Los Angeles Dominatrix Io Moon sat down with author, educatrix and media-maker Tina Horn to talk about her new book Why Are People Into That? based on her long-running indie podcast of the same name. Read on and see what Tina Horn had to say about all things sex, pleasure and kink, including the tricky topic of consensual non-consent, first experiences in adult toy stores, how porn effects our sex lives and more!

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Tina Horn (TH): When I was at Jamie Joy’s Electro Stim class at the Pleasure Chest, I ran into a friend and they said, “I’m surprised to see you here! I would have thought you already knew everything there is to know,” and I was like, the primary reason is that I’m here to support my friend (Jamie) teaching this class, and I’ll do that every day for the rest of my life. Even if I knew every fact that Jamie discussed about the difference between beeswax and paraffin, the way that they teach is interesting for me to observe as someone who teaches, but also as someone who is interested in kink. Also, there is probably something that I don’t know! I always want to stay a student and stay a learner, and I think that everyone would benefit from maintaining that attitude. Even the idea of being a sexpert – I guess I’m an expert on sex, but so many people appoint themselves sexperts when it’s like, what does that even mean?

Io Moon (IM): I get that, particularly about wanting to learn and understand different teaching styles. Especially when it comes to sex, there are so many ways in which we’re all informed by our own experiences, and I’ll never have the experiences that you’ve had, you’ll never have the experiences that I’ve had, so there are places where we can learn from that and that’s part of what I love about this type of work.

TH: There was this Nina Hartley video, or maybe I was seeing her speak, and she said something about how sexuality is endlessly interesting because it’s different for every individual person that is alive or has ever lived. That really resonated with me also as a retort of like, does doing all this thinking about sex make you bored of sex? If you work at an ice cream shop, do you get sick of ice cream? Some people do get sick of ice cream, but I’m not tired of sex because talking about sex and having sex – I say in the book, that sometimes talking about sex feels like the opposite of sex.

IM: I think that you talked about that a little bit in the consensual non-consent (CNC) chapter. You referenced the book Acts of Service by Lilian Fishman, where Nathan, one of the subjects, didn’t want to negotiate with the third, and expected her to know all his desires because he’s a man. Nathan is saying, “She wanted to talk about everything first, she wanted to know our safe word, she wanted to know what we were willing to do and what we weren’t,” and me, having come from a place now of having particular frameworks around these types of conversations, it’s kind of funny that someone would take offense to that. It also in some ways comes from a place of privilege – it can be a very cis, hetero-man thing to say. Of course, after reading this chapter, I’m scrolling on Twitter [now X] and there’s this tweet from a porn star I follow and they’re like, “I don’t have a safe word, and I never will!”

TH: Consensual non-consent is a topic that I ended up teaching a lot of workshops on in the pandemic. Part of that was the fact that I was learning to teach on Zoom for the first time. I knew that people wanted workshops that were not just the same old same old when we were quarantined, so the idea of teaching a class that was about dark fantasies was very appealing to me. When I decided that I was going to write a chapter of my book about it, I was like, well OK, the sort of most obvious framework for how to write a piece about consensual non-consent is to write about the nature of rape fantasies, and I am very interested in rape fantasies and why we have them, why I have them, what people think and say about them.

But the more that I thought about it, the more that I realized that the thing that I really wanted to write about is BDSM communication and negotiation. Your example of the tweet, of the porn star saying, “I’ll never have a safe word,” – the appeal of that as a tweet, as a provocation, is the same provocation as consensual non-consent because, the example that I gave in the book, is that there’s a reason that people free-solo climb up the sides of mountains. There is so much safety equipment available for rock climbing, and some people feel like there is an experience that they cannot have unless they do it without that safety equipment. There are trapeze artists – that is literally where the phrase, “without a safety net” is from – there are people who want to do specific routines without a net because they feel like that is an experience of their technique or expertise, where they feel like if they did the exact same thing, with a net, it wouldn’t be the same, and the spectacle for the audience wouldn’t be the same.

If you feel like there’s a sexual or kink experience that you can’t have with the safety tool of a safe word, I respect that people want to have that experience. I feel like the whole point of BDSM is to provide people with those tools so that they can have those extreme dark and dangerous experiences, but far be it for me to tell someone that I know better than them what is going to get them there. I think that you can play a consensual non-consent scene and have a safe word. I don’t think that there’s a contradiction in terms.

If I was going to do a scene that involves some sort of consensual non-consent fantasy, I would want there to be a safe word. And I’ve also heard people say, “I don’t like to play with a safe word, because if I know that I have it, I’m going to use it,” or “I don’t give people safe words because if they know that they’re going to have it, they’re going to use it,” and it’s like, well you’re not using it right. Again, far be it for me to tell people how to use safe words, for the psychological element of the test of endurance or trying to figure out how to push yourself or be pushed. This is also connected to the idea of people who want to be in 24/7 relationships or have total power exchange. In my mind, the way to have that is by circumscribing a space that is bigger than average that encompasses your entire life. To me, all that consensual non-consent really is, is wanting to feel overpowered or wanting to overpower someone, or wanting to feel controlled, or wanting to feel in control, and that is such an intoxicating feeling.

I’ve done a lot of stupid shit in order to try to feel the way that I want to feel, or the way that I think that something, whether it’s a kink activity, like spanking, or some person – there are ways that sex can make you feel that you would do anything to continue to feel that way or to feel that way again. I hope that everyone reading this blog has the feeling at some time in their life of being able to get something that they want so bad.

IM: Do you remember the first time you went into a sex toy store?

TH: My high school job was at a headshop, a hippie store. It was a retail job at the kind of shop where you could get a belly button ring with the Sublime logo on it, or like a glow in the dark dragon chess set. There was a backroom, and customers had to ask to go into the backroom. The backroom had two things: “tobacco” products, like 6-foot-tall water pipes with gnomes on them, and adult novelties. They were truly novelty jelly bachelorette dildos and VHS tapes. If you said anything about cannabis, you had to leave - I had to kick people out and be like, “That’s not what we’re selling these for!” I was very young, my first sex industry job, the skills that I use to this day, both as a sex worker and a sex writer, and even being in a place like Pleasure Chest, I think that I developed on a lot of instincts that I already had at the time to figure out what someone was asking for and discern what they really wanted.

I had never been interested in buying myself a vibrator because I had been getting myself off with my hands from a young age and I loved doing that, so I wasn’t particularly like, “I need an aid,” but when I got to college I was like, “Well, now I want to do it just to have the experience,” so that same boyfriend who makes a cameo in the beginning of this book, I made him take me to a sex toy store, and I bought this little battery operated purple vibrator, and I just never liked it. It wasn’t until I was introduced to the magic of the Magic Wand that I was like, “Well, this is different because it feels like someone else is doing it, and that someone else is a robot.” And then I taught a spanking workshop at that shop, like 10 years later. I went back and taught a class at the place I bought my first vibrator.

IM: You mentioned something in the CNC chapter about how you think that a lot of the moral outrage around porn is because we have this, I think, very anal-retentive fear of coming undone, so to see someone have that experience, to us, is like, “clutch our pearls.” Can you talk a little bit about that?

TH: One place I talk about it is also in the fisting chapter, where I'm talking about circlusion and the concept of circlusion and bottoming and bottom-phobia. Basically, my theory is that fear of porn is fear of the bottom, which is an inherently misogynistic fear, because it’s about the fear of coming undone, and the fear of what we associate with the “woman’s” experience of sex, which, in so many ways, is not inherently feminine or inherent to the vagina or even inherent to having a hole, it’s not inherent to being straight, it’s not inherent to anything. Which is part of what is so exciting about the concept of circlusion, the idea that a hole can be active.

It might’ve been in the CNC chapter that I talk about the fact that porn is the first place that I saw women being sexually aggressive and just losing it. I think that there’s a stereotype that everyone in porn is faking it. Are movie actors faking it? They’re working, does the fact that they’re working make it less significant that they’re performing what extreme screaming pleasure could be like? The idea that people are watching porn and seeing choking in porn and then trying to choke their partners – porn is not the problem there. The problem is a lack of pleasure-based sex education because that’s also the first step in young people being like, “that doesn’t feel good,” or maybe “that’s not what I want,” or even “I do like this, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

I think that people fear letting go and losing control and porn depicts that. I don’t want to make porn out to be some sort of utopia, but in my experience, you see more in porn in terms of a variety of bodies and what a variety of bodies look like in states of undress, and states of sensation. I get off to porn because I like watching people fucking, but there is a sense of awe and wonder to me that is simultaneously totally carnal and totally – humans are so cool, this is humans at their best! Look at what human bodies can do!

IM: I think that what you said about the “woman’s” experience of sex and the hole being active, witnessing that for the first time, goes back to kind of like, not the inverse, but I hear that in the way that you talk about your hunger to be desired and to be an object of desire in a particular way that you weren’t experiencing even though if you were to talk to someone about your general sexual experience, they would have assumed that that was something that you’d felt. Desire is so complex and I think that it is interesting that that is almost a political statement to say that, that you want to experience desire, and experience it in a certain way. The way that you wrote about CNC and your interest in rape fantasies and then parsing out the different parts of talking about dissociating and what that experience is like and why that feels good to you.

TH: I think that part of the pleasure that I take in watching porn is, and in particular I like – is it focusing on the bottom? Not necessarily – regardless of the gender of the person who is topping or bottoming, I like watching somebody being so desired. Maybe the arousal is real and whatever fucking “real” means, but I think that that is part of the pleasure of watching porn. Watching a bottom get to experience being wanted, even if it is a story that is being told.

IM: I think too that then, what you said in the CNC chapter, creating your own experience regardless of what is happening to you. I read your interview with PsychologyToday, and you mentioned a Darla DeVour, who talked about conceptualizing sploshing as death?

TH: I talk about sploshing as death, but also it’s this author who says that she has this recurring fantasy of “drowning, gasping for air, completely submerged, like a bug, and then reaching out for a savior who stands still as they choose to watch her drown,” but by the time she sent me that quote, I had already gotten to the point where I was like, the only way I can understand this is to see it as people being comfortable with the disillusionment of the ego, as people are losing their form, they’re accepting the validity of death.

IM: I feel like that is kind of strung throughout the chapters and the kinks that you’re exploring. Cannibalism and consumption, desire, to be devoured.

TH: Definitely, and maybe some of the most personal stuff that I talk about is how much I love pain and you know, masochism is like practicing for death in a certain way. But in a nice way. The same way that savasana pose in yoga is called “Corpse Pose” because you’re practicing for death and that is lovely! Because, whether you practice for it or not, it’s going to happen!

IM: Masochism as practicing for death, that’s interesting. I also think of it as a very resilient practice and, really pushing our psychological, our physical limits. Then it goes back to what you’re talking about free solo climbing. All these things that you put in this book are related, who would’ve thought?! (laughs).

Tina Horn is a writer, educatrix, and media-maker.

Her book of fetish cultural criticism based on her long-running indie podcast Why Are People Into That?! will be out in 2024 from Hachette. Deprog, her new detective thriller comic book series, is out in 2024 from Dead Sky.

Tina is the creator/writer of the sci-fi sex-rebel comic book series SfSx (Safe Sex) (Image) and the host/cowriter of the phone sex podcast Operator (Wondery). Her reporting on sexual subcultures and politics has appeared in Rolling Stone, Playboy, Hazlitt, Glamour, Jezebel and elsewhere; she is the author of two nonfiction books and has contributed to numerous anthologies including We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival, which she also coedited.

She’s available for nonfiction book development editing, creative consulting, and personal relationship coaching. Tina has lectured on sex worker politics and queer BDSM identities at universities and community centers all over North America, and works as an on-set consultant for film/tv/theater including Pose.

Tina is a LAMBDA Literary Fellow, the winner of two Feminist Porn Awards, an AVN-nominated director, and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence. Originally from Northern California, Tina spent a decade in NYC before re-settling in Los Angeles.

Mistrix Io Moon is a professional Dominatrix based in Los Angeles. Io's particular brand of domination is salacious, silly, and sadistic ... with a smile. Specializing in heavy bondage, CBT, and corporal punishment, Io delights in encasing, objectifying, and decimating dedicated devotees. You can find Io on Twitter and Instagram, @serveiomoon, and at www.serveiomoon.com.