Wild animals do a lot of snarling, growling, biting, scratching and general rumpussing: Janet once did a scene where both she and her top were wild animals, and agreed to speak only in growls, shrieks, hisses, purrs and such… a great scene that cost them both sore throats for several days. Animals like getting primal.
INANIMATE OBJECTS. Bottoms in a scene can become inanimate objects – sometimes useful, like coffee tables, or purely decorative, as in a bondage sculpture. Dossie once spent a very contented hour or two wrapped up in miles of rope, blindfolded and hooded, while an orgy that she could hear but not see took place at her feet. This might sound frustrating, but the actual experience was wonderful: there is a trancelike delight in having absolutely nothing to do in a sexy environment.
To be a human coffee table may satisfy a need to suffer in the name of submission, or may be an excuse to do nothing but enjoy the presence of your top and his guests. Again, much of the reward comes from the extreme passivity of the role.
Bondage sculptures, using hundreds of strings attached to permanent or play piercings, are a popular human art form. You get the stimulation of lots of needles, and can hold still and do nothing while one or more piercers fusses all over you. A major piercing sculpture could involve several bottoms: we recall an especially delightful “string quartet.” Do be careful to choose a position that you can maintain for several hours without needing a chiropractor to recover.
Dossie recalls a mannequin scene in which the bottom was required to stand in very high heels with a book balanced on her head while two tops tried to distract her. This forced her to stay very centered and perfectly in line with gravity while absorbing a lot of stimulation, with no permission to respond to it in anyway. Miss High Heels got very high indeed!
Tops might want to recognize that holding still for long periods of time is very difficult and often painful. In some scenes, this might be appropriate material for additional cruelty; in others, the bottom might perform better with praise and appreciation for his or her hard work, and occasional opportunities to stretch.
ROUGH AND TOUGH
THIS is the section where we talk about the scenes that involve struggle, resistance, and the outward appearance of nonconsent – some of the most challenging, and the hottest, play in our communities’ repertoire. This kind of play gives us the chance to exert ourselves and to be overcome – to fight our hardest, see our tops at their most powerful, and finally knuckle under to what we really wanted all along.
RESISTANCE SCENES: CAPTIVITY, KIDNAP, RAPE, INTERROGATION. If you enjoy playing as a strong, powerful, resistant bottom who has been overcome by force, these are the scenes for you. Since many of our fantasies are noncon-sensual, the outward appearance of nonconsensuality can make these scenes incredibly hot – and the closer to the edge of nonconsensuality you get, the hotter the scene can be. But playing close to the edge of nonconsensuality can also raise the emotional and physical risks for both partners; therefore, special negotiations and agreements are in order.
Resistance play is big fun in that it relieves you of your sense of responsibility: “Help! Someone save me… just not right now, OK?” The struggle, both emotional and physical, can also be very cathartic: Janet once spent a delightful hour or two getting tortured and raped, with her hands tied to the headboard, her feet tied behind her top’s back, and a gag in her mouth, and felt relaxed and sexy for days afterward.
There are some practical concerns that must be dealt with in resistance play. It’s actually not all that easy, and sometimes nearly impossible, to subdue a bottom who is resisting with all his might. So if you intend to lose the wrestling match, you need to figure out how: some people just cut their strength; others use a handicap, like tying one limb down first, so they can struggle all they want and still be certain not to escape. Struggling needs to be discussed beforehand with your top – tops have limits too, and may need some way to reassure themselves that you really want to while you pretend you don’t.
We have also found that sometimes the adrenaline rush that accompanies struggle may be incompatible with sensual openness, so some form of transition may need to be written into the script. One top of our acquaintance liked to wrestle wildly until the bottom was securely bound, then quiet her down with a massage before proceeding further.
A resistance scene gone wrong can bear heavy consequences: genuine anger that can interrupt friendships or even, in a worst-case scenario, precipitate violence. Resistance scenes played out in public also run the risk of rescue attempts by well-meaning outsiders.
Some of the emotions that can come up for the bottom in a resistance scene are real-world fear, anger and panic. Depending on what you’ve negotiated, you can either stop the scene when one of these emotions comes up for you, or go on playing and see what lies beyond the strong emotion. Janet once went through a period where her real-world anger stopped several scenes in a row… she and her top finally decided to play through it, and what turned out to lie beyond the anger was floods of cathartic tears.
If you’re going to play through your anger or fear, you should be prepared to experience a strong and sometimes disturbing catharsis that may take hours, days or even weeks to process fully. It’s not a good idea to surprise your top with such strong emotions; if you suspect that a scene might trigger old issues or cause real-world emotion, it is essential to have your top’s informed consent to what might happen, and to be sure that your top is willing to be supportive of you throughout this entire spectrum of experience.
For example, both of your authors had some strongly negative childhood experiences with having our faces slapped, so face-slapping is a serious emotional trigger for both of us, that we will allow our tops to do only if they are willing and able to work through deep emotional stuff with us. Janet tells tops that she trusts a lot, “If you slap my face, I can’t predict how I’ll react – but if I come unglued, you’re going to have to help put me back together again.”
If you are not sure that you and your top are both ready for this kind of emotional fallout, tell him or her, or use your safeword, when real-world emotions come up.
Playing through strong emotion is an enormous, emotionally risky commitment for top and bottom alike. If you find a top who trusts you enough, and who you trust enough, to explore this area, recognize and appreciate the gift she is giving you. Similarly, a bottom who opens up and shares such difficult and profound emotion offers a great gift to his top. We all do well when we honor the courage and love it takes to play on the edge.
DOSSIE’S PROMISES FOR RESISTANCE PLAY. In order to play safely with resistance, Dossie has developed three promises that she gives her top during negotiations for these scenes. They are:
This is not where I’m going to process disagreements with you. If I feel angry with your real-world persona, we will discuss that outside scene space.
I will resist only when I am turned on, so any time I fight back you know the scene is working.
If I get mouthy, resistant or angry, I promise you that will always be an invitation to aggress. Feel free. Be bad.
These rules, or similar ones, are an important safeguard to your own and your top’s emotional well-being during resistance play.
HUMILIATION AND VERBAL ABUSE
A GOOD scene may create more than one set of reddened cheeks! The “sweet shame” of humiliation is a potent addition to many playstyles, and some bottoms find that humiliation is where the juice is for them.
The tricky question is: what do you find humiliating? Crossdressing, for example, is a source of pride to one bottom, a window to an alternate persona for another, and an acute humiliation to a third. Some bottoms find the act of kneeling to their top, or of speaking the word “Master” or “Mistress,” to be profoundly humiliating, while others grovel and abase themselves without a second thought.
Consider the difference between the foot fetishist, to whom kissing a well-shaped foot is a keen delight and privilege, and the “captive” who finds i
t an agony of indignity and unwilling submission. You can see, then, that almost any scene in this book can be played as a humiliation scene – if you find it humiliating.
Some players like to further season the stew of humiliation with verbal abuse (a term, by the way, which we don’t like much – we wish there were another word than “abuse” for a consensual scene). Verbal abuse involves the top calling the bottom nasty names, or scoffing at him, or belittling his performance in some way.
If you play with verbal abuse, you’ll probably find that some words and phrases are so easy to tolerate that they hardly qualify as abuse: we both find it very entertaining when a top says during a scene, “You enjoy this, don’t you, girl?” – obviously, we do. And, since we wrote “The Ethical Slut,” we think being called “slut” is a big compliment. Other words may be humiliating in what feels like a good way, creating a pleasantly erotic sense of shame and outrage.
If a particular type of verbal abuse – for example, disparagement of your physical appearance, intelligence, earning capacity or whatever – creates serious real-world anger or loss of self-esteem for you, it’s probably better to tell your top ahead of time, and perhaps to avoid that type altogether. These limits may come up unexpectedly, and may not be altogether rational – we know one bottom who adores being called “slut,” “cunt” and similar names, but lost it with real-world rage when her top called her a “bootlicker.”
Conversely, if what really turns you on is being called “scrawny,” “fat,” “stupid” or whatever your pet word is, you’re entitled to get that, although it may be tough finding a top who’s comfortable giving it to you – keep trying.
Remember, a good humiliation scene takes cooperation – your top can only humiliate you with your help!
PLAYING WITH CULTURAL TRAUMA. A kind of play that is particularly controversial for many individuals and groups within the BDSM communities is play that involves enacting some of the horrors of our cultural past. Although humanity has a shocking history of torture and genocide to choose from, the scenes that are likeliest to cause problems are those from the more recent past – most often those that involve the Holocaust and Nazis, and those that invoke the racially based slavery of the American eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Older incidents such as the Spanish Inquisition seem to push fewer buttons because they’re buried deeper in our cultural memory.
We know bottoms who belong to recently oppressed minority groups and who have found tremendous healing and excitement in building scenes around that historical oppression. One African-American friend says, “Playing a consensual scene in which my top called me ‘nigger’ made me much better able to handle hearing it in the real world. Before, when I heard the word, I’d become irrationally, reflexively furious. Last week a panhandler called me that and I laughed in his face – ‘now there’s a smart way to ask for money, bozo!’”
Obviously, these scenes can carry a deep and serious emotional charge for both bottom and top. Tops may have trouble with invoking the spirit of bigotry even when they know themselves to be loving and egalitarian people: we know lots more people of color interested in playing slave than we do white folks who are comfortable being Simon Legree. Bottoms may find unexpected wellsprings of anger or internalized oppression. We suggest extreme care in negotiating and enacting such scenes, similar to the precautions we’ve suggested for playing around a history of personal trauma such as rape and abuse.
Additionally, if these scenes are enacted at a play party or other gathering, onlookers may be shocked, scandalized or infuriated. These issues have been hotly debated. Check with party hosts about scenes involving racism, sexism or Nazis: remember that if you enter a party wearing swastikas you may be stimulating people who haven’t chosen to play with you. When you shout words like “nigger,” “dumb cunt,” or “filthy Jew,” the people around you can’t close their ears. While we believe partygoers must be responsible for their own reactions, it’s courteous to let people know ahead of time the nature of the scene you’re about to do so that they can choose whether or not they want to watch or move into another room.
And when you and your top can work together to reclaim parts of yourself that have been wounded by humanity’s sad history, what a great and worthwhile gift that is – a perfect example of how the darkest corners of BDSM can bring the greatest illumination.
SOME NOTES ON PUBLIC PLAY
IF YOU SEE a large crowd of people gathered around a scene at a play party, you may find Dossie or Janet at the center of it. We’re both avid exhibitionists and love public play (by which we mean play in front of a consenting group of kink-friendly people – not playing out there in the real world, which can nonconsensually involve bystanders).
We recognize that play parties don’t work for many of our readers. Some feel that they cannot come that far out of the closet (although confidentiality is a paramount rule of any responsible play party), some are too shy, and some simply live in areas where there are no play parties, poor dears. Nonetheless, we feel that play parties are a vital part of the growth of the scene in general, and a great way to grow as a player.
Play parties give you a chance to observe the play of someone you are considering bottoming to, and offer a very safe place to play with a new top for the first time. Couples in exclusive relationships also often attend play parties, not to play with others, but for the many rewards of seeing and being seen.
Parties give you a great opportunity to be a responsible voyeur. By “responsible” we mean someone who is sensitive to the boundaries of the players, who doesn’t interfere with scene space or attempt to join scenes without permission, and who respects confidentiality. Voyeurism gives you a chance to learn new playstyles and techniques. It’s also wonderfully validating to see happy, proud, confident people publicly doing whatever it is you’re scared to do because it’s “too sick.”
So what, you ask, is a play party? It’s basically an environment in which people do BDSM scenes within the sight and hearing of other players – from half a dozen to hundreds or, in the case of some of the huge national leather conferences, even thousands. Playing in an environment where you’re surrounded with the screams and moans of other bottoms can multiply your own excitement tremendously.
Most play parties take place in a home or industrial space that has been to some degree converted for kinky play. Typically, you walk in the front door – sometimes paying a small fee to cover rent and edibles – and into a socializing space. In this space, people eat, talk and negotiate. In another area you will find one or more play spaces, often dungeon-like rooms filled with thrillingly mysterious equipment: slings, bondage tables, St. Andrew’s crosses – a large X-shaped cross for bondage – spanking horses and so on. Walls and ceilings are equipped with eyebolts to attach you to. Often, the dungeon has some space in which polite voyeurs may sit or stand quietly to watch the play.
Most play parties these days enlist experienced volunteers as “dungeon monitors,” or “DMs.” Dungeon monitors, often identified by an armband or special t-shirt, observe the play and intervene if necessary to preserve the party rules and safe boundaries. Anytime you have a problem at a party, the DM is there to help you. If you have concerns about the safety of a scene you’re watching, you talk to the DM, who is familiar with party standards and is usually the only person authorized to interrupt a scene. DMs are also happy to show you how to use the equipment, to answer any questions, and to bring you safer sex supplies, water, and such items if you’re all tied up and can’t quite reach them.
To make yourself welcome at play parties, respect the house rules. They may vary widely from one party to the next – read the rules sheet, or ask a dungeon monitor or other authority figure if you’re not sure. Do not attempt to join a scene in progress unless you have been specifically invited, and do not interrupt a scene to ask if you can join: this will disrupt the very play you were admiring. Be polite when asking to play with someone and friendly if they decline, and be ultra-res
pectful of people’s boundaries. It’s an act of courage to take off your armor in public, and people who are doing so need and deserve your courtesy and sensitivity.
Intoxication of any kind is a serious breach of party etiquette. Janet once attended an unfortunate party where a first-time attendee, obviously stoned, took one look at a beautiful submissive who was awaiting her master in a classic slave pose and started to giggle. That first-timer was never invited back.
Many parties have a “party safeword” – often, here in San Francisco, the word “SAFEWORD” itself – which is a “Mayday” signal that can be called by a top or a bottom who needs outside help in a scene: for example, a top whose bottom has fainted and who needs help taking care of him, or a bottom who feels his top may be out of control and not respecting his regular safeword. If you hear someone shout the party safeword, be prepared to help.
One of the most radical acts of the sexual revolution is the de-privatization of sex. Party play helps us unlearn our modesty, our shame, our inhibition. It provides a “reality check” as to what it is that BDSM people “really” do. And, last but certainly not least, it’s a great source for hot new fantasies!
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S/M AND SPIRITUALITY
Sexuality has always been our path, even before S/M became available to us. Starting with the task of reclaiming our sexuality from the Puritans, sex has been the path on which we explored psychological growth and healing, feminist empowerment, self-knowledge. and spiritual communion.
In the BDSM communities, spiritual practice has always been common, if not always talked about. A number of the early S/M support groups were established as churches with very serious religious intent. In recent years, ceremony and practice involving S/M and body modification have become more widespread and better known, and many support groups and circles, even businesses, have sprung up to fill the needs of ritual players and modern primitives. It will be impossible to let you know everything about this complex and wonderful subject in one chapter, but we will do the best we can.
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