This past weekend, some friends came in from out of town for a goth/fetish club event. My friend, his wife, and their roommate came down and we went to a new-ish club space in Atlanta. On the downside, the dungeon/play area on the bottom floor had a salty, sewer-like smell to it. Ugh. On the upside, lots of my friends were there, and there were some fun scenes; a rigger friend started the night off right with a suspension scene.

My friend requested on behalf of his wife that I put her on the cross and beat her, and also their roommate. I’d played with both of them before at a goth event in Louisville several months ago, and I was very happy to see that they both enjoyed it and wanted more. I did check in after that first time and they had only good things to say, but you never know until they come back for a second helping. The wife in particular caused my sadist-sense to go off the previous time; she’s pretty reserved, but I could tell that she was really getting into it. The scene this night was also pretty basic, for a few reasons. For one, I had had a few drinks, not enough to be anywhere near drunk or inaccurate by any means, but enough that I felt restraint was in order since neither of them are in the lifestyle. Also, it was a club that I wasn’t familiar with, and I don’t generally do intense scenes in public — it triggers some people when a girl is crying and you keep on hitting her, for example.

Anyway, I used one of my favorite toys: the dragon’s tail. I love the versatility of that thing. Thuddy, stingy, biting, wrapping… it can do a lot. Also, I like that it takes more skill than a flogger — you can be very precise with a dragontail, which appeals to me. I explored a bit more with the girls this time, and learned that my friend’s wife prefers pain on the back, whereas the roommate prefers it on the ass. Both of them are pretty shy and tentative about giving feedback, so I was very glad to see that they were being more communicative of what they like.

I also played with another friend after I was done with those two, and after all that I was ready for a break, so luckily my friend Blue was there to give me a beating with the dragon tail, and my other friend (the first girl’s husband) ready to give some rough body play. He is not really in the scene, but is good at that and seems to enjoy it.

In retrospect my switching that night made me think about my different headspaces.

My top headspace is very high-energy. I feel on top of the world, charged, radiant and aggressive. The more I let the chains loose on the beast, the more aggressive I get. Riding that edge has provided for some of the most awesome scenes, but I have very rarely done that since it’s still a place I’m a little afraid of. If I ever did something to someone that ended up harming them (especially emotionally), it would kill me. But at the same time, I really like hurting people badly. (Note the difference between harm and hurt. Pain is good. Injury is bad.) After a good scene as a top, I feel like I want to go run, or wrestle, or something. I’m jazzed, and the world is sharply in focus.

My masochist headspace is much more of a calm place. When I’m experiencing good pain, the world melts away. In fact, witnesses to my first singletailing scene (wherein my back got torn up pretty good) remarked how relaxed I was, as if I was about to fall asleep. The pain becomes punctuations between moments of stillness. Stingy pain is like a shooting star in a black sky. Punches from rough body play are like an aggressive massage. Afterward, I feel serene, like I want to snuggle up and doze off. I melt, and the world becomes fuzzy.

I also had the always-fun experience of another person from the scene coming up to me after that with an amazed/surprised expression saying, “Man, I thought you were a top!” To which I happily replied, “I am. I’m also a masochist. So really, I’m a dominant sadomasochist.” He identifies as a Master, but proceeded to tell me how he likes pain sometimes too. I honestly can’t remember the details — I was drifting at that point, not really able to hold a conversation.

At some point while I was doing all of this, a friend of mine used his new paddle on my girl. They both had quite a good time, and she was very positive about his spanking technique — he’s new to it, but apparently has a good feel for it (pun intended). I was pleased to see that the next day he followed up with me making sure that everything was all right, and making sure that I was still okay, reassuring me that he didn’t have any designs on my girl or anything. It wasn’t really necessary — I consider him a good friend and wouldn’t have okayed it if I thought anything funny was going on — but it was a very nice gesture.

Some other friends from New York came down for a grappling tournament last weekend as well. Unfortunately their schedule was packed so we didn’t get any play in, but I did enjoy a nice breakfast with them Sunday morning before they left. I’m very seriously considering starting a kinky grappling group here in the Atlanta area.

In a nutshell, it wasn’t really that bad. There were only a couple of cringe-worthy moments in the 2.5-hour process, and those were fleeting.

A friend of mine described having a tattoo done as being similar to a very intense violet wand session. I can see the parallel, even more so due to the sound that the tattoo gun makes being somewhat like an electric crackle. Overall it felt like what it was: something very pointy being vibrated against my skin very fast. It didn’t really feel like it was actually piercing the flesh — probably because it was going past the epidermis, but just enough to get to the dermis.

There were also two types of needles/guns used. At some point in the process, I think during shading, he used a gun that sounded a lot different — quieter, and a more… “watery” sound, as if it were submerged. I asked about that, and he said it was a rotary tattoo gun. Doing a bit more research, I see that there are four different types of gun — rotary, coil, liner, and shader. I’m not sure which of these was used on me; it’s quite possible all four were, and some just sounded the same as others. The rotary gun had more of a pressure, “grinding” sort of feeling to it, with a hint of an abrasive feeling. I’d classify it as less painful than the other gun by just a bit.

Just as painful as the needle, if not more so (probably more so), was the nearly constant wiping-away that the artist did, to remove excess ink, and any blood that came up. The skin was already raw from the poking, so adding abrasion to that wasn’t terribly comfortable. And it was a different sort of pain, so it was difficult to keep in the headspace.

Being into BDSM definitely helped with the process. Specifically, it helped to practice pain processing such as breathing techniques and focusing. I even found myself going into brief bouts of headspace many times during the process. My girlfriend was there to lend support, but due to being in and out of headspace so much, I was pretty unresponsive. That, combined with the fact that I was looking off into space and hardly ever looked at her, made her think that I was angry with her for checking in — but we talked about it later and cleared that up. I’m definitely glad she was there, and checking in.

Overall it was a good experience, and I have a lifelong mark from it — how cool is that?

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.

In a lot of the more serious dungeons, there is no alcohol allowed. The secondary issue with that is that would require a liquor license in most places too, but nonetheless, most serious lifestylers agree that drinking and BDSM don’t go together.

I’d thought that most, in fact, were teetotalers when it came to drinking and playing.  And while some definitely are, the more I talked to people in the community, the more I found out that this wasn’t true. A friend of (who is an experienced dominant) had a few drinks when we were at dinner before playing in the dungeon, and I was a bit surprised. She told me, “A drink or two helps me to loosen up some.” She’s deadly accurate with a singletail whip (or with two at once!), and who am I to question her judgment?

And the more I paid attention, the more I saw this philosophy in other experienced players. Now, it was generally when they were playing with someone they were already experienced with, which is important to note.  And that also brings me to a…

Caveat! I am not saying that you should drink and kink. I am saying that from my personal experience, one needn’t be of the philosophy “if you’ve had a single drop of alcohol then you can’t play for the night!” I myself have played when I was too close to that edge, and better safe than sorry as they say.

In fact, my “too close to the edge” incident happened recently. It was at a gothy event that had some BDSM on the side, and with my girl not there and me without my equipment, I wasn’t planning on playing, so I had a few drinks. Then an opportunity planted itself firmly in my lap. There was a girl at the event that I’d wanted to play with for some time, but the timing was never right. Speaking with her there, it seemed that she had wanted to play with me as well. A guy standing next to us offered his flogger. I’m a pretty good self-judge, and I knew I hadn’t had enough drinks in me to lose accuracy. And the flogger, like the girl, was very well put together. So I couldn’t resist.

What I didn’t account for was that the flogger was weighted very differently than I was used to — it had longer falls, and a longer handle. My floggers are generally balanced right around the neck, this one was balanced further down the handle. So there were a few times that I wrapped. Which grates on my nerves like fingernails across a chalkboard. It screams amateur, and I am better than that.

The girl graciously told me afterward that she hardly noticed, and that it was a great scene. But you see, I’m a self-perfectionist. Also, what if I had had more drinks? Would I have passed up the opportunity in favor of caution? I think I would have, but I can’t really say.

This weekend I will be attending Frolicon, where there will lots of alcohol, and lots of play going on. I generally only make a mistake once, and I won’t be making that one again.

Knowing that I was into the lifestyle, he talked to me, related his story, and got some advice. I am ever gleeful to bring someone over to the dark side. Since then he’s been reading some good literature, and getting involved in the community of FetLife.com.

Last week, he also needed a change of scenery, to get away from some distinctly negative influences for a while, so he visited me. In addition to all the normal hanging out stuff, we did a few lifestyle-oriented things.

Wednesday, my mentor was holding a demonstration on flogging, so we went to that. I didn’t tell him that it was at a gay bar until we were on our way there. What? I’m a sadist, after all! Seriously though, he wasn’t squicked by that, and found the demonstration to be very informative. He also learned that when one goes to a demonstration, one inevitably gets the intense urge to practice whatever was being demonstrated. The price of knowledge.

Later that week, we went to a local munch, and this one was good in that it had a discussion (last week’s topic was punishment and obedience training). So he got to meet some people in a non-threatening environment, and listen to a lot of different viewpoints. Unfortunately, the room we had at the buffet was overflowing, so it was a bit tough to carouse much.

Then later in the weekend, there was a play party at the local dungeon. It was one of the less crowded nights, which was a good thing in that it meant my girl and I actually got to use the whip room (it’s been way too long since I’ve been able to singletail her, and we got crack-blocked at a previous play party by someone who jumped us in line for the equipment). It also wasn’t overwhelming for Jerzeem. As almost everyone is their first time in a dungeon, he felt a little awkward, and was quiet, but he enjoyed the experience, and got to see a few different styles of play. One thing he noted was that a lot of the play was more ritualized than he’d imagined it would be.

So, he got a little taste of a few different aspects of the BDSM world last week. He’s already arranged to go to some munches in his home town, and is even looking forward to a BDSM convention there. And he just this weekend realized that Harley and Joker had a distinctly BDSM-tinted relationship. Let’s just hope he doesn’t think too hard about Batman and Robin. Ageplay, anyone?

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.

As happens from time to time, I’ve been going through some stress in the past few weeks.  Not the least of which was coming to the realization that I needed to break things off with one of my girls — I saw that she needed someone who could be more emotionally available.  But I won’t go into that.  Let it suffice to say, I was in need of release.

Being a sadomasochist, I find release in both the giving and receiving of pain.  I had planned to attend an event at the local dungeon, 1763, and to be whipped with a singletail by a friend of mine named Dream.  I wasn’t aware that the demonstrator for that night was to be Wayne Brawner, though — someone very skilled with whips, who had mentored Dream’s own mentor.  He had come without a demonstration partner, having planned to take a volunteer from the crowd.  So of course, I volunteered.  It actually was a bit more organic than that — we talked some before the demonstration during the social period, I expressed my interest, and so it was.

Wayne talked a bit about his ideas on S&M.  For example, he doesn’t believe in safe words.  This was my first experience with him, but I got the distinct impression that he is a bit of a harder player, and that he uses S&M as a spiritual experience.  He talked about forcing people past their limits, bringing them to the point of tears, and then anger, and then laughter.  In my head, I could see his point.  Those in the Sun Dance ritual weren’t allowed to call “red,” were they?  I knew I was in for a trial, but that is exactly what I came for.

And he did not disappoint.  After a brief demonstration of the versatility of a singletail whip — first beating me on the back with the handle end, then showing how wrapping can be done on purpose to good effect — he went right into it with no warmup to speak of.  After a few lashes to my back, it seemed that he realized I wasn’t very sensitive to pain there, so he went at my front, directly for the navel and nipples (my nipples are extremely sensitive).  He was unrelenting, hitting the most sensitive spots over and over again without mercy.  I knew that his goal was to break me down, and to prove something to me.

And he did.  He took me past what I had ever experienced before.  First I began to sweat, and then to shake.  Eventually it was all I could do to stand on my feet — part of me wished that I had been strapped to a cross, but the greater part of me knew that would have been too easy.  After whipping my left nipple repeatedly (the man has deadly accuracy), he would come up and pinch it, and twist it.  And then my right, but he didn’t torture that one with the whip so much.  Probably just to give a contrast.  I’m not sure how long it went on, but at some point I started to experience nausea, and he stopped shortly thereafter.

I was vulnerable.  Stripped bare of ego and pretense.  I felt… raw.  Alive.

And it struck me then that sadists are more than someone who gives pain, and release.  A skilled sadist breaks you down so that you can rebuild yourself.  Holds a mirror to you, to show you not who you think you are, not who people tell you you are, but who you really are.  Sometimes you’re actually stronger than what you believe.  Sometimes you’re weaker.  Either way, you’re forced to see it, and deal with it.

Later that night, after I had recovered some, I had the pleasure of helping my own bottom to find some release.  I can’t say that I broke her down as Wayne did me, but then again I couldn’t hope to match his experience in that arena.  It felt good to be able to give back, and after that night I’ve come to see my role as a dominant/top in a deeper way.  I also realize what drew me to this lifestyle.  I used to think it was simply about pain and pleasure.  That is only the surface though.  I’ve always sought to help others in their paths in life, with whatever small amount of wisdom or empathy I could offer.  BDSM is an extension of that.  It’s about personal growth, evolution, enlightenment.  It’s about burning everything to the ash so that it can be rebuilt stronger, healthier, renewed.