BDSM Weblog

Would have posted this sooner, but I wanted to get permission to use the picture below first.

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.

Filed under: Educational, Goings-On by Sammael