“We should watch that new show Sexy Beasts together,” Matt said. “It’s very demisexual.”

While it is not uncommon for us to describe particular people as “very demisexual” (e.g. “Wow, the host of the podcast I’m listening to just used the word ‘recalcitrant’ in casual conversation and I’m way more attracted to her now; god, I’m so demi”), it’s rare for me to hear a piece of media described this way, so I was intrigued.

Brief demisexuality explainer incase you don’t know what that word means: it’s an identity on the asexual spectrum. Demisexual people, like me, don’t develop sexual attraction until an emotional connection has formed, or at least until they feel like they know the person in question beyond a surface-level familiarity.

I minored in psychology when I went to journalism school, and while those teachings have been hugely helpful to me in my career (dissecting research studies, understanding psychosexual phenomena, etc.), they’ve perhaps been even more useful to me in my personal life.

I remember sitting in the back of a lecture hall one sleepy morning, having chosen that far-away seat on purpose so the professor wouldn’t see me scrolling through Reddit or Twitter. (Bad girl.) I looked up mid-lecture to find that the instructor was explaining the theory of multiple intelligences. My eyes widened and I switched tabs to my note-taking app, suddenly desperate to absorb what was being taught.

What I didn’t appreciate, at the time, was that this professor had a pretty leftist, intersectional, progressive view of what intelligence is and how it functions. I’d just thought she was lecturing about boring brain stuff (god, if I ever have to hear another goddamn explanation of what the amygdala does…), but I realized in that moment that she was imparting something much more useful: an entirely new way of thinking about a trait I considered of utmost importance.

See, I’d always been one of those snobs who prefers to date smart people, whatever the hell that even means. I even identified as sapiosexual for a time, which I now understand is a weirdly appropriative term that misidentifies an elitist, often classist and racist preference as a sexual orientation. But I’d had reason to question the simplicity of that viewpoint in recent years. For instance, I’d dated a few people in high school who had various combinations of ADD, ADHD, autism, and dyslexia, so I’d come to understand (far too late; mea culpa) that misspelled texts and showing up late to dates did not necessarily mean a person lacked intelligence or respectfulness. But I did not have a concrete, scientific way of thinking about this revelation until that lecture on multiple intelligences.

Hi folks! In early 2020, the editor-in-chief of a major conservative Canadian newspaper reached out to me to say he admired my work and that his paper was trying to bring in more young readers, so he was wondering if I’d like to start writing a sex column for them. I was confused – it’s a seriously conservative publication! – but readily agreed to write the first column he suggested I write, which was about what to do when your partner discloses they have a spanking kink. However, after I had already written and filed it, I found out that said editor-in-chief had left his position, and I got bounced around between a bunch of different editors, all of whom must not have shared his belief that this right-wing newspaper needed a sex column. So, instead, I’ll share it with you all today. It was, to say the least, a fun challenge trying to condense all the crucial 101-level info about this kink into a short print column, especially knowing that many of the folks reading it could be anti-kink (or, for that matter, homophobic or misogynistic). Yikes. Hope you enjoy!

Has your partner expressed an interest in being spanked? While this kink might seem unusual, it’s actually one of the more common ones: a 2015 study found that 33.1% of Canadians have fantasized about spanking or whipping someone for sexual pleasure, while 32.6% have fantasized about being spanked or whipped. So there’s a 1-in-3 chance anyone you meet could have this proclivity – and your partner might well be one of them. Exciting!

Incase you missed the memo on kink, here’s a primer: while a lot of pursuits that fall under the BDSM umbrella (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism) may appear scary from the outside, they can also be (and should always be) 100% consensual. Just as non-consensual sex is rape, non-consensual BDSM is abuse – but that doesn’t mean that the enthusiastically-desired version of either activity is inherently wrong or harmful. Sexual masochism, among other fetishes, was once widely considered a mental disorder – but so was homosexuality, for instance, and we now know it’s a perfectly valid sexual orientation.