I’m not sure if this post counts as advice, a rant or me just kicking an idea around. Possibly all of the above. It covers some thoughts that have been top of mind recently and I wanted to get them down in an ordered form.
I’ve been thinking about scenes where the participants have a particular goal in mind. For example, doing an intense whip scene, or trying out a new challenging activity or driving someone crazy with a long tease and denial session. The kind of scenes where it’s not a freestyle, as the mood takes us type of play, but where there is a game plan to execute. For those kind of scenes, I think it’s important to realize that all submissives have a particular ‘stress budget’ available, and the game plan has to be designed so it can reach the goal while sticking within that budget.
We often talk about activities, particularly intense ones, in a binary fashion. Either someone can take it or they can’t. We treat each action, like swinging a cane or tying someone up, in isolation. It’s under their limit and OK or it’s over their limit and they safeword. In reality scenes are often a mixture of activities, and even relatively simple ones like basic bondage, take up some of the submissive’s capacity for handling more. For example, I don’t have an issue with gags, and they’re certainly not a limit for me. But I can take more pain and do more intense activities without one than with one.
I think a better way to think about it is as if each submissive has an overall stress budget that can be allocated across different simultaneous activities. For example, if you’ve tied, gagged and put nipple clamps on a submissive, then you’ve already spent some of his budget on three different things. If CBT is next on the menu, it needs to fit in the remaining budget, or you need to lose one of the existing stress points to create more headroom for new play.
Every submissive starts with a different size of budget. And the cost of different activities will consume different amounts of the budget, depending on the person. For example, sticking a hood on me burns a lot of my budget. I can handle it, but mix it with other activities, and I quickly reach my limit. On the other hand, piecing is a relatively low cost item for me. I can handle it even when combined with a lot other things at once. Other submissive may be exactly the reverse of that.
It’s also possible to increase someones budget. Sexual arousal typically makes it possible for a submissive to deal with more intense play. As endorphins and adrenaline flow then the budget for play increases. Of course what triggers that is again unique to the submissive. For me, things that increase my budget include eye contact, physical touch and blending sensuality with the sadism. For someone else it might the sound of the domme’s heels on the floor, a particular outfit or a roleplay scenario.
If my theory of stress budget is correct – what are the implications for constructing scenes? I’ll save that for part two in tomorrow’s post. Until then, I’ll leave you with an image of a budget that’s being spent in many different ways.
I believe this is by Miss Velour. She’s a UK based pro-domme and you can visit her professional site here.
Paltego, thank you for this very perceptive comment. I think you have hit the nail on the head exactly!
There is another dimension to this: the stresses of daily life can also eat into a sub’s kink budget and one of the important preparations for a session is to carefully manage your work and life balance in the days or maybe in the week or two before hand so the sub will arrive in the Domme’s hands fresh and ready physically, emotionally and psychologically, so he (in my case) can give the Domme just as rewarding a trip for her as he hopes she will give him
That’s a good point about how the budget can very depending on mood and other life issues. Definitely true. I’ll try and add that to my final post on the subject. Thanks for the feedback!
-paltego