Death, Kink, and the Alchemy of Surrender

My thoughts on the Hulu series Dying for Sex & the healing modality of kink

A few weeks ago, I found myself in an off-hours kink dungeon, attending a talk led by friend and sex therapist Valeriya Petrikova. The room felt more like an AA meeting than a BDSM dungeon, with its fluorescent lights, rows of foldable chairs, and black coffee in paper cups. The topic of the evening: kink as a therapeutic modality.

This concept isn’t unfamiliar to me. In my sexology training, kink was an important part of the syllabus and often surfaced as a powerful tool for healing. What struck me during that evening, however, was how difficult it remains to communicate this truth to the broader world. Kink lives at the intersection of taboo and transformative, its capacity for healing potent while the lamen’s understanding remains precarious; its acts and those who partake have long been villainized. Often misunderstood, it’s reduced to some macabre-sounding keywords, or something you stumbled upon on your incognito browser, but underneath lies a concept far more profound: a modality for rewriting narratives, reclaiming power, confronting the very nature of control, and even what it means to be a living, dying thing.

And then a few days later, the mainstream anecdote found me: propped up in bed in the soft red glow of my infrared mask, I binged all eight episodes of a freshly dropped Hulu series called Dying for Sex.
Based on the podcast of the same title, and the true story of Molly Kochan, Dying for Sex explores (among many other things) the nuanced relationship between pleasure and pain, and the profound and neutralizing experience of life and death.
It floats to the surface the often overlooked fact that pleasure is our essential and sacred birthright, and is equally important in our human experience as confronting the depths of pain.
Dying for Sex reveals what we so often don’t want to see: that pleasure and pain aren’t antonyms, their mirrors. Each sensation is part of a continuum. Together, they define the edges of human experience. In a culture that stigmatizes each, reclaiming our pain and our pleasure becomes the ultimate act of healing and resistance.

Light spoilers ahead…

Pilgrimage to Pleasure
In Dying for Sex, Molly’s terminal diagnosis becomes the catalyst — she has never had an orgasm with another person, and she cannot die without knowing what that feels like. That desire leads her on a pilgrimage of sorts, and she soon realizes she doesn’t even really know her own pleasure. This deliberate path of reconnection, and some very loving shepherds, guide her into the open arms of the kink community. This becomes the salve for her grief and trauma, yes — but also for her understanding of desire. For Molly, kink becomes the means through which she reclaims sensation, ownership, and identity after years of emotional disconnection. For the first time in a long time, it’s her way out of her patient-status and into her power, offering her the structure and safety to confront long-buried wounds, to explore authority on her own terms, to find her voice and use it, and to finally experience her body as a source of feeling rather than fear.

Pain as Portal, Kink as Catalyst
In its simplest terms, think of kink as a series of rituals that are deeply rooted in consensual exchange of power, controlled physical sensation, and emotional exposure. In this context, pain isn't punitive (unless you want it to be) — it’s a portal. When framed intentionally and safely, pain becomes alchemical, releasing endorphins and oxytocin that alter consciousness, ease emotional tension, and foster deep trust and connection. Like athletes experiencing euphoria after pushing their bodies, those who practice kink often describe reaching altered states such as floating, mental clarity, even bliss through the structured release of physical intensity.

But the power of kink isn’t just physiological. It’s narrative.

Within these dynamics, individuals can reenact or confront emotionally charged themes — helplessness, dominance, shame, abandonment — and change their outcome. The very structures we build around a scene — the consent negotiations, safe words, aftercare — all create a container in which we can safely explore what has previously felt unsafe. An individual who has felt voiceless can practice advocating for their boundaries or have their needs met. Someone who has feared being seen fully in the most vulnerable of moments can be held and celebrated. In this way, kink becomes a stage for psychological re-scripting. It can be a way of metabolizing trauma, reframing memories, and reclaiming authorship over one’s body and mind.

The Mirror of Mortality
Our cultural fear of dying mirrors our fear of kink. Both challenge the illusion that we are in control. Both demand complete surrender. Both expose our fragility and our desire to protect ourselves from pain.
When practiced with intention, kink becomes a ritual of surrender. A practice in letting go. It asks participants to hand over power with trust. To allow themselves to be undone, to be witnessed, and exposed. These moments are an invitation to confront the parts of one’s humanness we so desire to repress: our impermanence, our limits, our yearning to be seen exactly as we are, our mortality.

As Dying for Sex reveals through Molly’s story, facing death often sharpens our longing to feel something, to shake ourselves awake and feel it all to the fullest. Those who practice kink have reported an almost immediate pathway into that aliveness. It can create a controlled burn through which one can access suppressed emotion, somatic truth, and the strange, sacred poetry of pain woven with care.

Kink as Sacred Reclamation
In a society that thrives on emotional numbing, prioritizes productivity over presence, and pathologizes physical sensation outside of narrow norms, kink offers a radical alternative. It offers a container to feel the good and the bad side-by-side. You can scream, cry, crash-out, laugh, it’s a safe space to come undone — and be put back together.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not about doing harm. It’s about accessing what lives beneath the surface. About transforming pain into meaning, story into choice, alchemizing our deepest fears into our closest intimacy.
“I want to feel everything, for as long as I can,” Molly says as she prepares for her journey into death.

Learn more about my work as a sexologist & intimacy coach @ innereros.com