If you're a millennial like me, this man may have also played a role in your sex education. He calls BDSM "varsity-level sex play," which to me is the perfect metaphor. If you're going to engage in it, you've got to put in the time, effort and education to do it right, which means safely and consensually. And if you do, toying with power exchange can open up vast new dimensions in your sexuality. My clients and my play partners go various places in their minds, in their bodies and they often describe sessions with me as trips.
Anita Rao This is Embodied, our show about sex, relationships and your health. I'm Anita Rao. Bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism. It's a mouthful of sexual preferences and behaviors, succinctly wrapped up by one acronym: BDSM.
It can involve arousal through pain or humiliation, roleplay, toys like ropes and harnesses, intercourse or just erotic play. It's about exploring sensation and boundaries. Smoky I just remember, you know, in the summers when you're up late at night cause you don't have to go to school the next day and you're watching TV and just something kind of came on HBO and I was like "Ooh, what's this?
Anita Rao That's Smoky. She's a Black, queer femme based in Los Angeles. Her introduction to kinky sex play was through the long-running 90s HBO documentary series "Real Sex. Smoky I'm like, you know, 15, 16 years old, turning down the volume so that my mother won't hear what I'm watching while she's sleeping.
And I was fascinated by all of it. I just needed to know more. And so that was kind of my awakening of both, like, my sexuality and knowing from a really early age that that was going to be connected with the kink and BDSM world. Anita Rao Smoky's instincts were not wrong. Today she's a leader and educator in the LA area BDSM community and the co-founder of Obsidian, an organization that creates kinky events for queer people of color.
