Stim4Stim Transcript S2E3: The BDSM One
Stim4Stim S2E12 Transcript: The BDSM One feat. Leigh Cowart
[Theme plays]
Zack: Hello Mister and Mrs. Autism and all the ships at sea. You’re listening to Stim4Stim, the relationship podcast by and for autistic people. I’m one of your hosts, Zack Budryk. Who else is here with me tonight?
Charlie: Hi there! Charlie Stern, and we’ve got a full house: we’ve got Mr. Bird, Paris, and Stevie and Nicky, who I have renamed on the internet Kris Jenner and Kourtney Kardashian because we are relying on Petfinder names to make us go viral, because, you know, I’m fostering for a very tiny bird rescue. Not a lot of people apply, not a lot of people are looking for special needs and pre-loved birds.
[Bird tweeting in background]
Charlie: So, we are casting — you know, Stevie and Nicky fighting with each other all the time — into them being sassy, shrewd business women.
[Laughter]
Charlie: So, that’s the story. I still have four birds in the background.
Zack: Girlbosses
Charlie: Yeah, girlbosses.
Zack: And I have — she was here the last time we recorded, but I’ve got our eight month old chihuahua, Ziggy, in the room with me right now, and my mother-in-law’s chihuahua, Lida, is here as well. They’re best friends and she’s over here like ninety percent of the time and I think that they’re tired enough that they have been, that they’re — from running around all day making their gremlin noises, they probably won’t make a cameo. But, just in case, I got eyes on both of them right now. And we have not introduced our guest yet, but they are someone who wears all sorts of hats, and I don’t wanna give a short shrift. Would you like to do the honors yourself?
Leigh: Yeah, yeah! My name is Leigh Cowart, I am the author of Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. I am a science journalist and former researcher, and sometimes naked on the internet, and joining me today is my cat, Larry Hotdogs, who is probably going to be irritated with me for not doting on her in the way she’s used to [laughs]. She is a very spoiled former feral, and now she lives in luxury and is a huge pain and I love her. I’m her butler, and it’s great. I’m really happy to be here, thank you for having me.
Zack: Of course, thanks so much for coming on.
Charlie: Thank you for joining us, and I just muted myself cuz the bird noises are so intense, but one of the parakeets just hit me in the head.
[Laughter] [Parakeet tweeting in background]
Charlie: Just like, sheared by my temple. They are getting closer and closer and they always wanna jump on me when Mr. Bird and Paris are on me.
[Laughter]
Charlie: But they’re still scared of me, so, yeah. One of them just flew at my head, and then flew away.
Zack: Evil mindset
Charlie: Yeah, I know. I’m just really excited about this episode. We have so many things on the trash pile that we have tried to do in the past, and we have not yet had an episode about autistic people and kink. We have not yet had a successful episode that involves that. We have had many attempts.
[Leigh laughs]
Leigh: Oh no!
Charlie: I know
Leigh: No pressure, Leigh!
Charlie: Well, as long as we don’t actually get into an argument it’ll be better than our first attempt.
Zack: High bar
[Leigh laughs]
Charlie: Yeah. But I’m really excited because for me BDSM involves a lot of regulated interaction and sensation, in a way that obviously is like one hundred percent customizable for what you need. You know, you are potentially interacting with tradition, but you’re not beholden to scripts, as I think one would see in terms of a vanilla heterosexual, sort of like male conquest female sort of thing. We have a lot of women who write in about their difficulties as autistic women connecting with men, and I am to assume that this is all vanilla and that the social scripts, you know, being hundreds and thousands of years old, are very oppressive. And I see an element of freedom in BDSM because when I enter a situation, I know what I want and I am negotiating every second with another person.
Leigh: Yes. Yes. For me, BDSM gives me a lot of really direct context and expectation and scripts and conversations that you can really — that you’re supposed to have, but it’s like the norm to have. And it functions — if you’re able to have these direct conversations about what you want, what you like — because it is in the interest of BDSM practitioners to move away from ambiguity for safety purposes and for emotional reasons. Being in a situation in which I can very directly tell somebody: this is what I like, this is what I want, this is what I’m into, and have them not only say that back to me but also affirm out loud that they want this, that they’re here for this — it really allows me to stay much more present in the scene, or the sex, or the relationship, without constantly being hypervigilant about me going off the script that I personally don’t really know. And a lot of the people I play with are autistic as well and it just seems like being allowed and encouraged to really go over some rules, go over sensation expectations — what sensations do you like? What sensations do you not like? What sensations would you like to explore? Asking those things to someone who, in the context of vanilla sex, where the expectation is this, you know, kind of standard, almost romcom script, people are like “well what do you mean what sensations? Like, why are you asking me this? No one’s ever asked me that before.” And getting into BDSM really gave me a much broader vocabulary and much bigger understanding of what it’d look like to say out loud what I want and hear what other people want, and ask questions, and really get into the verbal side of: what are we doing here? What are we gonna do later? That kind of thing.
Charlie: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I am hoping that listeners, no matter their orientation, will get out of this that communication has to be upfront.
Leigh: Yes
Charlie: You know, I think the first episode we ever did, when it was just Zack and me, we talked about something that could instantly enhance your life right now, which is lube. And lube and communication are things that I think in queer and kink contexts are so normal. But I remember when I was younger trying to will things to happen. To will someone to like me, to will someone to make the first move, and I feel like a lot of people are trapped in that.
Leigh: Yes
Charlie: And I will say that movies do not help.
[Leigh laughs]
Leigh: No, they do not.
Charlie: At all. At all. There is no communication during sex, there is only vibes, and, you know, eye contact.
[Leigh laughs]
Charlie: But, there is a rich tradition within BDSM that you can dive into and learn from generations past. And that is pretty comforting to me, that this is a living history where there are models, but you don’t have to do anything. But I feel like Hollywood really holds people back in terms of if they are trying to pursue a relationship, kind of going in — I’m sorry.
[Leigh laughs]
Charlie: I think what I’m trying to say is that a lot of us get our education from fiction.
Leigh: Mmm
Charlie: And I think BDSM culture and history are going to be more helpful, even if you aren’t kinky at all.
Leigh: Yes. I agree with that for sure.
Zack: The thing I was thinking of was I remember it wasn’t until the early 2010’s when the whole idea of affirmative consent became sort of a broader discourse, and all these old reactionary media men are going like “so, do these college kids expect you to just like ask for permission every step of the way?”
Leigh: Well, yes!
[Laughter]
Zack: Yes, first of all. But that also seems like such a relic from having your horizons completely limited to this vanilla marital conception of sex, as opposed to something like kink where that’s not only a moral requirement but it’s also a big part of the ritual, I guess is the word for it.
Leigh: Mmm
Charlie: Ritual’s a good word.
Leigh: Yeah, I think that for me the negotiations that I’ve done in a kink scenario really helped inform the way I would do those kinds of negotiations outside of a scene. Because I realized that having really clear, clearly articulated expectations and being able to share with someone very directly, based on not scripts so much but like templates, templates for negotiating a BDSM scene —
Charlie: Templates it the best word for it.
Leigh: Yes!
Zack: I think that’s a big part of finding your own way as an autistic person in general is the idea that, you know, maybe you start with the idea of the script and that’s not gonna be reliable one hundred percent of the time, but it will help you develop templates.
Leigh: It feels very good to me to have the structure of a template to work off, instead of feeling like I’m trying to cheat off of somebody else’s handbook that I never received. And so being able to use negotiation tactics, or steps, and being able to look at it and be like: ok, this is how this person negotiated this; how would this work for me? How can I use this in this situation, or over here with this different person? That kind of thing. And it really helps. It’s so freeing, it feels so good to get the kind of structure for expectation and emotional engagement that allows me to let go some and really enjoy the scene, and I feel so grateful that I have that in my life. It’s such a good tool. It’s such a full toolkit, and I feel like, you know, people talk about kink versus vanilla and I think it’s a false dichotomy. I want to clarify when I say vanilla I’m more using it to mean not kink, and not using it in a derogatory fashion. And as an aside I think it’s funny that we use vanilla to describe something that some people refer to as boring or standard when vanilla is a seed pod of an orchid; it’s like a very luxurious and wonderful scent and flavor that we use all the time that people love, it totally superseded floral flavors in baking when it came to the U.S. and like blew up the way it used to. So I think vanilla’s very sexy and very wonderful, both as a flavor and as a way to fuck. So, just to clarify on that front. I think however feels good for you to engage physically and sexually with another person, as long as it’s consensual, is wonderful. And the negotiations from BDSM can be really useful to negotiate whatever you want in bed. It doesn’t have to be a spanking. But I think that people are not used to thinking of like, “regular sex”, whatever that’s supposed to mean, as having those steps of: what do you like, how do you not want to be touched, what are your limits, and how will you let me know you wanna stop? I really like that one; I love that there’s a way to slow down or hard stop in the BDSM scene and give feedback as it’s going on, because that for me feels a lot safer when I’m playing with somebody — that I’m going to know, unequivocally, if it has to stop. And I like that, it feels good to me.
Charlie: Yeah. Also, thank you for unpacking the kink versus vanilla thing, because I would say no matter what sex I’m having, I am, lifestyle, a kinkster, but I am not beating the shit out of everyone I have sex with.
[Leigh laughs]
Charlie: You know? My BDSM philosophy doesn’t dictate anything I do in bed, and doesn’t necessitate, and, you know, it’s not inherently going to involve pain and worship, etcetera etcetera. It very much is just going to be a communication style.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: And then, where I go from there, that’s up to everyone involved. Yeah. Vanilla doesn’t exist, basically. You know?
Leigh: Right. Yeah
Charlie: And I think autistic people have an advantage because sometimes, I mean, a lot of the time, it’s easy to be blunt and have no fear, and if there are certain key points you have to hit — you know, asking permission at every single point, I think that’s going to be an easier skeleton for people who are unsure.
Leigh: Mhmm. Yeah
Charlie: If you do have to negotiate every single step of the way, almost you can mechanize it, you can gamify it, and go from one set to another. I think that is very freeing, I think structure is very freeing.
Leigh: Mhmm. I agree. Do you have any specific questions related to BDSM in this context, or want to talk about how to start these negotiations?
Charlie: Yes. I think you should lead that.
Leigh: Yeah. For me I like to do my scene negotiations, or any negotiation with a potential partner, in writing. For me it gives me a chance to really be as specific as I can be, and distill my thoughts to be as clear as possible, which brings comfort to me because it makes me feel like, okay, I have done my best to communicate this, and now I want to see what your response is, in writing, and I want to be able to refer back to this conversation. But I tend to do most of my major conversations in writing; that is the style that works for me. I can become a little emotionally overwhelmed having a serious conversation, pleasant or unpleasant, you know? Anything too much is still too much, and so I feel like I can better regulate and sit with my emotional responses if I’m doing something in writing, and having it to look back on to prepare for the scene feels really good. It can be hard to put yourself out there. I get that. And different people have different levels of rejection sensitivity. And that is something that comes up for some people when you are negotiating desire so directly. We are culturally indoctrinated to feel shame around what we want, so the idea of really directly telling somebody “I want this” can be scary. Cuz they don’t do it in the movies, back to the whole movie thing. It’s just like, you’re supposed to kind of intuit your way through this fumbling ritual, and they just have all these fireworks go off and everything will be perfect but you’ll never have to say it out loud. And it’s hard to unlearn that. But unlearning it allows you more space to find out how to ask for what you want in a way that feels good to you. The negotiation, some people are put off by it cuz it sounds very bureaucratic, but these negotiations can be very sexy. Like, getting consent in the moment can be very sexy. When people talk about, like, “oh, what do you have to ask every step of the way?” Yeah, and it can be fun! Having someone say yes when you ask them if they want something is amazing. I don’t think that gets focused on enough. Saying “I wanna do this, do you want this” in a scene, or before a scene — to get that verbal or written affirmation, it can be really arousing. Cuz then you know. You know that lingering doubt that’s like: oh, am I doing this right? Do they really want me? Do they wanna date me? I struggle with that. Like, until someone directly tells me that they’re interested, I’m always like I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m reading this right. So being able to hear, like, yes, they want this, they want me to do that — I find it really arousing and I find that it just feels so much better than a lot of the fumbling ambiguity I did when I was younger and trying to figure out if I was staying on this imaginary script in the right way. So I find that it has just massively expanded the amount of pleasure that I’m able to bring into my own life. And just because it sounds like paperwork does not mean it has to feel like paperwork [laughs].
Zack: Yeah. I mean a chore is what you make a chore. That’s true of a lot of stuff.
Leigh: Yeah
Charlie: Yeah. I love that now, in terms of like Planned Parenthood-led sex ed, and other related models — I name Planned Parenthood because one of my friends from college is a full-time sex educator for them — I love that they are now teaching not only consent, not only yes or no, but enthuasiastic consent.
Leigh: Yes
Charlie: They are teaching enthusiastic consent, they’re teaching fuck yeah, instead of just yes. They are also teaching that a no is a no, a maybe is a no, and I think that’s really important. I actually don’t accept sure, ever. Like not even if I’m sending nudes. I ask for consent to send nudes, and if it’s a sure, I don’t accept that. I say “is that a no?” or “is that a yes?” Or I say I don’t accept sure.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: I don’t think I would have discovered or realized that I was autistic on the same timeline or with the same tools had I not been in a seven year relationship with someone from deep in the kink scene — kink community, not kink scene, like, a session. I would have not had those tools had I not been taught by that partner: follow your yes.
Leigh: Mmm
Charlie: You know, if we were on a trip — and we did frequently take trips — and we were feeling kind of hungry but we weren’t sure if we wanted to stop, or we kind of needed to pee, but we weren’t sure. It was always like, if you have that spark of needing something or wanting something, I think you want it.
Leigh: Hmm
Charlie: And if you’re too tired but wanna be a good sport, but don’t know if you can actually go out to a bar or whatever. You know, we were often celebrating Halloween together and that was like, a four day affair. Halloween was like an Olympic sport for us. So if we needed to tap out because we needed to save our energy for the rest of the Halloween weekend, you know, we were following our no. Any inkling of a no, any sort of doubt, or feeling tired, or feeling overextended — everything shut down.
Leigh: Mmm
Charlie: And it also often went hand in hand with needing food or needing rest, and there was a point at which my former partner had a changeable battery symbol necklace. Full battery was green, of course, low battery was yellow, and no battery was red. And of course those are BDSM metrics; oftentimes yes is green, maybe is yellow, or you’re getting to a no with the yellow, you should slow down with the yellow, and then red is everything needs to stop. So despite the fact that we did not have sex for most of this relationship, it was a BDSM-oriented, autistic relationship.
Leigh: Mhmm
Zack: Charlie, that’s so interesting, cuz I have actually been at events for autistic people that passed out name tags with that exact same color coding you’re discussing, so that’s another way that they dovetail.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: That’s awesome. That’s really good to know.
Leigh: Yeah, I know. I love that. I know someone who has a tattoo of a balloon and they color in the balloon themselves based on certain metrics, and it’s like a visual communication device to show where they’re at, and I think that’s really wonderful. You know, going back to what you were saying, I think so many of us are kind of indoctrinated in the idea of when we’re supposed to say yes, and it led to me becoming very dissociated from what I actually wanted, because I was trying really hard to mask and stay on a very specific script. Like this is when people want food, this is when people want this. This is what I should say now, this is what I should say later. And so being able to actually kind of come back to myself and be like, wait, do I really want this? Why am I saying yes to this? It’s taken a lot of years to kind of — and I’m still breaking those patterns — be like, okay, do you want this thing? Is this really your yes, or is this the yes you learned you were supposed to give in this situation, to fit in, to communicate with people, to not disrupt the flow of what I think is supposed to happen? And I think coming to that felt sense of yes, or that felt sense of no, has been really life changing for me. And that’s one of the things I love about a negotiated BDSM scene, is there’s always a way out. For me! Like at any point if I’m just not feeling it, I can call yellow, I can call red, and it’s done. You know, I often struggle to end a social interaction. I always have to like, pre-set a way to leave, otherwise I’ll just kind of get stuck in this liminal space of, like, how do I stop doing this without upsetting people?
Zack: I’m gonna let you go.
[Leigh laughs]
Leigh: I’m gonna let you go now is a good one. I’m gonna use that in a scene. It’s my new safeword. But it makes me feel a lot safer, to know that I have a very direct and unambiguous way to leave that is pre-negotiated, or to stop that is pre-negotiated, and they’re expecting to hear it, and I won’t accidentally get mired in some sort of social interaction that is not making sense to me, or that I feel like I’m, you know, messing up somehow, or I’m upsetting someone else by telling — you know, I grew up in the church, that was not good for me. And so what I’m doing is I’m unlearning a lot of those people-pleasing patterns and kind of like, projected good person facade. Like I am a good person, but I was really concerned about: how do I broadcast all of the right things all at the right time? And that’s why I’m bad at leaving [laughs]. I used to be bad at leaving social engagements cuz I didn’t wanna make anybody upset. But now I know that that wasn’t good for me, cuz when I’m done, I’m done. And me staying in a situation that doesn’t feel good to me leads to stress and activation in my body, in the past has led to increased substance use, like if I couldn’t leave physically I would try to leave emotionally or through substances, and that’s really hard on the body. Like I’m not trying to sound overly vague about it. There are biochemical cascades of cortisol and activating neurotransmitters that really do cause physical changes. Being stressed out, being unable to finish an activation curve is hard. And I was putting myself in these situations because I was so worried about fucking up the exit. So with BDSM I know what my exit is, and it allows me to enjoy my time there a lot more.
Charlie: Yeah. We talk a lot about autistic people not feeling fully human, you know, being in situations emotionally where we’re sacrificing our comfort for another person.
Leigh: Yeah
Charlie: Because it’s like, you don’t think your needs are valid because you are subconsciously in the mindset that you are not as full of a person as the other people present. I mean, we talked about in the last episode, how oftentimes people feel like robots or aliens or cryptids or whatever. And you know, that’s a huge thing, that you feel like you’re playing a human, you’re presenting as a human. You have impostor syndrome about your own humanity but that manifests into, also, you don’t feel like an equal player in these situations.
Leigh: Right
Charlie: This one gets me all the time, where I’m running late to something, or I have to finish letting the birds have dinner or something, and I feel bad that people are waiting for me. But it’s like, when I’m hanging out with this one other person who is my friend, my schedule also factors into these plans.
Leigh: Yes
Charlie: And I have such a hard time with that. Like my timetables, my schedule, my needs, my exhaustion should be taken into consideration. Cuz I’m fifty percent of this interaction.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: But we’re also used to minimizing ourselves.
Leigh: Yeah
Charlie: And I think the one thing that any listener can take from this episode is the tools to be a little braver and feel a little more secure in our validity as a person with needs.
Leigh: Yes. Yes. I very much spent a large part of my life trying to not be a person with needs, and just be kind of like a thumbs up [laughs]. Just like, doing whatever. That’s not good cuz also, that’s not real consent. That’s not a real yes. That’s a pre-programmed — that’s a should, not a yes.
Zack: That’s the ‘ok’ button.
Leigh: Yeah. Sure [laughs]
Charlie: Yeah. And often a coerced yes.
Leigh: Yeah. You know, something I’ve been doing to try to counteract that impulse, to just be like “yeah sure”, is take time. I still very much have kind of a pre-programmed “yeah sure” that’s in there, and so I try to just give myself extra time to be like — even if I think it’s a yes, I’ll be like “that feels like a yes” — I need just a little bit of time to feel it out, and not just immediately check out and do what I think the script should be, and actually be like, okay, is this what I want? And practicing saying no, you know? It took me time to learn how to do that and feel secure in it. But the better I’ve gotten at protecting my yes, the better my yes feels, and the easier it’s gotten for me to be like, “not for me, thanks.” But it’s a skill. It’s a skill, and, you know, not to sound like a gym teacher, saying no is as much of a muscle as anything else — it takes practice. And it takes skill, and it’s something that can be learned and improved upon.
Charlie: Yeah, we are always talking about social skills being a muscle, and how autistic people often work harder on ours. And I describe the pandemic as atrophying my muscles.
Leigh: Yeah
Charlie: And I have to work harder, and that’s not a failure. That’s, you know, me constantly improving.
Leigh: Mhmm
Zack: Yeah
Leigh: I am a full-time writer, so I was able to spend a lot of time at home the last two years cuz I work from home, and a lot of that was hard but also it was the longest stretch of time that I have spent unmasked in my life. Like I figured out what worked for me, and I got a lot more insight into what my actual days look like if I wasn’t interacting with lots of people outside the home and doing all of these things and all these lists and going out and being spoken to, and being touched by strangers, and like someone put their hand on the small of my back to move past me — things that really trigger a flight response in me. I had time to not experience that. And it was extraordinarily illuminating. And I realized how energetically demanding my frequency of masking had become in my everyday life. So now I’m really working to kind of restructure various parts of my life, cuz I realized I was doing things that didn’t make me happy. I was doing things that made me feel like shit cuz I thought I had to do them, then I stopped doing them and I was like, ohh. Ohh! There’s room for other stuff! Ohh, oh my god. This is amazing [laughs].
Zack: Mhmm
Leigh: You know, I know a lot of people, a lot of my friends have come out in the last two years. And part of that is apocalypse shit, you know; if time is running out, you gotta confront some things. And part of it was spending more time with themselves allowed them to hear themselves more clearly. It certainly was the case for me. I came out publicly a year ago as non-binary, for lack of a better term. Non-binary, that’s the one I use professionally, cuz I feel like it’s easily parsed. And it’s just been extraordinary. I feel like, ohh. Like a weight has been lifted. People say that and you’re like that’s an overused metaphor, and then it happens and you’re like, ohh, I get why it’s an overused metaphor, that one works for me.
Zack: Yeah. Especially past the point in your life where we’re really trained to believe that — you know, by the end of high school or an equivalent age, you’re supposed to have completely figured out all of the big aspects of who you are.
Leigh: Yeah [laughs]
Zack: A lot of the time when you have a life-changing revelation about yourself any older than that, you feel like it must be an error of some kind, because you’re supposed to be past the point of all this.
Leigh: Yeah. And it’s especially conflicting to have such an ability to hear yourself during a tragedy of such magnitude. I don’t really talk about my experiences during it with my own interior state, cuz I don’t know how to say that without sounding like the world’s hugest asshole. Like I don’t mean to say that this is good because this happened to me or anything like that, I want to be very clear. But there is truth that in having quiet time to myself, I have come to know myself so much better. And I still don’t know how to communicate that. I believe that the work is important, and so I keep putting it out there. I’ve gotten wildly off-topic [laughs], I’m sorry.
Charlie: Oh it’s totally fine. I do wanna cycle back to masking in the autism sense and the pandemic sense, because this is such a gendered thing. Just like hyper-specifically with autistic men and autistic non-men — we as people who are perceived as not men. Everyone in public is always trying to get our attention.
Leigh: Yeah. Yeah
Charlie: Everyone is demanding so many things from us. And it’s such a good point for you to mention the hand on the small of your back thing.
Leigh: Oof. All the time!
Charlie: I have started angrily confronting people who do this and wear a big scary leather jacket to make sure this happens less to me, because I also don’t have enough of a fear response, so I will scream at a man and, you know, ignore my safety and the consequences. Because it is just thing after thing after thing of usually men but sometimes women, just like needing my acknowledgment.
Leigh: Yeah
Charlie: And needing an interaction with me. And it’s so entitled and it’s so subconscious, and no one is thinking twice about needing something from me. And I’m sure that’s the same experience for you, and I do believe it’s very gendered.
Leigh: Mhmm. It’s very disruptive to the nervous system to be touched from behind by a stranger. I’ve started to just — I use abject confusion: “Did you touch me? I don’t like it when strangers touch me.” And they’re like “what?” [laughs]. But, you know, obviously you have to do it situationally, because there is a danger. But sometimes just being like “oh, no, I don’t like it when strangers touch me”, people are just like, “what? What? What? You can’t just say that to me!” Like, “oh, I did, yeah! I don’t like that, please don’t do that again.” They just kind of look at you like a goldfish. Cuz people aren’t used to hearing that. Some people are not used to hearing that. And I’m lucky, I work as a bouncer, and that was just extraordinary for me, because now if someone touches me, I can just tell them we do not allow that kind of touching here, I do not want you to touch me. And if they’re like “oh gosh, I’m sorry, I didn’t even think about it”, they get to stay, and if they’re like “you can’t tell me not to touch people”, I just throw them out. We’re serving people alcohol here; I don’t want someone who’s just gonna start touching strangers. So in developing my own personal boundaries around bodily autonomy, you know, how to tell someone no in a situation, very directly to their face — I learned that from stripping and it’s been very useful in my life. But I did not have those skills loaded into my programming prior to being shown exactly how to do them.
Charlie: Yeah, and oftentimes if you confront someone about touching you, it’s like they barely think about it so they barely remember that they did it sometimes. Like it doesn’t register to them. I think we should get into our first question because a lot of this is what I struggled with. I struggled going from a pandemic studio apartment, hyper hyper isolated, just Paris for the longest time, and then Mr. Bird, and then I moved to New York and I was suddenly being perceived in my own home.
[Leigh laughs]
Charlie: How do you deal with being perceived and perceiving others in your own home? How do you deal with: there is someone here that I live with?
Zack: Yeah. So our first question is:
“I have a lot of trouble dealing with the sounds and smells of other people in my own space. It makes me very tense, which in turn makes me constantly exhausted and angry, which definitely affects the amount of energy I have left to complete my basic routines, especially at night. I moved out of my parent’s house a few months ago after staying with them through the first year and a half of the pandemic. I now live alone, but I lived with roommates throughout college and found it just as stressful from a sensory standpoint as living with my family. I didn’t realize I was autistic until January 2021, so I didn’t really have the words to describe why I’d been so stressed 24/7 in my own college dorm and in my own family’s home. This is one of the first things that clicked in my mind. When I realized, I started looking for a professional evaluation.”
Leigh: Yeah. Sensory overwhelm is no joke. I am a huge proponent of headphones, earbuds. I have a couple different types of earbuds that let in different levels of sound. Loud noise, it feels like an attack, I respond as if it is [laughs].
Charlie: Yeah. You don’t necessarily have to minimize yourself, but I feel like vowing to be neutral and having your roommate sort of be on the same page as like, being neutral, helps so much. You know, so you’re not necessarily drowning out loud music with noise canceling headphones. Like, meeting at a neutral point. The submitter talks about perceiving and smelling other people’s smells.
Leigh: Mhmm
Zack: Yeah
Charlie: We obviously have a lot of overlap with physical disabilities in our community, me included, so I am very sensitive to smells and migraine triggers. And my biggest thing is vowing to be scent neutral.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: So not chemical-free, but keep everything sort of in check, and not overload on Febreeze or something similar. Because basically I’m trying to be as neutral as possible, I’m trying to be as emotionally regulated as possible and never have a bad day, just have a neutral day.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: And I think for a living situation, you very much have to not disrupt each other, and come from a place of respect. Since probably 2018 or 2019 I’ve tried to make every aspect of every experience as neutral as possible.
Leigh: Mmm
Charlie: Which makes me sound like American Psycho.
[Leigh laughs]
Charlie: But that’s how I’m making it from week to week dealing with other humans. Yeah.
Leigh: I feel like oftentimes in roommate negotiations there is discussion of noise. And I’d like to see a move towards doing that for smells.
Charlie: Yeah, absolutely.
Leigh: Just be upfront, and be like I cannot do a lot of synthetic perfume, or I need a scent-neutral space as much as possible. Being trapped with a smell, that’s difficult. Someone sprayed me with perfume in an airport once right before a transatlantic flight, and — eugh [laughs]. It was miserable. I couldn’t get away from it, it was on the clothes I had on, I felt stuck with it, that triggered fight-or-flight. So being upfront about smell needs, as much as light, sound, touch, that kind of thing, I think is a great practice when you’re looking for someone to live with.
Charlie: We currently have a struggle with our downstairs neighbors smoking in the common areas indoors, like in the stairwells and the hallways, and on my worst, definitely homebound and less fed, and less, like, in control days, I feel like I am being sieged. I feel under attack. And obviously we have air filters, but as much as we try to explain the basic physics of solid, liquid, gas — gas expands to fill every space — it’s allowed. You know, we asked them to smoke inside their own apartments, but then they’re like, “oh we don’t want our apartments to smell like it.” But it’s like, my whole apartment is upstairs from you, you’re smoking with no other doors preventing contamination. You know, I’m living with your smells. You’re not living with your smells, I’m living with your smells. So it very much feels like a war sometimes.
Leigh: Yeah, I mean, physically your body is responding to that, and it can be really hard to settle your system in the face of something like that.
Zack: And I think another thing is, depending on when you moved in with a roommate, if it was pre-2020, you’re seeing way, way more of your roommate than either of you probably expected moving in. So I think it’s perfectly reasonable to renegotiate some terms that you might have been iffy about bringing up when there wasn’t a pandemic. I don’t think that living with one another had any of the implications then that it does now.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: Alright. Should we read number two?
Zack: Yeah we can.
“Dear Charlie and Zack,
Ever since I started working from home due to Covid, I cannot for the life of me regularly brush my teeth in the morning. It’s like my brain had a slot for teeth brushing after breakfast, before I leave for work, and now that I don’t leave for work the slot is gone and I often just don’t. I think it probably doesn’t help that I saw this video about how you shouldn’t brush your teeth more than thirty minutes before or up to an hour after eating. I’m stuck in optimization mode of when is the ideal time to brush my teeth after waking up, putting it off because I have more coffee to drink, I’m about to eat lunch and it’s 4pm and my mouth had felt gross all day and I haven’t brushed my teeth or washed my face yet, as I do it at the same time. I solved the problem of not getting stuck doing whatever I’m doing at bedtime by putting an alarm clock in my bathroom so that I have to go there and turn it off, and since I’m in the bathroom anyway I might as well start my bedtime routine. I can’t do that in the morning because there’s no more time when I definitely won’t have a meeting on weekdays. I’d love any tips or tricks you and your guest have.”
Leigh: That one is tough. I get that. I have some sensory stuff with flossing, so now I use two different flosses. I kinda go by the motto some flossing is better than no flossing. I sympathize with the chaotic morning schedule. How do you put a schedule in place when you need one, when there’s variability? I really love the alarm clock in the bathroom at night, I think that’s brilliant.
Charlie: Yeah, the toughest thing is that to get things done you have to do them. And this is something that I think about so much, and I had that realization years ago, that to get things done you have to do them. And that is so crushing, because how do you convince yourself to do them? You know, for me teeth brushing is also a sensory thing. So I feel for this person with the optimization because this person has very bad OCD.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: Like, I don’t know if they know, but the optimization thing relates to kind of a purity thing.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: A purity obsession. So this is just beyond ADHD and autism and, you know, forgetting to do something. This is a preoccupation with: what is going to make me the most clean. You know?
Leigh: Mmm
Charlie: Statistically. And for this person, I think I need them to be able to think less.
[Leigh laughs]
Charlie: Which is not an easy piece of advice. You know, I can’t tell you to think less. I think this person would really benefit from going on autopilot and sort of a muscle memory thing where you are doing multiple parts of your routine at once. So, I am on testosterone and I also had an eye injury, so I’m applying lots of different goops at night. So I’m like, the only way I’m able to get this all done is to just not be present — not in a dissociative way but in a muscle memory way.
Leigh: Yeah
Charlie: It may be that this person needs to bundle things, and just like — I was talking about gamifying and itemizing. I think that’s what they need to do. Because I also have had hygiene OCD in the sense that I felt like I was stripping my skin using too much soap. So I had to fully change everything about how I was washing my body. Not that I was drying it out and aging it, but like, something bad will happen with my skin, you know, if I dry it out too much.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: Not even the sensation of having dry skin, but very much the optimization of: I don’t wanna disrupt my biome. And that’s a weird thing that’s popping up on skincare Tiktok now, people are telling you not to wash yourself at all, and that, ironically, is a purity preoccupation.
Leigh: Yeah
Charlie: And that is an OCD thing. Because you’re so worried about something you can’t even see, and you are forgoing your comfort for optimization.
Leigh: Mhmm
Zack: Yeah. See, I kind of lucked out with this honestly, because I hate the feeling of not having brushed my teeth worse than the task of brushing them or the feeling of brushing them. Which, I guess I have less of a trade off to make. But the thing in terms of making it work with my routine is I shower in the morning, and honestly I just started brushing my teeth in the shower.
Leigh: Yeah
Zack: It’s one task. The showering is one task that happens to have brushing my teeth as one leg of it. And that simplified things a little and it kept me from getting bogged down in the details of laying out my morning routine when I can combine two steps like that, rather than having to plan them separately and get up the will for each of them separately.
Leigh: Mhmm. Yeah, the bundled muscle memory shower is amazing. Now, my showers, they always go the exact same way. And I don’t have to expend much energy thinking about in what order I’m gonna do things. I have two different showers: I have a long shower protocol and short shower protocol, but they’re both just like fully in my body and that makes it really easy for me to do it. So I really feel for our question asker who had their morning routine disrupted. Cuz it’s hard to implement a new routine that sticks. And especially when you have additional factors that increase the difficulty of that. A friend of mine does phone timers for everything. He sets an alarm for his teeth everyday, and so when the alarm goes off, he just does his teeth. It doesn’t matter if something else is happening. Obviously if you have meetings to attend that are not consistent it can be hard to implement a system like that. But having a regular pattern has been really good for me, and I hope that this person can find a way to put a pattern on top of their busy morning that they can eventually just do without thinking.
Zack: A lot of times getting yourself to do a task is just introducing something you’re uncomfortable with into something you’re already comfortable with.
Leigh: Mhmm
Zack: Like, I guess that’s the closest thing to a hack there is for this.
Charlie: Yeah
Leigh: I visualize in steps. It helps me get something new into my — sometimes I wanna do something but I feel like there’s a disconnect, and so actually thinking through every single step — like, okay, I wanna brush my teeth in the shower — is not enough for me. I have to like visualize putting the toothpaste in there, putting the toothbrush in there, thinking through every little step of the process to get my executive function online, to do it. But once I’ve thought it through in my head it almost feels like the work is done for me. I’m like, okay, I’ve thought through every little step of this, and I’m to the end. Okay, I know how it ends. Alright. Well I’m gonna go try it now. Because somehow, sometimes the uncertainty of where it’s gonna go — even if it’s something mundane — thinking through the mundane event to its completion can give me a felt sense of, like, ahh. Okay, yeah I know what this is. I can go do this.
Charlie: I also wanna suggest to this person, maybe if you’re this far in the pandemic and still doing Zoom meetings, like maybe incorporating — if you are getting fully dressed, if you aren’t getting fully dressed — get fully dressed from now on. Because you can make it part of an outfit. Like, here I am presenting myself to the world. I’m wearing underwear and/or a bra, I’m wearing a shirt, I’m wearing pants that aren’t stretchy pants, I’m going to present my face to the world, either wearing makeup or not. But to present my face to the world, it has to be clean. And I have to, you know, put on chapstick or whatever. So to make it part of an outfit might also be a good hack.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: Because even for recording, like, I was dressed today, but I wasn’t dressed in compression tights which I need for physical disabilities, and I didn’t have a bra on. So I had to get a bra on, I had to at least get some brows and mascara on. To make myself confident I have to be in what I call “show mode”. I think of things as a theater set.
Leigh: Mmm
Charlie: So when I have people coming over I get my apartment in show mode. Potentially this person can take the mindset of making teeth brushing part of their work clothes.
Leigh: Mhmm
Zack: One of the life-saving things as far as my mental health during the pandemic actually has been that I became a lot more better dressed than I was beforehand. Even though I’m literally all dressed up and no place to go, it helped center me and almost became like a uniform, but one that I set the terms for, and it created stability where there really was none.
Leigh: Yeah. I definitely can see that having a strong influence.
Charlie: I was just going over my notes for what I wanted to cover and I forgot to mention this. No one teaches you how to shower.
Leigh: That’s true [laughs].
Charlie: I read a long Reddit thread a long time ago about people not having been taught how to shower, and so one person thought that you get in, the water is not running, you turn on the water, you deal with the minutes of cold water and then it warms up. And they were complaining about, like — aww man, don’t you guys hate it when you have to wait in cold water? And people were like no, you just don’t go in, you just wait.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: And it was a whole thread of people not having been taught how to shower. And I distinctly remember learning tips from a partner when I was in my first year of college. Like very basic things about washing myself that I hadn’t thought of before. And honestly leg washing discourse all comes down to, like, there are just gaps in how you were raised. You know? And you just have to realize that they’re gaps, and then you adapt.
Leigh: Yeah. I Google everything. I like to Google really simple questions, cuz I find it’s been really helpful. I love to Google various checklists just to see, you know?
Charlie: Yeah
Leigh: Cuz it’s easy, you know, especially something as private as showering. If that’s not something that you do in a shared situation very often, you would never know. So that’s why I like conversations like this. Cuz it’s good to talk about it, cuz then you can find where your own gaps are. We all have them, it’s nothing to be ashamed about, like we all have our own little knowledge gaps and that’s fine, it’s just part of being a person.
Charlie: Yeah. For example, hairdressers are better at shampooing my hair than I am shampooing my hair, because they are more practiced.
Leigh: Mhmm
Charlie: And that’s not a value judgment on me or them.
Leigh: Yeah
Charlie: They’re just better at it.
Leigh: They’ve done it more!
Charlie: They have more experience. I do wanna talk before we get to our last question — I do wanna talk about hygiene and care and keeping and aftercare, in terms of sex, and, you know, BDSM — or not. Because something that was really helpful for me was, at one point learning people’s comfort tastes: what beverage do you have to have ready for them after sex? Some people are really specific about that.
Leigh: Yeah
Charlie: And it used to be a thing on FetLife where you would delineate what your aftercare was. And for the partner I was dating for all that time, it was Coca Cola. I don’t know why, but, you know, even if they were having a bad day — this was not a very much sexual relationship, but sometimes it was essential. If they were a little bit frazzled, if we had too many errands, we needed to obtain a single bottle of Coca Cola. And it’s so easy, and for me the taste is coffee, you know, that’s my comfort taste, and — I wish more people outside of kink knew what their aftercare needs were.
Leigh: Yeah
Charlie: I wish they could go into situations and be like hey, if I’m coming over to your house you need to have pretzels for me or else I won’t feel normal.
[Leigh laughs]
Charlie: Or something like that, you know? Which is like very, very autistic but I think anyone could incorporate, like, basically a rider into their social situations.
[Leigh laughs]
Charlie: Because oftentimes you just need familiarity, and you need regulation, and you need a second with yourself.
Leigh: Mhmm. Yeah. Well you know it’s like the best way to get your own needs met is to ask, and the best way to know what someone else needs is to ask them. Both of those things are very vulnerable things to do, things that maybe we don’t think about. But those gestures, both expressing a need and asking someone to express their needs, can be really intimate acts, and just really affirming and kind things to do. You know, some of that falls under the umbrella of kind of the old school, southern hospitality that I grew up with. You know, you figure out what your guests like and you make sure you have something there for them to show them that, like, hey, you’re welcome in my space. It’s a ritual marker. Like, you are here, so I got the tea you like so that you know that I know you like it and you’re loved here. And, you know, thinking about ways that you can add those kinds of interactions to your life can be really enriching. I sometimes struggle with feeling like I might ask for something that is weird. Or I used to struggle with this, I don’t so much anymore. But being able to have conversations about desire, sexual or otherwise — even just what kind of beverages you like, this would make me feel more comfortable, this is something that I like — asking in such a way that is kind of solicitous of the other person’s involvement, like letting them in on a secret. It’s not a demand but it’s like a secret thing that they now know about you that can bring you closer.
Zack: Asking for permission in a sense is such an intimate thing and it should be seen that way, rather than a logistical obstacle of some kind.
Charlie: For a long time I thought people who drank needed to drink in all situations, in all hangouts.
Leigh: Mmm
Charlie: Like it didn’t occur to me that if you drink you sometimes just will not, depending on the context. It’s such a big, galaxy brain-unlocking thing, to talk to each other about what items you want around when you hang out. And it’s so funny that I still think about people’s aftercare lists on FetLife in 2011, and how that blew my mind. To use internet parlance, that was a cultural reset.
Zack: Yeah
Leigh: I will let you guys know, I have about five more minutes before I need to go do bedtime stuff with my kid.
Zack: Oh sure, no worries.
Charlie: Oh definitely. Okay, let’s do our decompression question. We have a random question that we ask to just round out the episode that has nothing to do with anything. So I’m going to ask: what is the song you cannot play around your pet? Or television, or like, doorbells for dogs, etcetera etcetera — what can you not have playing because your cat or dog or bird will react?
Leigh: Larry is pretty chill, however if I play really loud music it upsets her and she will try to — not so much attacking my feet, but like grabbing them.
[Laughter]
Leigh: Like “there’s something wrong here!” And she’ll be like “rrrawh! Rrrawh!”
[Laughter]
Leigh: She’s looking at me right now like “what?” She just doesn’t — there’s a certain decibel level where she’s like “this is not cool with me anymore.” And I get that, I respect it, I turn it down when she does that. I’m not trying to stress out my cat. But she’s a very quiet cat, so it’s very funny when the music is too loud cuz she never talks, and then suddenly you’re just like, blasting some atrocity from high school in the kitchen at two in the morning and a little cat comes running in like “rhhow, rhhow, rhhow, rhhow!” We turn it down for Grandma, she doesn’t like it. She’s a good baby though.
[laughter]
Charlie: Is she genre-picky?
Leigh: Umm…opera would make her, like, apoplectic. She doesn’t like very sustained, long, high notes.
Charlie: Mhmm, mhmm
Leigh: But also if there’s too much bass she starts to touch the cabinets.
Zack: [laughs] So our cats are pretty chill, I say as I’m trying to keep the tortoiseshell off my desk.
[Leigh laughs]
Zack: But Ziggy, our chihuahua, does not like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from Encanto, for whatever reason.
Charlie: Oh my gosh
Zack: Which is — you know, we’re kind of asking for it by being like the only childless people in America who’ve had that on a loop.
[Leigh laughs]
Zack: You never know what’s gonna set her off. I guess she somehow connects it with seeing people outside the window, which will always get her going. And Rachel, my wife, is always saying that the chihuahuas are great guard dogs but they wouldn’t know what to do in terms of follow-up.
Leigh: [laughs] That tracks.
Charlie: Yeah. They’re alarms. Well, I think everybody knows by now that Paris cannot hear Britney Spears’s “Toxic”.
[Zack laughs]
Charlie: I don’t know if it’s distress or if he thinks it’s another bird, the duh-nuh, nuh-nuh-nuh.
[Laughter]
Charlie: I think he thinks it’s another bird because this originated when it was just me and him, like before Mr. Bird and obviously before the parakeets. He cannot hear it, and I also sometimes was playing the version that was in Promising Young Woman, the instrumental, sort of, you know —
Zack: The spooky trailer version.
Charlie: Yes. Yes, with violins and stuff, and he could not handle it.
[Laughter]
Charlie: He absolutely could not. So whenever that little hook — no matter the format, no matter the cover, he can’t handle it. There are a couple other things, like Hozier’s “Cherry Wine” at the end has some bird sounds, and also “Rock Lobster” by the B52s.
[Laughter]
Charlie: You know, it has that breakdown where it’s just like them making dolphin noises.
Leigh: Yes [laughs]
Charlie: Yeah. That scared him the first time but he’s okay now with the B52s, he’s friends with the B52s now.
Zack: There was a reconciliation.
Charlie: Yeah, yeah. I lost him the other night and I was about to put on “Toxic” because, you know, I needed him to start calling out to me.
[Laughter]
Charlie: But I found him, so I didn’t —
Zack: Marco!
[Laughter]
Charlie: Yeah, yeah. Exactly! Yeah. That’s exactly what it is. So at least now I have that in my toolbox, cuz he does sometimes get lost. So that was our episode! Thank you so much Leigh. Thank you for coming!
Zack: Absolutely
Charlie: And tell us where we can find you.
Zack: Yes please
Leigh: You can find my book, Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose, wherever books are sold. It’s available in hardback, e-book, and audiobook — I do the narration in the audiobook. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram at @voraciousbrain, and if you have any questions for me after the show, please feel free to direct message me, I’d be happy to chat. Thanks!
Zack: Yep. Thanks again so much for coming on.
Charlie: Thank you so much!
Zack: We will see the rest of you next time. Thank you so much for writing in, please keep doing that, we really appreciate it, can’t do the show without it.
Charlie: Yeah, and next episode we are actually going to bully a neurotypical.
[laughter]
Charlie: So write in any questions that you’ve always wanted to ask of a neurotypical, like why do you guys do that? What does this mean? Write in at stim4stim@gmail.com or DM us on Twitter under the same handle. Thank you so much.
Zack: See you guys next time.
