January 12, 2023
Kinks, Fetishes & Pervertibles
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- What’s the difference between a fetish and a kink?
- How common are kinks and fetishes?
- What are the most common fetishes?
- How do I move when thrusting during sex?
- What are some household objects that I can use as kinky pervertibles?
Jess and Brandon weigh in on your kinky questions in this quickie episode.
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Rough Transcript:
This is a computer-generated rough transcript, so please excuse any typos. This podcast is an informational conversation and is not a substitute for medical, health, or other professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the services of an appropriate professional should you have individual questions or concerns.
Kinks, Fetishes & Pervertibles
Participant #1:
You’re listening to the Sex with Dr. Jess podcast, sex and relationship advice you can use tonight. Welcome to the sex with Dr. Jess Podcast. I’m your co host, Brandon Ware, here with my lovely other half, Dr. Jess. Hey. Hey. 2023. I am finally getting used to writing writing it because I kept typing 2022, even in Contracts. Yeah, I usually do that for the first few weeks of the year and then catch on. I’m liking this year already. Well, that’s great. Yes. And we have a quickie for folks today, real quickie on kinks versus fetishes, because we’ve got a super limited amount of time, and we just got off three flights, one of which was a very, very long overnight flight because we have some work overseas. Yeah, that was a bit of a milk run, but glad to be where we are. Yeah, it was an accident. But we did get to stop for a really good club sandwich. Always about a good club sandwich. Actually, there were two really good stops. We also had a really nice meal in one of the airports that never really happens. Oh, yeah, that’s right. We had a stop in Toronto. It feels like a million years ago. But yeah, if you’re lucky enough to fly through the Signature Suite in Toronto, their food’s always been good. It’s from Chef Hawksworth, who’s a Canadian chef who has restaurants on the west coast. But the food’s gotten even better. Yeah, well, I mean, you loved it. You were happy. I was just pleased not to be sitting on the ground working for an hour. I live for food. I live for food. All right, so we’re talking kinks versus fetishes, and this person wants to know something fairly straightforward, which is perfect, because we’ve got this quicky amount of time. They’ve asked, what is the difference between a kink and a fetish? How common are they? What are the most common fetishes? And they say, I think I may have a few fetishes. So, Brendan, do you know the difference between a kink and a fetish? I do not. Okay. I’m just straight out, I mean no. Do you think you’re kinky? Yeah, I think I’m a little kinky. You’re a little kinky. You’re not, like, dress up kinky. I don’t think you’re identity or community kinky. Like, you’re not at the dungeons, you’re not at the parties. But I could. You could. I took you to one once and they sort of tore you to shreds. Do you remember that? You know, I don’t, but I feel like you should tell me that. It was the one that was up high in that apartment for a specific celebration. They did. I recall now because you were in a suit. I was in a suit. I definitely was the one that was singled out as someone who hadn’t partaken in some of the activities before. One of these things just doesn’t belong to be fair, it was a wedding it was a collar. And so you showed up in a suit. Yep, I did. I wore a very kinky I wore a kinky dress. Anyhow okay, so kinks versus fetishes. So there’s definitely some overlap, but generally speaking, both refer to sexual arousal and desires that fall outside the conventional norms. And when we say that, it’s interesting because norms obviously vary from place to place and culture to culture and I think even generation to generation. But generally speaking, kinky refers to anything that deviates from conventional sex. So again, that’s super subjective. It could be specifically BDSM. So bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, satamasochism. Whereas a fetish refers to a behavior, a fantasy or an object that must be present in order to experience sexual pleasure. So a kink is something you enjoy and a fetish is more likely to be more essential or central to your sexual experience.
Having said that, not everyone’s going to agree because there are some people who use fetish to describe any attraction or arousal in response to a nonsexual object. So it could be pantyhose, it could be trees, it could be farts, it could be feet, it could be kind of anything that isn’t conventionally associated with the erotic. This distinction between something you enjoy being a kink versus something that is central or something that is required being a fetish. Again, there’s always going to be personal differences in how you describe. And I think it’s important to note that, yes, we use different terms to describe different desires and identities, and there are going to be people who call their fetish a kink and vice versa, and that’s just fine. But I do think that sometimes this distinction can be normalizing for folks. So you know that I don’t really get turned on unless I have those pantyhose. Theres, there. That’s okay, right? It can be also super helpful when you’re communicating your needs and your boundaries and your desires to a partner, especially if they have a similar understanding of the language as you do. There seems to be this desire to explain fetishes, and we can’t always explain why we find something arousing. There are theories. For example, some people believe fetishes develop as a learned and sort of subconscious response to an early erotic experience. So we consider this imprinting. So for example, if something was present during an early sexual experience, maybe once or twice or multiple times, you can come to create that imprint or erotic association. Others theorize that fetishes that are related to non conventionally sexual body parts might have to do with the way the brain interprets and processes pleasure. But I think the bottom line is a fetish is simply about pleasure and arousal. It doesn’t really require an explanation. So if you’re into something, just give yourself permission to lean into it and explore it with curiosity. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s not causing harm and as long as all the people involved are into it. So I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about fetishes or if there are non sexual objects or body parts that turn you on as you’re having this discussion. I’m sitting here thinking do I have any fetishes? And none immediately come to mind. But I definitely feel like, as you said, yeah, I got a little kinky streak in me for sure. But I feel like I just want to take some time to think about that. Like is there something that has in the past that I’ve fetishized? Right, right. Well, I’m thinking about even though it’s difficult to really pinpoint what people are into because when we do research in this field, studies are often small, they’re often convenient samples. So you’re pulling from websites that people are visiting where they’re already kinky. Right. They’re already expressing an interest. So there’s, I think, a huge selection bias. But there are ways in which we can better understand fetishes. So there was a study that found that fetishes are most common in several ways. So, number one, fetishes related to nonsexual body parts, feet or toes or objects related to the body. So pantyhose and shoes, things that you wear on your body, apparently those are the most common fetishes. So 33% for nonsexual body parts, 30% for objects related to body the body. And then next in line we have fetishes that involve a desire of preferences for specific behaviors. So, for example, your partner biting their fingernails or somebody doing something specific to your toes and that’s 18%. So body parts, then objects related to body parts, then preferences for specific behaviors by a partner. Next in line is a fetish for a desire for a specific behavior from yourself. So something that you actually do. So for example, peeing on a partner, those types of behaviors come in at 7%. A social behavior comes in next. So that could be like dominance or submission. And then finally, objects that are unrelated to the body come in at 5%. So, for example, being turned on by dirty dishes or being turned on by the stem of a rose or something like that. And then when we think about kinky sex, oftentimes the research is under the umbrella of BDSM. And it’s funny because of course the definition is it’s anything that’s outside the norm. But now the data is showing that over 50% have experimented with bondage discipline, dominance submissions, sadomasochism or sadism and masochism. And so it’s actually more common.
So I guess the question becomes is it that kinky? Is it that kinky now that people are into it? And does it have to be like, does it matter if 5% of people do something or 99% of people do something as long as you’re into it? I want to have a fetish over dirty dishes because I feel like then it would be great. You’d always want to do the dishes or something like that. That is that a thing it may be that you’re turned on by the dirty dishes or you’re turned on by a partner doing the dirty dishes. Or maybe you want to be punished and you want to do the dirty dishes. Maybe that would be counterproductive because every time there was there are dirty dishes that we end up having sex. I guess so I don’t know that’s every day. And I don’t think it’s as simple as the mere presence. There’s some sort of erotic association that can be really specific to the person. So I haven’t had a client with dirty dish fetishes, but I’ve had clients with so many different types of fetishes. I’d say the most common that I’ve I’ve seen actually it aligns with the research, is body parts. So a lot of people into feed. I get a lot of requests for photos of my feet. I’ve never got requests for photos of your feed. Yeah. And I’m glad that no one has gotten requested that. As you mentioned this, I like hands. Like fingers and hands definitely something that pay attention to. So I’m going to think about that and just want to maybe explore it a little bit more because I don’t know, it’s not something I think about that necessarily turns me on, but it’s something that I definitely pay attention to. Yeah. You always comment on hands, and I never paint my nails. I love your hands, but without do you want nail polish on them? No, I’m good just the way they are because I’m not painting them because, you know, I’m just going to chip them right away. I do too many things with these hands. So I had another person asking about how common fetishes are. Maybe it was the same person. I try and group your questions together and kind of look at them thematically, but fetishes actually are more common than most people might imagine. So there was a study published in the Journal of Sex Research that found that almost half of us so 44.5% expressed interest in fetishism. And this was in the research. They were basically asking respondents to answer the question, have you ever been sexually aroused by an inanimate nonsexual object? And it says, not including a vibrator. Now, when we started with the original definition that the object has to be central to or essential to arousal, this question doesn’t really reflect that because it’s just asking if you ever have once. But I think the point here is that everything exists along a spectrum. So even if you don’t consider a desire a fetish, if something turns you on a little bit, if there’s something that is peaking curiosity around an object, go ahead and explore it. Don’t hold back. Okay, so kinks versus fetishes.
There’s your quickie answer. And then I also got a question about pervertibles. So somebody is asking about pervertibles. So pervertibles are generally objects that you can transform from your everyday life into something kinky. And we actually write about this in our book Marla and I the Ultimate Guide to Seduction and Foreplay. And there are pervertibles kind of all around your house. So in your kitchen you’ve got wooden spoons and spatulas and kind of flat, wide utensils that can be used for spanking or impact play. You’ve got kitchen towels and dishcloths that can be stuffed in the mouth as gags to kind of minimize talking and sounds as a form of deprivation. You’ve got ice you can use for temperature play. You can kind of trace it along the body or over the genitals. You’ve got all these phallic objects in your kitchen. Carrots, cucumbers, zucchinis that can be used for oral and vaginal penetration with condoms and lubricants and anything with bumps on them you don’t want to use. So it needs to be nice and smooth so it’s not going to rip the condom. I know people use chip clips, the ones that you use to keep a bag clothes, because you can use those as nipple pinchers or skin clamps. You’ve got aprons that can be used as restraints for bondage play or role play. You’ve got fork, spoons and pans that can be used for anticipatory sound play. You can kind of blindfold your lover and experiment with different sounds to pique their interest or confuse them or overwhelm their senses. You can definitely use different foods for all factory torture and pleasure with a blindfold. So that’s just in your kitchen, because we’re near the kitchen right now. I stirred it there. In your bathroom you’ve got your bathtub, showers and toilets that can be used for different liquid and bodily fluid plays. So if you’re into golden showers or water sports, you can use mouthwash that contains menthol that you can incorporate into oral sex sensation play for that kind of cool sensation and tingle. Some people love to shave a partner as part of a sensual scene or kinky place. You’ve got your razors. You can shave off body hair together. You’ve certainly got all of these textured objects in your bathroom like combs and brushes and nail files and electric toothbrushes and maybe electric clippers and exfoliating gloves and loofahs and toothbrushes. You can use them all over the body for sensation play. I think when people think about kink and BDSM, they’re just thinking about whips and chains and what they see in law and Order. But kinkplay can be sensual. It doesn’t have to be rough. It can be so many different things. You can definitely use small kind of face cloth, sponge, poops that you can use as gags. You can use makeup brushes for sensory play and a hot wax application. I love that. And then if you move into the bedroom, you’ve got ties and scarves and belts and you can use them as restraints as well as spanking instruments. You can use underwear or socks as mouth gags. You can use dirty socks. You can use dirty underwear if you’re into that. You can use clothing to play with gender and cross dressing and costumes for Roleplay. Maybe you have Halloween costumes that you can also use for Roleplay. You can use pillows for sensory deprivation as well, for sound restriction, for a variety of positions. And then bedsheets themselves can be used as restraints. Right? Like I know you’ve done that before where you take the top sheet and use it to kind of hold down or tie down so you can do these things all intuitively. But I love that question about pervertibles because I think I just named like dozens and dozens that are just all around. And if I look around the room we’re in right now, I’ve got a bunch of dried flowers that can be used for sensory play. OOH, I’ve got this what do you call this? I don’t know. Shearling? Yeah, it’s like a shearling kind of rug thing. Like a little throw that you throw on your couch that can be used for sensory play. I’ve got these kind of cups that could be used like I don’t have something to heat them up, but they could definitely be used for cupping. Well, I was also thinking with like a lubricant, like using them to rub over the body or something like that, because these are tiny, little, very heavy glass cups that are next to the bed that would work really well. So lots of things to play with.
And then finally, before we go, I said it was a quickie, I’m sort of sticking to it. But I have a question about how to thrust when you’re having sex. So I want to preface this by saying that not everybody likes thrusting. Some people like thrusting, some people don’t. So this is a person with a penis and they want to know, how do I go in and out? What do I do basically, other than just going in and out. So, yes, you can go in and out just as it sounds you could do. I’m going to give you some technique ideas. You could do an upward curve where you kind of start with your hips down low and move in a yard. You shape as you curve upward. And of course you can do the opposite, which is the downward curve where you move your hips in a circular pattern, more curving in a downward motion. You can do a slow, shallow thrust where you move really slowly in the shallow part of the canal to kind of stimulate the very, very sensitive nerve endings and tune into every sensation. You can do just a super slow thrust, which kind of sounds like it doesn’t make sense because we think of thrusting as really fast, but it doesn’t have to be. So you’re going as deeply as you can, but as slowly as you can, like millimeter by millimeter. And that can be really exciting from the anticipatory part to the actual physical sensations. You can do the change up, where you start with a few quick thrusts and then you alternate with some slow movements. This is really great for kind of peaking interest, building momentum, building desire, and even kind of edging, because you might be doing something that feels really good for them. And then you do a bit of a change up. You can do the up and down grind where you slide all the way inside and gently shift your hips up and down. Or you can do the hip rider, where you stay perfectly still, but you guide your partner’s hips toward you in whatever motion feels natural. Again, you’ve you can move them up and down. You can move them in a downward curve. You can move them in a shallow thrust. You can go in and out. So those are just a few ideas for thrusting. I think we’ve got, I don’t know, eight there or something like that. But do what feels good. I think that’s the thing I think about whatever feels good. It’s nice to have a few items in your repertoire, but thinking about that upward curve that you mentioned at the very beginning, you’re pressing the abdomen in so that the abdomen also pushes on the clit. I find that to be a very effective move. Oh, is that if you’re facing a partner with a vagina? If you’re face to face. Okay, I get it. Sort of like the cat, like the coital alignment technique where one partner slides up so that the person with the clit has something to grind against? Yeah, that’s exactly it. This is when we need video demos. Okay, we’ll have to do a course on that. All right, we absolutely have to run. But that was a quick one, but hopefully a good one. And hopefully the talk around kinks and fetishes and thrusting and convertibles just reminds you that anything you’re into, anything that excites you, anything that makes you a little uncomfortable, is an opportunity to just get curious. And before we sign off, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at a Love Honey. They carry everything you could possibly think of for your kinks, for your fetishes. I already talked about pervertibles, but if you want to have kind of the real thing that vibrates with all the bells and whistles from brand new affordable toys for people who have perhaps never used one before, to all the more high end advanced stuff, they’ve got it all. And you can save with code. Dr. Jess ten lovehoney.com. And they ship pretty much all over the world. If you’re in Canada, it will automatically direct you to Lovehoney, CA UK. Same deal. So check out love, honey. Use code. Dr. Jess ten if you’re shopping. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for chatting, babe. Thank you. Have a great one, folks. You’re listening to the sex with Dr. Jess podcast. Improve your sex life. Improve your life.
