Source: PGHcitypaper.com.
USA – Though he fought it for decades, HiThereCatsuit, host of the popular kink podcast Authentically Kinky, has always been kinky. Some of his earliest memories are of watching Batman at 3 years old and being immediately drawn to Catwoman. When he entered puberty years later, he had his first orgasm while watching a rerun of Catwoman tying Batman up.
As an adult in the ‘80s, he started experimenting with leotards and tights (they weren’t hard to come by then!) and found that he was turned on by the feeling. Over Zoom he tells me, “My private region was caught in a bondage, so to speak, and it turned me on.” In college, and later in his ‘20s, his internal struggle with his desires caused him to binge and purge bondage paraphernalia. He says, “I’d buy clothes, then I’d throw them all away; I’d buy magazines, then I’d throw them all away.”
He thought he had thrown the suits away for good when he got married to a vanilla woman who wanted nothing to do with his sexual interests, but the end of their long marriage opened space for him to reignite his interest in kink. While he thought he was going to satisfy some of his cravings (both for touch and sexual gratification), he found so much more than he was looking for. He found kindness.
I talked to HiThereCatsuit about the relationship between kindness and kink in the below interview. To my delight, he arrived at the interview in a catsuit. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
It sounds like wearing catsuits is an essential part of your sexuality. Beyond it being connected to your early sexual memories, what do catsuits do for you
When you wear a catsuit, like right now, I am feeling the catsuit hold and caress my right shoulder. But if I let my mind wander, I realize it’s on the bottom of my foot, and now it’s on my left hip and on my chest, and suddenly I am surrounded in touch. My catsuits quit being sexual; they started being an anxiety armor. And in scenes [where he and his play partner(s) act out a pre-negotiated kink dynamic], they become sensation amplifiers.
Do you consider yourself to be a sensation seeker?
Originally, I was a sensation person but then got into impact [a sexual practice of being struck by another person, usually repeatedly, for the gratification of one of both parties]. The best impact tops are the ones that do a lot of sensation in-between the blows to connect with you physically. While I sometimes got into a sub-frenzy where I wanted to do all the things, what I really wanted was that connection.
The first time I ever had a public scene, [the dominatrix] tied me to a bondage table, arms up, ankles down. She decided to do a little CBT [cock and ball torture] and put clothes pins on my private parts. Ironically, that wasn’t doing anything for me, except for making me say, “Ow!” But the sensations, the conversations, being totally helpless … I felt like she released me. When I sat up on the table at the end of the scene, I started bawling. I realized that for the first time in a dozen years — and this is not an exaggeration — I wasn’t thinking of what I had to do or what I had done. I was in the moment. I realized then that kink was where I needed to be.
Being in a kink scene is the one time that I can take a vacation from my mind, and especially when it’s a one-on-one situation, because it puts me in the world that exists when the rest of the world goes away.
You have described kink as a form of kindness. How do you define kindness?
Kindness is something that is given without the expectation of receiving something back.
I will be there with a bottle of water at the end of your scene, even if I’m not in your scene, because I want to make sure you’re taken care of. I send texts to people just saying, “I wanted to send some love to you just so you know somebody was thinking about you.” To me, those are kind things.
You teach a class calledKindness and Other Kinks. Can you tell me a little about that?
The first time I taught that class, it was about how we see ourselves. When we see ourselves through a mirror, we see a distorted reflection. When we see ourselves through a camera, while it isn’t backward like a mirror, we often view the images through the criticism or the praise of everybody around us. What I wanted to do with the class was ask: What if you were able to see yourself without distortion and without feedback? How would you see yourself? Would it be possible to see your own imperfections, but absolutely embrace them? And then I started to expand the class to teach how we can change the way we see ourselves through kink practices.
Can you give me an example of this?
Let me tell you about my birthday scene that happened almost a year ago. I went down to Florida to see a [professional dominatrix] who had listened to my podcast and heard that I was turning 60. She said, ‘Why don’t you come down here for your birthday? We’ll shoot content, we’ll do personal scenes, we’ll go have some really good food, and you’ll get an experience that will give you an understanding of what you talk about in your podcast.’
It was the best experience of my life. The most intense part of the experience was my birthday spankings. She had introduced me to implements from the company that produces the finest leather implements in the world, The London Tanners.
The night before she was going to use them on me, she had me smell them. This is something that I’ve discovered to be an amazing kindness; if the domme has you smell the implements before they hit you with them, you have that memory — that olfactory memory — in your head, and that can be very arousing and satisfying.
When we got to the birthday spankings, she laid out the London Tanners implements and asked me to take off my catsuit. I got on a spanking bench, and she said, “I am going to give you your 60 impacts with three different implements.” I had taken a caning the previous year so I thought I could handle it. She didn’t think I understood what she was saying so she added, ‘I’m going to hit you 60 times. With three different implements.’ Sixty times three is 180. 180 spankings.
My breath halted a little. She brought out the first one, which looked like a solid leather pickleball paddle. She had me smell it, and she said, ‘Are you ready for your first 60?’ I said, ‘Yes, Mistress.’ She said, “You need to count each one of these and say, ‘Thank you, Mistress, after each one. If you mess up, we start over again.’
She started to hit me and by the time I got to 10, Jessie, I was ready to call red because I’ve never been hit that hard in my life. Then I got to 20, and I thought, ‘How am I doing this?’ And then I got to 30, and I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this, but I’m halfway there. Let’s see what happens.’ Then I got to 40, and I was crying. There was a puddle of tears on the spanking bench below me. By the time I got to the end, my tears were on the floor. At 60, she touched my head and my hair and said, ‘Oh, my damsel, I am so proud of you.’
I tried to catch my breath and was crying. She said, ‘Are you ready to continue?’ I didn’t even think about it before saying, ‘Yes, Mistress.’
Then she brought out a long strap, about a foot long, looped with leather. She started again, and this time she played with rhythm. The first 10 were super slow, so I had to think about each and every one of them. Then the next 10 were so fast I could barely keep up. Then suddenly I was at 30 and I thought, ‘I can do this.’ I was screaming inside, but I could do it. Then 40 and 50. At that point I had determination in me to get to 60. At 60, she said again, ‘Oh, my damsel, I’m so proud. I’m proud of you.’ I held back tears because her pride felt amazing.
She said, ‘I need you to take a break. I need you to breathe. Stand up, stretch out your legs. When you’re ready, get back on the bench.’ I was up for one or two minutes, and I was back on the bench. She said, ‘My damsel, are you ready for the last set?’ I said yes. She said, ‘Get off the bench and come give me a hug. I just wanted to make sure that you were willing.’
That’s so sweet. What was that experience like for you?
The lesson I learned on my birthday had something to do with the pain, but it had everything to do with the gift that she had given my heart.
The next week at work was one of the most difficult weeks I’d had and I was ready to give up. Then I went back into the dungeon in Florida and I thought, ‘You don’t have to give up, you can do this.’
What could be seen by the outside world as someone beating the bottom of their sub to the point where they’re crying and screaming had actually been one of the kindest things that had ever been done to me — one of the kindest gifts that had ever been given to me.
She gave me the ability to not give up when I think I need to. Even though I had lived a lot of my life pushing through, this was a physical manifestation of my perseverance.
I think about it every day, it allowed me to see myself as someone who is worthy of your time because before that, I didn’t think I was. That was an enormous gift of kindness.
Jessie Sage (she/her) is a Pittsburgh-based sex worker and writer. Her freelance writing has appeared in a variety of publications including The Washington Post, Men’s Health, VICE, The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, Hustler Magazine, and more. At the beginning of 2024 she launched a new podcast: When We’re Not Hustling: Sex Workers Talking About Everything But.
You can find Jessie on Twitter @sapiotextual & Instagram @curvaceous_sage. You can follow her new podcast on Twitter & Instagram @NotHustlingPod. You can also visit her website jessiesage.com.
