A Post About Safety

First I would like to say I am sorry for my lack of posting of late. For awhile I just couldn’t think of something to post about, once I found a topic I never made the time to post.  So here is my apology, not that there are too many people that are following my blog but for those that do there it is.

 

So I had a couple of things that I wanted to post about but I will only choose one for today. A friend of mine asked me to make a post about safety. This isn’t unusual for me as I have led some discussions on the matter and it is something that is very important to me. I could go on at length about where it is okay to strike someone and the risks involved with many BDSM related activities. But, I think a post like that would miss the true mark of the topic I was asked to post about. The concern for a topic about safety came from viewing pictures in which a submissive was, I am assuming, caned until it caused lacerations on her skin. Now for most of you the BDSM mantra of “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” come to mind almost immediately. Here was the question that my friend posed, “Which of those three words do you put the most importance in?” Does the fact that such a beating was consensual make it okay? Or is there a certain line where, no matter how much consent there is, a set of actions is unsafe? Do you question the sanity of the people involved in such an action? Personally, I have never liked the “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” motto, now let me qualify why. It has nothing to do with not liking the idea that your play needs to be all of those things. Rather, it comes from perceptions and people’s desire to force their ideas of safe and sane onto others. Nothing that you do as a BDSM practitioner is completely safe. The idea of safety is taking calculated risks and knowing the ways to keep your play as safe as possible. If you do those things then I consider your play safe. If both you and your submissive know the dangers of playing with electricity and are properly prepared if something were to go wrong then you are playing safe. It doesn’t matter that electricity is more of an edge play than say for instance light bondage.  That being said there are some things where I think the risk outweighs any benefit that you get from the play. If it is very likely that playing a way will cause lasting damage to your partner or yourself then that method of play isn’t safe. Granted this is my opinion but I think it is fairly good all in all, take for instance using metal cuffs in a situation where your partner will be putting weight on them. This type of action is very likely to cause tendon or nerve damage to your partner, therefore, isn’t safe to be done.

 

So I guess the safety thing that I want to hit on is know what you are doing. There are many things out there that I do that others would probably consider unsafe. For instance, I enjoy electrical play for many people this is something that should never be done because of the risks involved. In my case, I have spent a great deal of time looking into the risks involved and what all can be done and what should be avoided. I know the most basic rules like, when using toys that send current through the skin never cross the heart.  I also know about the toys I use, I know for instance that a violet wand has many fail safes built in that make it difficult to impossible for straight current from your standard socket to enter the body. I keep my equipment in proper working condition so that these fail safes are maintained. 

 

In the end, you should never want to do serious damage to your partner. I don’t mean this to bad mouth people into things like branding or scars. What I mean is you should never want to beat your submissive so badly that she starts to experience kidney failure (Yes that is possible). You shouldn’t want to do something to your submissive that will make them unable to write properly or use their hands. As a partner hopefully you care about them enough to avoid these things and would never play with them in a way that could cause lasting damage to their ability to function.  That is where I draw the solid line of safety. If something you are doing could cause serious permanent damage and you aren’t aware of the potential and doing everything you can to avoid that damage you are being unsafe. To the couple that would want to play with a cane like that I can only ask a few questions. Are you trained in first aid to deal with the lacerations that were caused? Do the two of you know that intense beatings like that can cause a huge dumping of myoglobin into the blood that can lead to kidney damage? Are you keeping a close eye on your submissive after a beating like that to look for sluggishness and signs of the things that could go wrong? If the answer to these is yes, then congratulations you were inside the bounds of what I would consider your right as a couple. Is what you were doing risky? Hell yes, but you know the risks and are doing what you can to prevent, avoid, and treat the problems that may come up. If the answer to any of those is no, well my friends you are doing something that could change your lives forever, and not in a good way. 

Thoughts on Control and Submission

I have recently run into a small problem. It is about the way I think about power exchange compared to the way others may think about it. Most people I have encountered believe that a submissive must choose their dominant. I share this opinion and think that each person must find the person they trust and can submit to on their own. In the end it must be the submissive’s choice as to who they submit to. Now this is the point that I have found that I conflict with some others, on some level Kai included. I am not totally sure why this is perhaps is it just me being overly cautious, or perhaps there is something else to it.

Many of the people I have talked to, and that isn’t saying much as my pool is limited, believe that once the submissive makes it known in some fashion they are interested it is the part of the dominant to take control of them. In the context of a single, planned out scene in which the parameters are laid out before hand I can agree with this statement. In those cases there is a clear beginning of the power exchange and an end, you only need submit or be in control for that set period and much of what is going on is predetermined at least in part. Now here is the place that I seem to deviate, in the context of a long term relationship I think it is important for the submissive to make some kind of gesture aside from a passive display of interest.  I think this is due to the amount of commitment that is required on both sides of the equation.  In the context of a long term play relationship the boundaries between vanilla and BDSM are blurred and sometimes do not exist. There really is often no defining moment between play and not, the scenes just flow into your daily life. As a dominant I would like my submissive to know that she is getting into that type of situation. I sit and tell them what they are getting into and then they need to choose to commit to it or not. After they have made the choice and offered their submission in a tangible way then I will begin to take things from them as I see fit and scenes will just materialize out of thin air. But, until they decide to take that step I feel that taking their control outside of the boundaries of a pre-discussed scene is something akin to rape. It is forcing someone to do something that they may not be completely willing to do. To put it in a non-sexual way if you imply that I can take something and I do, but the offer really wasn’t there it is still stealing and I am guilty of the crime. If you give me the object and say take it whenever you want, then I am no longer stealing from you and I have no problems taking it if I need or want it.

Some people might say that this diminishes my strength as a dominant because I am unwilling to take and use what I want. If you ask anyone that has scened with me in the past you would find that they don’t think me less of a dominant and many of them have really loved the times that we have spent together in scenes. I think that the way I approach things actually makes me a more responsible dominant and better than I would be if I merely took what I wanted all of the time. In the end to be a good dominant I believe that you must have the submissive’s best interests at heart. In doing things my way I hope to be able to say that I have Kai’s best interests at heart when we play and when we think about our relationship. I can say that in the past I have had my submissives best interests at heart and I hope that many of them learned from me and can say that they truly enjoyed our time together and that after we parted ways they still thought about me in a good fashion. 

In the end, I am not sure if my method is the correct one, or that there is a single correct method because as I said each person much find their own way. I do know that the method I choose is what has worked for me and is my method, and I don’t see it changing in the near future. Perhaps you disagree with it, or you have a different method that you choose to employ. I encourage you to post here if you have a different method or you just want to talk about mine.