necessarily getting hard, but I was very interested: leaning forward, paying attention to that shit. And I remember, in 5th grade, there was a policy in my school where, if you got done all your work, you could pick up any encyclopedia and read whatever you wanted…

KS: [giggling]

SS: What?!

KS: That’s so cute!

SS: You could read whatever. Read the dictionary, or the encyclopedia, or any of the books on the shelf. And I found myself drawn to the “H” one, and to the “HY” one… I was like, “Oh, wow, hypnosis! Weird! What’s up with that?” And then I was incredibly hard and incredibly turned on in the middle of class, and I was like, “Oh, shit, fuck. Close that!” And that’s about the time that I started Googling stuff and trying to figure out why hypnosis, and the idea of mind control and controlling people’s thoughts/minds/bodies with words, was such a hot idea to me.

KS: And you told me that for a while, you didn’t think that it was real, or that you could actually do it, and then eventually you learned how to do it. Can you tell me about that?

SS: Yeah. When I started Googling it, one of the first things that any baby hypnokinkster will likely come upon is the Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive; that’s the big site and it’s been around for a long time, and on the front page of that site, there’s a statement about how it’s all fantasy and it’s not real, and I think that that, combined with probably stuff from Wikipedia and stuff from Penn & Teller’s show Bullshit!, all of which I was consuming at that time, was like, “Okay, well, this isn’t a real thing, and you can’t do it, but it’s still really hot to me, so I’ll read this erotica and I’ll fantasize about it and masturbate to it but it’s probably not something I’ll ever be able to do because it doesn’t exist.”

KS: And then how did you learn how to do it?

SS: Good question. I think a couple of years later, in my late teens/early twenties, I started branching out a bit more – not just reading erotica but finding communities of hypnokinksters on websites like Tumblr and Sleepychat and Hypbook and FetLife and Omegle. People were spread out all over the place, but these places were all overlapping, and if you used the same terms, you could find community in all these places at that time. In spaces like that, in live-chat spaces and on Tumblr where people were posting scene logs and stuff, it was very obvious that people were doing it for real. It wasn’t just fantasy. I think one of the first people that I read was H-Sleepingirl. She posted a lot of scene logs from parties in New England and New York, and the New York hypnosis group on FetLife was constantly posting about how they were doing parties or trancing people. And also, on Omegle, it’s a chat website where you can flag what terms you want to chat about, and I was flagging with “erotic hypnosis,” “hypnokink,” all these terms, and there were people on there that clearly wanted to do scenes, and that’s how I learned to do it, is by chatting with people, and trying stuff I had read about on Tumblr and in other places, and seeing what worked and what didn’t.

KS: That’s gotta be different, doing it in text chat versus doing it in real-time.

SS: It is! It’s super different, yeah. There are people that are more susceptible to being hypnotized in text versus audio versus in person, based on their modalities, essentially, and there are people that can’t go into trance in any of those various things, or for whom it’s less likely.

KS: Tell me what is sexy to you about me being in trance, or about putting me into trance.

SS: Sure. The hot thing about hypnotizing you is that it is a form of control, but it is control of your brain. It’s really hot when I strap you down, because I have more control over your body, or when I hit you, because that puts you into a more submissive place, where it’s easier for me to tell you what to do… but with trance, it’s bypassing, a lot of the time, the conscious mind or the critical factor, so it’s hot because I can suggest that you do things and you’ll respond much more quickly and without a lot of questioning of the commands that you’re given. Also because I can make you do things with your brain that you wouldn’t think to do on your own, or that you would think were ridiculous if you were fully conscious.

KS: This is a basic question: can you explain the components of a hypno scene?

SS: Yeah. Not every scene will have these components, but this is probably generally relevant; most scenes will have them. You’re gonna start with a negotiation of what’s allowed, what’s acceptable. Some people don’t want to be touched during hypnosis, some people do; some people have existing triggers that they don’t want used, some people have existing triggers that they do want used; et cetera. So, a normal BDSM-style negotiation of, like, “What are you consenting to? What is okay? What’s not okay? How are we going to get out of this if we need to? What will you need after this?” That’s step 1. Once you have that, there’s often a concept in hypnosis of something called “pre-talk,” which is talking to your subject, as a hypnotist, about what it feels like to be in trance. So, talking about what that state feels like, giving them – before you’re in the scene – a sense of the fact that they’ve probably been in the state before, and a reference point for what being trancey and being hypnotized feels like. If you don’t do that, it’s much harder to get somebody to that place, if they don’t know what they’re going for, if they don’t know where they’re trying to get. So, in a lot of people’s pre-talk, they’ll talk about “highway hypnosis,” like, “Remember a time when you’ve been driving, and you got to your destination, but you don’t remember all the steps?” or flow state, like, “Remember a time when you thought you were never gonna finish a paper, and then you wrote for hours and hours and got it done, and all of that time in between sort of melted together into this very focused place?” So that’s pre-talk.

KS: Cool.

SS: Once you’ve got somebody comfortable with that, and agreeing that they recognize that place, it’s a lot easier to start an induction, especially if you’ve never done that with them before. Let me just define what that is first: an induction is when you take somebody from an awake, alert state into trance, usually a light trance at first, and then we’ll talk about how to deepen that in a second. Inductions vary pretty widely; there’s a lot of different kinds. Progressive relaxation is the one that a lot of people are very familiar with, which is like, talking about relaxing somebody, muscle by muscle, or muscle group by muscle group, their eyes, their shoulders, their chest, their feet, whatever, every muscle group is getting more and more relaxed, and as their body gets more relaxed, their mind gets more relaxed. The other ones that are pretty commonly used in erotic hypnosis contexts are the Elman induction, which is a multi-stage induction that does some progressive relaxation and some fractionation and an arm-drop and some other stuff… There are rapid inductions, which are commonly used by stage hypnotists or magicians, which are like, handshake inductions, butterfly inductions, stuff like that. There are confusion inductions, which are when you overload the brain with too much information or too much input to process, and in that moment of too much information and input, you can give the brain a suggestion, which is just to let go of all of that, and a lot of people will follow that and just sort of drop. There are others, but those are some examples of inductions.

KS: Okay.

SS: So you have the pre-talk, the induction, and then deepeners, usually. Deepeners are techniques that will take a trance that already exists, a light trance, and then deepen it. There’s a lot of ways to do that. There’s countdowns, there’s deepening patter, there’s fractionation, which is bringing someone up and then down rapidly many times, and every time that you go down, you can drop deeper. And then, when you have somebody who is in a trance and has been deepened, you can do suggestions. So there are short-term suggestions and long-term suggestions. You can install post-hypnotic triggers: things that, after the person is out of trance, will make them react in certain ways to certain stimuli. You can do amnesia play, you can do immobilization, all kinds of different things as triggers or suggestions. You can play with people who are in trance, and you can install suggestions and play with people who are not in trance. Those are both things that are fun.

KS: Yup!

SS: And then there’s an awakener after that, which is bringing somebody out of trance, whether that’s to play with those post-hypnotic suggestions, or even after you’re done playing with them while they’re in trance. And then aftercare, after the scene. Those are the main components.

KS: Thank you.

SS: You’re welcome!

To be continued on Wednesday, when we’ll discuss the difficulties of disclosing a hypnosis kink, our first hypno scene together, what makes someone a good hypnotic subject, trance triggers, hypnotherapy, and some of the sexy things we like to do with hypnosis!