You’d be forgiven for thinking every living soul on Madonna’s good green earth is getting a little freakier. This year alone, A24 put a gay Dom/sub relationship replete with pet play, bootlicking, and public sex at the center of Pillion . Olivia Wilde got wild with knife play and threesomes in I Want Your Sex . And even the motion picture based on a book Emily Brontë wrote in the 1840s, Wuthering Heights , had some very 21st-century coded mouth spitting .

“Kink has gone way more mainstream in the media,” Rachel Wright , LMFT, a New York-based licensed psychotherapist, tells Cosmopolitan . For kinksters and the kink-curious, that increased visibility offers the invaluable gift of shame reduction, she says.

But some people are experiencing a darker flipside to that visibility, too. “It can be disorienting for people who aren’t interested in kink to see so much of it, because that visibility can become internalized as expectation,” Wright tells Cosmopolitan .…