Here’s a final few thoughts to conclude my theory of the submissive ‘stress budget’. See the earlier parts here and here.
Phil raised an excellent point in a comment on the first post: The submissive’s budget can also be diminished by stress and overload from daily life. Sometimes kink can be a release from that pressure, but in other situations it’s necessary to take it slowly and allow more time to grow the budget as play unfolds. It also mean a submissive has a duty to perform self-care and be aware of their own mental state prior to playing.
I hope all my readers understand that the budget concept I’ve described is meant very much as a thought experiment and a theoretical way to think about more complex scenes. I’m not suggesting submissives start negotiating scenes by saying their budget today is 75 and while caning is down 10 on the stress-o-meter, whips are up to an expensive 45. I’m also not suggesting that dommes keep a running budget count in their head during play. This is just a possible abstraction for thinking about limits in a slightly more realistic way than the traditional hard/soft definitions.
Finally, if anyone new to kink and femdom is reading this and thinking that it all seems very complicated and somewhat daunting, then all I can say is please disregard everything I’ve written. You can absolutely ignore all this and have an amazingly fun kinky time. Just grab your partner by the balls, bite his neck and whisper that he’s your slut puppy in his ear. I’ve played for years without caring about any of this and had some amazing experiences. You don’t need to understand film theory to enjoy a great movie, and you don’t need to deconstruct kink to enjoy dominating or submitting to someone.
In line with that idea, and as a change from the last couple of crazy kink images, here’s a simple shot to finish on.
I believe this is the actress Giovanna Ewbank with her husband Bruno Gagliasso. You can see more shots from this sequence here and here.