Let’s talk about what a praise kink really is, how to know if you have a praise kink, and how to incorporate it into your sex life if it piques your interest. In general, a kink is anything that is particularly arousing for a person, particularly things or sexual behaviors that are considered nonnormative. Praise kinks are reasonably common, says Zrenchik, since “praise as a mechanism for pleasure” is widespread. That said, he prefers to see kinks as lying on a spectrum rather than a binary—that is, it’s a little simplistic to say that everyone either absolutely has or absolutely does not have a praise kink. Our own personal erotic histories can also come into play in the development of a praise kink. “Perhaps when growing up you saw a love scene in a movie between a man and a woman, and the woman was moaning loudly about how good he was making her feel, and how big he was, and how sexy she found him. Well, if watching that movie was one of your first sexual experiences, you may have had an early imprint that a big part of sex was women giving praise to men. Thus, you began drawing connections between the two and developed a praise kink,” says Zrenchik. Here are some ideas of phrases you can say during sex that might turn on someone with a praise kink:
