I am newly exploring the BDSM community.
What is your advice to practice safely as a beginner?
So, I love this question because it lets me say the thing that I always say which is that safe isn’t really a thing.
We can do safer.
We can do risk-aware.
We can do managing our risk.
We can do harm reduction but safe is a goal that I don’t think any of us are ever going to hit.
When it comes to practicing BDSM, to some extent there’s always a level of risk involved.
What kind of risk, how much risk depends on what kinds of activities you’re doing.
So, for instance, if you’re doing impact play, depending upon what kinds of implement somebody is using, depending upon where on your body they’re hitting, there are different kinds of risks.
If you’re doing more kind of psychological play or more DS-focused play, there are risks to your emotional health or to the way that you feel.
There are risks to your relationships.
There are all different kinds of risks.
So, what I would say is come at this real perspective that is less about “How can I be safe?” and work from a perspective of “How can I be aware of the risks and mitigate them to the best of my ability? How can I decide which risks are OK or I’m OK taking and which risks are too much for me?” because everybody has different levels of risk tolerance.
The next thing I would say is do a lot of reading.
Listen to a lot of podcasts.
By reading, I do not mean Fifty Shades.
Look, I will never judge you for enjoying hot porn.
Hot porn is hot porn.
I get it.
If Fifty Shades makes you super titillated, great.
Like I will not yuck your yum.
But I mean read books like The New Topping Book and The New Bottoming Book by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy.
Read The Heart of Dominance by Anton Fulmen.
There are a ton of really great books out there about kink and BDSM.
Mollena Williams-Haas wrote Playing Well with Others with Lee Harrington.
Look for those kinds of authors, authors who are involved in the kink community who are well-known educators in the kink community.
Read their stuff.
If there is a kink community near you, whether that’s a dungeon space, whether that’s different groups of people who do kink, try to get involved with it and talk to a lot of people and go with the expectation that you’re not going to be playing with anyone for a little while.
I know.
This sucks.
I’m such a like spoilsport but a lot of people decide they want to get into kink and they want to like dive in all the way right away and I get where that comes from.
It makes a ton of sense.
You’re super excited.
You’re super into it.
But when we dive into something like kink, we tend to not know the kinds of questions we have to ask and we tend to not know how to vet someone really well because my next big tip is you need to vet the people that you’re playing with.
So, what does it mean to vet someone in a kink context?
If I’m vetting someone for a job, I’m going to get their resume.
I’m going to go over their resume.
I might verify different parts of it.
I’m going to contact their references and talk to those people.
I’m going to do an interview with them and see how they answer questions.
I might give them like a trial test or have them come in for a couple of trial days to see how they function in different settings.
Part of the vetting process is about determining how a person is and how well that lines up with who they depict themselves to be because in reality, most of us tend to be very good at putting forward like the best aspects of ourselves and we tend to be varying degrees of good at being honest about the things we’re less good at, the things we struggle with, the ways in which we sometimes are not as good to the people we play with as we could be.
So, when you’re new to a community, there are unfortunately – as with any community, as with dance communities, as with game communities, there are unfortunately in many communities people who are looking for folks who are brand new to play with, so that they can take advantage of those people who don’t yet know what is and isn’t OK.
Anyone who wants you to be super exclusive, tied down to them in a contract right away is not someone who is good for you.
They might frame it as training.
They might frame it as like a trial period.
Like whatever they’re framing it as, anyone who tells you that you should not spend some time when you’re new to the community talking to different people, trying things out with different people, exploring different people, probably not a good person to play with because you don’t know yet what you enjoy.
There are tons of things that we’re into in fantasy that when we try them in real life, don’t work for us the same way.
That doesn’t mean that our fantasies were wrong.
It means that what works for us in brain space isn’t always the same thing that works for us in meet space.
So it’s important for you to have some time to explore different things with different people, see how you respond, see who you respond to, see what activities work well for you and if you’re locked down with one person, a lot of times someone who’s asking you to be super exclusive to them really fast is someone who knows that you having exposure to other people will lead you to think that they are not a great person to be with.
So, make sure that you give yourself some space and some time to explore with different people, different activities, different ways of doing things.
Kink is not always sexual.
Kink may be sensual.
Kink may give you sexy feelings but not all kink involves sex.
In fact a lot of public dungeon spaces do not allow sex of any kind or if they do allow sex, they require everybody to use barrier protections or then they only allow certain kinds of sexual acts.
So, knowing what the kind of rules are going to be is important for you but also it’s important to remind yourself that just because you enjoy doing kink with someone doesn’t mean you have to have sex with them.
It doesn’t even have to mean that you’re entering into some big, deep, meaningful relationship with them.
There are plenty of people I’ve done scenes with because they wanted to try something out and so we did a quick little scene for them to try something and then we like shook hands.
We’re like, “Good game. Let’s move forward.”
Kink and BDSM are play.
We call it playing with each other.
We talk about doing scenes because, you know, as Dan Savage has put it, it’s cops and robbers for grown-ups with their pants off.
What we’re doing is a lot of very interesting, experimental stuff and sometimes that means that you need to be able to free yourself from expectations and how it’s supposed to look.
You’re never required to have sex with someone you enjoy doing kink with.
Someone may only want to do kink with people who also like having sex with them.
That’s valid and that means that might not be someone you want to play with.
You can explore things with lots of different people.
If you still don’t know what you like, a lot of places will have events called “tastings” and during a tasting, they will have different people there who know how to top, different activities and they will let people who want to try those activities try it out with them topping them.
So, one dungeon in Philadelphia that I went to, they had a tasting where someone was doing electro play, someone who was doing wax play, someone who was doing fire, someone who was doing knives.
So, you could go in and try all these different things out and see what you enjoy, what you don’t with someone who is there for the strict purpose of just like giving you a test ride of whatever it is.
They’re not expecting you to give them anything back.
It’s not any kind of an expected transaction.
It’s just you show up and have fun.
The next thing I would say is like make friends on the scene.
Focus on making friends first.
Focus on making connections first rather than finding tons of people to play with because the people in the scene know who the other good people in the scene are.
When you go into a new scene, if you start making friends with folks and find people who you genuinely connect with, who it seems like share similar values to you around things like communication, transparency, honesty, like the people who share your values will know who else in that community shares your values.
They will also know if there are any folks in the community who are a missing stair or who you maybe want to try to avoid.
Again, any community, because we are humans, is likely to have at least a handful of folks who are not right folks.
Kink is no different in this way from like I said other communities.
I used to be a social dancer and every social dance community I was ever in had at least a couple of folks who were kind of predators.
I’m not saying that he was a predator but my ex-husband tended to date young women who were new to the scene.
He was a teacher and an organizer and he would date the young women who are new to the scene.
They would have a relationship and when they broke up, the woman will disappear.
Again, I’m not saying he was a predator but some people are looking for those folks who are new to the scene because they don’t know what else to expect.
So, spend some time making friends.
Spend some time getting to know people in a way that is not about doing stuff with them in a kink context or a sex context because you need that community to help you figure out how to navigate it.
A lot of communities also will have either ramp-up classes or they will have different ways to help people enter into their scene and so look for that.
If you don’t have a big BDSM scene near you, there are tons of resources online.
FetLife is the biggest social community for kinksters.
I hate the FetLife website.
The user interface is physically painful to me but I still use it every so often because it’s the best way to meet kinky people and find out about kinky events.
There are also often Facebook groups.
There are Discord chats.
There are all kinds of things.
Something good to look for is a munch.
So in the kink world, a munch is a gathering of people where you get together at like a restaurant rather than at a kink or dungeon space, so that you can just meet people and talk to them without there being any expectation of play happening.
It’s a really good way to start getting to know people and meet them and talk about things and find out what’s going on in the community.
What else would I give?
Tips for beginners.
Go slower than you think you need to.
Start simpler than you want to.
Give yourself lots of time, right?
You’re not going to try all the kink things you want to try in the next two weeks.
You got to give yourself some time and space.
If you’ve been contemplating this for a couple of years, it might take you a couple of years to actually get to the point where you can really explore this in a way that’s healthy for you.
I know it can be frustrating and you want to do it now but it is important for you to give yourself that time and space so that you can find people who are good connections for you, who you can trust as much as possible, who will negotiate with you in a way that is upfront.
That’s the last thing, negotiation.
All the kink is negotiated.
There is no point at which anyone does not get to say no.
Sometimes you will have like a negotiated “We can’t say no except under these circumstances,” but there needs to always be a way to renegotiate that outside of your roles.
So outside of the dominant-submissive role, outside of the top-bottom role because if we don’t have that space to meet each other as equals to have these discussions, it’s nearly impossible for true consent to be present.
So, when you’re having a negotiation with someone, someone who is a better person to play with is someone who during that negotiation will ask you about like what do you like, what don’t you like.
How will I know when a scene is going well for you?
How will I know when a scene is going poorly for you?
Do you ever lose your words?
Do you have any things with your body that I need to know about?
Are there things that you absolutely hate?
What are your hard limits?
Those are things you’re an absolute no to all the time.
What safe words do you use?
If you use green, yellow, red, what do each of those words mean for you?
All of these kinds of questions, someone who’s really asking them wants to have a conversation with you and is looking to figure out whether you two are a good fit to play rather than trying to convince you to play with them, that’s a much better person to play with.
Sometimes there’s someone who is super freaking hot and we really, really, really like them and we really want them.
But they might be a terrible person for us to play with because what they’re super into is what we are super not into.
So again, you want to find someone who will negotiate with you, who understands how to negotiate and who’s asking you those questions that are about your experience, what you like, what works well for you and how to understand in your body when things are going well or not well.
The other thing is aftercare.
Aftercare is basically the way that you help take care of someone after a scene.
Everybody needs aftercare, both tops and bottoms.
It can look different for different people.
If you’re playing with someone who does not do aftercare, it is valid for them to say that they don’t do it and personally for me, I will not play with someone who doesn’t do aftercare because whether I’m topping or bottoming, I need that time after a scene for us to like check back in, reconnect, make sure we’re OK, come back to normal head space.
Folks have found in studies that when you’re doing kink or BDSM, for the people who are bottoming, they can often get into a state of consciousness called “subspace” which has been shown through like brain scans to be very similar to a meditative trance.
Similarly, people who are tops can get into top space, which can be this kind of altered state where you just get very much into what it is that you’re doing.
So, it’s important to have that transition period after a scene to get back into normal head space, to get back into being a regular human being rather than being stuck in that top or bottom space of trying to come back alone.
Like I said, there are a ton of great books out there.
This is a huge topic.
You could teach an entire like two-hour class, probably a multiple class series on how to get into BDSM and in fact some groups have done that in the past.
The Society of Janus used to offer like new-to-kink classes where they would have people come in, talk them through all the different things, take them on like a field trip to a dungeon.
But check out.
There are so many resources online.
There are so many great books.
Check them out.
Do a lot of research.
Talk to people.
Get to know them as humans.
Build some friendships.
Build some community and then look at starting to play a little bit.
Start low, go slow.
It’s going to feel like it’s taking forever but I promise it’s a much more sustainable way to do things.
