Ep20 - "The Science of BDSM" with Brad Sagrin

Ep20 - "The Science of BDSM" with Brad Sagrin
Scientists have put BDSM under the microscope, producing theories that range from insightful to ridiculous. "The Science of BDSM" explores the history of scientific research on BDSM, from early attempts by psychiatrists to pathologize S&M to recent work by social scientists to understand the demographics of BDSM practitioners, dynamics of BDSM relationships, hormonal effects of topping and bottoming, and altered states of consciousness that BDSM activities sometimes produce.

Dr. Brad Sagarin is a professor of social psychology at Northern Illinois University and the head of the Science of BDSM Research Team. Brad's research focuses on consensual BDSM, social influence, and statistics. Brad has been published in scholarly journals, has given radio, TV, and podcast interviews, has consulted for radio and TV programs, and has delivered lectures to academic and non-academic organizations. His research has been cited in newspapers and magazines, including The Economist and New Scientist. He holds Doctorate/Master's degrees in Social Psych from Arizona State University, and a Baccalaureate degree in Computer Science from MIT.

• ScienceOfBDSM.com
• Facebook.com/BDSMScience
• Fetlife.com/Science_of_BDSM

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SINagogue hosts and guests are subject matter experts but not *the* expert. We believe outside of violating consent, there's no wrong way to kink except to think your way is the only way. The show is presented from a RACK (Risk-Aware Consentual Kink) point of view, not SSC (Safe Sane Consentual) because each person’s definition of safe is different based on their risk profile. Use of the word "safe" on the show fits our definition, and that doesn't have to be your definition. 

Reminder, we try to make our content as inclusive as possible regardless of gender, orientation, role in the lifestyle, etc., but we do inherently speak from our own point of view. We want to learn from our mistakes. If you feel like we said something offensive, let us know. Reach out via our website or call us at 469-269-0403.

Today’s show was brought to you in part by the letters S and M, and the Number 69. 

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Chapters

• 1:29 Introductions
• 10:56 Intersectionality and BDSM
• 15:38 Prevalance
• 21:31 Biggest Challenge
• 33:53 Hot Off The Presses
• 38:59 Academic Support
• 45:45 What Can Vanilla Learn?
• 57:42 What's Next?
• 1:05:44 Oops
• 1:15:14 Final Thoughts

Transcript

1:14

Posting with me today is my partner, my ADHD squirrel wrangler, my submissive, my brat, my little, my pony, or just my little pony. Ah, the butch to my sundae ounce, little bit. This is episode 20 and with us today is Brad Saggerin to talk to us about the science of BDSM. Scientists have begun to place BDSM under the microscope, producing theories that range from the insightful to the ridiculous. The science of BDSM will explore the history of scientific research on BDSM from early attempts by psychiatrist to pathologize, sadism, and masochism to recent work by social scientists to understand the demographics of BDSM practitioners. The dynamics of BDSM relationships, the hormonal effects of topping and bottoming, and the altered states of consciousness that BDSM activities sometimes produce. But first, a word from our sponsors. Dr. Brad Saggerin is a professor of social psychology at Northern Illinois University and the head of the science of BDSM research team. Science of BDSM.com, Brad's current research focuses on consensual BDSM, social influence, and statistics. Brad has been published in various scholarly journals given radio, television, and podcast interviews, consulted for radio and television programs, and delivered invited lectures to academic and non-academic organizations. His research has been cited in newspapers and magazines, including the economist and new scientist, He Old's, a doctorate and master degrees in social psychology from Arizona State University and a baccalaureate degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thank you for being here in the synagogue. Let's talk about the science of BDSM. Thank you. It's great to be here. So where do we start with science and BDSM? Well, I think the early thinking on the subject, kind of from an academic standpoint, really started with Sigmund Freud and contemporaries there. And that's when BDSM or Sadomasochism, as they were talking about it, then really was assumed to be a pathology. And recent research, though, I think, kind of runs counter to this, finding that in a lot of ways BDSM practitioners look a lot like the rest of humanity, probably the big difference being that BDSM practitioners are higher in what's called openness to experience, which she would probably expect, kind of given what practitioners do. And a lot of recent research has really identified a lot of the positive aspects of king relationships and king activities, the couple bonding that king activities produce, the benefits to the type of intentional authority transfer relationships that king stirs sometimes get into and so on. Gotcha. So what do you at the science of BDSM do exactly? So we do scientific research to get a deeper understanding of BDSM activities, BDSM relationships and related types of practices. So we've also done research on things like body rituals, hook pulls, hook suspensions, and that kind of thing. Really I'm really interested in questions about the physiological and psychological effects of BDSM activities. So we've looked at things like the altered states of consciousness that tops in bottom, sometimes get into and trying to get evidence for things like top space and subspace that are talked a lot about in the community, but there hasn't really been a lot of research identifying the nature of those altered states of consciousness. So that's a lot of what we typically focus on. We do a lot of field research where we go to events and organizations that host BDSM activities and then invite members of the community to let us observe what they do to give us saliva samples, do cognitive tests before and after their BDSM scenes so that we can measure the effects of these activities on the practitioners. Very cool. What kind of experiments surveys are you doing out there? Right now we're focused on looking into a pop play is actually one of the latest things that we've been looking at. We're pretty excited about that. This is a new area that some other researchers have started to explore in terms of who does pop play, what are the things that they get out of it and so on. And so we've just started kind of dipping a toe into that and it is just amazing fascinating stuff. And I remember at the Indiana Leathering King weekend recently and had a chance to do some observations and some measurement of pups engaging in pop play and it was amazing. I have to say also that just watching the pups play made me want to jump in there. It is so much fun, so joyous. It was really fun when one of the balls would just kind of roll over to me and I'd roll it back in and feel like I was a part of the action. But one of the most fascinating things was that after the pop play was over, we actually sat and had about a two hour conversation with the pups where they would tell us about pop space and what helped them get into it, what they got out of pop play and so on. And it was a real reminder of the scientific benefits of kind of bringing participants into the discussion. So yeah, we're doing measurements on them, but also there's just a great deal of insight that they can tell us when we engage them in conversation. Wow, that's really cool. Any particular reason for choosing pop play over pony play or kitten play or other types of fat play? Mainly because the pups were around, but I actually think that looking at pet play more generally would be really fascinating. There are, I've been to the claw, the cleavll and leather awareness weekend for a number of years definitely met a lot of pups and seen a lot of pop play there. And so I would say that mainly because kind of that's the first piece of the community that we've had contact with, but I think that looking into other types of pet play would be really interesting and to see where you see similarities and differences. For me, one of the most interesting things that we ended up hearing for the pups was the kind of list of things that helped them get into pop space. One of the pups described the fact that putting on the pop hood and then seeing his snout was really, really important and also feeling the weight of the tail, that those kinds of things physiologically ended up helping to shift him into pop space. And then also, of course, interacting with the other pups, interacting with the people around was really good for doing that. But it just looked like so much fun. Definitely one of the activities that when I was on the outside watching it made me most tempted to just kind of jump in. Very cool. From a psychological standpoint, I would be curious to know how many pups I would be having pups identify as having a social anxiety because that is something that I know interacting with with the different pups. If they don't have their hood, many have mentioned having some sort of social anxiety and having their hood on, their puppy mask, allows them that freedom to step out of themselves and into, you know, a more comfortable space. So I'm curious if something like that would be researched as well. It's a great question. I haven't seen a study on that particularly, but I think that would be a pretty good prediction. Certainly, I think one of the things that putting on a hood does, and I think pups will describe this as well, is really helping in terms of reducing inhibitions, giving people kind of a sense of anonymity, helping them shift into that altered state of consciousness that people describe as pups space. So it wouldn't surprise me at all to see that a pup play is one of the things that helps to relieve anxiety. There's actually one of the theories out there about what people might get out of bottoming in BDSM scenes, and I think it would probably apply to pup play as well, was developed by a social psychologist named Roy Balmeister, who had a theory of massacism as an escape from self. And what he did was he looked at massacism and said, "Massacism may be a way of helping people get into the here and now, get into their bodies so that while they are bottoming in a BDSM scene, they're focusing on what's going on, the activities, the sensations they're receiving, and they're not thinking about all of the other life stressors that they normally experience the themselves as a parent themselves as a person at a corporation. All of these other sort of connections and things that weigh on us, Balmeister viewed massacism as a way of relieving themselves of that stress. I would anticipate that pup play might do a similar thing to people, even though it may not be massacistic in terms of being physically or psychologically painful. It also still may be a good way of getting rid of or separating oneself from the stresses of day to day life, at least on a temporary basis. Have you done any studies or are you aware of any studies on the Venn diagram of neurodiversity and BDSM? We have just started thinking about that. We do have a line of research that we've been doing looking at intersectionality, so we have a paper out that looked at the intersection of race and kink. We have some data collected looking at the intersection of gender identity and kink, and one of the things we're definitely looking to do in the future. In fact, one of my graduate students is embarking on some research in this direction is looking at the intersection of neurodiversity and kink. Some research that has come out of other labs has identified the fact that there definitely is, as you say, an overlapping Venn diagram there, and they've identified the fact that some neurodiverse individuals in the kink community talk about the fact that the explicit affirmative consent norms in the kink community are very helpful for them because rather than have to rely on nonverbal interactions, on flirting, on things like that, they can just kind of talk about what they want and hear from a potential partner about what their partner might want, and that explicit discussion makes it a lot easier to handle those social interactions and negotiate mutually pleasurable play that they'd like to do. So that sort of thing has started to be looked at, and our team is kind of just embarking on some of that research. Check with me in six months or a year, and hopefully I'll have some data to share with you. Well, as a sex therapist who deals a lot with the kink community, I can tell you from my experience, I would guess, 19% of kinky people are some form of neurodivergent, not scientific study, of course, just my personal observation. You're out there, you're doing these research, you're doing those studies. How do we benefit from this information? That is a great question. In my mind, one of the goals of my research teams to try to reduce the stigma and get accurate scientific information out there about BDSM authority transfer relationships and so on. And my experience has been that when we get accurate information out there, really by itself helps to reduce the stigma. For example, the very first study that we conducted, we did a scene study looking at hormonal changes in couple bonding, and we also did behavioral observations at the Arizona power exchange. We did follow up study at Thunder in the Mountains. And when we were doing the scene observations at Apex, one of the things that we recorded was the presence of aftercare that after the scenes were over, not all of them, but most of the participants would sit and sit quietly and cuddle with each other and talk and kind of debrief after the scene, have a snack, have something to drink. And we basically observed that and documented it in the study. One of the things that really surprised me when I started to present these results at academic conferences of psychologists was that that was the big aha moment for psychologists. It wasn't the hormonal changes, it wasn't the numerical results having to do with couple bonding and such like that. It was when we simply put out there that there's this thing called aftercare and from our observation, a good majority of BDSM practitioners in our study did aftercare after their scene was over. And that was a demonstration to this room full of psychologists, the positive relationship context in which these activities take place. And I think that that really helped to dispel a lot of the mistaken stereotypes that people had about BDSM activities and BDSM practitioners. So in some ways, I think just documenting things that would be totally second nature and kind of, you know, uninteresting to even write down within the BDSM community end up being some of the most important things to document because they're just not known outside of the community. My hope is that the research that we do will help to kind of push that along and especially in this, you know, post 50 shades of grave world that we're living in, where a lot of people are curious about BDSM and not necessarily getting the most accurate information from their immediate source of information, that information that's coming from our lab and other labs will help to reduce the stigma and get more accurate information out there about kink activities. So one of the things that has come out of some recent research that didn't come out of our lab, but I think is really interesting stuff to talk about, is some research on the prevalence of BDSM interests and activities. And the estimates from different studies very wildly, kind of the low estimate that I've seen is an estimate of about 2% of people. That comes out of a study out of Australia where they asked a representative sample of Australians whether in the last 12 months they had engaged in B&D or SNM and they defined those terms for people and they found that when they asked it in that way, only about 2% of the participants indicated that they did. The high estimates are actually upwards of 2/3. One study out of Belgium got an estimate of 68.8% of respondents from the general population of Belgium indicated that they had participated in or fantasized about at least one activity that we would put within the umbrella of BDSM. However, they didn't use BDSM by name and in some other questions in the same study where they asked people who had actually just said, "Yeah, I've tied up a partner or I'm interested in somebody dominating the forsexual pleasure." Only 8% said that they were BDSM practitioners and only about 18% more said that they were interested in BDSM. The way you ask the question can really affect the results but one overall message is that the interest in BDSM when you ask about the behaviors rather than by name is really, really common and statistically we might actually say that it is normal and it's statistically abnormal to have no interest whatsoever at Kink. That's fascinating. If you word it differently of, "Do you enjoy tying up your partner versus are you engaging in SNM?" Yes, I enjoy tying up my partner. You get a more accurate, it almost sounds as if you get a more accurate response of what people are really engaging in compared to otherwise. I think you're right. I think that asking about the behavior, you're going to get a lot more people willing to acknowledge it because in a way asking about, "Have you done Sadomasochism?" That's a pretty scary term in saying yes is taking on the identification as a BDSM practitioner and that's kind of a much higher part of participation. And so studies that have looked at behavior tend to get much higher estimates and I would agree with you. I would think in a sense if we're looking for an estimate of what is the prevalence of BDSM fantasies, of BDSM activities, I think asking about behavior rather than identity is going to get you a more accurate number. As a follow-up, because of terminology and stuff and then just the nature of the porn industry and what they portray as being SNM of somebody in one of the full, either latex or leather hoods that do sensory deprivation and so that idea of SNM is something like that versus,"Oh, yeah, I enjoy speaking with my partner once in a while." I guess I don't consider it kinky, but yeah, we do it and it's the behavior. It's the same thing. Like, okay, he's a mask or something. It's the same thing, but how much is just what the porn industry puts out there as what SNM is and so the societal look at it compared to the behavior, how much that might influence it with works and such. It's a good point and people for good and for bad learn a lot from the porn that they watch. And there's some really interesting and troubling research by Debbie Herbannock out of the Kinsey Institute of Indiana University that has shown the real prevalence of choking, for example. And they link this to the amount of choking that appears in porn and people watch porn, they see people choking, they see people getting choked and they kind of make an inference that this is just what people do. Unfortunately, it means that a lot of people end up just kind of rolling out choking without negotiating with a partner. It can of course lead to very negative experiences. It can lead to injury. So I think that there is a lot of information out there, but the sources are not always complete in terms of giving people the full picture of it. I think that sources that also will, for example, show some level of negotiation, some level of aftercare is better in terms of both being able to show hot, exciting activity, but then also giving a sense of how people do this ethically and appropriately in a way that is going to be mutually enjoyable for everybody involved. I've heard you cite that 68.8% statistic many, many times, but only once have I heard you rounded up to 69. And it drives me nuts. I know it's accurate, but... Yeah, maybe I'm a little British in that way, I don't know. It's a little funny trying to keep it clean when of course I'm talking about kink, but what can I say? But it's more scientifically accurate, so yeah. I appreciate that. What is the biggest challenge when doing research into kink? Has it doesn't seem to be getting people to participate in your studies? Oh gosh, the kink community has been so generous in terms of participating in our studies. It's just been awesome. In fact, we will often finish a particular study and then be chatting with people afterwards that when we finished, for example, a study that we kind of affectionately call our switch study where we were interested in looking at the causal effect of topping versus bottoming. And most of the studies that we've done, we've invited people to join the study and then they pick who's going to tap and who's going to bottom in their scene. And then of course pick whatever their scene activities are and we look at the physiological effects of their scene, their psychological effects, what they do. We had one particular study where we were interested in looking with a strong causal inference. And so we wanted to use kind of the method of using random assignment or randomized experiment. And so we invited people into the study who were willing to be randomly assigned with a literal role of the die on who's going to top and who's going to bottom in the scene. So people came in, many of whom were switch identified, but of course, well, we had some people who were not, but were willing to top our bottom in the scene based on the role of the die. And it was incredibly generous. I mean, people showed up. They did a bunch of baseline measures. We then rolled the die to find out who was going to top and who was going to bottom. They then actually on our request waited half an hour so we could get some measures right before their scene began after they had a chance to anticipate it. They did their scene and then afterwards we did some cognitive measures, let them do after care, did some measures at the end. And after all this was done, while we were debriefing people, I remember sitting and joking with people and saying, well, I think in our next study what we're going to do is randomly assign people to an activity. You know, maybe you're doing a bondage scene and roll the die. Oh, you're doing flogging. People were like, oh, totally signed me up for that. I would completely do that. So the community itself has been incredibly generous in terms of participating in our research, being very patient with us as we're learning new physiological measures, as we're kind of rolling things out and developing our surveys and that sort of thing. So that's been fantastic. I would say that the big challenges are one of them is that, of course, the people that we generally are able to sample are people in the organized Kink community. And one of the questions that we often get is, well, how do the results that we get in these studies that you're doing at Kink events and Kink organizations? How does that apply to the larger population of people that are doing Kink in the privacy of their own home? And the answer is, that's an awesome question and I have no idea. Being able to get access to people who are doing Kinky activities, but not doing so in a public way is a lot more difficult. And we're giving some thought to how we can do that, but it's not something that we've managed to kind of break into yet. But that'll be a really good thing for finding out, you know, are the results that we see in the organized Kink community? Are they applicable to the larger set of people that are doing this only in private? I would say that the other big challenge is, um, funding, getting funding for research on sexuality, level-own alternative sexuality is incredibly challenging through traditional, federal granting agencies. And in fact, the majority of funding that we have received has been from the BDSM, leather, Kink community itself from organizations and individuals who are interested in or willing to financially support our work. And we're of course incredibly grateful for that. And if somebody is interested in financially supporting you, there are methods to do that on your website, correct? There is a donate page on our website, which goes to the Northern Illinois University Foundation. It is a non-profit, so any donations are fully tax deductible. And that money is taken into Northern Illinois University, but then earmarked for use purely by the research team. And so that's the way, and that can be done by check or credit card or what have you. I was going to say to be clear, when they make the donation, they can actually designate it specifically towards your research, even though it goes to the foundation, is that correct? Yes, in fact, we would very much appreciate it being earmarked in that way. There's a place to select the target of funding, and ours is the BDSM research fund on our website at points, people specifically to that, and that would end up earmarking the money specifically for the use of our team, and most of the donations that we have received have come through that avenue. Wonderful. Yay! How awesome people support you. Well, certainly joining in our studies when we are doing research is fantastic. If somebody visits our website at scienceabdsm.com, they can join our social media. We're on Facebook, on Reddit, on, I'm just going to say Twitter, of course, X now, on the set life, we do also have a mailing list, it is not at all spammy, I said maybe two or three newsletters a year in a good year, but those are a variety of ways to kind of follow what we're doing. We also try to keep our website itself updated with upcoming conferences that we're going to be at, and if anybody is interested in really geeking out on the research that we do, we've uploaded PDFs of all of our academic publications, we've published 14 papers so far in academic journals, and we actually just got our 15th one accepted, so that will be uploaded as soon as it's published in the journal. Congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you, we're excited about that. I know one of little bits favorite things. If you participate in one of your surveys, you can give them a pen, correct? Yes, we do. We actually, over 10 years ago now, we started producing participation pins as a way of giving people a symbolic thank you for participating in our research. So we have a friendship pin that's been our ongoing friendship pin in an enduring way. If you look at our website, you'll see it's the flask that's tied up with rope, and we also have a yearly participation pin that changes every year, and we try each year to put a pin together that combines scientific themes and BDSM themes. This particular one this year is a dinosaur based one who's tied up in being a tippled by a feather. And so we're designing right now our 2025 pin. Fantastic. So when somebody participates in one of our studies, we are delighted to share one of the pins, and I have to say it is a thrill for me when I walk around conferences and see people walking around with other vests with our pins on them. It just, I don't know, it just makes me warm inside. I really love it. They seem to be very highly desired. I'm not too good. I think it is wonderful, and I'm very happy that we have a way of being able to, in a tangible and visible way. Thank you, and give a recognition to people who again are just incredibly generous in terms of the time that they give us and generosity to be in our studies. The research we do would be impossible without the support that we get from the community and the people in the community. I know I've passed along when the science of BDSM has had some of the surveys posted in such like that. I have shared those links with others and have been like, look, do the thing, support the research. And even if you can't donate, then do it this way because the supports them in order to prove that, you know, basically practitioners of Kink and BDSM, the research is seeming to uplift and support that there's lots of positive aspects. That seem to come from it. I recognize that there, you know, of course, with anything that anybody does, there can be negative things, but in terms of just some of the research. I, of course, so appreciate your help in terms of recruiting people into our studies. And you're right. The majority of the research findings that we've had, I think, paint a very positive view of BDSM activities, BDSM relationships. We are also a scientific research team, and so we really are committed to following wherever the data lead. And sometimes we do have a finding that paints kind of a different picture, and we are committed to making sure that that information gets out there as well. When we first started doing our scene studies, for example, one of the scenes in the first round of data collection we did went poorly. As the top and bottom both described it, somebody changed the music in the dungeon to a piece of music that the bottom found very jarring it kind of through her out of her headspace, and she just couldn't get back into the scene, and they both raided the scene as one of the worst ones that they ever did. One of the things that we observed is that in that particular scene, unlike pretty much everybody else in the study, the participants reported feeling less close to each other, kind of less intimate after the scene than they were before. The bottom's cortisol levels, that's a marker of physiological stress, continued to go off after the scene was over, kind of showing that she found it physiologically stressful, and that that did not kind of return immediately toward baseline. And I think that that illustrates what, of course, we know to be real, which is while most BDSM scenes go well, this is an activity that does carry some risk, and when scenes don't go well, they can have potentially negative consequences. And so I think that that's an important thing that I was, I mean, obviously I'm not happy that somebody in our study had a negative experience as part of their scene, but I was glad to be able to document something that's real, and I think is part of giving a full picture of BDSM activities to kind of put out there to the scientific community and to the larger community. From a practitioner standpoint on my end, that it, that, that almost seems to stress the importance to me that there is now scientific research in the, in the aspect of if a scene goes poorly. The importance of aftercare because that human touch, that closeness, those different things of when it does go poorly, and even if you don't feel as close, the aftercare aspect is R8-1, it can be used to bring, you know, when the adorfen high is high, it helps to bring you down and helps to ground you, but then on the flip side as you, you know, stated that there is a scene that, you know, didn't go as well because the music was poor, and it just took her out of headspace and such like that, that the aftercare aspect is, okay, even if you don't really quite need it, you actually still really need it because I'm going to hazard a guess, and if there's not scientific research on it just yet, hopefully something of, of proving that, you know, that aftercare that touch helps to bring you back more to, you know, again, more, more normal, more grounded, more, you know, reconnect when you end, and don't feel as connected because, oh my gosh, you know, we had to end and it just couldn't get into headspace. So that, to me, seems to stress the importance of aftercare, not just for good scenes, but also for the bad scenes to, you know, bring everything still back to that even level. I think it's a great point, and you may well be right that in a way aftercare may be more consequential for scenes that don't go entirely well. Now, certainly we should recognize that not all scenes include aftercare, some people find aftercare to be very important, some people don't, when we've done scene observations, a lot of the scenes have included a phase of aftercare, but not all of them had, and we haven't necessarily seen problems with that. Actually, one of the interesting findings that we had recently, we haven't published the, this is, this is kind of hot off the presses data that we'll haven't gotten to the journals yet, is that we were really interested in actually looking at whether the bonding that we've seen happen between couples as part of the same activities, does that happen during the kind of conventional scene activities, or does that happen during aftercare? And so we had a study where we did our measure of bonding before the scene began, right after the scene was over before aftercare began, and then also after aftercare was over. And what we actually found was that the increase in closeness, we had used a measure of self-other overlap, and the increase in self-other overlap seemed to happen during the main scene activities, and then stayed high, but flat during aftercare itself. This is of course not to diminish the importance of aftercare, it might be that anticipating that people are going to do aftercare itself might be an important part of it, but it was interesting to find out that the bonding itself seemed to happen during the scene activities themselves, and not necessarily, at least for the study, these scenes that we observed, not necessarily during aftercare. That makes sense to me. So how did the science of BDSM start? Well I was a graduate student at Arizona State University, and while I was in the doctoral program there, I ended up meeting a bird in Nadine Kotler, MasterBurt Kotler and slave Nadine Kotler, and MasterBurt learning that I was studying social psychology kind of started nudging me and saying, "Hey, you might want to spend some of your research effort focusing on this thing over here on BDSM, and at the time I was focusing my research on other things, but I kind of put it in the back of my mind, and eventually after I became an assistant professor working at Northern Illinois University, the idea kind of came back to me, and it was also after reading more deeply and hearing Roy Balmyster talk about his theory of masochism is escape from self, and my thought was, I think he's right, but I think the theory is incomplete. I think that his theory does explain the motivation for some masochists some of the time, but I think there's a lot more to it than that, and that was one of the things that really motivated me to start getting into this area of research. I went at the time, I was pre-tenure, which means that NIU had not made a long term decision on whether they were basically going to give me a career long appointment. Pre-tenure is a pretty tenuous part of an academic career where you're kind of on trial, and at the end of it they make a decision, do they want to commit to keeping you there for the rest of your career, if you want to stay here or do they let you go? And I remember at the time going to my department chair and saying, "Okay, look, I'm thinking about devoting some of my research effort to studying BDSM. Is that going to be a problem for you and is that going to be a problem for my going up for tenure?" And he said, "You are a researcher. You should study whatever it is that is of interest to you if you publish your research in good journals, in good peer-reviewed academic journals. You can study whatever you want." And I was like, "All right, let's go ahead and test this." So I started doing research on BDSM. I was continuing to study other areas of social psychology, and you know what? They were accurate. They stood by what they said. I ended up getting tenure there. And now some years later, BDSM and related activities constitute the majority of what I study. Very cool. All right. Oh, and I was going to say, and I have to say I love it. I mean, it is such a wonderful, fun, exciting area to do research in. Part of it is that going out into the community, getting a chance to share the research findings that my team has produced and that other BDSM researchers have produced back with the community that makes this research possible is just an incredibly wonderful thing to do. We always get such great ideas in the conversations that we end up having with community members. It's just, it's such a smart community of people who have thought so deeply about what it is that they're doing that we gain so much in having a chance to present and having those conversations asking questions. I always leave with new insights into our data, new ideas for future studies. And so it's just a really exciting area in which to work. In addition, as I think we've seen that society has started to reduce the stigma associated with BDSM. It's certainly still stigmatized as an activity, but I think it's getting reduced as it's becoming more popular. The stigma attached to research on BDSM is also getting reduced. And that means that there are now more and more labs out there that are doing research on Kink, which is also a really exciting thing. And it's been fun to be one of the labs that's been kind of on the forefront of that research. So it sounds like both the university and the research community as a whole have been mostly welcoming, mostly supportive? Yeah, very much. Completely supportive. Very much so. I have to say I got very lucky in that the job that I got at a graduate school was at a remarkably open-minded university. Northern Illinois University has been cited as a really open university for different gender identities, different sexual orientations. And so I think that part of that overall philosophy in atmosphere has made them very open to the research that my team produces. We, of course, like other researchers studying research with human subjects have to get our studies approved by the Institutional Review Board of Northern Illinois University. And the NIO IRB has been really open to this kind of research. They certainly scrutinize our protocols and make sure that we're not doing anything that's going to put participants or the research team at unnecessary risk. But they have never failed to approve one of our studies and when they have recommended changes to our protocols, it's never been anything that I've objected to. It's been something where I'm like, wow, that's a really good idea. I hadn't thought about that. That would be a good thing to ask or that would be a good precaution to put in place. So I just got very lucky in I'm at a university that has been very supportive, gave me tenure with this being an open part of the research that I do. And that's also been wonderful. And the graduate students and undergraduates that I've had the opportunity to work with have also really been a great part of this research process. And how long have you been doing this? Well, gosh, we conducted our first study probably back in 2001. Second data collection, 2002. We published our first paper in 2009. And then I'd say that we came together formally as a research team. I'd probably placed it in about 2011 where we did our first trip to the Southwest leather conference was the first conference that we went to where we did presentations. And then we started branding ourselves as the science of the SM research team. We came out with our first set of pins in 2014. We got our patches for our leather vests some years later. And I was, oh my god, incredibly honored a couple of years after that when we were placed on the leather quilt. I remember when we first got leather vests and we put patches on our vests as to sort of be a research team in a visible way. I remember being kind of worried about how are people going to respond to that or people going to see, well, you know, you're not a leather family. It's not appropriate. But in fact, we were incredibly warmly welcome and a couple of years after that when we were put onto the leather quilt was, well, I was really at a loss for words, which doesn't happen to be very often. And so really, I think showed how affected I was by that, but it was a very meaningful gesture to me. One of my joys with doing this podcast is I get to share the people who are very influential with me, with all the listeners. And I know I've said it to you a few different times in a few different ways, but you were definitely one of those people. Until our past first crossed at my first big kink event, I very much felt like a member of the freak show. You talked about the non-stigmafication. That was the moment for me that there was somebody out there who was doing this in a professional way, but not in a dominatrix way, professional. I had the idea in my head to be a therapist, dealt with kinky people, but I hadn't even met a sex therapist, let alone one who built with kink. I assumed they were out there, but finding you, I knew for sure they were out there. And very influential through getting my master's degree because I'd be writing papers on kink in BDSM and between purity filters and just lack of content out there. There are a lot of times rather than searching for BDSM or whatever. I would search for your name and find who are papers or people who cited you in their papers or papers you had cited, and that's how I would find my sources. So I wanted to one publicly thank you for that and give you your flowers. Wow. Thank you. I met a lot of foot words, which I thought happened to be very often, but gosh, I'm so glad that I was able to give something of value. I'm grateful for that opportunity. I really am and I'm really glad that the work that we have done has been of use. I say absolutely. I know I've used to hear papers several different times in my college degree program of social work as I'm working towards my master's degree. So yeah, and actually used it, used the information in discussion posts and dialogue to actually dispel some misinformation that was out there of my classmates, which I was amazed and shocked and their perspective of things. I'm like, whoa, hold on. I know there's some research on this one second. So I'm very much appreciated as well and I know it's definitely used. Well, and I think that sometimes that's where it's so useful to just put numbers on things because numbers can be persuasive, data can be persuasive, and even things that I think we know from a lot of experience and observation when you've got statistics to back it up. It can really help, it can really help, you know, that we've seen that by the hard numbers, people are closer together, are feeling more intimate together after they've finished a BDSM scene compared to before. They were, that we've observed that people in long-term authority transfer relationships seem to have these dynamics, which seem to really be a benefit. And one of the things that we're starting to explore is how the larger vanilla world can benefit from some of the things that the intentional relationships that kink practitioners get into what lessons can the larger world learn from that. So I think there's a lot that the kink community can teach to the larger world, especially as universities and organizations are starting to wrestle with questions about consent. For example, one of the things that I think the kink community can really show is how people can sit down and talk and negotiate, and that that does not in any way undermine the excitement and the passion of the activities when they take place. I feel like there's this idea in the larger community that, oh my god, we can't talk about sex if we talk about sex, that'll jinx it and we'll never actually be able to have the sex. And you look to the kink community and you find people who are quite ready to sit down and have an extensive conversation about what is each person want in the scene, what are the limits, what are the desires, what are the hard limits, and then they go in and play with the freedom of knowing that everybody wants to be there and what are the activities that are on the table, what are the activities that are off the table, and that explicit conversation has enabled that scene to happen. It has in no way prevented it from happening, and that's something that I think the larger world could really learn from. Absolutely, I mean I say it all the time that every relationship has the relationship agreement just kinky and ethically non-monogamous people are a lot better at sitting down and negotiating it and not running off assumptions. Absolutely. One of the things that we're starting to look into and what am I graduate students, Breemazi is potentially designing her doctoral dissertation to look into this specifically, is looking into intentional relationships across the kind of range of relationships where people sit down and mindfully try to construct a relationship that is going to work for everybody involved. And one of the things that we've started to see is that a lot of authority transfer relationships be they dominant, submissive relationships be they master slave relationships be they handle pet relationships and so on. A lot of these types of relationships are very intentional that the individuals negotiate with each other what they both want. They craft a relationship in the relationship rituals and dynamics in a way that's going to satisfy the needs in an ongoing way. They keep the conversation open about what's working and what's not working and are ready to evolve their relationship as the individuals themselves evolve and this is something that I think we can learn so much from because and this is a point that for example Ravencaldira has made in some of his writing is that it is often the case that a lot of conventional relationships are very non intentional. They just kind of float along on autopilot until there's a real problem then they go to a therapist who helps them try to add intent to the relationship but of course that's not from the beginning that's only after their real problems that need to be unpacked. And I think there is so much benefit to potentially setting up a relationship with intention from the beginning and so I'm very excited about Bree's potential dissertation looking at authority transfer relationships but also looking at consensual non monogamous relationships of different forms and other kinds of intentional relationships to see what are the commonalities and what can we learn from that that perhaps all relationships can really learn from those benefits. And I think that's part of the reason Kink appeals to the neurodivergent is because they don't understand those unspoken rules of society and all of a sudden here's a community where we're speaking about those unspoken rules and clearly defining them. Absolutely. I think that what limited research has been done so far has started to identify that explicit conversation as one of the benefits that neurodiverse individuals in the Kink community will sometimes cite as one of the real benefits of that community for them. My sense though is that I think that that's something that everybody benefits from is being willing and being in a community where the normative messages are that it's okay and encouraged to talk about these things, to look inside and decide what you want and then to be open to communicating that to other people. I think one of the tragedies about so many relationships outside of the Kink community is that people just don't talk even to their relationship partner about what their real desires are and how is somebody going to just telepathically intuit that and instead what people have is a relationship or one or maybe both people are unsatisfied in a way that is tragically unnecessary where if they would open up to each other who knows they might find that they are compatible on a whole new level or that they are willing to generously give to the other person what would turn them on in a way that they're just not yet doing because they have an at that conversation. I mean Disney has set the bar unrealistically high. Can true loves first kiss? How can you know if it's a true love if you're not even conscious or consenting to that kiss and then get married the next day once you do it? It is not. The expectation is it's supposed to be that easy but it's not. It's like everything else in our lives you need to communicate open and honestly and directly. One of the most interesting things that came out of one of our papers on long term BDS and relationships it was a paper that actually Masterbrook Cutler was doctoral dissertation and then published in 2020 in an academic journal. What he found in the long term BDSM couples that he interviewed was that there was a commitment to transparency and communication that happened pretty much from day one that these were individuals who reported that they had been in prior unsatisfying relationships with partners that they were incompatible with and that when they were meeting new partners they would disclose right up front what they wanted what they wanted at a relationship what they wanted at their kink what they wanted out of their sexuality and that that would very quickly establish is this a person that they're compatible with and if not they didn't want to waste either of their time it meant that they developed knowledge of what their partner wanted from very early on and it also meant that they developed satisfying relationships for both people were really able to get what they want out of those relationships because of that commitment to open communication and transparency and again I think that that's something that everybody as they negotiate relationships could could really learn and benefit from. What has been the most surprising thing you have learned from one of your studies? Well I guess a couple of things come to mind. One of them is actually in a sense one of our more troubling findings if you don't mind if I share that. No, go ahead. We are committed to following the data where they lead and once in a while the data lead to a place where the findings I think are important to get out there but where the findings are potentially pretty negative. One of the places where we saw that is when we started to look into the intersection of race and kink and what we ended up finding in the stories and reports of people of color in the kink community is that the kink community has a vein of races of running through it, not everywhere, not in every organization but it's there and it can make the kink community potentially an unwelcome place for people of color who are looking for a place to explore. We ended up finding for example in this study that people of color were substantially more likely to report experiences of discrimination, experiences of fetishization compared to white participants in our study and both in the stories that people would tell in the research itself and then also as we started to present the results of this research to the kink community we would have members of the audience really validate that and share their own stories and my hope is that getting this information out there will help move the conversation forward. My sense is that the kink community is a community that wants to do better, wants to be more inclusive but doesn't always know the best way forward in doing that and so I think that getting information out there about what the community does well and then also where the community really has a distance to go in terms of learning and being more inclusive, I hope will help move that conversation forward. So I would say that that is one of the things that I found surprising and troubling in our data that I really wasn't anticipating although of course in a way being white myself it is part of my own privilege in terms of race that I was really unaware of it and that that was really invisible to me and it was part of my own growth and learning is to have to take a step back and be surprised and be disturbed and just kind of listen and hear the stories and hear the experiences and say all right it is troubling but good for me to learn these things and to help get that information out there so that the community can hopefully move in a direction of doing better. Very good. I mean I know the kink community has some problems with racism if nowhere else as we talked about on episode 19. Those by the book in the gory and subculture it explicitly says as I understand it that if you are a person of color you can't be a gory and master. Wow. So I understand where it comes from some places. I don't like it either. And I hope that this is one of the places where getting scientific information out there may help to move the conversation forward. I remember when we first started to present the results of this study and I had the opportunity to join a panel and co-present with Missy Dom and Cream Dream from Black Femme Dom's Atlanta and it was a privilege to have a chance to present with them just to incredibly smart people who speak really wisely and with a great deal of information on these topics. And I remember that the conversation that we were able to have as part of the panel and with the audience of that panel I thought was really open and that I hope that the data that we were able to present in our study was a way that we were all able to kind of look at this situation with an open mind and with an open heart and maybe with a little bit less defensiveness that can sometimes happen there. And I hope that that's one of the things that the research that we do can help to serve and can help to move that conversation forward and help to move the community in a direction of growth. So what's next for the science of BDSM? Do you have specific studies on the horizon? Well we do. We had just started before the COVID pandemic shut us down to start working with EEG. Our measures thus far of altered states of consciousness have either been cognitive measures where we have used cognitive tests like the strup test which is a nice measure of the executive function portion of the brain and in that way we think that it's a pretty good indirect measure of subspace. However, the strup test can be affected by a whole lot of things and so while it might be indicative of subspace it could also be indicative of a whole other lot of different things. And so one of the things that we were particularly excited to start doing is to use EEG as a way of looking more directly at what's going on in terms of brain states. We started to do a little bit of data collection with EEG before the pandemic shut us down and now that we're back to in-person events we've dusted off our equipment and just started doing it again, doing it again. We are however really climbing the learning curve with that and so we're new in terms of that and we are excited to stay also just starting to like get the technology together in the software together to actually be able to analyze some of the EEG data that we've collected in the past and so I'm hoping that we'll have some new insights into that pretty soon. We're also starting to learn the challenges of doing EEG. And EEG is that headset that people can wear that does a measure of a brain states in terms of whether somebody is in an alpha state or a beta state and so on. However EEG is very susceptible to movement and so for example one of the things that we were hoping to do when we started to do EEG most recently is to actually use EEG with pup play. We found that actually pup quits were awesome at holding the EEG headset in place. I was the one that was sitting there watching the computer watching the EEG data come in and I'm like our connectivity is awesome and then somebody threw a dog toy out and the pup started to play and the EEG data went like completely to trash. We started, we were suddenly at like 0% EEG data coming in. The funny thing was that the pups would play. They were of course really kinetic lots of movement. We were getting no EEG data whatsoever and then at one point they all just relaxed for a moment and all kind of got into a puppy pile and suddenly we were getting an awesome 100% EEG data for about 25 seconds and then they got up and started running again and it all went away. So what we're finding is that there are some types of activities where EEG data tend to work pretty well. If people are doing a scene where there's not a whole lot of movement then we're looking to do EEG data with potentially the tops and bottoms in those scenes but where there scenes with a lot of movement it's probably not the right measurement instrument and we're starting to look at things like heart rate monitors, galvanic skinned response and other types of physiological measures that may not be so sensitive to movement that happens during the scene. Very cool and I am very glad to hear you picked that back up again because I think I was part of your first trial run with that or very close to you. Absolutely were and I fully recognize every time I see that we actually owe you your EEG data which I'm very excited. I had actually hoped that we would have the data analyzed by the time I was on this podcast good so I could say hey I just sent it to you we're not quite there yet but I do have to say we're working with some software folks right now who are putting some tools together and we're starting to get some EEG readings out of the past data that we've collected and so hopefully the next time we talk I'll have some data for you. Very cool. Awesome. At a quick question do you have a favorite study that you have done or one that might be like kind of on the books that you hope to be able to start doing? Well one of the favorite studies I think for me that I did was the switch study the one that people came into the study and were willing to be randomly assigned and part of that is I'm trained as a social psychologist and one of the things that I have really enjoyed doing as I start to do kink research is bring in kind of the tools of social psychology to apply to this other area where a lot of the research has really been either survey research and we've done our own survey research don't get me wrong there's a lot to learn from that but I really love being able to use kind of the methods of social psychology as a way of gaining insight and so the idea of being able to do something where we like literally randomly assigned somebody to top or bottom or one of the things that we're planning for the future is where we actually randomly assign people to what activities are going to take place during the scene. One of the questions that we've gotten a lot from people when we present our scene study results as well but are the effects different for a bondage scene versus a scene with flogging versus a scene with some different activities and my answer is always that is a great question and I don't know like we don't have those data yet but we've had enough people when I've suggested the idea that are like sign me up I will totally be in that study where I think that there's the possibility of doing that where we could take for example a limited number of activities and enroll people in the study that study who would be willing to do one of these four things like a scene with bondage a scene with impact a scene with spanking a scene with clothes pins or something like that just sort of a limited number of things and they would enroll in the study do their baseline measures we would roll a die to find out or spin a spinner find out what their activity is going to be and then the great thing is that from our measures what we would be able to find out is causally what is the causal effect of flogging versus bondage or flogging versus clothes pins or power exchange versus some other activity and that would I think be both a really fun and interesting scene to do and also to give us some insights that we really wouldn't be able to get from other things so I'm very excited to do that and I have to imagine as types of play goes you wouldn't be able to do that with electrical play probably not because part of the part of the way that we want to maintain the random assignment is that ideally everybody who comes into the study would be comfortable with any of the potentially exiled activities it is of course completely within the ethical rights of somebody to drop out of the study at any time and for ethical reasons we would of course put no chorus of pressure on somebody to stay in however there's a real benefits to everybody staying in the study because if they do we can be most confident about our statements about the interpretation of the results so for example if we had an activity like electrical play that only a small subset of people would be comfortable doing or we did like play piercing or something temporary piercing that might also be something that fewer people would be willing to do we might find that a greater proportion of people if they got randomly assigned to play piercing or electrical play would drop out of the study compared to people assigned to spanking and if we did that it would make it more difficult to be confident about the causal effects of the different activities and so this is a really long-winded way of saying yeah you're absolutely right we would probably want to avoid things where only a small subset of people would be comfortable with that activity we would instead want to do things where most people who might sign up for the study would be willing to do any of the activities on the menu. I was more interested in the state of your equipment after getting the electrical shot yes that too and you're going to remind me to all right I'm going to go ahead and share it so one of my more embarrassing moments as a researcher we were in the field this was before the pandemic when we were doing some of our early eG work and our general philosophy when we do a scene study is that when somebody comes up they can do whatever activities they want to do and so sometimes we'll get people who sign up for the study and they're like what do you want us to do and on our answers do whatever you want you do whatever activities you want to do and so we signed some people up and they enrolled in the study and they said what do you want us to do we're like do whatever your activities you want to do and they said okay well we were thinking about doing the violent wand is that okay and I thought about it for a moment it was like well why not sure go right ahead and about half a second after they started the study we of course put the eG headset on we did our other measures we got everything ready we're reading the readings on the computer and they touched the bottom with the violent wand and I'm like oh shit that was not the way the session so yeah learned learned my lesson on that there are some times where the answer is no that is not a compatible activity with with eG so yeah my bad screwed that one up I was very glad that it actually didn't completely destroy the equipment but we just got really lucky there and now we don't do electrical play when we're doing eG measurements I mean that's totally fair and that's a hard one to go back to to go back to the university I feel like so so you know that thousand dollar headset you bought us yeah yeah it's my bad yeah exactly so you have to make a mistake don't make that mistake again but as I admitted we're definitely on the learning curve with regard to eG but lesson learned fortunately wasn't in that case an expensive one well when you're doing things that people haven't done before there's always going to be a learning curve and there's always going to be some mistakes and well that would be part of the fun and that is definitely the case and you know we've definitely got our list of mistakes I mean the the funny thing actually thinks thinking back as long as I'm sharing my embarrassing memories as a researcher was we have generally tried hard to vet our materials and not offend people you know we're very grateful to the community and we certainly don't want to put into people into a position of being uncomfortable and probably I have to say the survey that we deployed at one point where we offended the most people was something we had not we had not anticipated at all we were actually pre-testing a set of words for their association with dominance and submission it was a one-page survey where we just had a list of words and we wanted people to indicate the let the extent to which they thought that this word was associated with dominance and this word was associated with submissiveness and we had a variety of words on that we basically went to a sort of fissaurus and listed a bunch of those and we suddenly started finding that people were really pissed off and we're like what is going on here and finally somebody came up and said I'm really offended like I feel like the survey that you've deployed is very judgmental and we're like what are you talking about and they would say well you've included words like beneath and it seems like what you're asking there is whether somebody who is a bottom somebody who is a submissive is less than somebody who is a top or a dominant and we're like oh my god that is not at all what we were intended we were really just looking for commonly associated synonyms so that we could use that in another study and so that was also a real lesson learned that we now really try to vet our materials with the people that we're going to be giving them to to make sure that we haven't inadvertently put in something that's going to be offensive or something that's going to be ambiguous and that people you know are going to know how to answer but in that case we had looked at it as a research team and we as a research team include people on the team who are themselves kind of identified but yeah I guess we were just looking at that survey from the researcher perspective and when people were looking at it from the participant perspective uh yeah we screwed up and so that was also something where it was an important lesson learned and we now really try in any case where we're where we're not sure about it to show the survey to a set of people who are potential participants and one of the things we asked them is look is there anything problematic here is there anything offensive and we very much want to hear things before we deploy a survey to a larger number of people. Now you mentioned uh team members who are kink identified but you also have team members who are not kink identified correct we do we we find that we have a we have a mix on the team and my own perception is I think that that is a really important mix of voices to have around the table. I think that we all of course enter studies with bias. I am absolutely biased as a social scientist with probably every study I've ever done like I have a way that I want the study to come out I have a set of predictions and I think that the mix of perspectives around the table is really useful in terms of helping to avoid bias the people who are kink identified can help infuse their knowledge of their lived experience in terms of our predictions and our methods and our hypotheses and the people who are not kink identified can really offer that perspective and help to sort of temper the assumptions that the kink identified people may make and so I think it's a really great mix of voices and mixes of perspectives to have on the team and I really value that. I might be wrong but are you the person who has the story about jazz and water skis? I'm going to take that as a yes. Yes. So my so I teach in a social industrial area the social industrial area in the Department of Psychology at Northern Illinois University and because my research team does a lot of research on kink and related activities my curricular area has become very knowledgeable about kink related things. However sometimes they're still pretty kind of new to the terminology and at one point one of the graduate students on the team was doing a presentation and it was on people's perceptions of a variety of kink activities and they had up there uh among other things water sports and they had up their skat and one of the other professors in the area who was fairly new to the area said oh I'm kind of confused what is what is water skiing have to do with BDSM and what is jazz have to do with BDSM and I just sat there probably for the little red and the graduate student to her credits managed to maintain her calm as she explained yeah water sports in skat are not referring to water skiing and jazz and she then explained what they actually referred to and everybody laughed in this professor who washed a little bit and everybody in the room got a little bit more knowledgeable about about kink jargon so yeah oh that's amazing it was it was a fun moment and at this point I think everybody has gotten completely educated and pretty jaded so you know we can often even just skip the preliminaries when we jump into our research that's good I think sometimes that's not always a bad thing no no I think I think it can be useful and my hope is actually we have a clinical psychology area in the department and my hope is that maybe one of the side effect benefits of having the BDSM research team be part of this department is that it may be that the clinical psychologist who graduate from our Department of Psychology will come out more kink aware just because of the research that's going on in the area and certainly you know as we know I'm certainly rabbi as you know having kink aware therapists and clinicians is critically important for the well-being of members of the community yeah so I know any chance I get to educated vanilla therapist I absolutely take it as always been well received sometimes I do get the deer and headlights look but that's okay because that means the client down the road is getting the deer and headlights look yeah absolutely and I think being able to help somebody expand their awareness reduce their judgment as you say can be really helpful downstream when they have a client who has revealed this aspect of themselves and then they're not either approached with having to educate their clinician or approach with negative judgment absolutely well before we wrap this show up is there anything else you would like to share about the science of BDSM we have covered a lot of territory here I really enjoyed this conversation appreciate the reminder of some embarrassing memories from the past but also and really touched that you have found our research to be of use and valuable I have been incredibly grateful to have had something to contribute to the kink community and it really does my heart good when I find out that the work we're doing is is having an impact I'm very glad of that no problem I mean I know you're somewhat removed from the end results of your research so if I could bring that to you I absolutely will run through your social medias real quick for anybody who may be interested in following you with absolutely the best place to start is at our website science of bdsm.com and there you can find a link to our social media on facebook on x on reddit on fat life as well as click a link to join our mailing list we have a mailing list that is we don't share our email addresses with anybody we send out maybe two or three newsletters a year you can also just visit us on our website to keep aware of upcoming conferences that we're going to be at to download copies of our academic papers to see announcements of new papers that have gotten published and so on so that's I think really the best place to start and to take a survey and get a pen absolutely and take a survey and get a pen and I will throw links in our show notes to your website and social medias very much appreciated not a problem well thank you very much for being on the show upcoming synagogue classes both virtual and person on elector play both with and without the violet wand brady daddy's body drumming check out our website for specific details on those but with that said that's it that's our show say goodnight little bit goodnight little bit