My wife, Gina, always gets chosen.

I don’t know how it works—some combination of her face, her body, her laugh, her utter lack of self-consciousness—but put her in a room of a hundred people and whoever is looking for a volunteer will find her within thirty seconds. It has happened so many times I’ve stopped being surprised.

So when Virgin Cruise staff moved through the ship selecting passengers for a “secret activity,” I watched it happen again. A hand on Gina’s shoulder. Her delighted laugh. And we were in.

They led us deep into the ship, below the waterline, to a bar transformed into a grown-up dungeon. Red lighting. Chains bolted to the ceiling. Paddles, whips, handcuffs, a full wall of fetish paraphernalia arranged like a museum exhibit. We were in the bow, far below deck, and the ship’s movement sent the chains swaying in slow, hypnotic arcs—left, right, left—the leather and steel catching the red light in a way that was, I’ll admit, genuinely atmospheric. The designers knew what they were doing.

About ten of us stood in a circle, phones confiscated, told nothing.

Two sexy cruise directors, of different genders, in very skimpy outfits, explained the rules. We would be blindfolded. We would comply with whatever we were instructed to do. Then she handed each of us a small vibrating device and asked us to identify it.

Courageous reader, we identified it.

We were told to pair up. Most couples around us separated immediately, choosing strangers with the focused energy of people who had been waiting for exactly this. Gina and I looked at each other, grabbed each other’s hands, and paired up like the scandalized evangelicals we no longer are—but apparently still are, a little.

What followed was forty minutes of almost complete failure to be aroused.

She hit me with the plastic whip. I laughed. She hit me harder. I laughed harder. I paddled her, gently, then less gently, and she started laughing too. We attached the toy handcuffs to one of the swaying ceiling chains with the solemn concentration of people assembling IKEA furniture. The other couples around us were deeply, genuinely into it. We were having a wonderful time for entirely the wrong reasons.

We went back to our suite that night and had wild and fun sex—vibrators, our own choreography, the fantasies that actually work for us—and the plastic whip was never mentioned again. It is under the bed in Barcelona right now, still in its little bag, loyal and patient and completely untouched.

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For a long time, I filed this away as just not knowing what we were doing. But Gina loved Fifty Shades of Grey. Read all three. Found them genuinely arousing. Which meant she was responding to something in the BDSM world — and then we handed her an actual whip, and she couldn’t stop laughing.

That gap deserves examination.

Dr. Michael Bader spent years studying the psychology of arousal and landed on a framework that changed how I think about all of this. Sexual arousal isn’t triggered by acts. It’s triggered by psychological scripts—the emotional story beneath the physical activity. What we need to feel in order to let go.

What Fifty Shades delivers has almost nothing to do with rope. It delivers the fantasy of being chosen so completely, so overwhelmingly, that the chooser loses control. It delivers surrender without initiation—desire arriving like weather, something that happens to you rather than something you have to ask for. For women raised in purity culture, where female desire was either invisible or dangerous, that fantasy resolves something deep. You didn’t want it. It found you. The moral equation is clear.

For some, the practice doesn’t deliver the same result because it requires negotiation. Setup. With a plastic whip from a cruise ship gift bag. Self-consciousness arrives. The script breaks.

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But what about the people who were actually enjoying themselves in that red room?

They weren’t broken. They weren’t acting out damage. For many of them, the power exchange was doing something that nothing else does quite as well—handing control to someone trustworthy and feeling the extraordinary relief of not having to hold themselves together for a while. Or the reverse: holding someone else so completely, so carefully, that the responsibility itself becomes erotic. BDSM communities have built the most rigorous consent frameworks in the history of human sexuality. Safe words. Negotiated limits. Aftercare—the deliberate, tender return to ordinary selfhood after intensity. The church, which spent centuries moralizing about sex, never developed anything approaching this level of ethical care. The people the church called deviant built the ethics the church failed to teach.

What kink delivers, at its best, is full presence. The body stripped of distraction, held in sensation, unable to drift into the mental noise that prevents most of us from arriving completely. Some people get there through tenderness. Some through intensity. The neurology is different. The destination is the same.

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Here’s what the research reveals: BDSM works best for people whose erotic wiring runs toward power dynamics—people for whom intensity, surrender, and control are the fastest routes to full presence. People whose wiring runs elsewhere—toward tenderness, sensation, shared imagination—often find kink beside the point. Two different roads to the same destination. Both worth taking.

Purity culture left us with a reflex: whatever we’re not doing must be what we’re missing. Someone else’s arousal becomes our indictment. Their pleasure, our repression.

But indifference to kink isn’t a locked door. It’s an open one you simply walked past on your way to a room you liked better. And an attraction to kink isn’t perversion, depravity, or evidence of a wounded soul—the words the pulpit reached for when it couldn’t explain what it feared. It’s an open door you walked through on your way to a red room that you prefer.

The plastic whip under the bed in Barcelona is not evidence of damage. It’s evidence that you know what you want.

For those of us who spent decades not knowing that at all—that’s not a small thing.