Kitten says, “Will you please play with me?”… I say, “How?”
This is a blog about asking for what you want. Just because you’re kinky doesn’t mean anyone — even the most Dominant Domly intuitive Old Guard been around a million blocks experienced pervert hedonist kinkster — knows what to do with you if you don’t take responsibility for knowing at least a little about what you want out of play. At the end of the day we all want to be taken care of. We all want to impress our wills perfectly and joyously with our partners. Those are huge sweeping ideals though, and to get anywhere near them realistically means talking about sex, talking about kink, and acknowledging very specifically what turns you on, off, and sideways.
I consider BDSM and kinky sex to be describable somewhere between the concepts of “an adult playground” and “the advanced math of sex”. There’s an enormous cross section of things to do and ways to do most activities. From fetishes centered around materials, objects, or body parts, to blood sports, water sports and beyond, to psychological play such as degradation or interrogation, to pet play (of many sorts) and spiritual or energetic kink, service submission, behavior modification… the list goes on and on infinitely. Clearly everyone who’s into being submissive or bottoming for a night (or a lifetime) certainly won’t do so in the same ways, or even for the same reasons as others do. I teach an entire workshop about the various reasons and ways people approach submission (contact me if you’re interested having me teach in a town near you). It’s impossible to know what, as a Top/Dominant you’re allowed and not allowed to do with another person’s body, mind, and emotions without talking about what they both enjoy and dislike first. Gathering that information is the responsibility of all the people interested in play. It’s not the Top/Dominant’s job to make sure they head up extracting every bit of information from a potential playmate when it hasn’t been offered to them. If it were, a lot less play would happen. Like any method of seduction someone must start the conversation, and everyone must participate for that seduction to successfully go anywhere interesting.
To illustrate: recently I asked a few of my more intimate friends to play with my pup. My pup and my friends are currently in a different state, far away from me, and I figured it would be a nice opportunity for my pup to get some play. All of the people I talked to and my pup are mutual friends of one another, and they all hang out regularly, so it seemed an easy way to instigate from afar. We have pretty much all played together in one form or another, but we generally do so separately and in different combinations. Many of us aren’t into the same things. We all have different prime directives, and those differences matter in how we negotiate playing new games with one another.
Even though there was a general excitement from everyone to play “somehow”, there was not enough direction (on my part, or my pup’s) for everyone to know exactly how to manifest that play. Further conversation within the group was necessary. My pup knew I had encouraged our friends to “yank his chain”, and he entered the party expecting a bit more out of the evening than he ended up getting. When I checked in the following day, I found out that my pup didn’t tell anyone at the party what he actually wanted, and he was disappointed more hadn’t happened. At that point my pup got a good scolding as it turned out he never took the opportunities he had over the course of the evening to directly ask for what he wanted, even though opportunities presented themselves. I expect my subs to be clear communicators and do at least half the heavy lifting when it comes to getting theirs.
Being submissive doesn’t get you off the hook for talking explicitly about what things you desire — in fact most Dominant people who care about being good little hedonists are waiting for some type of permission before bringing the big seductive sadistic hammer down on their prey. No one wants to enforce their will on another person if the outcome will be that person feeling as though the were violated, bullied, manipulated, or taken advantage of. This means submissive people must offer something the get the ball rolling. Even if you’re new to BDSM and don’t know what you like, offer at least that information and be willing to thoughtfully converse about what sounds interesting, scary, and disinteresting to you about BDSM to begin with.
There’s a well known saying in BDSM circles that “the submissive person in any scene is actually the one in control”. This is an important concept to understand, and is ultimately what separates BSDM from abuse. When a sub/bottom withdraws their consent for an activity, it stops. End of story. This gives Tops/Dominants a lot of permission to really get into a scene in nasty yet attentive ways. Knowing that it’s our job to stop when our sub has reached a limit allows us to have fun finding (but not overstepping) limits. If we break our toys we don’t get to play with them anymore. If we violate trust we are liable for the damage we’ve caused — be that physical, emotional, or mental. Just like in every facet of sexuality, “no means no” (or, rather, “red means stop, and hard limits mean no”). I’ll be super mean/sadistic/fun/weird/exploratory/etc. once you give me permission to and some boundaries to watch out for along the way. Maybe you want to be punched really hard but not humiliated. Great! Those guidelines let me know what I should do to you and what I should be careful not to do. Maybe you’d like to be degraded and verbally abused but I shouldn’t leave any marks and don’t get into “little girl” territory in the degradation… Wonderful! I’ll call you a filthy piggy whore and make you bathe in mud rather than literally drag your body across the dirty ground it in a way that might leave scrapes and marks… Perhaps you want to be treated literally like a dog and play fetch and eat out of a bowl and get scratched behind the ears — or, perhaps, “pet” play for you means being treated sub-humanly — kicked, yelled at, and eventually fucked and treated like meat? You can see that these are all very different scenes, and a Dominant will have preferences of one type of play over another, just as a sub will. It’s the worst when you think you’re getting exactly what your fantasy scenario is and then realize “oh no, this is not at all what I thought we were going to do…”.
So know what you want. Explicitly. Practice asking for it. Say it outloud in a mirror ten times before you go out if you have to. Write it down a bunch of times, write scenarios out before you go out to play to practice articulating, at least for yourself, what your fantasies for the evening are. This way if you meet someone you’re interested in, instead of just looking at them blankly and wishing beyond all hope that they’d just be able to read your mind and see the images making you all wet and happy in your head, you actually are prepared to say one or two things about them and get the ball rolling in the right direction.
I do not respond to people who cannot tell me their fantasies. There is nothing to respond to. This is paramount to a big ball of nope for me — nothing’s gonna happen is the outcome. If a sub can tell me even one thing they like, I can ask questions about it. “Oh, so you like getting your balls kicked, how hard? Are there other forms of CBT you like? Do you like rough play in general or is it just located in your genital area that you like abuse? If you like pain in the balls, can I stick needles in them too (devilish grin)?”… The actual scene we’re going to have starts to unfold for me in a way that takes into account the other person’s preferences, considerations, desires, fears, sensitivities, and interest in challenge. All of a sudden I have 45 minutes worth of ideas about what I can do to this person instead of 10 swift kicks to the nuts (which may or may not be satisfying to me), and we’re done.
No one is ever going to know all the answers. However, we each do need to know at least one answer and take responsibility for sharing it with the people we want to play with. That’s how partnership in and out of power play works. Now go get it!
Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
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~Thank you.