Kinky Co-creation and Steamy Power Exchange

 

“Kinky Co-creation and Steamy Power Exchange”

a Girl Boner podcast transcript

Emma: I think that co-creation is about being able to show up as your authentic self and to have your interests, but to really be listening to your partner and to really be figuring out what’s the special experience you can together have.

Eireann:  I don’t know that I’ve ever had any time in my life where I was just as a human being, who is a creative and a vulnerable person and a very strong person and kind of quirky, all of those things are situationally accepted in different places. But when I’m with my significant other, all of those things get to be present and loved.

August/narration:

Today you’ll hear two stories, one from the archives and a brand new one. Both stories involve not only spicy fantasies brought into fruition with a partner, but cool creations for others to enjoy, partly inspired by those experiences.

First, Emma Velicky’s story.

Emma is the founder and CEO of Saturday Box, a kink and roleplay adventure company focused on bringing couples closer together.

Emma told me she learned about kink and BDSM at a young age

Emma: Very, very early, much earlier than I even really knew what sex was. when I was, like, three years old, I watched the Aladdin movie, I then had these recurring almost nightmares, but I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t that scared and I was kinda looking forward to having the nightmares again, where I was being kidnapped by Jafar because of, of course, the famous hourglass Jasmine in prison scene at the end of Aladdin.

August/narration:

The dream went like this:

Emma: I was in my grandmother’s house and she had this big white staircase. I was running away down the staircase and grabbing onto one of the posts. Jafar was behind me chasing me and then pulling on my body.

I just started having that kind of thing of like, oh, there’s some amount of interest in this captive princess thing.

And it seems sort of normal in a way when that is, the cultural narrative for so much of, the media that little girls are exposed to.

You know, I’d play with my friends, and we would always do the mermaids and the fairies. We had a lot of storylines. I think probably I was pushing it more than other people to have all these  captive storylines.

August/narration:

In terms of actually learning about sex, she learned a little bit a few years later.

Emma: In terms of actually learning about sex, that wasn’t until I think I was in maybe second or third grade, and I was at the time in an evangelical church, and they were having sexual assault survivors speak in the church, and my mom wanted to make sure I knew what that was. So she asked me if I knew what sex was, because she knew I was kind of precocious. She figured maybe this girl’s figuring out things on her own.

And I was like, “Oh, it’s like what they do on America’s Top Model. It’s like when they’re really sexy.” And I, like, kinda gave her a pout, and she, like, cracked up. She explained to me the physical act of sex, that it’s, like, a penis going into a vagina.

That did not seem appealing to me at all. I was like, “Oh, that’s such a strange thing.” What she probably should have said is right now you might not have certain drives, but as you get older, you know, your body’s gonna change and some of these things that don’t seem appealing might seem appealing. But no one gave me that clue, so that was kind of the end of that.

August/narration:

As Emma got older, sexuality became more fraught in the whole evangelical, chastity-first type way.

Emma: Young girls, like teens and preteens, go to these conferences. They get silver rings, and it’s similar to a promise ring except it’s almost taking a cue from the nuns where it’s a chastity promise to  save yourself for your future husband, saving yourself for God.

I didn’t participate in this. I guess they stopped doing it the year before I joined the youth group.

August/narration:

Still, similar ideas lingered on. Meanwhile, Emma’s was still drawn to her early fantasies — in very innocent, age-appropriate ways, of course.

Emma: There’s a big culture of the guys and the girls being separated. And then on the parallel track, I would almost say, I was, like, again, being super drawn to these kink and BDSM themes and narratives that I was finding in culture.

I was looking up weird fetish sites on my phone and being like, Wow, this is so interesting. No one’s naked or anything, so I’m definitely not looking at anything bad. But I guess all the women are in maid outfits. That’s interesting! I don’t have a name for this.

I don’t know at this point exactly what sexual excitement is. I just know I keep looking at this stuff and I keep coming back to it.

So I really had those two kind of parallel tracks going on from the church level, I was never really kink-shamed, at least really in the beginning, because that was so far out from anything that they were exploring.

August/narration:

If the church thought having intercourse outside of marriage was bad…

Emma: …they weren’t ready for anything beyond 101.

August/narration:

Because she didn’t have language or context for her kink and BDSM interests, they were just sort of there, “latently in the background.”

Emma: Because the other thing that would happen, and this I think is a little later, I would go to school. I was very like boy crazy, which I guess does not seem like a surprise. But I was very boy crazy. And I had this guy who was like my kindergarten boyfriend or something, but we would play Robin Hood on the playground.

And he would be Robin Hood and I would be Maid Marian, and I would be like my little hands in the monkey bars, basically tied up. And that was like the thing that I contrived to do and he also contrived to do. There were so many things like that.

August/narration:

Like her dreams. She had more, some years after the Aladdin capture.

Emma: I had a dream at one point it was like on the playground and all of the guys that were in the class, brought me to their leader because I had stood up for one of my friends.

And I was like, “No, I’m not gonna like say sorry or whatever.” And then like the dream ended. So it’s like these things that I now recognize are just like 100% kink dreams. But I mean, I was having them at like, five, six, seven. Whatever those wheels were turning, my brain was just very attracted to that kind of narrative, to that kind of dynamic.

August/narration:

At a certain point, she ended up acting on some of those fantasies.

August: So you mentioned that in youth group you had these friends that you ended up exploring somewhat BDSM with.

Emma: Yeah. You know, we went to an evangelical church. I would say about half of the kids were homeschooled. And the reason they were homeschooled explicitly was because they wanted the kids to not be exposed to, like, the evils of the world. If you asked them, that was what they would say.

And so you had a lot of very nerdy, kind of intellectual but socially underdeveloped, to some degree, boys. But again, they were like, it was like a big group of these families with like four kids, three kids. And, you know, they mostly were hanging out with each other.

It was a youth group where we were being separated at times with the boys and the girls. The girls were being told the thing about like, “Oh, you don’t wanna be a cow that gives out the milk. You don’t wanna be a stick of gum that’s chewed up.” That was the prevailing narrative.

August/narration:

In case you’re not familiar, those metaphors are used a lot in Evangelical churches and purity communities. A girl who’s not a “virgin” has given herself away, used herself up, gotten “dirty.”

Emma: And so you have youth group, which is a very horny place because you have these people that are sexually repressed, these young teens that are sexually repressed. And then you’re like super focused on not allowing them to have sex with each other.

So you basically put them constantly in situations that are fairly arousing where it’s like you’re chasing people around a gym. You’re tackling people around a gym. You’re staying all up night at a sleepover, but you can’t have sex. It’s a very erotically charged environment.

August/narration:

At a certain point, Emma engaged in some BDSM play with boys a little older than her. That started with friendships. Looking back, none of this surprises her.

Emma: In this erotically charged environment, I had friends. Because I really appreciated the intellectual stimulation, the conversation, the friendship that I was able to have with these boys that were a little bit older than me usually. Some of them were my age, but a little bit older than me.

Because they were homeschooled, there was like a social gap that I think was greater even than we talk about like, oh, girls emotionally mature first.

August/narration:

That can be fueled by lots of things, by the way, including brain development differences and social expectations. Research shows that kids assigned male at birth are also more vulnerable to digital age pitfalls than intersex kids and girls. Boys are also more prone to isolation-fueled delays that come from spending so much time on screens.

Anyway, Emma felt like she and those slightly older guys as she grew into her teens were on pretty even footing. And there were some perks to the age gap.

Emma: Some of them, they had cars or they like kinda age out of the youth group but still sort of go, but then have an apartment or like a place that we could kinda hang out or something like that.

And so I developed these friendships and they really were, you know, primarily friendships. But it was interesting because, it was so externally placed on me that there was the opportunity of misbehavior.

August/narration:

There was this one guy in particular she ended up exploring BDSM with — someone she’d sort of been in a relationship earlier on.

Emma:

His mother came to my mother and was like, “I am worried about these two young people. I’m worried that my son is gonna take advantage of your daughter.” And my mom was like, “They’re just friends.” ‘Cause my mom, my mom can be very cool about things in a way that sometimes resists logic.

But, she was like, “There was nothing going on.” And there wasn’t anything going on. It was really when we were exploring you know, the faith and leaving the faith that I think we kind of wound up connecting on that deeper level and just kind of being able to talk about more of the taboos associated with that lifestyle.

And one…I had said like, “Hey, this is like a thing I’m into. This is like a big thing for me. And he was like, “Oh, I have the exact same thing, but on the dom side.” And we were like, oh, we should probably do something with this. That seems like a crazy fortuitous thing. Like, there’s no way we’re not gonna act on that.

August/narration:

Emma told me she distinctly remembers, later in her teens, being spanked by a boy in a mini sedan. They seemed compatible and had texted about it. But the actual experience made her question whether she was actually into BDSM.

Emma: The first thing that we did, like ever … I think he would like finger me while we were driving in his car, but that’s not really kink. That’s just like a general sex thing.

But the first like kink thing, and I mean it was really like the only kink thing that we did, was one night after we had been hanging out, we, you know, pulled over in his car in a baseball field near my house. we parked, and it was in the dark. And, you know, he pulled my pants down, and he was giving me like a spanking, and he used his like belt to kinda tie my wrists up.

The setup like is very good. The setup is like very good for this. was like a really strong guy. You know, he’s giving me a spanking, and it like really hurt just ’cause he was so strong. I just remember feeling like, wow, this is really, like, awkward, and it’s a little bit boring, and I’m not sure if I actually even like this.

It was really stressful to me because at that point I had developed such an interest in BDSM. I was kind of getting to this point, you know, leaving the church, having all this exploration where I was thinking like, “Oh, I’m stepping into this chapter of my life.”

And then I was like, “Oh no, the first time I do it, it’s like a big flop.” Because there was literally nothing wrong, you know? It was almost like a convenience thing of, “Oh wow, this is crazy. This person has the exact same interests as me. I guess we should just do something together.” Whereas I don’t know that we really had the necessary rapport relationship for that kind of thing. And this is I think a big thing I actually struggled with before I left the church.

In the Christian sect you’re really told like you wanna stay within it, you want to marry someone who’s also given their heart to God. And so as like a separate thing, then I was like, “Oh great, I don’t have to worry about that.” But, you know, having that realization of being so interested in BDSM and kink, being like, Oh, that’s also gonna narrow the field. And at that time I felt it was really gonna narrow the field because in the little explorations I had done, it had seemed like such an outlier thing.

Now I would absolutely not feel like it narrows the field. It narrows the field to people I’m interested in. Like no one I’ve ever been interested in has not been interested in this. So I think I’m not really worried about that today. But at that time, I was like, “Any bone that comes across I must bite,” you know?

August/narration:

While Emma felt like a pervert for awhile during her youth, that shifted once she got to college.

Emma: I think by the time I was in college I was already like, “I am not a pervert. I am normal. Let my freak flag fly.” But, that time, like, in late middle school, early high school, was really, really rough for me. that was like the main time I was struggling with faith and feeling like, Oh, I don’t think any of this logically makes sense anymore.

And I think the issue with that, and this is, like, another theme that I think comes up a lot with sexuality, is there is an intellectualism to it and a realization that you can have about something being okay or not being okay, or being what you want or not what you want. And then there’s the second layer, the reality to it, which is, you feel that shame, right?

That’s something I wish we talked about more as a culture. There are so many just holdovers, like subconscious shame feelings, desires, disgust. And you have to kind of wade through the muck and the mire for that. Probably a lot of the shame I felt around BDSM was just that it was anything sexual at all. And knowing I wasn’t really supposed to be involved with that kind of thing.

I think where it got more specific was after I had sort of been saying, okay, I’m not really gonna be presenting to the world as a Christian.I can have more conversations about sex with these other men, like friends. That’s a thing I’m allowed to do.

At the time of this happening for me, Fifty Shades of Grey was coming out. that might have been a turning point for me. When that’s a bestseller it’s kind of hard to, sideline something like that because it’s like, okay, at least there are a lot of people putting that in their quote interesting column.

August/narration:

Eventually, Emma realized that for her, BDSM is the most fulfilling with someone she loves—which goes against a common myth that if you’re into kink or BDSM you’re non-monogamous and having sex with strangers all the time.

Emma: I don’t know if there’s one set experience, but I think it’s really just the ongoing games that I’ve had with specifically, you know, my husband, but even, previous boyfriend before that. And it’s really like almost like the language that you develop as a couple where you have, inside jokes, but it’s not like a joke.

It’s inside bits you could almost say of just, a certain look or a certain hand signal, all these things. For me, that’s where I feel a lot of the fulfillment, the element of play, the element of the shared connection.

I have done the hookup culture and I have had on my dating profile, this is how my husband met me, that was I really handcuffs, but we can talk about that on the second date.”

I was doing hookup culture in college after I had my my first bad breakup, and I was fully advertising like, “Let’s hook up. Let’s do kink.” That’s what I’m interested in. Like, you could just pull up to my dorm and that’s what we’ll do.”

And I just never had experiences that were so mind-blowing from that because of the level of communication and trust and figuring out where your interests intersect. I never had a bad experience that was anything dangerous, just like sometimes a random thing I’d be like, “Oh, that was like kinda creepy.”

But just, nothing so good as, compared to like…

August/narration:

…what she has now with her husband.

Emma: We try to target once a month that we kinda have an elaborate multi-day kind of kink role play fest. We kinda think about what we might wanna do. We try different things.

Sometimes it’s more physical, sometimes it’s more role play driven. We recently bought a cage, it’s like a dog cage that we’ve been really enjoying. And it’s like, yeah, you know, I, don’t really think… I mean, I guess you could individually store a dog cage, but it takes two people to assemble it, you know?

There’s like the 10, 20 minutes of downtime where you’re assembling this cage that I just don’t know is gonna work with a stranger, you know? Do you really wanna IKEA with a stranger? I don’t know that that’s the proposition.

August/narration:

Today, Emma’s company, Saturday Box, makes kink boxes to help people have spicy new experiences without having to do all the advance planning.

Emma: We basically try to help people to kind of have an experience in the box that they open and see character cards, you know, have a scenario and have the props and have everything they need to guide them through.

I think that kink and BDSM is a mainstream thing, and I think that we need to improve some of the narratives around it. I think that it’s something that can be explored, within marriages or long-term relationships.

I feel like there’s so much stuff that’s coming out that’s great stuff about women and self-pleasuring and solo pleasuring, and then there’s a lot of stuff that’s out there for men, on the porn AI chatbot side that I think is not so great. But the point is that there’s really a lot of stuff helping people to kind of explore their interests solo.

There is only so much you can do solo and a lot of what we actually want is to have fulfilling experiences with a partner. And I think there’s a lot less out there to actually help people when they have already chosen their partner, and they’re coming to it, with a little bit of fear that they’re gonna feel that rejection.

And to just take that experience and make it as easy as possible to make it feel more playing, to make it feel less like performing, and to create that judgment-free environment for people.

August/narration:

If you want to have such an experience, with or without one of those boxes, Emma shared this advice:

Emma: My tip is just to really co-create. And I think that co-creation is about being able to show up as your authentic self and to have your interests, but to really be listening to your partner and to really be figuring out what’s the special experience you can together have.

I think that it can be difficult for one person to feel like they’re just fulfilling the other person’s fantasy. But I really think that coming together is sort of the way to go.

August/narration:

Next, from the archives, Eirann Shell’s story. Eirran is an erotica author who found her way to a satisfying D/s, or dominance and submission, relationship. Eireann discovered something sex-related she enjoyed early on, too—reading about sex.

Find the transcript for Eirann’s story, originally released in February. 2025, here.

Learn more about Saturday Box at saturdaybox.com.

Find The Adventures of Waverly Goode on Amazon, and Best Women’s Erotica, Volume 10 most anywhere books are sold.

Find direct links in the show notes. There you can also click to explore the Girl Boner Patreon community. I’ve started a new series of Girl Boner quickies that you’ll only get at patreon.com/girlboner. I also share behind-the-scenes glimpses of upcoming episodes, occasional giveaways and discount codes, and more. Thanks so much for listening.