50 shades of gray hair: Baby boomers use BDSM to spice up bedroom

Baby boomers are experimenting with “Fifty Shades of Grey” — and not just their hair color.

Older New Yorkers are booking more appointments for bondage-discipline, dominance-submission, and sadism-masochism, or BDSM, according to a Manhattan dominatrix.

Ms. Kitty LaReaux, a dom at a Manhattan dungeon, told The Post her boomer clients want to learn “how to please their partner” — and “unpack “years of sexual oppression.”

Ms. Kitty, whose sessions start at $255 an hour and can span 12 hours, said the consensual kink is is like “emotional therapy,” but costs less than a shrink.

“We’re like sex therapists,” she added, noting the sessions often involve more talk than action.

There has been an “influx of people coming in from all ages and backgrounds” since the isolation days of the pandemic, she told The Post, including women and married couples.

Sessions can be healing for clients with past sexual trauma because they can play out painful memories but give them “a different end,” said Dylan Gong, another dom.

Gong, who uses they/him pronouns, said they were “healed” by BDSM — which ranges from light spanking to choking and rope bondage.

“We are certainly seeing on the internet a lot more conversation around this idea of trauma play, or using kink, BDSM or rough sex practices to overcome or heal from past traumas,” said Debby Herbenick, a sexual and reproductive health professor at Indiana University.

BDSM is still considered taboo, Herbenick said, but has gained in popularity in mainstream media, like in the television show, “The Idol,” and in Jack Harlow’s tune “Lovin On Me,” which features lyrics such as, “I don’t like no whips and chains, and you can’t tie me down.”

Compared to younger clients, old-timers tend to be “more repressed because in their generation that stuff was way unacceptable,” said dominatrix Natasha Rabin. “The gender roles were like the housewife and the man would go off to work and there wasn’t too much in between.”

For members of older generations, a dungeon is a place for them to let their kink out in secret.

Popular among her BDSM-loving male Boomers is crossdressing and “wanting to be a sissy — a pathetic man,” Rabin, 46, said.

Olivia Snow, a Manhattan dominatrix and a sex-work researcher at UCLA, said her clients average in their 50s, but 40% of her business is 60 and up.

Older clients tend to like “classic BDSM,” said Snow, 35, including wanting to engage in corporal punishment, role play and bondage. Younger clients are more into sensual domination — a softer form of domination focused on real or fancied pleasurable sensations — and fetishes, she said.

Jennifer Hunter, who started her boutique-style phone-sex service business in 1996 after graduating from college, said her Boomer clients “value sex and interaction more.”

The younger clients, who grew up with easy access to porn, are more trend-driven. One particular role-playing scenario popular among clients above 70, Hunter said: Victorian settings and fantasies with a naughty school boy and a school headmistress.

One of Snow’s clients, 58, said he enjoys urethral sounding — the inserting of an object into the urethra — as well as bondage and crossdressing. But his pain threshold has changed with age.

“I seem to have a lower pain tolerance when it goes from fun pain to ouch pain … as when I was younger,” he said. Plus, “the older you get the longer it takes you to recover [from things] like riding a bike or visiting a dungeon.”

For older kink-lovers that play solo, it can be better to keep their desires a secret from their same-age partners, Rabin said, “because the marriage would not survive it.”

“Unless their partner’s mind was opened up somehow, or they were introduced to it in a way that was gentle and not threatening,” she added. “But if somebody’s not interested in this stuff, it can be traumatizing.”