Guess what? LOLA is sponsoring this week’s episode. You can get pads, tampons, and liners delivered to you, via their rad subscription service, at 60% off your first order when you subscribe. Just use promo code SGR when you visit mylola.com and get started.

This week it’s you and me and all your emails.

But before I answer your questions, let’s talk about the Seattle Erotic Film Festival and Dan Savage’s HUMP! Festival, both of which I attended this week.

The Seattle Erotic Film Festival had a lot of films that really weren’t my cup of tea. Which is OK, but it did tell me a lot about what I enjoy watching and what I don’t.

I mentioned “Cake” by Anne Hu, and you can see the trailer here. It was truly delightful. Boner Loaner and How to Date a Couple were also favorites. Oh, and two films with scat play! Color me surprised.

HUMP had a lot more that I enjoyed and laughed over, but I was still bummed that the best sex films were both awarded to thin, young, cis, hetero-presenting couples.

Jnix wrote in wanting to know what the definition of “cis” is. Great question.

Shane not only showers me with love but needs some help with a new girlfriend who is scared of spanking and flogging. What can Shane do? I share my first experience with flogging and how I didn’t really enjoy it. But now flogging and spanking are huge parts of the sensation and kink I enjoy.

Marisa is worried that her new love of being restrained might become a problem is she does it too much. Will it stay exciting if she does it a lot or should she try and hold back so it continues to feel special? My thoughts include adopting an attitude of curiosity and wonder – whether we’re talking about monogamy, restraints, or anything else in our life.

I also touch on why newness doesn’t always have to be the goal, despite what we’re constantly sold in this world.

Hopelessly Devoted to Boot is desperately in need of help because his boot fetish is ruining his marriage of 20 years. He needs boots, and while his wife used to accommodate his fetish by wearing boots, more recently she’s been refusing to wear the boots he needs for sexual arousal and pleasure. Now their sex is virtually gone. What can he do?

All the thoughts on fetishes, the humanity of our partners, and navigating tough spots in relationships.

Sad Gay Millennial wrote a long, eloquent letter to me about his loneliness, his violations with gay male culture, and his fear of bottoming even though he loves it. I adore that he acknowledges a lack of consent culture and widespread patriarchy which is present in gay male culture. In addition to therapy & professional sexual help, hear my thoughts on how to navigate love, dating, and trauma when you feel alone and totally empty.

Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook. It’s true. Oh! And Dawn is on Instagram.

Resources mentioned in this episode

My Sex Map game is only $9 and can help you find new ways to talk about sex. Grab it here.

About Dawn Serra

I am the creator and host of the laughter-filled, no-holds-barred weekly podcast, Sex Gets Real. I lecture at colleges and universities on sex and relationships, too.

When I’m not speaking and teaching, I also work one-on-one with clients who need to get unstuck around their pleasure and desire.

But it’s not all work! In my downtime, I can often be found watching an episode of Masterchef Australia, cooking up something delicious, or adventuring with my sexy AF husband.

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to (You’re listening) (You’re listening) You’re listening to Sex Gets Real (Sex Get Real) (Sex Gets Real) Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra (with Dawn Serra). Thanks, bye!

Hello, lovely listeners. Here we are with another episode of Sex Gets Real. It’s just going to be you and me, and porn, and listener questions this week. I also wanted to mention that once again, Lola is sponsoring this week’s episode. Lola is a subscription-based service that sends you, in these really pretty little boxes, pads and tampons for your period. So if you or someone in your household needs pads and/or tampons, Lola is 100% organic, it’s women owned. They send it to you automatically so you don’t have to remember to go shopping. You can actually customize exactly what kinds of tampons or what kinds of pads you get, so that it fits you perfectly. I actually customized mine pretty heavily, so that I could get exactly the things that I wanted. And they are generously offering 60% off your first order. You just have to go to mylola.com and enter promo code SGR for Sex Gets Real, and that gets you 60% off that first order that you get. So I hope you check it out. They’ve been so generous in supporting the show. Of course, you can’t beat not having to go shopping for your pads and tampons. When they just show up at your door and a pretty little box and you know they’re organic. 

Dawn Serra: I also wanted to mention that every other week I’m still doing my Sex is a Social Skill group calls. We have another one coming up soon. You can check out the link at dawnserra.com/ep179 for this episode or check out the show notes. We talk about all sorts of stuff. Last time, we talked about the intersection of shame and desire like what do you do when you have shame around some of the things that you want? We’ve talked about anger, we’ve talked about being cherished. This coming call is going to be all about erotica, and writing out our sexual interests and fantasies – that should be a fun interactive little call. So totally check that out. If you want to practice saying new things and thinking new thoughts, and connecting with super awesome people. It’s like hanging out at a book club or a coffee shop, but we do it online. So I’d love to see you there. 

Okay, so the past two weekends, I have actually seen a lot of erotic material. Because I attended the three day Seattle Erotic Film Fest down in Seattle. Then just last night here in Vancouver, I actually went to see Hump, which is the Dan Savage Film Festival. And I wanted to tell you a little bit about it. The Seattle Erotic Film Festival, they were so generous and they made it really affordable. It was in this really great old timey theater in Seattle. They had films showing for three days. What I will say is a lot of the films and the aesthetic were so not my cup of tea. If nothing else, I really learned that. The very first film that we went to see was called Picture of Beauty, and it comes out of Poland. It opened with a 20-minute short from Portugal called the Debutante. It was interesting because both of the films were by white men who – I think the first one was made by white men. I’m not sure, but I know for sure the second one is. And it just felt very male gazey. These thin white young women frolicking through fields, it had a terrible story arc. There were so many loose ends, and I don’t know that porn always has to have a story. If it’s going to have a story, I think it either needs to be really campy, and just acknowledge like, “We’re really just here for the sex. So we’re kind of making up a story.” Or it needs to be great. This is an attempt to be great, but it failed miserably. So it was kind of eye rolling, honestly, for me. I hesitate to say that it was beautiful because it was kind of tropey in the beautiful. We were looking at green fields and then these very thin, very young, white cis women would frolic through the fields. Then there was an artist who is obsessed with painting beauty. Of course it was these very thin, naked, white, young, able bodied cis women. So it just didn’t move me. It wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t different. 

Dawn Serra: We went to a set of experimental films, the vast majority of those felt really difficult to sit through. It was either flashing images where you couldn’t even really truly see what you were looking at. You just got the impression that it was nudity of some sort, but you couldn’t actually see the body parts or see the motion or see the activity. It was just, of course, again white people flash beige-y skin like a movement that didn’t mean anything. There was a couple like that. I so support people doing their art in the ways that they want to. This was not for me. I felt frustrated and there was no context. There was nothing to move me, there was nothing that interested me. 

So what went well, there was a short during the Future Sex Shorts called Cake. Cake is actually by a filmmaker who works for HBO. She cuts trailers for Game of Thrones, and the Young Pope, she’s done a whole bunch of commercials. Her short was nine minutes long. You can actually see the trailer. I’ve linked to it at dawnserra.com/ep179 for this episode, and it was just this really cute, nice succinct story. That was a couple who bought a sex robot, and Ann actually plays the sex robot in this film, and how they desperately want to spice things up, but how wrong things can go when you don’t quite know what you’re asking for. It was hysterical. Every single detail in the film was spot on. It was simple and beautifully shot, and even had some smart racial jokes in it. And it was just beautifully done from start to finish. 

Dawn Serra: There was another one in the Future Shorts called Boner Loner that I loved. It was about a future where this guy who certainly isn’t your traditional porn guy. He’s super hairy and he’s got a little bit of a belly, and he’s a little bit geeky. He’s about to have a hookup and he realizes he can’t get hard. So he calls Boner Loner up, and literally Boner Loner is a company that loans you a boner for whatever activity you’re about to have. So they send over a boner, which is actually this guy who’s very robotic, but he has a hard cock. So the geeky guy, his date shows up and she’s like, “Oh, wow! You got a Boner Loner!” He’s like, “Yeah, only the best for you.” So the Boner Loner fucks her 17 different ways and at the end, the Boner Loner goes away, and then the geeky guys the hero. She tells him how amazing he is. 

it’s kind of this infomercial feel. It’s very tongue in cheek. It knows it’s being ridiculous throughout. But I just loved the message of thinking outside the box to find a way to please a lover who’s coming over, and then getting to be the hero when it wasn’t his cock that was the one that was actually doing some of the sex. It was really funny. Some of the filmmakers were actually in the audience. Then we saw a series of shorts called It’s Complicated, and those were actually the best of the festival. There was a really sweet little lesbian consent film, that was hot and flirty and cute, and at the end, it was all about consent. There was a very funny instructional video kind of made like those 1950s instructional videos. There’s a narrator that’s talking to the people on screen. Like, “Wouldn’t you like to date couples too?” Then they smile and nod. It’s called How to Date Couples. And it’s just this funny, cute, little film making fun of a lot of the bad things that happen when you first decide you want to date a couple. Then what happens when you actually meet a couple you like, and how to make that successful. 

Dawn Serra: So it was a mixed bag for me. I think what became very clear after watching all of these films was, it’s important to me, at least, I’m not saying it has to be important to you. But it’s important to me that there’s a point – that it’s not just the same old, same old thing. That it’s not just hyper masculinity or hyper femininity, without being aware that it is. If you’re aware you’re doing that and you’re kind of using that trope for a reason, then I think that that self awareness can be really hot and interesting. Then we saw the Dan Savage Hump Festival, which one of the really fun things about that festival, if you’ve never been, is that all of the films have to be five minutes or less. So that means no matter what you see, no matter how much you love it or hate it, you don’t have to sit through it for more than five minutes. There were, I don’t know, 24 films that we saw in a two hour period. 

For the most part, they were really funny and smart. Many of them didn’t have actual sex. They just made fun of sex or simulated sex. There was an animated film, there was a song about sock puppets. Something that did scar me just a little bit is at the Seattle Erotic Film Festival, the It’s Complicated Shorts program actually had two scat play videos. One of them was surprisingly well done. It was this funny, gay instructional video that was highlighting all of the the tropes from gay male culture, and it was really cute and really funny, and moved to through the fashion and flagging, and how they hook up and the different activities they do. Then the very end, after they had done some fisting and some piss play, they did a little teeny scat scene and it’s kind of intentional – they’re looking at the camera and they’re acknowledging like, “Yes, we went there. We’re pushing your buttons.”

Dawn Serra: There was another video that is called Breakfast in Bed. For me, it’s challenging to watch. That film actually showed up at the Hump Festival, too, and so had to see it twice in one week. At least the second time I need to close my eyes because it wasn’t for me, but it was certainly fun listening to the audience react to it. The Hump Films were a big range. I think the thing that disappointed me the most is the Hump Festival does awards. So there’s best humor, there’s best kink, there’s best sex, and then there’s overall. The two that won for best sex and runner up best sex were two of the only films in the 24 film lineup, that had white, thin, young, able bodied sports couples having sex. So the winner was a couple who had hiked up to the top of a mountain and did some acro yoga and then they fucked, and they were super thin white, athletic outdoorsy folks. Then the runner up was almost the exact same thing of two white, athletic, young, able bodied folks, or at least white passing – the woman maybe was Latinx, but it’s hard to tell. They were having sex in lots of different adventurous places. Not that it wasn’t hot, but there was lots of other sex happening. 

There was so much trans sex happening and some of the trans sex was really hot. There was this one scene between two trans women who were hardcore fucking and it was really hot. I will say the Best in Show, though, was this wonderful little short called I’m Not Poly But My Boyfriends Are, and it’s about this woman who – they tell you what the end of the film that everyone featured in the film was between the ages of 51 and 75. So it’s this older woman who late in life, discovered that she was allowed to explore her body and have sexual pleasure. So now she has four boyfriends and she doesn’t like to call herself Poly even though all the boyfriends agree that’s what they do. And the film is their bodies having these wonderful conversations with the camera and then engaging in sex, and it won Best in Show. So that felt really good. 

Dawn Serra: There was some fucking hysterical films. So the new hump tour in Seattle, which is where it kicks off actually starts next month. So I got to see the very tail end of the films that have been circulating since October 2016. Which means in I think, October 2017, That’s when the newest films premiere out in Seattle and Portland. So if you haven’t had a chance to do that, I highly recommend it. I know they go out to DC and down to LA and up to Vancouver. It might take a couple months, but totally check it out. It’ll give you so much to talk about, and to giggle over and enjoy. 

Okay, so enough about my porn viewing, let’s jump into some listener questions. So the first is from JNIX – I’m not sure how to pronounce it, so I’ll just spell it, and it asks me to define a word that I use, which is cis. So this a word that has become more and more popular, and I’m glad you’re asking, and it’s a way of denoting whether or not your gender aligns with the sex that people call out when you’re born. So you know how when a doctor pulls the baby out and they say, “It’s a girl!” That’s because they’ve looked at the genitals and decided that that is what both your gender and your sex are – entirely based on your genitals. So if you’re a person where, when you got pulled out and they declared, “It’s a girl!” And as you grow up, your gender is as a woman, so they align, then that means your cis.

Dawn Serra: If you were declared, “It’s a girl!” But as you grow up, realize your gender was something else, maybe your gender is masculine or male, then you’d be referred to as potentially trans. You might be gender non-conforming or non-binary. There’s lots of different ways that we experience our gender versus our genitals. But cis is just a way of acknowledging that what people saw between your legs and declared your sex aligns also with the way that you feel in your body – it aligns with that. So you inherently, because of our world and unfortunately, the way that we organize around binaries right now, means that you’re born with a lot of privilege. People just assume that everyone in the world is cis, unless they’re told otherwise. That’s a privilege. You don’t have to do all that extra work and emotional labor of correcting people or telling them that that’s not the case. 

So I hope that’s helpful to you. There’s so many amazing resources out there. If you want to learn more Scarleteen is a great place to go. Then of course, any website that talks about queer rights or trans rights – transstudent.org has some resources with definitions. So I hope you’ll check that out and also give it a think whether or not your cis. What does that mean for you and how you move through the world? 

Dawn Serra: Okay, the next email is from Shane. It says “Please help with spanking.” “Hey, Dawn, I’ve been listening to all of your past episodes since finding this podcast recently and I love it. I love you. I would totally sleep with you. I came out as a lesbian a few years back, and now I’m dating a sexy school teacher. Just one problem, I’m super into giving spankings and floggings. It turns me on and makes me soaking wet. But my girlfriend isn’t really into it because she thinks it will just hurt. What can I do? Love you, Shane.” 

Thank you so much for writing in, Shane, and thank you for listening to the show. I appreciate all of the love. The very first time I encountered flogging was actually, god, I don’t know 15-12, maybe 12 years ago in Washington, DC. I was going to these monthly dyke school nights at The Eagle, which is the gay-male leather bar in DC, The Eagle. But at the time, every month on a Sunday, they were having a dyke night or lesbian night, where there would be group classes. Then afterwards, we’d drink and mingle and do whatever people do in leather bars. 

Dawn Serra: So there was one night when we learned lap dancing, and that was really fun. Because all of the butch-masculine identified folks were invited to sit in chairs in a circle. Then all of the feminine folks who wanted to participate – femme folks got to actually practice giving lap dances to different people. And that was a really fun evening. So they did all kinds of different things. One of the classes was actually on flogging. So my friend and I decided, “Well, we should go. We’ve never heard of this thing.” So they did a demo, and then everyone got a flogger, and we had a chance to actually try it ourselves. 

I think because it was new and I had never done it before and I was doing it with a friend that I did not have a sexual relationship with and we didn’t really know what we were doing. I didn’t really love it. Even though it was a really soft flogger, she was so tense and nervous that when I flogged her, she freaked out and was like, “Oh too much, too much, too much.” So I just assumed like “Wow, this must be something that’s pretty extreme because I was barely touching her with it.” Then when she did it to me – accuracy and where you hit is important. So it was a little all over the place and I kind of maybe liked it but it was too stressful. So I was like I don’t know if this is for me.

Dawn Serra: It took a couple of years of seeing it other places and then having other people try it on me before I realized I fucking love it. Now I have not been flogged by one of those really mean floggers that has rope knots at the end or really really stiff leather. The floggers that I have and that we have are pretty soft and thuddy and thick. But for me it’s one of my favorite ways to get embodied and to escape, and get really present and to turn off my brain. I love being flogged. It’s like a massage. I also love flogging, hearing that thud and hearing the groan on the other side of pleasure. 

One of the things that I love so much about the floggers that we have is we can wail on the other person and at no point does it actually hurt in a stingy way right. It just feels like these really solid thuds that feel like a really intense massage, and it makes your skin all warm and tingly and wakes you up to new sensations in your body. Then spanking, of course, I’ve had bad experiences with spanking where the person just laid into me. I had a terrible experience once where I had just met someone at a Munch and he offered to do a little scene with me, and he spanked me pretty mercilessly and then slapped me across the face without negotiating that and that really pissed me off. 

Dawn Serra: So of course, like anything, you can customize an activity to exactly what you want. Spankings can hurt, like fuck, you can bruise the shit out of someone and leave huge handprints. But they can also be these really fun teasing, fluttery little experiences that make you gasp and and make your skin a little warm but don’t actually hurt or sting too much. So the thing with your girlfriend is, we never want to pressure someone into something. We never want to coerce someone into something. We don’t want to make them feel like they have to do something on our behalf. So I think instead, having some open conversations and asking her if it’s okay to have the conversations. 

Another thing to keep in mind is often people are scared to have conversations about sexual or kinky activities. Because the assumption is, if we start talking about this, then there’s the potential you’re going to want to follow through on it like, “What if we start talking and then you decide now this means we can do it?” So I think it’s really helpful to approach a conversation with, “Hey, I’d really love to do this yes, no, maybe list,” or you can play my Sex Maps game. It’s only 9 bucks, if you don’t have it already. It’s just a little PDF that you download that helps you ask really fun questions of each other in new ways around sex and kink. But, just say, “Hey, I’d really love to talk to you about things that turn you on and fantasies, and things that turned me on. I’d love for us to do this someday on a date or in the park. So we can just talk. No pressure. Sex doesn’t have to follow it or anything like that.” Then get really curious like, “What are your thoughts around this? What makes you think that it’s going to hurt? What if you did it to me first?

Would that be interesting to you just so that you can have an experience of topping and trying this out? Would you be interested in watching any films or listen to this podcast together?” And see what she thinks. She’s allowed to be scared of it and to not want to do it. Sometimes it takes time, people just sitting with an idea before they soften into it. 

Dawn Serra: Oftentimes when people hear me say, “It takes time.” They think a couple of days or a couple of weeks. No. Ideas and the ways that we feel about them can take months for people to slowly ease into. So let her have her path and also invite curiosity. Let her ask you questions about your experiences and the sensations that you have. In the meantime, if you can enjoy some spanking porn and some flogging porn, and masturbate to fantasies of it – I think that can be a really fun, juicy way to stay in touch with that kinky side of yourself. But the key is really going to be inviting open curiosity and let her know that if at any point, she decides she is really curious, that it’s absolutely possible to do flogging without pain. You can even drape the flogger on her. I think that’s the thing, too, with kink that a lot of people don’t get is – they go to the most extreme. So if someone hears whipping, they think 12-years A Slave whipping or big bloody bruises whipping because that’s often what we see in kink porn or in erotica playing out. 

So we don’t really have a context for maybe when we play with the whip, we use it to restrain you, or I just trail it over your body. Or we do the softest of flicks over your clothes, so that you get that little risk feeling but actually no pain sensation. Just approach it sensitively. I’m sure that over the course of time that curiosity is going to naturally blossom. So good luck. Thank you for listening to the show. Feel free to share this episode with your girlfriend and maybe that will also add some curiosity to the mix so that you can have some talks about it because I am definitely a convert. I love flogging and spanking now, but it did take me some time to get there and to retell some of the stories. Thank you so much, Shane. 

Dawn Serra: So Marissa wrote in and I think this is a nice follow-up question to Shane’s. It says, “This could be a good question for your podcast or just in general if you don’t mind pointing me to some resources. I’ve recently gotten into being restrained and I love it. I’m wondering if I do it too often, will it lose some of its thrill? Is this inevitable? How can I keep it exciting? Is keeping it rare and special the secret? Thanks, Marissa.” 

Those are wonderful questions. Specifically, if you’re really into being restrained, I highly recommend checking out Emily Bingham’s book, Diary of A Rope Slut”. I just had her on the show a couple of months ago so it might be worth listening to the episode. But the book itself has, I don’t know, god, 15 or 20 chapters all about her rope adventures over many years. At this point, she’s been doing rope for probably 10 or 15 years. I think she says in the book, I can’t remember off the top of my head. But it’s still something that she loves doing. Like anything, whether it’s monogamy and our partners, or it’s polyamory or it’s being restrained or it’s writing erotica – the ways that we approach these things set the tone, right? 

Dawn Serra: So whether we’re talking about being in relationship with someone or really loving a specific activity, if we have a very, very, very special specific way of wanting to do that thing and then reaching a point where we assume we kind of know everything or there’s only one way to do it, the chances that we’re going to fall into a rut and feel bored are pretty high. But if we approach things from this curiosity mindset of realizing we will never truly know our partner. They are mysteries, even when we think we know everything about them. They are still fully contained human beings that are constantly changing, whether we see it or not. So there’s this beautiful sense of risk and curiosity that opens when we realize we’ll never truly know someone. There’s always going to be something about them that’s shifting. The same can be true for things like being restrained or liking impact play. 

There’s always something new that we can discover. Our bodies are constantly changing. The way that rope and restraints feel when we’re in our 20s, it’s going to feel differently when we’re in a body in our early 40s or late 50s. Because our body is changing, the context is changing, where we do it is changing, maybe the people we’re doing it with are changing. Maybe the types of things were being restrained with change. So I think there is something important to know that when you ask will it lose some of its thrill, there probably will come a point when it feels less new and when it feels less risky or taboo. Because once you’ve done something 10,000 times, you probably have grappled with some shame. You’ve probably grappled with it feeling like something you shouldn’t be doing or like something that’s super new. But in that place, you can start finding wonder and excitement at the endless possibilities. So those feelings may shift a little bit, but it doesn’t have to mean that it becomes boring or dull, unless that’s how you’re approaching it. 

Dawn Serra: So whether you’re talking about restraints or you’re talking about a partner that you’ve been with for 30 years, the way that you stay open and curious and noticing the constant change, the constant opportunity for new information – for new discovery, that’s where we stay in joy and in excitement and in connection. It can still feel special years later when you create these beautiful rituals around it and meaning. So I think it depends on what kind of a person you are, Marissa, if you’re the kind of person that knows how to stay in wonderment. If you are open to finding lots of different materials and ways of being restrained. If you know how to check in with your body and notice the changes every single time you do it, then it can continue to feel fresh and exciting and new. But if you’re the kind of person that tends to get bored rather easily, staying in that curious mindset isn’t something that you’ve really tried before or done before, then maybe it’ll lose some of its luster. 

I also think the ways that we relate to these things when they shift, it’s not always a bad thing. We’re a culture that tells us that keeping things new and exciting and thrilling is the best way to do things. So we’re culturally told that having the same type of sex in the same position all the time is “boring”. The assumption is that that’s bad. But what if it’s not? What if going from thrilling and special and exciting moves into comforting and nurturing, and soul-feeding and connected, and pleasurable and a place to surrender. So maybe that heart-pumping thrill is gone, but instead, you’re being fed in other ways. I think that can be an amazing thing too. So my recommendation to you, Marissa, is play with being restrained as often as it feels good for you. Also, start thinking about all the ways that this could be new forever, if that’s an important thing to you. If it’s not, or if you’re just open to seeing what happens, there is absolutely nothing wrong with something moving from thrilling to comforting, to safe and enjoyable, to normal and a part of your everyday life. That can be just as nourishing and fulfilling, as thrilling and exciting. It just looks a little bit different. 

Dawn Serra: So enjoy to your heart’s content and do whatever it is that you want to do for as long as you want to do it. Then stay curious, “What does it feel like to me now? I’ve been doing this for six months.” “I’ve been doing this for six years,” “I’ve been doing this for 16 years.” “How does it feel for me in all these different bodies and positions and in joy?” That’s the point of why we do all of this. So good luck, congratulations, and on recently getting into being restrained. I hope that there are all kinds of really interesting experiences ahead of you, and have fun. 

Dawn Serra: So I got this email from Hopelessly Devoted to Boot. The subject line is “Boot fetish ruins a marriage.” So here’s the message. “Hi. Your show is so awesome. I just discovered and started burning through the episodes. Thanks so much. I am all about a sex positive outlook and you guys are so great that way. I’ve been happily married to my best friend for 20 years. We are nuts about each other. The thing is, I have an insanely powerful boot fetish that has been challenging in our relationship. I bought my wife dozens of pairs of really expensive boots. Cheap boots turn me off.” 

“For the first five years, she wore boots – all over all of my favorite kinds. One of my big things is going into public places on a boot date with her. I love it when she wears thigh boots to dinner parties or shopping. It usually ends in massive sex at the end of the night. Because it’s like hours of foreplay for me. I know it sounds selfish, but I can’t help it. But little by little she stopped accommodating my fetish. She would find excuses like, “Oh, we’re going to have to stand a long time and I can’t wear heels. And more and more excuses over the years led to more and more aggravation. 

Dawn Serra: The thing that sucks is we’re best friends in all other areas of our lives. Note, I love all boots styles, not just heels. I like biker boots, wedge boots, whatever. So there are plenty of choices for her. She also has an awesome sense of style, so she always looks more like Vogue magazine. I think she’s just over it. She even told me she gave away a pair that was one of my all time favorites. I get so hard by certain pairs on her. Boots do nothing for me unless they’re on a woman, then it’s magic. Now I have to spend my private time looking at thousands of celebrities in boots on celeboots.com, where I can see high end boots on women. Consequently, my sex life with my wife has all but died. I mean, I would always accommodate her sexual needs while she was wearing boots. It was my Viagra. It never failed to get me hard. I was putty in her hand when she had boots on. What should I do? I’m stuck. Thanks.”

Well, first of all, thank you for writing in and for listening, Hopelessly Devoted to Boot. I definitely hear the pain and the stuckness in what you’re sharing. I think that it’s really tough. 

Dawn Serra: One of the things that stands out to me is when when we have fetishes one of the toughest things is fetish is often to humanize the person that’s helping us to live out that fetish. So whether we’re fetish sizing a person because of how they look, maybe because they’re in a fat body or they have a disability, We’re fetishsizing boots, or latex, or t-shirts because I just recently had a guy right in who has a fetish for t-shirts, especially with bubble letters on it. The danger is that the fetish becomes so powerful that we forget about the people that they are complex human beings with complex feelings and sexualities of their own. While some people really love being fetishized, or being part of a fetish, other people, myself included, don’t like that feeling of lost humanity. 

So I’m wondering if you asked your wife directly. what it was like for her to learn about your boot fetish, to have you buy all these boots for her, to wear all of these boots for as many years as she did. Then to really honestly find out what changed? Did she start to feel like it was more about the boots and not about her? Was she feeling invisible? Even if you were pleasuring her, even if the sex was really hot, if she didn’t feel like it was for her, it was because of her, because of how she looked, or because of how she smelled, or because of the things she wanted – but because of the boots, there may be a chance that she was feeling like an object. A thing to fill the boots so that you could get off. While some people might like that role, because it means lots of really hot sex, for other people, that might feel like something that over the course of time would begin to really hurt. There might be some resentment there. 

Dawn Serra: So I think the place you have to start is in inviting your wife’s story. It might really hurt to hear those words and to hear how she’s been feeling. But you won’t actually be able to start working on a resolution if you don’t have those conversations and if you don’t invite her perspective, and her stories. Finding ways to nurture your fetish is important. For some people with fetishes, their only outlet is finding videos online. If you get aroused from that, it absolutely counts. It counts as exploring your fetish. It counts as sex, that might feel different than doing it in person. Of course it feels different, but it does count as sex. 

The other thing that you might want to talk to your wife about is what if you hired a sex worker or a pro who could be present with you around the boots. Maybe you don’t interact with them sexually. Maybe you don’t have intercourse with them. But maybe you work with someone who loves boots and/or you pay to love boots and they were the boots for you, they let you touch the boots, and smell the boots, and do whatever the things are that feel really good for you when you are around a woman in boots. Then maybe you come home and have amazing, delicious sex with your wife. That’s an option. But the only way to find out if that’s truly an option is to have those conversations with your wife. She’s allowed to change her mind about what feels good. The hard thing when it comes to a fetish is it can feel really terrible and scary to start losing that. Of course it can feel aggravating and frustrating, and maybe even there’s some resentment there. But the people that were in relationship with, are allowed to change their minds. They’re allowed to want new experiences around their body and how you’re responding to them. Maybe she needs a break from being in the boots. If she doesn’t feel like she can actually say that to you, then I think what you end up getting is some of these excuses of, maybe she really doesn’t want to wear high heels. Maybe she doesn’t feel like having her feet in the boot, because maybe they’re really hot. Maybe her feet have changed, maybe her body’s changed. You’ve been together for 20 years. 

Dawn Serra: How are you inviting these conversations with her so that she can honestly say, 1.) “I really don’t feel like wearing boots right now.” Or maybe she wants to wear boots, but she doesn’t want it to turn into sex. Because maybe for her they’re not linked the way that they are for you. So maybe she feels like if she wears boots, it automatically means sex. We’ve heard this story 1000 times on the podcast. How many times have people written in saying that they don’t even want to hug their partner or get massaged by their partner, because they’re afraid it’s going to automatically turn into sex, because it’s become kind of the unspoken cue for, “Oh, we’re going to have sex.” Maybe she does want to wear boots, but she doesn’t want to have it turned into sex. 

So there’s lots of different potential opportunities here for conversations, for connection. It sounds like either those conversations aren’t being had or they’re not being had in the way that gets you information. So there’s no way to force your wife or to coerce your wife into wanting to do this for you. She needs to decide what feels good for her in her body, whether or not she wants to wear the boots. Then you have to decide whether or not that’s something you can live with. If she’s your best friend in every other way, and there’s this one place of kind of pain and frustration. It sounds to me like there’s a lot going in this relationship. Maybe you can get some help. Maybe you can work with a therapist that’s sex positive, or a sex coach, maybe you can talk to her about you finding someone who’s super into boots, and doing non-sexual boot stuff. Then coming home and being sexual with her. Maybe you can acknowledge that your fetishe is there and that you watch your videos around it. Right now, living it out just isn’t going to happen for the health of your marriage. 

Dawn Serra: It’s not necessarily like you have to choose between them. But sometimes you do have to decide is, this thing, for me, more important? If it is, then the option of course is to end the marriage. That’s always an option. Or if this marriage is feeding you in so many ways, this is your best friend. You Love each other, you feel so nurtured and sustained. Then there’s this place where you have your fetish, and it just feels really challenging, then maybe you need to navigate that challenge. Maybe you need to let some time pass. Check in with her if she’s like, “I just don’t want to talk about this for a while.” That’s probably going to mean many months, because there’s been years of this. So give her that space and decide whether or not you can sit in that discomfort. I know it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of options. But I do think that there are a lot of options for new conversations, processing feelings, finding new ways to connect, asking her what she’s super into, and focusing on that for a while. Get creative in this space. 

I think the danger is when we focus on the things that aren’t working, they fill up our entire lens. I’m working with a new therapist right now, who’s amazing. We are working on my trauma and my PTSD from my rapes, and things like that. One of the things that she’s constantly telling me is orient towards pleasure – to instead of focusing on the things that hurt and instead of focusing on the places where there’s wounds, if I instead focus on the places where I feel amazing in my body, I feel connected to my body, I feel connected to Alex, I feel joy and lit up like I’m really good at something or like I can be super playful, to really zero in on those spaces so that they fill me up and are a source of strength because we are not a world that allows or encourages adults to be playful and silly and to focus on the things that feel good. 

Dawn Serra: So that’s something else I just want to offer to you, Hopelessly Devoted, is, can you coexist with the boot fetish and the frustration? Also focus on all the things that feel amazing in your relationship with your wife and in your marriage. Focus on all the things that fill you up and feed you ,and see if that shifts the pain a little bit. Bottom line is lots of conversations, maybe some professional support, and definitely make sure if you reach out for professional support, that you do it with someone who isn’t going to shame you around your fetish. You need a sex positive therapist, because there’s definitely people out there who would want to focus on fixing your fetish instead of finding ways to coexist with it, and then nurturing your marriage. Thank you so much for listening to the show and good luck.

Here’s the last email. “Hi, Dawn. You can call me Sad, Gay Millennial. Longtime listener here. Love the podcast and the ways that it has helped me and many others to whom I recommended it process and engage our experiences with the world. Thank you. I am a gay cis male and I’m afraid of bottoming. I guess the context for this issue requires a bit of history. I have experienced repeated violations of my consent, ranging from instances where out of conflict or fear or pressure, I’ve gone totally still to instances of actively asking for it to stop and it just didn’t. I attribute this to the nature of the people to whom I repeatedly make myself vulnerable, as well as such an underwhelming sensitivity, or more importantly, education among our culture about sex and consent; especially among communities prone to trauma, who can sometimes go on to repeat them. But I have also experienced incredible cathartic, painfully vulnerable orgasmic joyous pleasure from bottoming – both with long term partners in one time encounters. So I know it’s possible and even more I miss it.” 

Dawn Serra: “Sex in general is difficult for me. I have been described as a wounded healer. In all of my relationships, I tend to assume a teacherly position, where I’m guiding my partners through understanding themselves, learning about sex, pleasure, and healing, ways to heal from all of their unique traumas. I always make myself so available to undo the hurt that others have experienced and to help them feel loved and powerful. But I have never been given similar mentorship from partners. Not in such explicit ways, at least. Increasingly, I find myself feeling as though my cup is emptying, and unsure if there is any way for this to ever be filled up again. The dilemma is, it’s so natural and intuitive for me to understand the problems of others and to guide them towards solutions that seem so clear to me. But that same understanding for my own problems often makes itself so evasive and far away.”

“I find myself giving mindful advice that is so pertinent to my own situations, that it’s almost as if part of me is talking to myself, and I can’t connect that other people are in fact going through similar things that I have and that should make me feel not so isolated. I appreciate my experiences for the understanding that it allows me to reciprocate with others. But even writing this now I am crying, because even this tiny amount of processing is breaking the surface of so much buried beneath dark, murky waters. I just cannot see through. I feel powerless, I feel alone, and at my weakest, unlovable. I know better, and that makes my inability to do better, feel worse. One solution I’ve tried to employ is to only sleep with people who I know and trust. But this is often difficult for a number of reasons.”

Dawn Serra: “I’m 24 years old and struggled with homelessness between the ages of 18 to 22, after being kicked out by my family for being gay. I couldn’t establish any sense of stability or purpose or belonging until I started going to school, which changed my life for the better, but left me with incapacitating amounts of debt. I have traveled cities, often and repeatedly, come face to face with the difficulties of any transplant. Only after about a year do I begin to secure any semblance of a social network, after a lot of effort for putting myself out there and trying, and even with my most recent and difficult move to Chicago over two years ago, all this time later, I am still now the loneliest I’ve ever been. It is so hard to find the space and the time for these types of relationships to develop that it just reaches a point of desperation. Why I resort to Grindr, which has almost only connected me to people who have commodified sex as a function and less as experience. I always leave these encounters feeling used, weak, and empty, and abused, when the ensuing behaviors like ghosting, gradual and communicated decreases in interest, or pretending we don’t see or know each other in public.”

“Several times I have contracted STIs from people who have denied it was from them, blamed me, or who I have just never heard from again. I understand that internalized stigmas and fears manifest themselves in many different ways. I just regret how disproportionate the frequency is of instances like this that are at my expense. I wish more people were brave. I wish more people were fair. Retrospectively, I see that I have bottomed for the people for whom I have felt the most vulnerable, and when eventually hurt by these people the most devastated. I know that I physically enjoy bottoming. But all of this baggage has made it so daunting and inaccessible, that I haven’t done it successfully for years. I feel starved of the intimacy that I need most as though my diet is starved of nutrients, and I’ve been eating the bare minimum to survive. I feel far away, somehow disconnected from my pleasure. I feel invisible and unheard when everyone passes by, like a ghost among the living. Even when I hear its hollowness and the echo of my footsteps, I continue to try but ironically, I feel the least touched after men have put their hands all over me.”

Dawn Serra: “I know this is a bad way to say it, but I just want to feel normal. I want to be able to have sex without fear. I want to be able to bottom without all of these attachments to pain and trauma, but I simply desperately don’t know how. Please help. Don’t feel bad if you can’t. Just writing this has made something inside of me move, like admitting it. Just the feeling that maybe someone out there cares brings me some solace. I’m crying now.” 

I just want to, first, say to Sad, Gay Millennial, thank you for being so eloquent in sharing yourself with us, in sharing your story and your trauma and your pain. I appreciate it so much. So much of what I’m hearing you say echoes a lot of the things I say on this show often, which is patriarchy hurts all of us. Audra Lord says that the first victims of patriarchy are men. I’ve talked to so many gay men who have had experiences with trauma and repeated violations of consent within the gay male community and a large part because this hyper masculinity, this toxic masculinity is so valued. There’s this rejection of all things feminine unless it’s done in this very exaggerated way. Unfortunately, as long as we exist in a world with patriarchy and toxic masculinity, there’s going to continue to be this disconnect and this pain that exists within gay male culture. Andrew Gurza has talked about it at length because he encounters it all the time as someone with a disability. 

Dawn Serra: So first, I want to say you are not alone in feeling these things. I have a very close friend who struggled for years as a gay man who did not want to be a part of the hookup culture. Even though he would certainly use Grindr to meet people and try and go on dates, he struggled to find people who wanted a lot of the things that he did, which was a loving, caring, safe relationship outside of the endless sex that is gay culture.

My first suggestion for you is to find a therapist. Find a loving, nurturing sex positive therapist that can help you process some of your trauma. Now, I will say as someone with sexual trauma that oftentimes talk therapy can make trauma worse, and a lot of therapists don’t like hearing that. But I am working with this fantastic therapist who is certified in somatic experiencing, which is a certification program run by Peter Levein. If you can find a Somatic Experiencing therapist or an SE therapist, they are specifically designed to help people work with trauma. It is a beautiful experience of integration and patience and healing. So definitely look for that, also, EMDR therapists do beautiful work around trauma and helping us to integrate and process trauma that’s stored in our body. 

Dawn Serra: So what I’m hearing from you is so much pain and fear and trauma, and also a willingness to sacrifice yourself in relationships, to be the wounded healer to be the teacher, which is a way of maintaining power and distance. Of course it comes from a place of love and wanting to help others, but it also means that you’re sacrificing yourself – that you’re not asking for the love and support that you need, that you’re not being seen for the places where you really need someone to be your rock, so that you can lean on them and break and hurt and be a mess sometimes too. As someone who has trauma and has a fat body, I have been very good at being in relationships where I got to be the caretaker, where I got to be the fixer, where I got to be the person that held things together, and the other person got to fall apart and struggle and hurt, and I never got to do that myself. That’s a really terrible place to be. 

We all need places where we can fall apart and be messy, and be wounded and be hurt, and be held and loved, and not rushed to fix. We can certainly find that in friends and in colleagues and intimate partners, and in therapists. There’s so many places where we can be held in that way. So I want to encourage you, first and foremost, try and find either an SE therapist or an EMDR therapist, and also an everyday talk therapy that can help you process so many of your feelings. Finding a sex positive therapist would be, I think, a fantastic place for you to be able to say these things and grapple with these things, and to rage and to be angry, and to be sad and to feel lonel. But to not have to do it alone. 

Dawn Serra: I also think it could be really interesting for you to potentially work with a sexological bodyworker, or a sacred intimate. I’ve had TT Baum on the show, you should definitely go listen to his episode. He works with lots of gay men in these spaces, and it can be really healing to work with our professional around our wounds. They need to consent to that and to feel like that’s a space they can hold for you. Certainly, we don’t want to just bring our wounds to a sex worker and then expect them to fix us like we heard with Lola Devina’s episode. But there are some very skilled sex workers out there who are specifically trained to work with sexual wounds and trauma, and to help people feel held and embodied in those spaces. So that might be something else that’s a really powerful practice for you where you can explore your body and you’re bottoming, and being vulnerable with someone who has the skills and the capability to hold that space. 

I just think that when it comes to dating and finding people of quality, it can take a long time, years sometimes, of doing our work and getting ourselves in a good place, and setting better boundaries, and making sure that we really only enter into relationships that nurture us and where we’re equals, where we’re not the caretakers, where we’re not the teachers, especially when we feel like that drains us. I think the other thing, too, that stands out is where is the joy? Where are the friends? Where are the places where you get to express yourself, where you get to be creative, where you get to have fun and play? Where are the places where you get to simply be without having to do all this striving and thinking and working and struggling? Where are you expressing yourself with art or with writing? Where are you having fun, just for fucking fun’s sake, because that’s so healing too. Where are you silly and ridiculous and playful? 

Dawn Serra: Finding ways to fill yourself up through those activities, and maybe taking a break from the dating and the sex can be a wonderful way to fill up that vessel you talked about feeling so empty around. Also finding safe places to have a lot of big feelings. I know I’m not giving you very many things that are super concrete. But I think first and foremost, as someone who has so many similar experiences to what you’ve shared here, we have to start with ourselves. We don’t have to do it alone. We can certainly be actively finding friends and community, places where we feel seen and held because we’re volunteering or we’re doing things we really enjoy. But finding therapists working on our trauma, finding people who we just have fun with, without it needing to be for sex or a relationship – those are powerful places. 

Those are powerful places that feed us and heal us and give us rich nourishing food because I know at the end, you talked about feeling so starved. When we have those things filling us up, we are so much better able to explore sexually, that vulnerability, and that dating space and that relationship space because we’re better able to say, “This is working for me” or “I’m starting to see that some old patterns are replaying and I’m just not willing to do that anymore.” But it takes having that full cup or, at least, to start finding ways to plug the hole so that you can fill it up in small ways. Thank you so much for sharing yourself with us. I hope that you find safe places to do some healing and growing. I want you to know that at 24, you have so much out of you – so many opportunities for meeting so many people. It can feel hopelessly lonely sometimes, especially when we feel like we’ve been fighting so hard for so long. 

Dawn Serra: I didn’t really start finding the types of relationships that were going to really fuel me until I was well into my 30s. The friends that I had, and still have but they’re far away, the friendships that I created the deep, nurturing, powerful friendships started coming into my life in my mid 20s. I had known people for years, but to really create those amazing connections were just being in each other’s presence was pure joy, and fulfilling. It wasn’t until I was in my mid to late 20s, that we really started having these powerful experiences together and making those friendships happen. Some people are lucky and find that in high school or middle school and sustain those, and others of us because we move or because we’re changing so much in who we are. It takes us a little more time. 

So my recommendation is find some professional support, in therapy, in trauma work, maybe even with some sexological body work, or some sexuality healing, and then focus on the things that bring you joy, silliness, and play. Start going to workshops and classes and events that feel like they’ll fill you up. That will offer you beautiful things or funny things and surround you with people who have similar interests, and really focus on you. So that you can find the edges of who you are and what you want and what you deserve. So that you can be so clear on the things that you need help around and the things that you bring to the table. So that when you do find someone to be in relationship with, you can come to the table and say, “This is what I’m looking for. Can you show up for me in these ways?” Then if someone disappears or decides they don’t want to be with you, of course, it’s going to hurt and it’s going to sting, and it’s going to feel ouchie. That’s just how it is, but you won’t feel like it’s because of you. That is lifelong work for some of us.

Dawn Serra: So I wish you the very best, Sad, Gay millennial. Thank you so much for trusting us with this. To everyone who listened, I have some really fun episodes coming up including an interview with Bex Caputo where we talk all about sex and toys, and transness and being on T. I can’t wait for you to hear it. If you have any questions or thoughts you can always write to me at dawnserra.com. You can support the show at patreon on patreon.com/sgrpodcast, every dollar helps. I will talk to you soon. Bye