Beyond Hot for a Teacher: 5 Ways You Can Role Play in Bed by Betty Butch

When most people think of erotic role playing, they probably think of teacher/student role playing. Someone wearing a plaid skirt short enough to violate any school dress code, and someone else looming over them with a ruler in hand. It’s a cliché but no less scintillating image; plenty of people get a thrill imagining such a banal, sexless dynamic colliding with adult eroticism. But it’s definitely not the only thing you can role play!

Erotic role playing is as vast as it is underrated. It’s a creative medium through which people can express themselves, try new things, and explore aspects of their sexuality that might otherwise go unexamined. And although on the surface you’re pretending to do or be something or someone else, it’s also a way to experience new levels of intimacy and vulnerability with your partner(s). You can learn a lot about someone through the veneer of the characters and roles they play.

Just remember that like all sex acts, consent and communication are paramount. Sex and each of its many steps and nuances – with or without roleplaying – should always be enthusiastically approved by everyone involved. Talk your ideas over with your partner(s). Listen to theirs. Come up with a game plan you can both feel good about!

So, what exists in the realm of role play beyond the trope of teacher/student?

1. Yourself, but different.

Why It’s Great

This is perhaps the easiest way to get into erotic role playing. Not everyone is ready to jump right into acting out their partner’s sultriest fantasies of bedding the top three hottest actors named Chris, and that’s okay! Sometimes the easiest roles are also the most fun to play.

Being yourself but in a different context allows you to discard any distractions you might be contending with in the present. Are you feeling less connected to your sensual self? Are you just not feeling inspired? Reimagine today. What circumstances would be better for your mood? What context adds heat to your dynamic?  

What You Can Do

Maybe you’ve just come home from a long business trip and your partner(s) welcome you back with enthusiastic, touch-starved sex. Or maybe you’re role playing that you’re in a Dominant/submissive-style relationship and you’re beholden to their whims and punishments (extensively negotiated beforehand, of course.) You can make up reasons to frame your sex as celebratory (like a pretend promotion), or desperate (maybe you’ve taken an imaginary drug that makes you need to orgasm), or even retaliatory (maybe they’ve cheated, or you’ve locked them in a chastity cage for months.) The circumstances are innumerable.   

How to Do It

One of the most entertaining aspects of role playing is setting the scene. What about your surroundings might need to be tweaked to make your fantasy easier to believe in? Props (like a little glass bottle filled with juice for your pretend orgasm drug) and costumes (thigh highs worn to seduce someone else?) can make your role more tangible. As can starting your scene outside of the bedroom! If you’re just coming home from a long trip, maybe begin by coming through the front door with an empty suitcase. Improv gets the blood flowing!

2. Figures of authority and/or figures of service.

Why It’s Great

Playing with power dynamics in bed can inspire a host of new experiences. If you’re not sure where to begin with dominant or submissive play, pretending to be a person that society perceives as commanding or low-ranking can help ease you into the headspace. It also gives you something to act out while you and your partner(s) are building up to sex. After all, there’s no reason you have to dive right into bed! Half the fun of role playing is the set-up.

What You Can Do

Beyond teachers and their students, there are countless roles in society seen as inherently powerful or subservient. There are positions of power based on occupation, like doctors, managers, politicians, landlords, or religious figureheads. There are are jobs society views as subordinate, like house keepers, babysitters, and secretaries. And there are power dynamics involved in familial or socially constructed relationships (like rock stars and fans.) Depending on your comfort zone and the interest of your partner(s), there are countless roles you can adopt as your scene’s scintillating framework.

How to Do It

Utilize props to help get you in the right mindset. Most occupations have a few key tools that everyone associates with them: doctors have their stethoscopes, janitors have mops, judges have gavels, housekeepers have paddles to punish you for leaving a mess…

Coming up with a bare bones plot can help too. Did a shy, doe-eyed barista make your coffee wrong one too many times this week? Do you owe an imposingly domly debt collector money but don’t want to part with your xbox? You can also flip roles around to encourage deliciously bratty behavior – maybe the babysitter is sick of you coming home late!

 

3. Complete strangers.

Why It’s Great
Do you remember the last time you were with someone who was a stranger to you? There’s something uniquely exciting about forging new connections, learning someone else’s needs and the ways you fit together. Maybe you were nervous and shy; maybe you were more vocal about your preferences, eager to teach; maybe you were both consensually careless, there to get some and go. Newness isn’t better, just different – and experiencing that again with your current partner(s) can make room for sparks of a different kind.

What You Can Do

You can go back to the beginning of your relationship(s) and role play a do-over of your first times to recapture or reframe those moments and all their awkward, electric excitement. You can come up with characters to play and meet each other through the lens of pretend, teasing out new parts of yourselves that just needed a different context to be expressed. Have you ever wanted to have a fling with an attractive stranger you might meet at a bar, or the airport, or a bookstore? Be that stranger for each other!

How to Do It

Depending on how involved you want to get with your performance, you may want to come up with a simple backstory for your character or scene. Who are they? How are they different from you, and how can you show that through your play? Are you going to lower your voice, imitate an accent, dress differently? Did your characters meet on a hookup app? Are you travelers forced to share a hotel bed for the night because of incompetent room booking? Are you soccer players from rival teams, meeting in private for the first time?

If you’re role playing a do-over of your first time with each other, what could have been different to make it a better experience? Maybe you hadn’t yet discovered the orgasmic glory of wand vibrators. Now’s the chance to see what it would have been like!

 

4. Pets (beloved, beholden, or bred.)

Why It’s Great

Pet is a role with connotations that are immediate and obvious: owned, cared for, loved. But it can also mean spoiled, training, treasured, obedient, protective, horny. Depending on the animal you’re taking inspiration from, or the dynamic you’re catering to (an owner with a firm hand? A fiendish breeder?), being a pet can embody any number of sexy overtones.

Indulging in your baser inclinations and being treated as simultaneously lesser and adored can be cathartic role play – and playing the owner can provide an avenue for all the open affection or stern handling you might not otherwise feel apt to offer.

What You Can Do

There are a number of ways these kinds of head spaces can be explored. You can try role playing as an animal (anthropomorphic or otherwise) and embody some or all of an animal’s behaviors. You can perform pet-inspired mannerisms, such as affectionate licking, pouncing, needy whining, or wanting to be pet. You can be an eager-to-please pup, you can be a show pony, you can be a docile hucow. Or you can play with owner/pet dynamics without delving into animal-themed role playing at all!

How to Do It

Pet role play can involve a lot of physicality if you want it to. You can position yourself to be lower than your partner(s) – sitting on the floor, curled up at the foot of the bed, begging at the table – and remain attentive to their needs. You can instead be a pampered pet and get in their way, demanding their attention and praise. You can wear a collar to signify your subordinate role. You can play with themed bondage (like the bone gag) or butt plugs with tails, or buy pet toys as props. You can indulge in more animalistic sex, including vocalizing with purrs or growls instead of groans.

5. Fictional characters.

Why It’s Great

It’s not unusual to idolize or even envy the heroes – and sometimes even the villains – of your favorite movies, tv shows, comics, and video games. It’s also not usual to be attracted to them. And whether it’s you or your partner(s) who want to chat up a god of thunder or a wizarding Chosen One, role playing as fictional characters offers you the chance to see what it’s really like to be in bed with – and as – your beaus of the big screen.

What You Can Do

You can embody the cocky sexuality of a rebel pilot, the brooding dominance of a kevlar-costumed hero, the sneering of a villain who’s won. You can be seduced by the very same lines that made you smitten in the first place, rolling of your partner’s tongue. You can make fanfiction jump off the page and into your lap, move into the lines of the fanart you’ve ogled again and again, reimagine moments from the source material in ways that would make a shipper blush. And the foreplay is bound to be geeky and giggle-filled as you cram as many nerdy references and callbacks as you can into your dirty talk.

How to Do It

Cosplayers are folks who dress up and sometimes even role play as characters from across the entertainment spectrum – and as the graphic novel Cross Play can attest, sometimes that role playing veers into the erotic. You don’t need a full costume made from scratch to indulge in some fun at home, though. If you need the inspiration, a merch prop or accessory will do, and these days those are in no short supply!

It can be surprisingly easy to pretend to be the characters you love the most: after all, you already know their quirks, phrases, and their motivations and fears. And your performance doesn’t have to be perfect! Think of yourself as the stunt double: you don’t need to be a flawless copy, you just have to fake it enough to give your ‘audience’ the right idea.

If you’re nervous, a blindfold can help ease stage fright for participants on both sides of the cloth. And no need to just imagine your ‘audience’ in their underwear – you can make it happen.

 

 

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Betty Butch is a queer, sex-positive blogger who reviews pleasure products and writes about identity and kink at bettybutch.com. You can find her on Twitter via @betty_butch.