When Jay works as an expert witness, he is being paid by the defense attorney to try to create an element of doubt in the mind of the jury that perhaps the defendant did not murder the victim with an intentional, very prolonged strangle hold. Jay’s expert witness, Dr. Knight, states that it 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. Try to “choke” your own wrist for four minutes, and it will become clear that this is not something that could possibly be done by accident, or in a moment of passion. That makes it essential for the defense to try to establish that a “playful tweak” can be instantly fatal.

I’m actually drafting a post about breath play, and carotid chokes in particular, for release within the next day or so.

Also, I think a lot of doms (especially male ones) tend to be “helpful” as a guise to put themselves in a position of authority and trust, and eventually seduction. It’s interesting to watch what happens when there’s an attractive piece of new meat in the scene. “O hai! My toyz, let me show u them!”

I’m not (god forbid) advocating recklessness (perish the thought – what sort of madman…), but I can’t mention knifeplay without a forty-minute lecture on the subject by some fat, leather-panted parrot of some 55-year-old douche in Kansas with Wordperfect and RedTube as his “first-hand experience.”

Frankly, I never thought I’d see cleft assholes in a community of against-the-grain people. It’s the first sign, to me, of someone full of shit. You don’t see a lot of gun advocates who jump down your throat with a lecture on gun safety the minute you say you might like to go to the range someday.

To your point, it’s a bit of a catch-22. Even if you do everything right, go out of your way to take safety precautions, but something goes wrong… the top is still every bit as legally liable. So it does make sense to minimize the possibility of something going wrong by going to lengths with safety (and again, I do think safety is a very important thing).

Maybe it is, as someone else called it, the more litigious nature of today’s society that has caused a lot of this. But then again, if that results in fewer people being hurt by accident, and newbies taking things more slowly, then that is a silver lining at least.

Sorry for rambling, but my point is this. For such a system of blame to exist, there must be hard and fast rules for who is “right” and “wrong”. Otherwise we’d have to accept that sometimes mistakes do happen, people do get hurt, and there is no one that SHOULD be blamed… and that is something we will not accept (anytime in the foreseeable future)

This ha been a constant source of psychic pain for me, especially during those times when I’ve had partners who were more vanilla. It’s very difficult to explain about kink in general, but I have found it nearly impossible to discuss why I’d want to bottom – it immediately brings up the humiliating images portrayed by movies and tv.