Gods, but I love the feeling of a whip in my hand. A flick of the wrist, and the cracker licks the skin softly. A snap of the elbow and a flick of the wrist, and it bites in. I love the feedback I get through the whip itself, and the feedback I get watching the bottom. The sound of it popping lightly, the twitch, and a moment later that angry red welt rising. It gives me shivers just thinking about it.

This is the third time I’ve gotten to use a whip on a live target, and first time I’ve really been able to do almost exactly what I wanted with it. I practiced for a while on a hat strung up as a target, but really my best practice came working with a live target. The first time wasn’t that great — there were a fair number of times where I missed my intended target. The second time was much better. And this last time… now I more fully understand why some people are addicted to the crack of the whip (pardon the pun).

My back after my first experience receiving a singletailing

Warning: rant ahead. (I seem to be doing a lot of that lately.)

A lot of people say you should practice for 10 years in a secluded monastery until you can knock over one dime in a row of dimes, blindfolded, before you use a whip on a person.

I call bullshit.

My whip teacher, who has been using whips for over 12 years, says that if you stay below the neck, you really can’t harm someone with a whip unless you strangle them, hit them with the blunt end really hard, or try to shove it down their throat. Other than that, you can make marks and maybe even draw blood, sure. But you’re not going to do anything that sends them to the emergency room. There’s simply not enough kinetic energy there. An amateur bondage enthusiast who doesn’t know what they’re doing can cause far worse damage than an amateur whip thrower.

This is coming from a guy that’s skilled enough to singletail someone’s face. I’ve seen him do it — just hitting with the fluff of the cracker on the eyelids for sensation play, biting in with the knot a bit on the cheeks. He often uses two whips simultaneously, Florentine style. I’m saying this not to glamorize him, but rather to say that this is a guy who knows his craft, and knows what his tools are capable of.

That said, if you’re learning on a live target, to begin with I highly suggest they wear a hoodie and some jeans. If they do that, they’re protected from anything you are likely to do to them — in fact, I can almost guarantee you that you’ll end up hurting yourself more than you will them.

The point is, a live person can tell you where you’re hitting, how hard you’re hitting, whether it’s a point of punctuation or a dragging feeling, whether you’re hitting with the cracker or the fall of a bullwhip (protip: don’t hit with the fall, almost no one likes that). Your skill will increase an order of magnitude faster when working with a live person, than with an inanimate target.

What I engage in is really more of “oxygen play” than breath play — coming from a martial arts background, I know a variety of chokes, and in martial arts they are split into two categories: blood chokes and air chokes. Blood chokes (like the sleeper hold, also known as the rear naked choke) cut off the flow of blood to the brain, whereas air chokes cut off the air supply to the lungs (which eventually cuts off the supply of oxygen to the brain). Blood chokes are far and away my favorite, for a couple of reasons.

First, blood chokes are much safer. Air chokes, which generally put pressure on the trachea, can cause damage to the trachea if there is too much struggling or if you apply the choke too hard. With blood chokes, unless you’re incredibly strong and using all of your strength, it’s unlikely that you’ll cause any damage even if you put the choke on very hard (assuming you let go once the other person goes limp).  According to Knight’s book Forensic Pathology, there is an expert consensus that it takes a minimum of four to six minutes to start to do permanent brain damage with a completely effective choke hold. So when you’re talking about 10 seconds or less, you should be well within the safe zone.

Second, the effect of a blood choke is almost immediate – you can choke someone to unconsciousness in easily under 10 seconds, whereas with an air choke it could take a minute or more. This can be good and bad, depending on what you’re going for. With an air choke, that leaves more time for panic (if that’s what you’re going for), but also more time for struggling, and more opportunities for an accident to occur. I don’t care how bad a girl she’s been; crushing her trachea is not appropriate punishment!

A note about blood chokes and unconsciousness: there are several levels of unconsciousness, and a properly applied blood choke will put someone into a basic level of unconsciousness quickly. So quickly and easily that you might think they’re faking. Trust me, they’re not. And while you can safely apply the choke for a while longer after this — maybe an extra 5-10 seconds — their body will reflexively go into panic mode, and even though they’re unconscious, they will thrash about. While this isn’t particularly dangerous for them if you have them secured (and assuming you don’t apply the choke for a long time after that), it will cause them to come back to consciousness more panicked, and generally with a splitting headache to boot. I’ve made this mistake before, so please learn from my mistakes!

Also, choking to the point of unconsciousness is (of course) not the only option, nor one I necessarily recommend. It takes a huge level of trust from the bottom, and a fair amount of knowledge from the top, to safely do that. Engaging in carotid chokes that do not end in unconsciousness (i.e. are only applied for a second or two) also gives that feeling of power exchange, the moment of panic, the building of trust.

*    *    *

The other night, I talked some with my girl about breath play, trying to find out what she gets from it. I highly recommend that you talk with your partner about these sorts of things, by the way — not just breath play, but your SM relationship in general. Getting a peek into your partner’s head helps you know them better, which strengthens the bond, and also makes play more fun. Knowledge is power, after all. *grin*

For her, there are several elements. There is the element of struggle, which is enjoyable for her. She is physically strong, and also grew up with two brothers, so she’s used to wrestling. She also has dated far more women than men, and even the men she’s dated she’s been able to physically best them in such situations for the most part. So she’s used to winning. For me (a skinny guy) to be able to physically overpower her when she’s really trying gives a certain edge to it; she’s not roleplaying and pretending to let me take control over her, I am physically taking control of her in a very real way.

There is the physical element as well. Breath play makes orgasms more intense. This is no doubt why so many deaths from auto-erotic asphyxiation occur. I’m not sure how much of this is purely physical, and how much psychological. I can say that even clasping a hand around a partner’s throat and applying light pressure has seemed to make their orgasms more intense. Note that this experience is always with people who welcomed it though — it’s absolutely not the sort of thing you do without discussing it first. But I don’t need to tell you that. You are all negotiating before scenes, and all you tops that want to engage in breath play are asking if it’s okay, right? Good, I thought so!

But the biggest aspect is trust. Once I lock in a choke, there is the moment of panic. She knows that she is completely powerless, at my whim. And though there is that survival instinct screaming in her brain, she also knows that she is in no danger. It’s exciting; it’s a rush of adrenaline; it both requires trust and strengthens it.

And then when she comes to, there is that split second where she doesn’t know where she is, what’s going on, or what just happened. Fear. Confusion. But she sees my face, feels me against her, and she is immediately at ease. The contrast from one extreme to the other makes it all the more significant.

From my end, it’s the exact same from the other side of the coin. It is an amazing feeling of control, and it feels good knowing that someone trusts you to that extent. You can see it, and feel it. In this day and age of emotional repression and distancing, it is beautiful to be able to form a bond that close, and in doing this sort of thing, you experience how deep of a bond it really is.

Though all SM activities require trust, I think that breath play, and especially breath play involving carotid choking to the point of unconsciousness, requires a different level of trust. If the top were to do something wrong, by accident or on purpose, it could more easily and quickly result in death than with any other SM activity that immediately comes to mind.  The worst-case scenario, no matter how unlikely, is still pretty extreme. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Jay Wiseman is against it.

For me, the risks are acceptable; my girl is more likely to be injured or killed out driving than while in my arms’ crushing caress. It’s a risk that each person involved has to weigh, but some people see it as unquestionably too dangerous to engage in, and I personally disagree vehemently with that notion.

I’ll preface this by saying that I have not seen the actual study, so I can only base my opinions off of the little information given in the article.

In a nutshell, it seems like they just asked a bunch of twins (fraternal and identical), “Do you have a g-spot?”   This is horrible research methodology.  It’s like going to 1920s households and asking the women if they’ve ever experienced an orgasm.   “A significant number of women said that they had never experienced orgasm, therefore we conclude that the female orgasm does not actually exist.”

If you’re serious about this, how about you start by doing some research on female cadavers?   Map out nerve endings, that sort of thing.

To play my own devil’s advocate, I see the point of this study.   I get the impression that the people behind this study believe that many women don’t receive pleasure in that way, and feel like there must be something wrong with them.   Personally I think in most cases that’s most likely because their partner doesn’t know how to properly stimulate it, but that’s neither here nor there.  The study is meant to say, “There, there. It’s okay.  No pressure.” (Pun intended.)  But if you want to say that, then just say it. Don’t try to prove it with bogus science.

Last weekend I went to a demonstration on medical play, focusing on needle play, medical stapling, sounding, and electro-stimulation. Some of what I saw there I was familiar with, a lot of it I wasn’t.

General safety note with everything mentioned here: use gloves with any form of play that could involve bodily fluids like blood, and make sure your equipment is sterilized.  In many cases, alcohol is not enough.

I’ve always been interested in sounds, for example. The very idea of, to put it crudely, sticking a metal rod down your pee-hole, does seem at first glance like it would be painful. But from all accounts I’ve heard, it’s not. Granted, I’ve only heard experiences from men, since it doesn’t seem to be a common thing to do with women. The word “intense” is frequently used, and when the demonstration guy was asked to describe it, that was about the only word he could come up with (it was his first time experiencing it). That, and that it felt good.

Technique-wise, with a sound you generally want to have the “equipment” (both yours, and the guy’s) lined straight up and down, perpendicular to the floor. Use plenty of lube, make sure your equipment is sterilized — via an autoclave if you have access to one. I understand that you can actually use a pressure-cooker as well, but I am not versed on the details of that. The mistress doing the demonstration says that she actually likes to use polysporin as a lubricant, since it has some antibacterial stuff in it just for extra safety. You start out with the smaller rods, support the cock in your hand, pull at the sides of the head to open up the urethra a bit, then insert the sounding rod slowly. Once it’s in an inch or so, you can pretty much let gravity do the work — never push/force it in.

There is a little valve at the base of the cock, which is the opening into the bladder (the Cobb’s Curve). You can sort of feel it out — it’s a little bump in the urethral passage at the base of the cock. It’s easier to feel it out if the guy is hard, apparently. Generally speaking, don’t go past that. It won’t be a problem if the guy is lying down because of a natural curve there that will prevent the rod from going too far. You only really need to be concerned with that if the cock is pointed down toward the feet. That’s pretty much all there is to it. You can slide it in and out in slower strokes, and/or twist it in your fingers for extra sensation/stimulation. Generally the guy will go soft within a minute or so of sounding. Our demonstration guy never got hard. Being on a table with a spotlight on him and a roomful of people watching, with the mistress’s help being some light fondling and the command, “Get it up,” I highly doubt that I would have been able to either.

The medical stapling was interesting. Medical staples, for those that don’t know, are like normal staples, except the ends curve in toward each other when they go in. I got a few in my arm just to feel it, and it felt like a pinch — not even a hard one at that. In addition to the obvious SM use, they are also good for decorative play — you can run ribbons under the staples and make designs. Similar to corsets done with needles, except medical staples are a bit less prone to being fucked with, so when doing them in a public place (the dungeon, a convention, whatever), you don’t need to be that careful. If you bump into someone or something, no big deal. I don’t think I could ever personally do needles from the bottom end (no huge desire to do them from the top side either), but I do think I could do medical stapling.

As an important note, medical staples do require a special instrument to remove.  So don’t go and get yourself a medical staple kit without one.  It’s a very simple thing, but I definitely wouldn’t try removing one of those suckers without it.  As it was, one of the staples caused some bleeding with me, though the others only caused some little pinpricks of blood.

And speaking of needles, that was also demonstrated. The basics are pretty obvious — the larger the gauge number, the smaller the needle (so a 14 gauge is pretty thick, 22 gauge pretty thin). The smaller the needle, and the more shallow you go, the less it hurts. I did learn that needles are a bit different than most SM play, in that the endorphin rush is almost immediate. The demo pincushion said that by the time the second needle goes in, she’s usually already flying in sub-space.

I wasn’t there for the electro-stim part of the demonstration (had somewhere else to be), but there was a bit of playing with a TENS unit earlier with the medical stapling. You can attach it to the staples for extra fun. You could also use it with a sound. Just remember, when dealing with anything that goes inside, the electrical sensation will be about 10-20 times as powerful, so start out really low, and amp up slowly.

I like going to demos like that — even if you know about the subject matter at hand, you usually learn something new anyway. And at the very least, you can share experiences/knowledge with others.