away. They can just sit down, fill out their checklists and compare results without getting too worried about how to bring up certain desires. I mean, at some point of course they'll hopefully talk about it, but hopefully the checklist framework makes it easier and lower- pressure. 3) Concurrently, it provides an easy way to turn down acts -- it's much harder to reject a lover's proposition when ze says, "Darling, can I flog you?" than it is when you simply fill in one bubble on the "Flogging -- Receiving" section. In the past, I've certainly felt a lot of anxiety when I wanted to turn down partners, and it's nice to imagine a set-up that would have made me feel less anxious. In fact, I love the checklist concept so much that when the University of Illinois at Chicago had me design my sexual communication workshop, I created a "vanilla" version of the checklist that had entries ranging from "oral sex" to "sex in public" to "tying up / being tied up." (Okay, maybe it wasn't entirely vanilla... I wanted to encourage people to voice things they weren't sure about!) Then I later found out that the amazing sex education site Scarleteen has created its own non-BDSM checklist, and theirs is way better than mine. I just love the principle of the thing -- the principle that a couple can have a lot of fun just by sitting down and talking about every conceivable sex act, being presented with some options that they maybe haven't thought of before, and honestly describing how into each idea they each are. te OK OK This can be found on the Internet at: http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2010/06/14/sex-communication-tactic-derived-from-sm-1- checklists/ te Kk ok te KK te OK oe COMMUNICATION: [theory] Sex Communication Tactic Derived From S&M: Journal- Keeping This is part of the same 2010 series as the previous two articles. In this piece, I mentioned 24/7 Master/slave relationships, which I had just learned about. Since then, I've learned a lot more about those relationships. I have n