The Switch Is Not A Myth

You know when you get A Great Idea, and it sounds like the best thing ever, and you can’t wait to implement it?

And then it falls…flat? Not falls flat like, say, the Edsel (no, I’m not that old; I just read a lot and one day hope to appear on Jeopardy [seriously, I’d love to go on Jeopardy, but mostly just to poke fun at the way Alex Trebek pronounces foreign and foreign-sounding words with such enthusiastic authenticity]). But a disappointing follow-through nonetheless.

At a recent party, T. was in full top mode, and pulled out 3 dice he had bought at the comic-book store (I’m the comics reader; he was just along for the ride and doesn’t really read comics [although I got him hooked on Blue Beetle before it got cancelled]). These weren’t the standard 6-sided dice you see on craps tables or…well, wherever people tend to play dice. (I’m not really a gambler, although I do love $1 blackjack at church festivals.)

These were gaming dice, of the kind used for Dungeons & Dragons and similar games. Neither T. nor I are gamers; he bought the dice mostly because he thought they looked cool, and then he hatched a scheme to use them during kinky play (as opposed to gaming play). One die was 20-sided, one was 8-sided, and one was 4-sided.

The basic idea was this: he laid out 8 beat-y implements (floggers, riding crop, etc.); I rolled the 8-sided die to pick which implement he would use on me. The 20-sided die determined how many strokes I would receive with the aforementioned implement, and the 4-sided die was used to determine if the strokes would be to my front side or back side (odd numbers were front and even numbers were back).

Out of all of the beat-y implements, I really only “like” the floggers. A good flogging leaves me loopy and stoned. The riding crop I can tolerate, but it’s not my favorite. The other evil toys (a plastic “magic wand” from a kid’s magic set, a short heavy lucite rod that I dubbed the “beat-y stick,” and a short piece of wood cut in the basic shape of a hairbrush, but without bristles, bearing the label “bald man’s hairbrush” — it was a goofy thing we found in a souvenir shop on vacation, and we knew it needed to be in our toy bag) were things that really freaking HURT me; it’s hard for me to take them, and when I do, it usually has to involve a good warm-up.

The problem with the execution of the dice game was this: it doesn’t allow for any warm-up. I’ve seen bottoms/subs/slaves who don’t need to be warmed up for impact play; they can jump right in and take one hell of a paddling. I, however, am not like that. So when my roll of the dice came up 8 strokes with the magic wand on my front side, it hurt in ways that I could hardly handle.

We kept on with the dice game for several rounds, until I finally told T. that the lack of warm-up was killing me. We moved to a spanking bench and he spent a long time flogging me — mostly florentine flogging, which I love. I was, in fact, loopy and endorphin-stoned when he was finished, which hasn’t happened to me in a long time. I slept very, VERY well that night.

I don’t think the dice game is bad, or something we’ll never do again. I just think that if we do it in the future — at least with me as the bottom — I’ll need warm-up first, and then we can move into the dice game.

It’s something that I think would also work well as a punishment. T. and I don’t have the kind of a relationship that involves rules and punishment, but if we did, I like the mindfuck-y aspect of the dice game forcing the bottom to be the one to “choose” her punishment.

This was the first time we tried the dice game, so neither of us knew how it would play out; we certainly weren’t expecting our most mind-blowing scene ever (though we also weren’t expecting a failure). And I wouldn’t call it a failure, either. I’ll just call it beta-testing.

The human body is a wondrous and strange thing. Here’s an example: my ass is the wimpiest ass known to ass-kind. Many people I’ve talked to say that, when their ass is being flogged/paddled/spanked, they are able to take more pain/stronger hits as the scene goes on. Not me. My ass gets more and more sore and tender as the scene progresses, and I can’t take more pain.

This is weird to me, because it seems like my ass should be a little bit tough. I sit on it all day, for one thing (my logic being that, since my ass supports my body weight — not insubstantial — all day, it should be hale and hearty). But no, I have a weak ass.

My vulva/labia, on the other hand, can take all kinds of evil sensations. And I would have thought that the general ladyparts area would be very tender. Apparently not. Or at least, not mine.

The other night, I asked T. if he would clamp nasty things on my tender bits (that might be a verbatim quote). He happily agreed.

First he put the leather cuffs on me and then ran a rope through their D-rings and through the headboard of the bed. Hands and arms out of the way: check. Then he tied my legs in a frog-tie and attached the spreader bar, so that my legs were held open. Pesky knees out of the way: check. Then he added a cloth gag (made from an old t-shirt; I have big time jaw issues and really can’t handle any other gag without serious nonerotic pain). Yelps and protests muffled: check.

For fairness’ sake — to, you know, make sure that all my parts were equally tormented — he put tweezer clamps on my nipples and tugged on them for a while. There may or may not have been grumbling from behind the gag….

Then he put racheting spring clamps on my outer labia (4 clamps total, eventually). Pinchy and tight and really, really nice.

He twisted them and tugged on them, racheted a couple of them down even tighter (more grumbling may or may not have come from behind the gag), and then he decided that the handles of the clamps were top-heavy and falling over, so he tied twine around them and then tied that off to the rope already around my legs, making sure that the twine was pulling on the clamps.

More torment ensued, with more twisting and tugging on the clamps, and eventually T. pulled out the Hitachi Magic Wand and ran it along the clamps, letting it vibrate them. The vibrations were both fantastic, in the stimulating sense, and terrible, because they made the clamps — which were already racheted down tight AND being pulled to the sides by the twine — wiggle and twist around more.

Evil. Naughty, delicious, evil.

Dev, of Devastating Yet Consequential, has a post up titled “bdsm is not safe”. I agree with pretty much every word of it. She’s definitely NOT saying that BDSM is a minefield rife with tragedy lurking around every corner. Not at all. She’s just saying that we can’t guarantee that what we do is going to be harmless every single time we do it.

Kinky folk often use the “safe, sane, consensual” label for what we do, and I think the label is useful as a reminder of what we should always be aware of. We should always do everything in our power to be safe, but, frankly, shit happens. Shit happens all the time. Even the safest person in the world can get caught in an unexpected problem (power outage, submissive has a panic attack, dom’s allergies flare up).

Many kinky people have moved from using the “safe, sane, consensual” label to “risk-aware consensual kink,” which is, I think, more accurate. But notice what part of SSC is missing in RACK — we’ve gone from safe, SANE, consensual, to risk-aware consensual kink.

Sanity is nowhere to be seen.

And, honestly, BDSM is not sane. At least, it’s not sane to the degree that it’s also not safe, in the way that Dev described. I’m 100% serious about this. I let someone staple me in the arm, not with a medical stapler, but with a big ol’ Home Depot industrial electric staple gun. At the same event, I let someone take a baton that was soaked in alcohol and then LIT ON FIRE and run it — still ON FIRE — over my unclothed skin.

That? Not sane. At least, not entirely.

But the thing is, that’s okay. In fact, it’s even good. We all need moments of craziness in our lives, the chance to step away from our workaday lives and the predictable routines that are a part of them.

The crazy moments are exhilarating. They’re fun, and scary, and not entirely rational, and often exactly what our hearts and souls need.

Sanity is overrated.