I’ve been having conversations about the meaning of BDSM for a long, long time. Part of that is that I’ve been doing various things that generally fall in the kink category since I was about 19. Part of that is that sex educators have these sorts of talks with a lot of different people. Part […]

Some new headlines about the Robert Pickton case are making the rounds. It seems that Jim Brown, one of the police officers involved in the investigation of the serial killer, had some photos on Fetlife, a social network for the BDSM world. The images of him holding a leash that’s connected to a collared woman […]

I recently found myself in yet another conversation with a longtime kinky player who made a disparaging comment about vanilla sex. If you’re not familiar with the term, it pretty much means anything sexual that isn’t BDSM, and it’s often used dismissively, as if sex that doesn’t include leather, whips, or pain is boring. Although […]

It’s hard to find good writing about kink. Let me rephrase- it’s easy to find plenty of folks who write about how to do BDSM play, and many of them know what they’re talking about and can explain it well. There are also quite a few bloggers who share their personal stories and experiences of […]

Do you want to do research or journalism about the kink/leather/BDSM community? The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago is an amazing resource and it has extensive collections. Of course, it’s often difficult to get there, especially when you’re a grad student or freelance writer. So I was really happy to see that there’s a […]

About a month ago, Kitty Stryker wrote a piece for the Good Vibrations Magazine, I Never Called it Rape: Addressing Abuse in BDSM Communities, in which she opened up a really important topic. It’s one that’s been simmering for a while and now that it’s come up in such a public way, there’s been a […]

Psychology Today posted a piece by someone with a PhD in computational neuroscience and someone with a PhD in biologically inspired models of machine learning, which apparently qualifies them to make some remarkable statements about gender, sexuality, and relationships. They seem to prefer making some remarkably reductionist and essentialist claims about how sex works, along […]