Beyond Taboo: BDSM For Intimacy and Personal Growth
An interview with sex researcher, Dr. Zhana Vrangalova for my book
This is the transcript of my interview with Dr. Zhana Vrangalova (bio below) for the book I’m writing that explores the potential of BDSM as a form of therapy. It has been lightly edited for clarity, with reference links and emphasis added by me.
I steer us away from clichéd questions about sexuality, opting instead for a deeper inquiry to begin the conversation: "What is the driving force behind your chosen field of work?"
Dr. Zhana responds with insight into her fascination with the pivotal role of sexuality and relationships in human well-being. She highlights the critical impact of societal ambivalence towards sexuality—ranging from suppression to misinformation—which complicates our understanding and expression of sexual desires, especially those that diverge from societal norms.
Near the end, we open into a broader discussion on the potential of BDSM as a therapeutic tool, not only for sexual expression but also for personal healing and intimacy building in relationships.
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Enjoy.
Nicolle Hodges: I came across your work a while ago through The Casual Sex Project. But it was an interview with Justin Lehmiller that prompted me to reach out to get your insights for my book.
You mentioned that there were two questions you hate being asked: What's the most interesting thing about sex and to tell people something they don't know about sex.
I’ll avoid both of those, and start off with this question instead: What is the driving force behind your chosen field of work?
Dr. Zhana Vrangalova: Sexuality and relationships are, to me, the most fascinating aspect of who we are as human beings. Relationships are one of the key aspects for pretty much everything for health and functioning. They are so strongly correlated with the quality of our lives in other aspects and they are critical for our survival. Without intimate relationships, we would not be able to survive. From the moment we're born, we depend on other people to meet our basic human needs, so we are, first and foremost, relational beings.
I think of close intimate relationships, sexual or non-sexual, as key in the foundation of almost all other aspects of functioning, and then the romantic and sexual part is probably, to me, the most fascinating because we, as a society, have such an ambivalent relationship with it.
On one hand, we all have some form of sexual and romantic desires, interests, and behaviours—and yet there is so much misinformation and suppression of human sexuality. There are so many avenues that we are not really allowed to explore or learn about. I think that creates this almost like schizophrenic state for many of us, where you just don't really know what to do, how to do it, what is right or what is wrong, especially people for whom their sexual and romantic desires go outside of that very small box of acceptability that society gives us.
60% fantasized about some form of non-monogamy that could include things like threesomes, foursomes, group play, and having multiple partners.
For myself, being a very sexual person from a very early age and then being an explorative teenager—I was curious about everything: casual sex, non-monogamy, same-sex and relationships, kinky sex; all these things were outside the norm—I experienced a lot of negativity from society. There was a lot of blind trial and error when you're trying to figure out how to do these things in a way that's pleasurable for you and other people, and that doesn't hurt yourself or other people.
Having gone through that in my teenage years, it was pretty clear to me once I got to applying for PhD programs, I knew that the one thing that was going to keep my interest for the rest of my life…(because once you do a PhD on a topic, you're sort of stuck with that topic, and if you get sick of that topic, then you've wasted sort of six or seven years of your life, so you better like the thing that you ended up doing a PhD on and want do it for a long period of time)…I knew it had to be sex and relationships that fall outside the norm.
The main guiding question for me was ‘how do people whose sexual and relational desire step outside of the box of acceptability navigate our sexuality and relationships in a way that is healthy, safe, and pleasurable for everyone involved?’
Nicolle: Thank you for sharing all that. One of the things that popped up for me when you were speaking was the mention that society is ambivalent to sex. Is that the same as calling society anti-pleasure?
Dr. Zhana: I think it's a mix and it depends on who you're asking. There are certainly subsets of society that seem to be very anti-pleasure and who want to keep sex to just procreational purposes and kind of diminish its pleasurable, hedonistic potential. I think many other parts of society do acknowledge the good that can come out of enjoying sexuality, but they want to keep that within these very small boxes of when it is appropriate to engage in sexual pleasure.
You know, most of us are sexual beings; yes, there is a small percentage of the population that's asexual or aromantic, but the vast majority of humans do have that need. It's hard to be entirely anti-pleasure on both an individual and societal scale, but I definitely think we are anti-inclusive by invalidating what many peoples’ desires are. There's definitely a lot of sex-negativity in our societies.
I think a lot of it stems from fear. Even those who are not necessarily anti-pleasure entirely, they end up acting in ways that have a sex-negativity effect because of the fear that if you acknowledge pleasure and you give people the tools for pleasure, then they're going to step outside the box you want to keep them.
A lot of that comes from the religiously-motivated or guided sex education that preaches abstinence until marriage. Supposedly once you are in that marriage, they say, ‘It's okay, you are welcome to feel pleasure now.’
Many of the religions, including to some extent Christianity, even though Christianity is one of the more sex-negative ones, but when you look at the big religions like Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, you know, in maybe not all versions of them, but many versions of them, they do say that sexuality is something that is there to be enjoyed as long as you're doing it at the right time with the right person and in the right context.
Puberty is happening earlier than ever before, yet we're kind of expecting people to delay marriage and family for longer. Unfortunately, it's hard to be telling someone that you can't have sex for 10/15/20 years of their lives because it’s bad, and then all of a sudden they're supposed to flip into, ‘Okay, now it's good’ as soon as they get married. That flip doesn't happen so easily.
Nicolle: Right, and that's where a lot of shame comes from. I want to talk about normalization and how what’s “normal” changes.
What you just touched on is interesting: When you tell people that wanting sex is wrong, they learn to suppress their desires. When they have sexual fantasies, no matter what it is, they feel it's wrong.
I'm curious about the sexual fantasies people have expressed in the studies you’ve found that society says, by-and-large, ‘this is not good.’ And how much of someone’s willingness to admit their strongest fantasy is based on society’s normalization of it.
I think of the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey around the same time that sadomasochism was declassified as a pathology in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). It’s perhaps no coincidence that this official reference said, “You’re not crazy if you like giving or receiving pain in a sexual situation, so long as it’s not preventing you from being an active member of society,” and then—BAM!—50 Shades becomes one of the top selling books of all time.
Dr. Zhana: We are seeing many of those shifts.
Something like a threesome is one of the most common fantasies. That's what Justin Lehmiller found in his survey of over 4,000 Americans. When you ask people, ‘What is your favourite sexual fantasy,’ that seemed to be the number one. So, that's a very common one, and I'm very happy to see more acceptance of that overall.
When you ask what's the least acceptable, I would say probably something that involves fantasies that could not be acted on ethically like pedophilic attractions or fairly fringe desires, luckily, like sex with the a corpse or sex with animals.
Nicolle: One of the worst things to confuse in a sentence is the difference between narcolepsy and necrophilia. Why so similar linguistically, I’m not sure.
Dr. Zhana: I was reading about this case where some people in the UK misread this woman’s biography who was a podiatrist (treatment of disorders of the foot, ankle, and leg) and thought that she was a pedophile (a person who is sexually attracted to children), and so they wrote anti-pedophile graffiti on her house.
Nicolle: Moving away from illegal behaviours, let’s parse the nuance between a fantasy and a desire that one might want to act out.
Dr. Zhana: That is an important distinction. Fantasies might be things that you jerk off to you or are sexually aroused by in your head, but wouldn’t actually want to do in real life. The things you want to do in real life, those become more like desires. There should also be that distinction between behaviour. Have we actually done it or would we actually do it?
45% that don’t feel very comfortable sharing their sexual fantasies with their partners
Nicolle: Perfect — and let’s pause there because before we go forward on this, I want to take a step back to where I actually heard about your work for the first time. You started the Casual Sex Project in 2014.
First off, can you touch on what that is?
And second, when I came across that project, I felt like as much as it was research, it was also an empathy-based project to allow us to see all the varied reasons why we might be seek out casual sex. Can you comment on the core intention?
Dr. Zhana: The Casual Sex Project was basically this database or repository of stories that people could submit about their casual sexual experiences, defined very broadly. Anything from a one-night stand with a complete stranger to things like friends with benefits or more ongoing types of casual relationships.
By the time I closed it down in 2018, we had over 4,000 stories submitted from people from all over the world. The idea was to showcase the diversity of these experiences in a way where it wasn't just academic people writing and researching about the different aspects of casual sex, but asking people why they do it? Who was it they enjoyed about that kind of experience? Did they use condoms? Did they take drugs or alcohol? Was it consensual? How positive or negative was the experience? Did they tell people about it?
There was a bunch of prompts that people would answer and the idea was to show how many different reasons we're doing it, positive and negative.
Nicolle: Part of the reason why I bring it up and why I'm curious about how that correlates to the work that you're doing now is this statistic: 45% of partnered Americans don't feel comfortable sharing their sexual fantasies with their primary partner.
Is it because, in a way, we want to preserve the way our partner sees us?
Dr. Zhana: Good question. We did this survey through Ashley Madison through U-GOV, which is an independent surveying platform that gets nationally representative samples, or so they claim. It was really the first time anyone has surveyed a nationally representative sample of Americans about their sexual fantasies, in particular.
Justin's book was amazing and it had a large sample and asked about a lot of different things, but that was not a representative sample, it was a self-selected sample. So, the people are definitely biased in some way, therefore, those percentages don't reflect what is going on in the US, as a whole.
These percentages, though, can speak to the question of how people are experiencing their sexual fantasies across the US. It was interesting to see that there's a very high percentage of people who have fantasized about things like novelty and different kinds of sexual positions and experiences.
Like, 60% fantasized about some form of non-monogamy that could include things like threesomes, foursomes, group play, and having multiple partners.
Nicolle [referencing this study]: 71% ages 18-34 were interested in non-monogamy; 57% in the 35 and older age group.
Dr. Zhana: Yeah, there was definitely a generational divide. That speaks to what you were saying earlier on the normalization of some of these experiences, behaviours, and fantasies that we've been seeing over the last probably 10-15 years with 50 Shades of Grey coming onto the scene and really making it clear that kinky fantasies are not a fringe thing. It's much more mainstream that we wanted to think.
Similarly, a lot of conversations and discussions around non-monogamy have been happening over the last 10-15 years, a lot of media coverage, and a lot of surveys. In this survey, we asked people what would be their ideal kind of relationship situation if you could be certain that it wouldn't harm your primary relationship and 30% of the people in the survey said that they would want some type of non-monogamy, some type of open relationship.
U-GOV has done their own surveys asking these questions around non-monogamy in slightly different ways, as well. They are finding that when you look at Americans overall, something like a quarter say that some type of non-monogamy or open relationship would be the ideal for them. Those numbers climb up to something like 40% of the people in the survey amongst the younger generation among, well, Millennials, in particular.
Gen Z is a little more conservative on that front.
The Millennials are the ones most likely to say that they want some type of non-monogamy, which is interesting.
Nicolle: It is. I feel like so much could be said just on that alone, but it’s a different conversation. I want to continue talking about the difficulty in expressing desire. By the time the desire it spoken out loud, that person has had to work through so many barriers within themself to, in a way, risk the outcome of sharing it.
I think of it like a chasm that you have to leap across in your inner world to even get to the point that you can speak your desire into existence, and then hope that it conjures the reality that you want.
What we're talking about here is communicating something that has great potential to change someone’s sex life and intimate relationships, which can come with fear of being judged or abandoned, for many people.
What is one of the biggest barriers to someone sharing their desire. Is it shame, like I mentioned earlier, that comes from years of conditioning?
Dr. Zhana: Yeah, I think it's probably a combination of a few things, and likely three main barriers to why we're seeing something like the numbers that we saw.
43% of the partnered Americans were not particularly satisfied with the sexual aspects of their relationship.
There's a lot of sexual mismatch or sexual dissatisfaction in American relationships at the moment. That's like, almost half of those in relationships are not very happy in their relationships, which is like, ‘Oh my God; crazy, right?’
What is going on‽
Similar numbers is that 45% that don’t feel very comfortable sharing their sexual fantasies with their partners, which if they did, chances are they would be happier and more satisfied. So, nearly half of Americans are not talking to their partners about what they want sexually, and as a result, many of them are ending up not very happy with it.
I think it's probably comes down to people not knowing what they want because of all that repression and shame and stigma externally. You haven't had an opportunity to explore, to learn, to try different things. You don't have the language to speak it into existence. So, that first level is maybe that you are not even aware of what the possibilities are.
The number of people, women often, but not just women, men too, often find themselves in relationships where they haven't had a lot of sexual experience before they ended up marrying the person that they're going to be with for the next 10/20/30 years. And the sex is sort of ‘eh,’ because they don't know any better. They think this is what it's like.
I have a couple of friends who just divorced after almost thirty years together. The guy had been monogamous throughout that entire time. The sex had never been great for either one of them. The woman had cheated. Now the guy, after going on the dating market and meeting someone new, was like, ‘Oh my god, sex was so good. I had no idea that sex could be this good. I knew I wasn't satisfied with our sex life because I thought it wasn't enough sex.’
That's what he always thought it was, they just weren’t having enough sex. It wasn't about the quantity, it was also about the quality.
Then the second reason is the shame.
You might know what you like, have some ideas, but there is a lot of shame and guilt associated with wanting that thing. Obviously that’s a barrier to sharing it. You might think that you’ll be thought of as a bad person or gross or whatever.
That kind of folds into the third reason, which is the fear of losing the relationship.
If you share something about what you want and your partner is disgusted or feels like that's not acceptable or immoral or whatever, then you might lose this rock of stability and commitment and love that you've probably spent a lot of time building and developing.
We tend to have these two desires. People think of them as an either/or kind of thing, but they're not. They're separate desires. One is the need for stability, love, commitment, and then the other desire is for exploration and growth and playfulness.
Nicolle: And why threesomes make so much sense as a fantasy because you're getting to experience your anchor partner, your safe space, your main person, while simultaneously getting this novel experience, all in one.
Dr. Zhana: Yeah, and for the people who are willing to give that a shot and who are not too afraid of jealousy, I think that's one of the best things that people can do in long-term relationships to bring in some of that excitement and novelty. You can do a new thing, but with your partner. Nothing is as novel as a new person, but then using that very novel experience while you're both there, that can very much strengthen the bond between you two because that newer chemical soup that happens in the brain will be experienced together.
When your anchor partner is there as well, then that novelty and the reward gets associated with everything else that is in that situation, including your partner. It's a pretty good thing for those who want to venture into that.
Now, there are a lot of pitfalls of how that happens, as well, and Justin's work really showed that very often these fantasies don't end up as good in reality.
Threesomes are notorious for not being as good as you expected them to be because there are a lot of potential challenges and obstacles to having a good threesome from when you do it, who you're doing it with, and what the dynamic is ahead of time.
Nicolle: In terms of percentages, the ‘power, control, and rough sex’ category was notable.
The younger generation, 18-34 at 65% percent, were most likely to fantasize about power, control, and rough sex, and at 35 and older, that drops down to 35%.
I have a guess as to why that might be.
Dr. Zhana: What’s your guess?
Nicolle: At 18, of course you're fantasizing about power because you have an idea of power without the responsibility attached to it. After 35, you have more responsibilities in your life you're like, ‘Fuck it, someone else be in control, please.’
Do you have any insight as to why that percentage gap is so large?
Dr. Zhana: The differences were also large in homoeroticism as well. That was more than double.
Nicolle: That's 42% for the younger group and 20% interest from the 35+ folks.
Dr. Zhana: So, both of those seem to be much more common among the younger generation. I think it’s greater openness toward some of these experiences that the new generation is growing up with that even 35+ folks did not necessarily have the presence of those kinds of sexual possibilities.
I guess with the non-monogamy piece, there's a decent difference there as well, but non-monogamy is also potentially much more threatening to a relationship, right?
Whereas something like BDSM is not necessarily directly creating a threat to the stability of the relationship, unless one person is really opposed to it.
I hate to see this, but there's a lot more presence of rough sex and power dynamics in porn that the younger generation is exposed to and has been from an early age. So, I wonder how much that is playing a role. They are growing up in the post-50 Shades of Grey world.
Nicolle: So you see it as pre- and post-50 Shades world, which was around 2012.
Dr. Zhana: As bad as that book was, and it really is a terrible book on so many levels from the literary level to exactly what healthy BDSM is, the sheer popularity of that book, meant everyone was talking about it. Middle-aged housewives were reading it left and right. I see it as a cultural shift.
Nicolle: I completely agree with you. It was a phenomenon that illuminated a certain degree of repression. Headlines were questioning, ‘What’s happening to the housewives of America?’ The horror! Women were reading 50 Shades of Grey on their morning commute and divorcing their husbands that evening.
There was there was no way that I could trust anyone [for me] to be in the submissive role.
Dr. Zhana: There's no putting the genie back in the bottle after that. Between the mix of general movement toward greater sexual openness, greater sexual experimentation among young people compared to older people, and the inclusion of rough sex elements in pornography are probably some of the main driving forces of that percentage difference.
Nicolle: I know that you've spoken about BDSM on your blog and how it actually had an impact on you in your twenties. You mentioned that you had pretty much experimented with everything that you could, and then one night while smoking a cigarette outside of a club, a tall, handsome, slender man waltzed into your life with a huge bag of BDSM toys and implements. He had always been kinky but had no one to explore kink with. You say it was a match made in heaven because you had endless curiosity about anything sexual.
I'm curious to hear what BDSM did for you and how it deepened your connection to self, given that you had experienced so much up until that point already?
Dr. Zhana: I dabbled here and there but nothing to that extent. The first set of experiences or feelings was, ‘Oh my god, there is literally an entire other planet of sexuality that can be explored and I want to learn all of it.’
I went deep with him and then other people during a few years there that we're just full of workshops and reading books and buying all sorts of implements and trying them out and exploring it from the position of a Dominant, which was very much in line with my personality.
For the most part, my sexual interactions had been on this relatively equal kind of level where we're both driving the experience. I tell them what I want, they tell me what they want, and it’s back and forth.
For the first time, I was in a different position of being in that Dominant role and that opened up a whole other side of myself within the sexual realm that I didn't quite know existed. It was great. I really enjoyed it. I also realized it's a lot of responsibility.
He ended up becoming a 24-7 slave.
He lived with me up in the attic in a nice cage that he had built for himself. So we took it fairly far and it was a very enriching experience and I'm glad that I had it.
Although, it does seem like my general predisposition when he comes to sexual interactions is to be even, with these sprinkles of D/s play as an occasional thing. I have not really explored my submissive side. I had a relationship for about a year and a half that ended about six months ago where I thought that might happen. We started going down that line a little bit, but we didn't get very far because he was not the right person to do it with so.
Hopefully, that's in my future because I feel like that side of the planet…it’s like I’ve been to the northern hemisphere but not the southern hemisphere much yet.
Nicolle: For science!
If 50% of the population is fantasizing about something, that is not a fringe interest.
Dr. Zhana: It's interesting to see that transformation too. What I realized was that the reason I could only be Dominant during that period of my life up until recently was that there was there was no way that I could trust anyone to be in the submissive role.
The way I've grown up, has been doing a lot on my own. I had to make sure that I took care of myself and it was sort of “every man for himself.” I grew up young with a lot of older people that I had to navigate and deal with, with very little parental support. I think all of that had an effect of making me needing to be in control of what was happening to me and not trusting anyone else to do a good job taking care of me.
Trusting someone else in this very vulnerable way was just not an option. I could only trust myself to take care of other people. The learning there was maybe that I'm not that great at taking care of other people because I haven't been taken care of by other people.
I think over the last few years, I’ve felt hopeful to be with someone where I can feel that sense of safety and trust to let go of control and actually submit.
Nicolle: The next exploration.
Dr. Zhana: Yes.
Nicolle: BDSM illuminated something for you. I think part of the power of BDSM, especially the D/s power dynamic, is that it’s relational. We discover so much about ourselves, not in isolation, but in relation to one another, in a state of arousal and specifically addressing our relationship to power, which can be confronting.
There is an opportunity in that state of play to see how that block, limiting belief, narratives, or fears might be popping up in other areas of our life that we didn't even think had to do with our sexuality. That is therapeutic.
Dr. Zhana: Mm hmm. BDSM can absolutely be therapy. I don’t think people should be doing it only for that reason necessarily but there should be awareness of the potential for that. I’d be on the lookout to just notice the kinds of things that pop up during those explorations and how they are connected to other aspects of their lives.
Nicolle: There's shadow play, I guess it could be called, where you might reenact a scene that was traumatic and rewrite the ending. That can be incredibly therapeutic for somebody.
Why do you think BDSM, with all of its potential to be healing for people, hasn't been taken more seriously as a form of therapy and is still considered taboo?
Dr. Zhana: I think that just goes back to fear. Up until recently, we thought these things were uncommon. If 50% of the population is fantasizing about something, that is not a fringe interest. That's a very common thing.
Until recently we weren't even aware that this is a common experience because of all of the suppression of sexuality. Even now that we are aware that it is much more common than we thought, there is still that fear that it's common for the wrong reasons, like it only ever stems from trauma or something unhealthy.
Now we are doing the work to show that it isn't.
Nicolle: It takes time for something to move from being pathologized to accepted.
Dr. Zhana: And there is a very fine line between BDSM and abuse. For a lot of people, it's hard to wrap their heads around.
Well, you have consent, but consent is complicated. It’s not a black and white thing as much as we try to portray it that way. We need to do a lot more work to fully understand when and if some of these desires are a result of potentially some pathologies or traumas or whatever, when they're not; when they can serve as a form of healing and therapy, and when they cannot.
I think there's still a lot work to be done and that needs to get done at the same time as we're normalizing these desires and experiences, as long as they're being enacted in healthy, safe, ethical ways.
We're on a cusp of these things being something that the vast majority of people thought were bad and weird and wrong, to slowly normalizing them, but also with the understanding that they do carry higher risks of potential harm.
It's not for everyone.
It places risk on consent-related aspects. I think of it in a non-sexual context or analogy like rock climbing.
There's rock climbing at the gym, which carries a little bit of risk, but not that much risk, versus climbing outdoors in a sport climbing area where you have hooks already placed into the rock and you just have to clip into those hooks.
That carries higher risk than the gym, but still some manageable risk. Then you have traditional climbing, where you have to hook as you’re climbing. That carries a lot more risk. It also depends on how high you’re climbing.
It doesn't mean nobody should be climbing at the highest level of risk, but if you're going to do it, then you have to be trained to do it, you have to have the right equipment to do it, you have to have the right knowledge and support.
We need to be honest about the level of risk that these different kinds of sexual and relationship behaviours and activities contain, and then make sure that the people we are going to do them with have the necessary tools and skills that they need to do it well.
Nicolle: When we think about risk, we assess the reward too. Climbing in the gym offers safety, but it doesn't offer the views of the mountains.
I started this interview asking about your driving force. There must be a driving force as to why we keep going outside and climbing, taking those risks.
Dr. Zhana: I mean, the views are pretty spectacular when you get up there.
Now, of course, not everybody wants and likes those views. Some people are afraid of heights. That's why you're going to have differences in how much reward people are getting from these higher risk experiences.
The people who are greater novelty seekers…because that's a biological thing, I mean, nothing is entirely biological, but there is a big genetic component of our need for novelty, sexual and otherwise…so the people who are high novelty-seekers, for us, standing on top of the mountain is a huge rush of dopamine that feels amazing. It's a massive reward that, for other people, would be quite scary and unpleasant.
Those people would much rather stay lower, and climbing at the gym actually sounds like plenty of fun. A lot of that has to do with how much stimulation our brains can take.
The people whose brains are easily reactive, they need very little stimulation for them to feel like, ‘Okay, I'm good; that's good enough.’ Beyond that, it's too overwhelming.
Whereas the high novelty-seekers, our brains are less reactive and need a lot more stimulation in order to feel that same level of, ‘Yes!’
Nicolle: To feel alive, essentially, to feel like themselves, is really what we're talking about here. It's about knowing that how you can get access to feelings of being fully alive and wholly like yourself aqre not only available to you but that you're not going to be cast out because of it.
Dr. Zhana: Exactly. And that's what I'm trying to do with my work and inspire others to do: create a world where no one is expected to live at any level of that novelty.
Also, those of us who need more stimulation can get that, and we get the support we need in terms of practical and psychological tools and skills so we can do that in a way that is safe, healthy, ethical, and pleasurable for everyone involved.
That's what's missing.
What we are told in this world is that if it's risky when it comes to sex and relationships, we shouldn’t be doing it. We're not told that in other areas of life. We are allowed to take risks. But with sex and relationships, if it's risky, well, then you “shouldn't be doing it.”
Just teach us how to do it well so we minimize the risks and maximize the pleasures and the benefits!
Nicolle Hodges: Beautifully put. Thank you.
Dr. Zhana Vrangalova: Thank you for writing about this. We need to be talking more about that potential that BDSM has, because it really is an altered state of consciousness and can be used for that purpose.
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