Play in the bedroom helps us process life and prioritize ourselves—alone or with a partner.

I recently spent an evening in Denver with the intrepid Rewire News Group team as the resident sexpert at the newsroom’s summer Repro Fund-Rager. I ran a “kink-ing booth”—our twist on the traditional kissing booth. Party guests took my five-question quiz, and I assigned them new kinks to explore based on the results.

Think of it like the adult version of Lucy’s 5-cent therapy window. 

The questions were designed to help me gauge pain tolerance, relationship to authority figures, astrological signs, and tolerance for the taboo. This is all valuable information when considering whether someone would enjoy experimenting with spanking or piss play.

Relationships to kink ran the gamut. I suggested that a career pup take their play to the next level with a gimp suit and told an experienced married kinkster to introduce electroshock play into their already roleplay-heavy sex life. I had a lot of fun with the brave-yet-inexperienced tenderfoots as well; for instance, I advised one woman to explore impact play by asking her partner to gently tap her face during oral sex instead of jumping straight to slapping. 

(Read more: BDSM: A Beginner’s Guide to Kink and Erotic Violence)

The kinking booth was envisioned as a lighthearted, sex-positive party game. But the exercise turned out to be much deeper than anyone expected.

“I forgot I liked that”

As I got to know the people who came to my booth, I found that many of them were in the early, wet-and-messy stage of recent life change. How much someone resonated with any given kink seemed correlated with........

© Rewire.News