After I took on Katie Roiphe’s article on female fantasies of submission last month, Natalie Zina Walschots reached out to take issue with a couple of my points–and invite me to have a more in-depth discussion of submission, kinky orientations, and how BDSM can best be de-stigmatized. Natalie is a Toronto-based rock critic specializing in heavy metal and poet who writes about sadomasochism. Which means she’s way cooler than me, so how could I say no? (Read her full bio and check out her two collections of poetry, DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains and Thumbscrews, after the jump.) The following is an edited version of our email conversation.

Natalie: I’d like to start with what you wrote in your ...