Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast: Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, and special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support.
Hello friends, and welcome in this episode of Insights at the Edge, our guest is Stefani Goerlich. Stefani is a certified sex therapist and a master social worker who specializes in working with gender, sexuality, and relationships. She’s a sought-after clinical supervisor, media consultant, and conference presenter who has appeared in national media ranging from CNN to the Washington Post. Stefani is the award-winning author of the professional books, The Leather Couch: Clinical Practice with Kinky Clients, and its advanced practice sequel, Kink-Affirming Practice. Stefani Goerlich is also the author of a new book from Sounds True. It’s called With Sprinkles on Top: Everything Vanilla People and Their Kinky Partners Need to Know to Communicate, Explore, and Connect. She describes herself as an expert on the edges, and a bridge builder between the margins and the mainstream. And here, Stefani, an expert on the edges, welcome to Insights at the Edge.
Stefani Goerlich: Thank you so much. I am so excited to be here.
TS: This notion of being a bridge builder, it’s one aspect of your work that’s so important to me personally. I think often, we judge each other, we misunderstand each other, we don’t take the time to really get behind the other person’s eyes and understand where they’re coming from. And I think you do an incredible job, at least that’s my experience reading your work, of helping people who identify as, quote-unquote, “vanilla,” really appreciating and understanding the world of kink, and also vice versa. And I wanted to start by asking you to help people who are like, OK, what is this whole world of kink? I think I know what you’re talking about, but I’m not sure. What are you talking about?
SG: So most of the time when people think about kink, one of two things comes to mind. They either think of the Fifty Shades of Grey dominance and submission or they think of sadomasochism, which we see some elements of in those books and movies too, which is in our minds, really focused on giving and receiving pain. And both of those, this idea of giving over decision-making authority or giving over your pain threshold to somebody else can feel really intimidating, and maybe a little scary or odd.
And so I always like to explain BDSM as really being several different things. We have bondage and discipline, which is exchanging control that might be in control of movement through the use of ropes, or silk scarves, or handcuffs. Could be control of behavior. Like if Tami, you were to tell me, “We’re going to do a podcast, but I want you to stand in the corner the entire time you’re doing it, and you’re not going to move until I tell you you can.” That’s discipline, that’s self-discipline on my part. It’s a control of my behavior, my movement on your part, so it’d be an exchange of control. Dominance and submission.
People think they’re really familiar with and they tend to think of it as control, but really it’s about exchanging authority. Who has the decision-making final say in the relationship? And that can be on issues as big or as little as the people involved choose to let it be. Could be, “You’re going to pick out my tie every day before I go to work.” It could be, “You’re going to make every single decision in the relationship.” It’s whatever they decide.
And then sadism and masochism we usually think about as pain. I like to say exchanging sensation, because pain is a very values-laden term, and in the Western world, pain tends to be a very negative thing. It’s something we want to avoid, it’s something we want to prevent, it’s something we want to treat. So instead of thinking about it as giving and receiving pain, I like to think of it as giving and receiving sensation, because that opens it up to a lot of different things that might feel painful for one person and really pleasurable for another.
TS: So we’re going to get into this a lot more, Stefani, but as a way to just orient our listeners for a moment to you and how you became so focused on kink-affirming counseling practice, what’s your personal background that led you to this? Why focus on this professionally? How did that happen?
SG: So my professional background is actually the world of domestic violence, sexual assault. I have worked as a domestic violence therapist, I have been a first-response advocate working with sexual assault survivors in the first 48 to 72 hours after their incident. That’s really my professional history.
Then as a sex therapist, a part of that process for many of us is something called a SAR, a sexual attitudes reassessment. And you are exposed over a number of days to lots of different relationships, lots of different sexualities, lots of different ways of connecting with people’s bodies—not that you would do as a therapist—watching them do in their own lives. And the goal is to really sit with your responses there, and to think about, what makes me excited that I want to help, and support, and affirm what are my biases that I might be noticing? Where are my pain points and my discomfort? And throughout that whole process with the group that I did it with, everybody was so supportive and so affirming.
We’re watching videos of couples in their nineties who can’t necessarily have penetrative sex anymore, but they’re still holding, and touching, and caressing, and everybody around me saying, “Oh, that’s so brave. That’s so beautiful. I hope my partner and I are like that when we are older.” We’re seeing people with disabilities who are working with sex workers to have a thriving intimate life, and people are like, “That’s amazing. I’m so glad that’s a resource for them.” And then we got to, I think, the hour we got on kink and the whole attitude in the room changed. And I’m sitting with a group of people who are already licensed mental health providers, who have already chosen sexual health as their area of specialty, it should be a pretty supportive group. And all of a sudden there were giggles, and there were whispers, and there were jokes, and there was laughter, and there wasn’t the same respect even that every other scenario we’d encountered had. And I got really angry. And I actually started writing The Leather Couch in that process. That first weekend I went home and I outlined The Leather Couch.
So as I was training as a sex therapist, I was saying even within this wonderfully supportive and deeply educated world, there are still people who don’t feel respected and who don’t feel understood and who aren’t understood. And so I started really diving into, how can I help other clinicians work with these people in a way that not only doesn’t cause harm, which I think is the minimum threshold, but that is actually affirming and supportive and celebrates what makes their relationships strong and novel and unique and thriving. And that’s been my work ever since.
TS: It’s interesting, Stefani, in preparing for this conversation, I mentioned in a couple of different meetings we have, these check-ins, at Sounds True. And people say, “How are you? Blah blah, blah. What are you working on?” And I shared, “I’m reading this book, With Sprinkles on Top, and I am preparing to interview a woman about BDSM. And it was almost like as soon as I said those words, the air went out of the room, everybody’s faces went flat and there was this thing like, uh, we’re not going to talk about this, are we? And you’re not going to say one more word about it, are you? And I had this moment like, maybe I shouldn’t be talking about this at all. And I just think that’s interesting that there’s this sense of, it’s not safe even to open up the discussion in a lot of different situations. And I’m curious to know why you think that is? Why is the taboo so strong?
SG: I mean, the surface-level answer is because what we see in pop culture never represents kink in a positive way. That kinky people, when they’re shown at all, we tend to either see them as the butt of a joke. It’s played for laughs, it’s somebody in a rubber suit head to toe being… You open the door, you laugh at them, you close the door, you move on. Or more commonly, they are the threat. They are the serial killer in the latest episode of Criminal Minds, they are the perpetrator of horrific things in horror movies. We don’t get, as a culture, a healthy, positive representation of kinky people. And in a lot of ways, that is because of the deeper answer, which is kink has been pathologized in the mental health world in a very parallel way that being gay or lesbian was for years. The diagnoses were created at the same time, when homosexuality was added to the manual that clinicians used for diagnosing mental illness, kink was added in. They were always considered parallel problematic behaviors.
And in the ‘70s, we took homosexuality out of the DSM and that was a huge accomplishment, but the kinky diagnoses stayed in. And there are clinicians within the world of psychology and that are on the advisory boards and the committees that help build this manual every time it’s revised, that are advocating for that to be taken out. But because there’s always been this understanding that it’s problem behavior, and because it hasn’t had that, I’m going to say “cultural redemption arc,” the other alternative sexualities or just other ways of being, gays and lesbians don’t choose to be gay any more than a lot of kinky people do. But we have positive representation of culture in America now. We can turn on TV, and we can see so many examples of gay characters that are thriving, and lesbian families that are raising children and having amazing relationships, and so that has helped us overcome the stigma that came from it being a mental health problem for so long. Kinky people haven’t had that, we’re still dealing with some really stigmatizing diagnoses as a provider.
And then also, the cultural movement hasn’t changed in a way that lets us see kink as just one of many healthy relationships.
TS: I love that phrase, the “cultural redemption arc.” And you’re definitely a leading voice in that, so I just want to thank you. Take a moment right here at the beginning and thank you for your work, and your commitment to speak up for people, to speak up for people who are being disrespected. I’m moved by that.
In your book, With Sprinkles on Top, you dispel some of the judgments, and I realized these are judgments that I myself have been like, oh, I wonder about that. Is there a connection between trauma in someone’s life and their attraction to kink? And you say no. The research is no, there is not. And I know that was a question that I had. Can you tell me about that research?
SG: Yeah, so there have been several studies that have looked at the personalities of kinky people, what we call the Big Five personality traits that psychologists look at, and then also just their stories, their histories, what the fancy clinical word would be the etiology of their behaviors. And what we have found in multiple studies is that when you ask kinky people whether or not they have experienced trauma, abuse, sexual assault, anything that we might put under that umbrella, they actually say “yes” on the same rate that people in the general population say “yes.” The reported rates of trauma are about the same, whether somebody is kinky or vanilla.
What I think is most interesting, though, is that kinky people are more likely to be given a diagnosis of PTSD. And that, I think, is a lot of where the myth comes from, is partly because we see more people who are saying, “I have PTSD,” or being told you have PTSD. And we want to form a connection between that and other areas of their life. But it’s interesting, because there’s so much stigma in the medical world towards kinky people.
About one in three people say that they’ve experienced stigma from their medical providers, which is a huge number. One of the things that I’m curious about is, is that really an accurate diagnosis? Or are clinicians that are coming into the room with some biases, with some myths in their minds about kink, more likely to diagnose somebody that probably has a very similar history as their vanilla friend would with PTSD, when they wouldn’t put that same label on a vanilla person that was reporting the same history?
So I’m really curious about whether that is an actual difference in kinky people, that they’re more likely to have post-traumatic stress disorder, or whether that is another marker of that cultural bias, where people that are kinky are more likely to have a label put on them, even when what they’re doing and what they’re talking about is not labeled for other people.
TS: You offer a statistic in the book that between two and seven percent of the population are, quote-unquote, “kinky.” And that correlates to something similar to being left-handed or redheaded. And I’m curious to know a little bit more about that, how that statistic even came about. How has this been measured?
SG: So that is an aggregate across multiple studies. And what we know is that when you interview people, about 50 percent of people will say they’ve experimented with some form of BDSM. It’s not a huge part of their life or their identity, but about half of people will say, yeah, I’ve played around with it. About a quarter of people will say, “I do it on a regular basis. It’s definitely something”—again, not a part of my identity—“it’s definitely a regular part of what my partner and I are doing in the bedroom.” But then depending upon what study you read, somewhere between two percent in some studies, up to eight percent in others, will say, “Yeah, I am very much involved in BDSM. It is a core part of my” —what I say, erotic map. “It’s a core part of how I’m wired, that I need a power exchange or fetish relationship in order to be happy and healthy in my relationship. I would not be happy in a vanilla relationship.”
And those statistics, if we take just the smallest number, if we just look at that two percent, that is roughly the same, statistically, as the number of left-handed people in America or the number of natural redheads in America. I’m not naturally pink, so I always have to put the natural in there. The number of Jews in America. We think of it as this tiny little subgroup within a subgroup standing off in a cultural corner somewhere, but it’s actually, when you do the math, it’s about 6.5 million Americans would fall into that two percent category of people that say, “This is a core part of who I am and what I need to be happy in a relationship.”
TS: And do you think people who identify as kinky, that it’s their core erotic map, that that is something that they were born with? Is that your working theory?
SG: So there are lots of people trying to unpack where that comes from, and whether or not we can call it something you’re born with. About 43-ish, don’t quote me on that exact statistic, but a plurality of kinky people, when they’re interviewed, will say, “This is something I’ve always known about myself.” And usually, they can point at a moment in childhood where they can say, “Oh yeah, when I look back as an adult, that was the moment when I realized I was kinky. That was the experience that, now that I have adult eyes and adult vocabulary, I can say was a really core moment for me.” So a sizable plurality of people would say, “It’s been a lifelong desire for me, a lifelong interest for me, even before I had words for it. I knew it was something that gave me butterflies in the stomach, or piqued my curiosity.” And usually, we don’t hear that in the context, again, of a traumatic incident. I usually hear it most, and researchers have heard it most, in the context of things like playground games.
Like, “Oh, we were playing cops and robbers on the playground, and they tie me to the flagpole, and that was a pivotal moment for me,” things like that. It’s very innocent, very playful, very age-appropriate moments that evoke a response that as adults they can go, “Yeah, that was it. That was when I caught on, and that was when I noticed that this was a thing that really was important to me.” And then it grows from there.
TS: In the beginning of our conversation, you broke down BDSM for us in a very helpful way. And when I was reading your book, the moment that I had this opening of like, huh, wow, I have so much more understanding now, was when you described how all of these actions could fall under a category of somebody relaxing more in their own way, finding their own form of, oh, this exchange of authority introduces a type of release, relaxing. I mean, obviously, there’s a playful component, but I know all of us want to relax. That’s something in us. We want to let go, we want to have that feeling of surrender. And I wonder if you can just speak to that, because I noticed it was something that gave me this, I get it, I get it in a certain way.
SG: There are some writers who will call kinky play a form of “serious leisure,” meaning the people involved take it very seriously. It’s not playful, they’re not joking about it. It’s an important thing for them, but it is a leisure activity. In that, it is relaxing, it is comforting, it is enjoyable, it is pleasant. And that relaxation piece, I think, is huge. And when we look at things from that lens, it can go a long way in helping us empathize and understand why people like what they do. I have a friend who was working in a very, very, very stressful job for several years, and was coming home just absolutely fried, on the brink of tears every single day. And one day, they came home and their partner had bought a straight jacket, and they said, “I just want to try something. Let me put you in this.” And for about 20, 30 minutes after work, they just laid in this jacket that gave them a nice squeeze and it held them. It very much felt like a weighted blanket, but it wasn’t heavy, it was squeezy.
And they had this epiphany moment, and every day after that, they would come home from work, put on a straight jacket, and just let themselves hold themselves effectively, and just let them have that moment of compression and comfort and quiet. And then they would take off the straight jacket and they would go make dinner. And that is a form of bondage, but it’s not necessarily what we always think of when we think about bondage. We think about somebody terrified, tied up in a basement or a dungeon somewhere.
And the same can be true when we talk about authority exchange with decision-making. I mentioned that in psychology, we have the Big Five personality traits, and one of those is agreeableness. And some people are just innately more agreeable. They’re not necessarily decision makers, they’re people that like to just—they go along, they get along, they’re happy with most things, and it can take a lot of mental and emotional bandwidth to make a lot of decisions throughout the day. So somebody that is really naturally high in agreeableness might love an authority exchange relationship, where they don’t have to make all the decisions, where they can hand that off to somebody else and not have to deal with that mental energy.
And then our sensory exchange folks. Again, people tend to think of it as this form of self-harm or of injury. There’s a researcher named Roy Baumeister who talks about it as hurt, not harm. And the hurt piece is actually what makes it relaxing, because our bodies release endorphins when we experience intense sensation, and endorphins are actually the morphine that our bodies create for themselves. We have endogenous morphine, endorphin. And so if you’re having a really bad day, or even if you’re having a really great day and you want it to be even better, doing something like a spanking with your partner or maybe a riding crop with your partner, and having that sensory experience, your brain releases endorphins. You get that lovely runner’s high feeling, and that can also be very soothing and also be very relaxing, but it’s literally happening at an organic level.
So there are all kinds of different ways in which people who enjoy BDSM use various aspects and practices of it to effectively relax in one form or another. To either take some of the mental bandwidth off, to literally have a moment of quiet and Zen, or to create a response in their body that floods their hormones with these lovely sensations that they enjoy.
TS: Now, Stefani, one of the things that I really appreciate about you as a writer, and as a speaker and teacher, is that you have a gift for helping everybody relax. That’s what I found in reading your book, and I’m wondering right now if you can help some of our listeners relax, who might be having the experience of, hurt not harm? Why would anybody want to be hurt? I don’t want to hurt my partner. Or any other judgment that might be coming up on behalf of the listeners who are like, what’s Sounds True doing having this conversation in the first place? What’s going on with Tami? I don’t know what judgments might be out in the field, but what would you say to those listeners?
SG: I think that there are lots of different ways in which we already do these things in very socially acceptable ways. We put our kids in football, and we will go and watch our child be tackled at full speed by eight other people, and stand up, shake it off, and keep going, and we cheer for them. And we look at their bruises afterwards and like, “You played so hard, I am so proud of you, you didn’t let anything stop you.” That’s a form of hurt but not harm. We go to the Boston Marathon, and we stand on the sidelines and we cheer as people push their bodies so hard to run for miles to the point of bleeding and dehydration, and we don’t question those decisions. Nobody looks at a marathon runner and says, “Oh, honey, are you OK? Are you sure you’re making a good decision? Are you in a healthy relationship with the running?” We don’t ask those questions. There are a million different ways in which, especially that sensation piece, that hurt not harm comes into play, that are incredibly not only culturally accepted but celebrated. Professional ballerinas brutalize their feet, and we go to the theater and we throw roses and we cheer for them. And we never ask them if what they’re doing to their bodies is OK.
So I think for a lot of people, it’s sitting with the idea that, because kink has been sexualized for so long, because we look at it as a sexual behavior and not as a relational behavior, that we tend to put it in the category of the sexy stuff that we just don’t talk about. Because in our society, we don’t talk about sex. And then we add in those other elements that feel confusing to us, like sensation play or control of behavior. Not everybody’s comfortable being tied up, and that’s OK, but when we add in the impolite society. “We don’t talk about sexuality and sexy things.” And then bring in the discomfort of, “And they’re doing those sexy things in a way that feels weird and uncomfortable to me.” Those biases make a lot of sense.
But when we become more comfortable talking about sex and intimacy in general, which is something that we’re moving towards as a society—we’re not quite there yet—it becomes a little bit easier to have the conversation. And when we think about all of the other ways that are culturally celebrated, that people are doing these same things, all of a sudden it clicked.
TS: Help me understand kink as a relational behavior, not a sexual behavior. Because I lost you there. I guess I’ve been thinking of it as a sexual behavior.
SG: So one of the things that I always say when I’m teaching is that kink is always relational, it’s only sometimes sexual. You can engage in BDSM play with your clothes on, both partners fully clothed. You can engage in BDSM play where neither person ever touches the other, you can engage in BDSM play by yourself alone in a room. It’s not always about having a sexual reaction, but what it absolutely always is, is about trust. It’s about building an intense bond of, I’m going to trust you in this moment to either give or take something in our relationship. I’m either going to give you the authority to do something for or to me, or I’m going to take that and you’re trusting me to do that. It’s about the closeness that comes from the communication and the negotiation of what that’s going to look like. It’s about the sensations that come up in each of our respective bodies when we do that, and it’s not always an erotic sensation.
As to your point, it can be relaxing. Somebody laying alone in bed, wearing a straight jacket while their partner’s watching TV in the other room, is not a sexual behavior. It’s a comforting behavior, it’s a relaxing behavior. And so looking at these as ways of building relationship, of ways of affirming the trust bond, of ways of increasing intimacy, of ways of increasing the way that we communicate, and the way that we are open and transparent with one another. All of those things are critically important for the relationship, but they don’t always happen in a sexual context.
TS: Tell me about your new book, With Sprinkles on Top, and the origin story, how you realized this was a book that you were called to write.
SG: At some point in my practice, I realized that while I had started out as an individual therapist, I was actually working mostly with couples. Right now, my practice is about 70 percent couples, 30 percent individuals. And regardless of whether my clients were coming to me in pairs, in groups, or as solo, a lot of them were talking about the same thing, which is, “I don’t understand my partner. I don’t get why they like what they like,” or “I just found out something about them and I’m freaking out.” And then a lot of my individual clients were coming to me because they wanted to figure out how to have those conversations with their partner. They wanted to plan out and build the bravery necessary to be really transparent and to share that part of themselves with their spouse or with their partner. And it was something that I was seeing a lot, and every single person thought they were the first person to deal with that.
Every kinky person sitting in my office saying, “I know I want to tell them, I know they need to know. I know things will be so much better if we can share this, but I’m terrified. What if they leave?” Every single one of them thought they were the only person having that conversation. And every spouse that called me because, oops, their partner left their browser history open or they stumbled across a box of books or toys or something under the bed. They all thought they were the only person that had been in this experience. And so being able to universalize that and being able to say, this is a really normal thing—whether you’re finding out something about your partner’s sexual or erotic identity, or whether you’re finding out something else about them. Maybe you never knew that your favorite football team, they loathe. It could be anything. Anytime we have this discovery of new information, it really can shake up a relationship. We start to question whether we knew them. We start to question whether we knew ourselves.
What does this mean about me if I could be married to you for 20 years and never know you hated my favorite football team? And so having a space where people could come and have those experiences normalized, and to be treated as if both of them are healthy and OK, was really important. Because a decent number of the couples that were coming to me after this were coming to me saying, “I found out my partner’s kinky,” or “I’ve been discovered, fix me.” Fix them, fix me. There’s clearly something wrong with them. We need to unkinkify them, so that I can feel comfortable being married. And that’s not a healthy relationship dynamic. My philosophy is really to celebrate and affirm both partners exactly as they are, and to help them find their commonalities there, not to coerce somebody into doing stuff they don’t want to do or giving up things that are really important to them.
TS: Let’s start with this notion of these two people coming to you, and one person identifies as very, quote-unquote, vanilla and one person identifies as kinky in their erotic map, and they haven’t had the conversation yet. How do you help both of these partners have a respectful, honest conversation with each other?
SG: I start with unpacking how that new information came up, because there are ways in which it can come up in a healthy way and there are ways that are more problematic. And those problematic ways, they’re going to cause damage in the relationship. So the ideal is always something akin to what my individual clients do, where they’ve taken the time to really think about, what do I want my partner to know? And how can I best tell them in a way that’s going to be received well and be supportive for both of us? And those are the easiest couples to start with, but those represent a minority. More of them, I would say, come in because either somebody has stumbled across something that they weren’t looking for but didn’t intend to find, and they’re dealing with the shock of that. Or worse, they have coerced information out of their partner. There has been some sort of, “I know you’re up to something and you need to tell me right now, or else I’m walking out the door,” sort of moments.
And those are the most difficult, because we’re already starting from a lack of trust position. And the person that’s being forced to share wasn’t given time or space to do that in their own time or in their own way. So there’s a lot of trauma when a forced conversation occurs. And so the first thing is really starting with, how did this come to be shared knowledge? What was that conversation like? How did that happen? And what do we need to do to repair that first? And then from there, somewhat counterintuitively for a lot of my clients, I say, “OK, now that we all know, and now that we’ve processed the knowing, that’s not actually going to be our focus. We’re actually going to table the kink piece for now.” And I want to spend a lot of time with my more vanilla client. I want to really dive into your thoughts, your desires, your fantasies, your erotic map, because that’s not something that most people in our country and our culture are allowed to do.
We’re not given a process for that, we’re not taught how to fantasize in our middle school sex ed class. So one advantage that kinky people have is that they’ve already thought about those things. They know what they’re into by the time we’re having a conversation about what I’m into. So it’s creating space for the other partner to do that same work and to have those same experiences. Because once we can do that with them, then we can bring the kink piece back in and start to look at, where do we have commonalities? Where do we have some overlaps? Where do we have some similar ideas about fantasy or some similar sensations that we both like? And we can build from there, but we can’t do that unless we really center the more vanilla person first.
TS: This notion of “sprinkles on top,” can you explain the title?
SG: I’ve said a couple of times, I really think that everybody needs to be affirmed for being just fine exactly as they are. And in the before-COVID times at a bricks-and-mortar office, I actually kept a cookie cookbook in my office because so often, people would come in and they would say, “I’m too vanilla,” or “I’m boring, I’m bland, I’m not interesting enough, there’s nothing here. I am not good enough because I’m not kinky.” And I would pull out my cookie cookbook, and I would challenge them to find any recipe anywhere in it that didn’t start with vanilla, that didn’t require vanilla. Because for me, when we talk about vanilla relationships, we’re talking about the traditional, classic romance. We’re talking about love and playfulness and mutual respect and affection and regard and encouragement and sensuality and desire. All of those things that we think of when we think about vanilla relationships are absolutely present in kinky dynamics too, we just add onto them from there. We take the cookie base, and maybe we mix in some chocolate chips, or maybe we add some pecans.
It is the foundation that we build everything else on. My goal is not to change my vanilla person into something else. I don’t want my vanilla person to be transformed into a kinky person. What I want to do is really celebrate their core vanilla-ness—what that brings to the relationship, why that is amazing, how that is wonderful, and then give them the option to enhance it if they want to. To decorate it, to add on. And one of the things that I love about the metaphor of sprinkles is that sprinkles are colorful and they make things prettier and they are more enjoyable and they enhance, but they don’t change the flavor of what you put sprinkles on. If you add sprinkles, it doesn’t turn vanilla ice cream into strawberry. Thinking about adding in these elements of common ground that we find together not as a process of changing somebody from vanilla into something else, but of decorating and enhancing their core vanilla-ness, I think is really where the sprinkles metaphor comes in for me.
TS: How often, when you’re working with a couple, do they reach a point where they go, “You know? Our sexual erotic desires, we’re just too different, this isn’t going to work. Come on, sprinkles on top. It’s not working. This was a great theory. We started therapy with Stefani, but come on, this isn’t working.” And do you think it’s because their erotic interests really don’t match or there’s just not enough will, if you will, or love or glue. I mean, people have all kinds of reasons to say, we can’t reconcile this or that. We can’t reconcile geography or our parenting styles or whatever. How do you view erotic differences?
SG: So most of the people that come to my practice don’t divorce. And those that do, actually, it’s very rarely because of desire differences in this respect. A lot of people struggle with libido differences, and that can become a huge barrier. It doesn’t matter how kinky I am, if I don’t have an interest in sex and you have a very high libido, that could be a barrier for us, especially if we are very committed to a monogamous relationship. So things like that will happen. Nobody likes a boring sex life. So I have found that where people can get past the initial knowledge, discovery, in whatever form that takes, really nobody’s ideal marriage is, we’re going to have missionary sex in the dark every two weeks for 20 minutes, and then we’re going to move on. People like variety, we’re wired for novelty. So the idea of adding in some sprinkle-esque things that bring in elements of their partner’s desires without threatening who they are and what they want, that’s an idea people are open to.
Where I see things break down is either in the, “Look, you want it and I don’t,” or “I want it and they don’t.” And I can’t make somebody want to have sex in their relationship at all, ever. That can be a barrier. Or where the trauma of the discovery and the way that that played out, just the fact that this is something I didn’t know and now I do, and I can’t reconcile that in my mind. It’s very rarely about the actual specific, “Could we bring elements of kink into our relationship or not?” It’s much more organic than that, and it’s a scenario we see play out in all kinds of couples. It could be a gambling problem that somebody discovers that leads to the same, “Now that I know this, I can’t unknow it, and it’s fundamentally changed how I feel about our relationship.” Those are the moments when I see things break down.
TS: OK. Let’s say someone is listening to this and they have kinky desires, and maybe even a real kinky nature that they’ve not disclosed to their partner. What would you suggest to them as the process that will generate the most understanding and the greatest results?
SG: So much like we do in my work and my practice, I usually encourage people to start by asking their partner questions. What do you think about when you’re by yourself? What do you think about when you’re turned on? When we’re watching a movie or a TV show, what makes you feel desirous and aroused? And starting by really getting to know them can be helpful, because we don’t often have those conversations in our relationship. And if we know that about them, that can help how we frame up those conversations about ourselves.
If our partner says, “I love romance novels, I especially love the romance novels where the heroine is swept away, and taken off and thrown into this crazy scenario she can’t control, and she’s a little bit helpless and a little bit out of control, but you know they’re going to fall in love and it’ll be fine at the end.” That can open the door for a conversation about, “You know, I really love actually the idea of playing with power and control. How would you feel if I just grabbed you and threw you on the bed one day? And maybe I grabbed some of my ties and we played around with—maybe I tie you to the headboard, and we pretend that you’re a character in a romance novel, and I’m the heroine or the hero.” You can start from their desires and use those to frame up how you explain your own.
Alternately, you can, if you’re not comfortable having those conversations, or if you have and you’re just concerned that you’re not finding those common points that you can build on, I really like encouraging people to find media that has scenes that show what they desire. And I don’t necessarily mean walking into the kitchen and throwing a porn video in front of your partner. Although, I mean, that’s an option. But thinking about movies that might have a scene that appeals to you, that when you’ve watched it together already, maybe has inspired or fired that kinky part of your brain, and rewatching it, but actually having a conversation there. Be like, “I’ve always really liked that scene. That scene does something for me. Every time we watch it, I get butterflies in my stomach.” Or “I am a little turned on. How do you feel when you watch it?”
And using those as conversation starters, because in both scenarios we’re not immediately being super vulnerable about ourselves. There’s a little bit of protection from rejection there, because we’re either asking them what they think about, what they fantasize about, or we’re asking, “What do you think of what those people on the screen are doing”? And it lets us take the temperature and gauge. And then from there we can say, “Would you want to try that? I’ve always been curious about that, how would you feel about that?” And that can be a really organic, authentic, honest way to introduce a topic that can feel really overwhelming or scary, and then you just expand outward from there.
TS: In the book With Sprinkles on Top, you offer a very detailed—and I thought, God, this is a lot of inner work—fantasy worksheet, where you ask lots and lots of questions to dig up what your fantasies might be. I’m curious if you can share a little bit about that, what some of the most helpful questions are. And then any encouragement like, OK, actually do this. Do this work, of really discovering what your fantasies are.
SG: I’m going to start with that part, because one of the things that I tell all of my sex therapy clients is that the vast majority of sex therapy work doesn’t happen in the hour each week they’re spending with me, it’s what they do with that when they leave. Sex therapy, any sort of relationship or connection building process, is only as effective as your willingness to actually go and do the process. So do the things, do the things. It is a sign of commitment to your relationship and to your partner that you’re willing to do the things, especially the things that make you uncomfortable. That can be an act of service or even a little bit of a sacrifice that shows your partner that you care about them. That, this maybe isn’t how I choose to spend my next 20 minutes, but I love you and this is important to you, so I’m going to try. Just that effort is a huge boon for your relationship.
But then from there, I think it’s really important to think deeply and detailed about our fantasies because most of us don’t. Most fantasies are a free association process. We just relax, and we let our mind go where it goes, and it is enjoyable or erotic in a given moment, but we’re not necessarily keeping a fantasy diary. It’s not something we think about in terms of patterns. So thinking really, really clearly and doing that self-reflection and almost like self-meditative process of, what sort of sensations am I thinking about when I’m fantasizing? What sort of scenarios am I in? What sights or sounds or textures do I notice being a theme in my fantasies? All of those are really important, because we can take those component pieces, and we can use those to find common ground with your kinkier partner. Maybe you notice the romance novel trope. “What I fantasize about every time is being overpowered and swept off my feet and carried away by this rugged sailor or pirate.” Maybe you would actually enjoy some light bondage play. Maybe a little bit of bedroom authority exchange would be enjoyable for you, because that’s a theme in what you’re already reading and enjoying.
If you’re noticing that all of your scenarios when you fantasize feature you—I’m going to be unpolitically correct and say—wrapped in a fur stole. You notice that everything is like, oh, either I was fantasizing about laying on a bear skin rug or I was wearing this amazing fur coat. Maybe you notice that and you’re like, that’s clearly a texture theme that comes up in my fantasies a lot. I wonder what would happen if I got a faux fur blanket and threw it on the bed. I wonder if that would do something for me that would shift the mood or shift my mindset. Little things like that, but actually taking the time to think deeply about what those little things are, giving yourself permission to really flesh out what you fantasize about can be tremendously helpful when you’re trying to find common ground with your kinkier partner.
TS: You know, Stefani, I don’t get the chance to talk to a kink expert very often. In fact, you’re the first one I’ve ever spoken to. And so I do have a question that emerged as I was reading With Sprinkles on Top about fetishes. And I thought to myself, Stefani’s really helped me understand BDSM, and what you call “the psychology of kink,” but I don’t necessarily understand, still, fetishes. I just thought of one that seems common that I can see my way into, which is a foot fetish. And I was like, what is that? And then I looked up how many people have foot fetishes and it’s a large part of the population. And I was like, what is it about the foot? And I wonder if you can just help me understand the nature of fetishes.
SG: So I mentioned that for a lot of people who are into BDSM, they notice a moment in their early life that they’re like, oh yeah, when I look back, that was how I knew. Fetishes function a little bit differently, because often, when we’re thinking about kink, we want to find that moment in childhood that became the kinky thing. And that’s a part of where that trauma myth comes from. If somebody enjoys sensation play, there must have been some sensation they received that did it for them. That’s not so true with BDSM, but that is very true with our fetishes. So a fetish is a strong sexual desire or maybe even a necessity for something, an object or a body part, that is not typically sexualized in our culture.
So if I have a client that tells me, “I am a huge butt guy. My partner has to have a great butt for me to be turned on,” that would not be a fetish because butts are sexualized in our culture. If somebody were to tell me, “I love feet. Feet are the sexiest thing. My partner has to have a nice pedicure and beautiful feet for me to be turned on,” that would be. Because in our culture, feet are not typically sexualized.
And it’s really important—because we tend to get very judgy about people’s fetishes—to remember that this is very time- and place-specific. If we go back a hundred years to the Victorian era, ankles were scandalously erotic, because they weren’t shown every day. The ankles were erotic because they were hidden. If we go to another part of the world where maybe people don’t necessarily wear tops all the time, breasts are not going to be sexualized in those cultures, because they’re mainstream and they’re just a part of the culture. So we have to recognize that what we consider to be unusual or asexual is going to vary depending upon when we’re living and where we’re living.
Feet are the most common fetish, and that’s actually really interesting, because one of the leading theories is—researchers have looked at brain scans, FMRIs, and the area of the brain that responds to erotic sensation and genital sensation, it’s actually right next to the area on the brain that recognizes sensation in your feet. So one of the theories for foot fetishes specifically is that their brains are actually a little overlapping in that wiring. And the sensations that would just be normal, oh, I stubbed my toe sort of sensations, foot feeling, gets cross-wired in their brain with that genital feeling part of the brain, and they start to have an erotic arousal to feet. But that is specific to foot fetishes.
For other fetishes, let’s say, balloons or fur, usually, what we find is that somebody had a moment in their life where that thing was sexualized. Maybe they were touching themselves while hiding in the closet, and it was the winter closet, so it was surrounded by all the winter coats, and they happened to have that feeling of a fur coat up against their cheek as they were touching themselves.
That pattern of erotic sensation combined with whatever the optic is, can become a part of the erotic map. So for fetishists, we actually do tend to have that—there was a very specific moment where this thing became eroticized—that we don’t necessarily always for our BDSM practitioners. And then our foot fetishists are unique amongst us in that their brains, sometimes they’re just wired to receive foot sensation as genital sensation.
TS: Now, a couple of times you’ve mentioned the erotic map. I just want to make sure I really understand. If I was to go at it and say, “I’m going to learn my own erotic map and my partner’s erotic map,” give me a sense of what I’m cartographizing, if that’s a word.
SG: Uh, word.
TS: I think I just made it up.
SG: I love it. So the erotic map is a term that’s used in sexology. Jack Morin is another author who uses it. I think the term was coined by Jack Money, but don’t quote me on that. But it’s a pretty common sexology term, and it is, if you imagine your brain as a map, it is the areas that you find sexy and pleasurable and erotic and enjoyable, and the areas where you don’t. So when we talk about somebody’s erotic map, we’re talking about the way that they are wired to give and receive sensation of all kinds, not necessarily intense sensation in a kink context, but any. And that means emotional sensation, what sort of interactions do I need to have in order to feel safe and turned on and desirous? What sort of moments, what sort of physical sensations, texture, sense, touches? Where on my body do I experience pleasure and where do I not? All of that together wrapped up is what a sexologist would call your erotic map, and it varies from person to person. We tend to be very generic about things.
We’ll say, “Oh, well, I am a super vanilla gay man,” and somebody else might be saying, “Me too. I am also a super vanilla gay man.” But your individual erotic map of what gay-man vanilla looks like for you versus what your friend’s gay-man vanilla looks like for him is still going to vary. Because there are going to be sensations and sight and sounds and touches and emotional responses and environmental factors and memories that are combined in a way that only ever is yours. And one of the most amazing things about doing couples work is helping people explore their individual maps together and find the places where they overlap.
TS: Stefani Goerlich is the author of a new book, it’s called, With Sprinkles on Top: Everything Vanilla People and Their Kinky Partners Need to Know to Communicate, Explore, and Connect. And Stefani, I want to end with this question, which is, you talked about the cultural redemption arc that we could say kink is starting on. We’re not there, we’re not there as a culture, far from it, I think. You’re a pioneer in that work. What do you think would be required? What steps do we need to take collectively so that there can be this sense of respect of differences, honoring of differences, curiosity about difference across the board for kinky people? What do we need to do as a culture for this to happen?
SG: I think we need more positive and mainstream representation of kinky people. I think we need a sitcom where the neighbors are in a power exchange relationship, and it’s not the butt of a joke or an area of concern, it’s just a part of how they live, in the same way that you have the Jewish neighbors across the street. I want to see rom-coms that feature kink elements that don’t make it a point of intense trauma or coercive abuse the way it’s been represented in some of the most popular movies featuring BDSM and kink. I want to see a culture that shows people what healthy kink, normal kink, majority kink looks like without immediately sexualizing it or wanting to fully dive into every single bedroom practice, so that people can see themselves represented in healthy ways and normal ways. But more importantly, so that vanilla people can say that, oh, 6.5 million Americans is actually a pretty big number. I probably do have friends that just don’t tell me about it and aren’t comfortable sharing that with me.
And even if we can get to a point where we can be in the grocery store and say, people here are kinky, and that’s fine. And I can’t tell who it is by looking at them. And I’m not afraid to be walking around in an environment where there are kinky people. It feels very almost like extreme when I say that, it feels like this odd thing, why would people be afraid? But that’s what we’re given. We are only ever shown kinky people who are either jokes or threats, and I think the process starts with showing kinky people who are just normal, boring people like everyone else.
TS: Stefani Goerlich, author of the new book With Sprinkles on Top, thank you so much. Thanks for your good work, your good heart, and for this conversation. And all the research and terrific writing that you’ve done. You’ve obviously really applied yourself so fully to this work. Thank you so much.
SG: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve really appreciated the opportunity.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
