Wondering how to work with clients that bring up topics around alt sex, BDSM, kink, fetish, or any non-traditional sexual practice?
Here are some tools for you and your workplace to compassionately engage with these clients without furthering stigma and self-shame:
Image Description: Each image has a light purple background with dark purple and dark grey text. The first page has SCSG in a grey square in the upper left corner. Bottom of first page has a purple outline of a light-bulb.
Text:
1st Page: Text Reads –
5 Tips for Kink-Affirming Practice. Dodd, SJ. Sex-Positive Social Work, Columbia University Press, 2020.
Tips:
1. Assume that a client’s kink, paraphilia, or fetish is not problematic. The behavior only becomes problematic if it causes the client emotional distress or significant physical harm to themselves or others.
2. Provide an affirming environment that helps the client explore and understand the fantasies, behaviors, and boundaries that work for them and to process experiences they may already have had.
3. Create a non-judgmental space for the client to identify and tackle internalized shame that may appear in emotions such as anger or hurt. Connect clients to communities for these groups, such as FetLife, Feeld, or sharing resources to reduce feelings of isolation and build community.
4. Empower marginalized people to develop autonomous sexual agency. BDSM communities and the RACK philosophy create the space for participants to determine the rules for play, deciding what is permissible and impermissible by negotiating boundaries about the type, intensity, duration, and context for the play or “scene.”
5. Check your own biases. Clients may come to session with topics that challenge you and push the boundaries of what you expect to discuss. Be sensitive to their experiences of discrimination and feelings of stigmatization.
2nd Page: Text Reads –
5 Tips for Kink-Affirming Practice. Dodd, SJ. Sex-Positive Social Work, Columbia University Press, 2020.
BDSM: Bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. Megan Yost and L. E. Hunter describe BDSM as a “sexual identity and a set of sexual practices characterized by explicit, negotiated power differentials, with a ‘top’ or ‘dominant’ person guiding interaction and a ‘bottom’ or ‘submissive’ individual following instructions or receiving sensation from the dominant.”
Paraphilia: Sexual arousal that occurs in relation to “objects, events, or people outside what is considered the norm” (ie. Podophilia, or sexual arousal by feet). These activities are non-coercive, meaning they are engaging freely with active consent by adults without explicit or implicit coercion by power dynamics.
Fetishes: Adjacent to paraphilias, represent arousal in response to an inanimate object or body part. But they are different from paraphilias because a fetish, either live or in fantasy, is the singular focus for sexual arousal. In other words, they are objects of sexual fixation, and arousal cannot be achieved without them.
RACK: ”Risk Aware Consensual Kink (RACK) “acknowledges that practice is not always safe, but that the risks of the activity are engaged in knowingly. Consent, however, remains central to philosophy