Today’s Locker Room Talk Topic is BDSM tips and tricks that will set your vanilla sex life on fire. Did you know that you don’t actually have to participate in BDSM practices to reap the benefits they offer people looking to improve their sex life? BDSM is governed by a set of rules, guidelines, and practices that can be applied to any kind of sexual connection and experience, and they are guaranteed to heat things up in the bedroom. Lesbian pleasure coach and sex educator Whitni Miller has vast experience in the BDSM world and shares how people looking to spice up their sex life can use some simple takeaways from BDSM to start firing things up in the bedroom tonight in this interview.
For the full interview, listen to the podcast:
Pleasure Coach & Sex Educator Whitni Miller’s Experience
I’m Whitney Miller. I’m the owner and operator of BDE moves LLC on social media platforms where I disseminate information. I work with clients one-on-one and I work with couples. I’ve had experience over the past year helping couples negotiate their D/S dynamics. And what that means is dominant /submissive, which is power exchange in BDSM.
My experience with BDSM is I started out practicing kink at home. Usually, that’s what happens to most people. And then I started going to a dungeon roughly two years ago. A dungeon is a private play place where kinky folks can go and gather in a safe, clean space and explore their kinks. Unlike a sex club, there’s no sexual intercourse in the dungeon and there’s no alcohol or drugs allowed. So everybody is with a clear head and can make conscious decisions on their part because everything in BDSM is upheld by informed enthusiastic consent. Anything happening outside of informed enthusiastic consent is abuse. And it’s not BDSM anymore. So a lot of vanilla people get confused because they’re looking at BDSM from a third-party view: they’re looking in. So they see things like impact play or power exchange, and they don’t see the consent and the collaboration, which makes BDSM practices therapeutic instead of abusive because there’s active trust and connections in action.
Enthusiastic Informed Consent & How It Can Be Applied to Vanilla Sex
For someone who’s vanilla and knows absolutely nothing about BDSM. the first thing that I want to talk about is enthusiastic, informed consent. It means that nothing is exchanged between one person or more, without informed enthusiastic consent from both sides. For example, if your partner wants a backrub and then they try to sneak in a handjob or want a blow job too and they didn’t talk about that ahead of time, so you think you’re getting into a backrub, lovey-dovey situation and then your partner rolls over and pulls their dick out, well, you might have been all for that, if they would have said that’s what they wanted, but that wasn’t discussed, the back rub was discussed. So now you’re feeling a sense of obligation, which can turn your arousal off.
In BDSM, we want to keep your arousal on, and to keep your arousal on we have to not turn on your inhibitors, which is your break, and that turns arousal off. Feeling obligated, feeling disrespected, all those things shut arousal down. So in BDSM, we counteract that by being clear and concise, and upfront, and having safe words. For example, Red means I don’t want to do that. Yellow means slow down or change direction or change the pattern or change pressure; and green means “yes, I like everything that’s happening.” So there are all these safety mechanisms there for you to advocate for yourself and maintain agency and autonomy over yourself.
Is Asking Consent For Everything Necessary?
Some people might ask,” I have to ask about everything. That kills The mood. Can’t we just do this in an organic way?” My response is “kills whose mood?” That’s always my question when anyone says that. Are you in a state where your self-worth is teetering and you can’t ask for what you want? you can’t use your voice and then deal with it when somebody responds with no? It does come down to an issue of self-worth. BDSM helps to support that and nourish with these conversations that are just open. It’s the same in Tantra. You can look at tantric sex practices and look at BDSM. And they’re almost like a Venn diagram, they kind of interconnect
BDSM Practices Empower Partners in Bed
Those consensual conversations can actually help build arousal because you’re talking about intimacy and you’re giving options and empowering the person that you’re inviting to get into the mood with you. You’re giving them agency over themselves, that’s empowering. And I don’t think a lot of people want to empower somebody before they have sex with them. That says a lot about the person initiating.
I see a lot of dynamics where people need to feel like they own the person that they’re having sex with. So sex is done to that person and not with them. That’s a socio-cultural thing. Women are things. women are something to be conquered, a conquest, and you’re supposed to collect them, like Pokemon cards. I think those types of people get into a scarcity mindset where they think, “If I empower this person, then they have more power than me.” That’s not so. You both have power. You’re supposed to feel empowered after sex, not like a transaction happened and someone is depleted, and the other person ended up more.
BDSM Allows You To Choose Your Partner
In BDSM, you’re choosing your partner. And, sometimes in BDSM, you’re not even choosing a partner you are romantic with but somebody that you have built trust with. By asking for enthusiastic consent and setting the ground rules it’s a way of saying “I’m choosing you”. If you continue to please each other, then you’re going to continue to choose each other, rather than feeling like, “I empowered you, and now you might want to go find somebody else.”
Roles Aren’t Assigned in BDSM, They Are Chosen
Often times in vanilla sex, the dominant role, and the submissive role, are assumed. It’s assumed that the woman is submissive and the man is dominant. And people oftentimes are forced into roles that perhaps they don’t really want to be in once they go to bed. Even in vanilla sex, there’s always that dynamic where one is leading a little bit more than the other and when people feel forced into a role that doesn’t light their fire, that’s problematic.
If you are practicing vanilla sex take a page from the book of BDSM and try different roles out according to your mood and interest instead of your gender.
Men talk all the time about wanting to feel desired by their partner, wanting to be grabbed by their partner, and get their shirt ripped off and just feel wanted. Everybody wants that, it’s not dependent on gender. There’s a book called The Ultimate Guide to Kink that talks about active and passive instead of dominant, and submissive. Vanilla people who aren’t interested in kink can do active and passive and make decisions like, “Tonight, honey, I’m going to be the active partner, and you follow my lead”, then they set the tone. And the passive partner agrees to follow the lead. And that can be a lot of fun, especially for men, who are not used to being in the position of being initiated on and having their partner take charge and take their clothes off and climb on top of them and tell them what’s going to happen. So you can change it up. Whenever you want, just come in and verbally say, “Tonight I want to be passive.” or “Tonight, I want to be active.” And that starts a fun conversation.
When you stop assuming, then you stop trying to initiate sex that people don’t want to have.
What is the line between vanilla sex and BDSM, and how do you know when you’ve crossed it?
So the way that I’ve heard it described over and over again, is that anything that happens outside of a discussion of power dynamics, like I’m, top your bottom”, or, “I’m Dom, your sub.” If that conversation didn’t happen, then it’s not BDSM even if there’s hair pulling and choking, and getting fucked from behind. It’s still vanilla, which is very dangerous. That’s the first thing that vanilla people want to play with is breath play. They all want to go straight to choking and that’s probably the most dangerous kink that you can play.
So many people who are into vanilla sex launch into things like choking and spanking without asking for consent in advance. This is where turning to BDSM can help.
How to Make Consent Conversations Sexy
For the past few years before I have sex with somebody, I let them know, I’m kinky. And I asked them what their kinks are. And I let them know what mine are. Because I do want to spank so I asked ahead of time, and I’ll even follow up. I’ll be like, do you like to get spanked? And is it okay, if I leave a mark? I ask if I spank you and there’s a mark there that’s gonna last for a while, is that okay? So I asked all that stuff while we are having tea at a tea shop. Listen, it’s a lot more awkward if you do this shit without asking and your partner gets a trigger response from it, you know?
If you’ve never had sex with somebody, you should be having conversations about STIs and protection, what body parts do you not want me to touch, and which body parts you do like touched the most. These should just be regular conversations. People will say, “Oh, my gosh, just too many questions.” And I’m like, “I think it’s so much more awkward to be in bed and touch somebody’s breast who has a sexual assault trauma response. And there you are with somebody you don’t even know how to apply aftercare to because you didn’t want to ask this shit at a time.”
Safe Words & How They Can Be Used During Vanilla Sex
The BDSM world has done the vanilla world a favor and has created a set of rules around how you get the okay to do different sex acts including the conversations you need to have and then how you put your toe in the water and move forward.f you don’t practice BDSM you can just leave what doesn’t apply to you and pull from the guidelines. And the guidelines are just consent models. There’s one called RACK, which risk aware, conscious kink. All of them are all about everybody being completely informed and having complete agency and autonomy over themselves. Everybody owns themselves the entire time. People often think things like, the submissive has the power, and the dominant has the power. No, both those people have power, the whole entire time. It never goes away, because consent is always reversible. The submissive is saying, I surrender to you, but only under the understanding that you’re going to act accordingly within the boundaries that I have discussed with you.
BDSM practices and all of the rituals that go into leading up to sex and finding out what’s okay with someone else, really do activate the brain and arouse you because you’re having conversations about sex!
BDSM is arousal centered. Filling out the forms you get excited because you’re reading sexy stuff. You may not even be in the same room. You may be emailing each other! Similar lists can be made for vanilla sex.
How Do You Want To Feel During Sex?
One thing that I love about exploring BDSM, is taking your partner how do you want to feel. We will say how do you want to feel during the scene? But for vanilla sex, you can ask your partner, how do you want to feel when we’re having sex? Do you want to feel cherished? Do you want to feel conquered? Do you want to feel empowered? Do you want to feel desired? Some people want to feel degraded every once in a while. Do you want to feel playful? Or do you want to take things slow? Ask these questions instead of assuming that you know how your partner wants to feel during sex.
My partner loves to feel objectified but then nurtured. I like that because degrading her makes me get in my head and wonder, “She knows how much I love her. Right?” So afterward, I get to put into the nurturing, which makes me feel better, because I called her my dirty little come dumpster and I want to come back and tell her, “but you’re my princess. Like, you know that, right?”
Aftercare For All Sex
Aftercare is a concept that comes from the BDSM world. It was adopted to make sure that people participating in intense scenes, especially those that included impact play, were ok before partners parted. But aftercare should take place in all sexual situations. Ask your partner what they need after sex to feel safe, loved, and cared for. Partners who don’t feel cared for after sex are less likely to want to engage in sex in the future.
