Tag: Photograph

If you’ve not seen my previous post, then I suggest this post will make a lot more sense if you go read that first. Or alternatively, read this one, try and guess what the hell I’m talking about, and then see if you’re right afterwards. Your call.

Assuming you buy my theory of a submissive stress budget, the obvious follow-up question is: What are the implications? How should I use this information?

The simple answer is to be aware of what your submissive budget is and what it costs to spend it on different activities. That’s certainly a necessary thing to do, but hardly radical new thinking. Where I think it gets interesting is when you start planning out scenes with specific goals in mind. Then I think the idea of a budget helps focus the play. You can evaluate if each new element introduced advances you towards the goal or simply wastes budget.

For example, let’s say you both want to do an intense impact play scene. In this case the bigger the whacks the happier everyone ultimately is. This means the budget needs to be focused on riding out the impacts. So make the submissive’s physical position relaxed, give him room to wiggle and don’t add other clips, clamps or spiky things. If you use bondage, make it light and comfortable. Mix the impacts in with things that grow his stress budget, like touch, teasing and visual stimulation. Spend all the budget on the focus on the scene, not on the details around the edges.

As another example, let’s say you want to try out urethral sounding, but that’s a new and scary thing for the submissive. In this case do the sounding as a very separate activity from other play. Making all his budget available for the sounds will maximize the chance of success and minimize the freak-out potential. Then, when he’s had a chance to calibrate, you’ll both have an idea what could be combined with them in future play.

We typically think about kink and BDSM as being all about maximizing intense experiences. But sometimes you want to achieve a particular effect with the minimum amount of stress. For example, tight hoods burn a lot of my stress budget, but I do enjoy sensory deprivation scenes. The solution to this conundrum is to use ear plugs and blindfolds. That achieves the same effect, but leaves a lot of my budget available for adding bondage, breathing control, e-stim devices, etc. In that kind of scene the domme is trying to add a lot of layers, but not burn too much budget on the early ones.

I’ve a few concluding thoughts on this topic I’ll save for a third and final post. Given I was just discussing sensory deprivation, I thought it’d be appropriate to finish with this image. I’m guessing a lot of his budget has been spent on that impressive wrap. Hopefully he’s got enough left to handle whatever she’s planning for the bit left sticking out.

This is obviously from the Divine Bitches site.

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.