Andrea Zanin

Hi! Nice to meet you! My name is Andrea Zanin, otherwise known as Sex Geek. Suffice it to say that sex-geekiness is my passion, my life, and the most frequent fodder for my excessive and overflowing desire to write.

Blog entries

of fame and money: on paying bdsm presenters

In the past couple of days, I’ve noticed a couple of posts making the rounds of the interwebs on the topic of payment for presenters at kink/leather/BDSM events. As a long-time sex and kink educator I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, and figured here would be a good place to share them. Bear with me. This is not a short post.

(don’t) assume the position

I stumbled across a blog post from a het male dom the other day, about the eight slave positions that he thinks “most dominants” train their submissives to do and have them do regularly.

trust me

Of course you can trust me. I’m a skilled top. I mean, you saw me swinging a whip around some and it looked good, didn’t it? You can surely tell I’ve been practicing for a long time, and that I was taught by the best. Safety protocols? Yeah, of course I follow those. Sorry, just a sec, I need to use the bathroom, I just had a coupla beer before the party.

on ecstasy

Not too long ago, I wrote an instalment of my “Ask the Sex Geek” column for In Toronto magazine in response to a reader question about trying to find resources on spiritual approaches to sexuality, such as Tantra, that don’t rely on a classic gender binary.

why rape jokes aren’t funny, even if you’re kinky

You’d think that given that kinky people are universally more enlightened about sexuality than the general population, nobody would have to explain this one. But from recent discussions I’ve seen go by online, it appears that we can throw that little “superior enlightenment” theory out the window (no big surprise there), and that a post laying out the basics of this is in order.

judging leather

I’ve been asked to judge a number of leather contests in my time. This always strikes me as a bit amusing, because I’ve never competed in one and I’ve made no secret of the fact that I generally find them somewhat… less than inspiring. They are low on my priority list of things I’d like to see the leather community doing with its energy.

basic, bizarre and beyond: your sex questions!

Today I had a phone conversation with the editor of In Toronto magazine, a gay and lesbian monthly entertainment and lifestyle glossy. He’s asked me to do a trial run as a Q&A-based sex columnist. Fun times!

24/7: what do you get out of it? some questions, some answers

Not long after I posted about conceptual frameworks for D/s relationships, I got a note from a reader who had a few questions for me.

books: love, fear and technology

(Warning: this post really isn’t much about sex, but it is about books and politics, and those things, to me, are pretty darned sexy. For those who are less intrigued by such topics, I promise the next post will be more suitably along the usual lines.)

what are we doing, here, exactly? or, conceptual frameworks for d/s relationships

The theme of D/s and power relationships has been at the forefront of my mind of late. Not too long ago, I put out a post about what I call This Thing—a particular sort of ownership-based D/s dynamic that some people call M/s (Master/slave).