How far would you go? #limits #bdsm #submission

By Lisabet Sarai

This month, our group topic is “Pushing Limits”. This theme could be addressed from a wide variety of perspectives: pushing one’s limits as an author, by trying new genres or formats; pushing one’s physical limits (I’m thinking of KD’s and Ashe’s pole dancing classes); pushing the limits of society’s acceptance for erotica. However, as I’m first up, I decided to take the more obvious route and discuss the topic as it applies to dominance and submission.

Although I have a reputation for publishing hot BDSM erotica, I have only modest real world experience. I’ve been involved in one D/s relationship which was quite serious and intense but which lasted, in its active phase, only about two years. Furthermore, during that entire period my Master and I lived in different cities, and early on, on different coasts. So the amount of time we actually spent together “in scene” probably totals no more than a month or two. Nevertheless, that was enough to profoundly influence my sexuality, my world view, indeed my life. Lisabet Sarai very likely would not have existed if not for GCS, to whom many of my books are dedicated.

Regular readers of the Grip will know, from my frequent posts about him and that relationship, how strongly connected to him I still feel, even forty years later and more physically distant than ever.

Anyway, in the context of BDSM, “limits” are actions that the submissive identifies as things she can not or will not do, circumstances that make her so uncomfortable that she rules them out of the BDSM interaction. (I’m going to use the female pronoun for the sub here, though I remind readers that there are plenty of femdom relationships, not to mention M/m and F/f. Furthermore, most of my observations below come from a submissive perspective, which reflects my own preferred role.)

A responsible dominant tries to elicit a statement of limits before starting any BDSM activity, and will generally respect them, not stepping over those lines in the sand. Experienced tops can often deduce a sub’s limits even when she can’t articulate them, by observing her reactions to actions or descriptions.

Part of the thrill of BDSM, however, comes from its unpredictability. If you know exactly what your Master is going to do, a scene can lose its intensity. In addition, a sub gets at least some of her pleasure from the knowledge that she’s satisfying the Master’s desires rather than just her own. What if she’s scared of the idea of getting caned, while her dom is itching to find a nice, flexible rattan rod and turn her butt bright red? Though he might choose to respect her limits at the expense of his own fantasies, she can’t help but be aware of his disappointment and feel as though she’s failed in her devotion to him.

Hence the idea of “pushing limits” — encouraging the sub to go beyond her initially stated constraints, to engage in new, usually more extreme or scary, activities or scenarios. This might sound like a violation of the “safe, sane and consensual” norms of BDSM, but in fact when managed carefully, pushing a sub’s limits can produce a more arousing and intense experience for both parties in the exchange. Why? The dom gets what he wants: more complete power over the submissive, as well as (perhaps) some sadistic pleasure from inflicting more pain or discomfort than he’d previously dared. The sub gets what she wants: the deep conviction that she has pleased her Master as well as pride in her own courage. Most important, however, pushing limits within a BDSM relationship builds trust. The sub learns that she can trust her dom to take care of her, to lead her through the fear to the pleasure beyond. The dom learns that he can trust himself to push his sub just far enough to experience the benefits, but not so far as to cause trauma.

So what about me? When I began my all-too-brief, incandescent relationship with GCS, I knew next to nothing about BDSM. I’d entertained myself with kidnap fantasies growing up, but I’d never thought of myself as the slave type. The concept of limits didn’t apply. He tempted me to step out onto the high wire of power exchange and I followed eagerly, scarcely looking down. At his invitation, I plunged into the murky depths of kinky lust. He gave me reading assignments, The Story of O and Anne Rice’s Beauty series. I devoured them, hungry for more. Whatever he suggested, I was willing to try. Indeed, I even took the initiative, searching out a riding tack store to purchase a genuine riding crop so he could use it on me.

When we were apart he’d quiz me about my reactions to various ideas, or send me images for my comments. He wrote in a letter once, “It never occurred to me that you’d refuse me.” As arrogant as that sounds (and that arrogance thrilled me), it was more or less true.

I understand now that I do have some hard limits: choking or asphyxiation, punching or being hit with a blunt object, extreme sensory deprivation, being fucked in the pussy by an object that has been in my ass. I don’t like the idea of being gagged. Needle play scares me, though I can’t say I’d never do it. But he and I never got to that point. We were still in the breathless, experimental stage—he probably marveling that he’d found such a willing partner, me overwhelmed by the emotional impact of surrender—when we officially broke up. I married a lovely, horny, but definitely vanilla guy. He found another sub, at least for a while. We never really got to the stage of pushing limits.

My memories and feelings for him fueled my first novel and have had an enduring influence on most of my stories since. As I continued to write erotica, I found myself using my tales to explore alternative worlds in which we’d stayed together. What would it have been like, to live together, perhaps to marry? How would our kinky games have evolved? How do you keep the thrill of BDSM alive when your relationship includes all the real world stuff: work, finances, family, illness, children, aging? Can you continue indefinitely to push limits into more extreme activities? How do you know when to stop? And if you do stop, if you draw lines you know neither of you dare cross, will the magic evaporate?

Many of my stories are explicitly about pushing limits, or at least exploring new territory. In “Just a Spanking”, for instance, the dominant asks, “Could you come from just a spanking?” The couple proceeds to answer this question. In “Body Electric”, my heroine succumbs to a charismatic nerd of a dom very much like my own Master, who proceeds to demonstrate his experimental electrical apparatus, to her mingled terror and excitement. In “Muse”, an author of erotic romance finally meets the brutal and demanding dominant of whom she’s dreamed, but never dared write.

One of my most emotional stories of this type is “Limits: A LoveStory”, about a long-established D/s couple who decide to advance to his cutting his initials into her flesh. That story begins:

He's the sadist in our relationship. But I'm the one who's more extreme.

This succinctly captures my fears about myself. Do I really have limits? Would I know when to stop? Would he? And if he did, would I be disappointed?

Fortunately or not, I’ll probably never know. But I continue to speculate on expanding limits in my tales of erotic power exchange, a legacy of that long-ago love.

How Obscenity Gave Me Comfort

By Annabeth Leong

I told you the short version of this story before, by way of introducing myself. I told you about the erotica that really matters to me, the stuff I keep on my shelves and have carried with me for years. Among that collection is Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, an obscene little novella that’s one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read.

I bought it during a trip to San Francisco, at the historic bookstore City Lights, which incidentally happens to be the publisher of the edition as well. The back promised “a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forbidden, obsessive fantasies of excess and sexual extremes.” I binged and purged sexual desire at the time, going on sprees of reading the darkest stuff I could find and then repenting and getting rid of all of it. I bought the book and brought it back to the hotel room I was sharing.

One of the early scenes is of the beautiful Simone, in a black pinafore and black silk stockings and no apparent underwear, sitting in a saucer of milk for the narrator’s titillation (“Milk is for the pussy, isn’t it?” she asks).

Bataille writes:

I lay down at her feet without her stirring, and for the first time, I saw her “pink and dark” flesh cooling in the white milk. We remained motionless, on and on, both of us equally overwhelmed… Suddenly, she got up, and I saw the milk dripping down her thighs to the stockings.

Okay, that’s hot. I’m pretty sure I masturbated the first time I read those words. Pretty much every time my roommate was gone that weekend, I was sneaking pages from Story of the Eye and touching myself.

Back then, I’d been poisoned by those Victorian style narratives, the ones that suggested sex was a slippery slope of depravity. First you lost your virginity, then you got in with the wrong crowd, then you started trying perverse things like homosexuality and sadomasochism, and before you knew it, you’d plunged yourself into an unfathomable sea of madness and debauchery, never to return to respectability again.

A little always led to a lot. One depraved thing would soon lead to something more depraved. Greater sensation replaced lesser sensation. Did it give you a thrill to have your wrists tied with silken cords? Well, guess what, sweetie: soon you’ll be letting someone choke you to death while fucking you in the ass, and how’s that going to look in the papers the next morning, hmmm?

I’d had some experiences that seemed to corroborate this viewpoint. There is a trembling thrill to a first time of any sort, and as long as I was chasing those, there did seem to be no limit.

I’d had a relationship that scared me, one in which I kept getting talked into more and more things I didn’t feel sure about, one that made me feel like a toy this person was intent on breaking. Because I kept having orgasms, he told me I must like what was happening. Because, even years later, I kept having orgasms thinking about it, I thought something essential had been corrupted in me and I was forever in danger of running dark and wild to eventual ruin if I ever let myself out of my self-imposed cage.

I expected that sort of thrill from Story of the Eye. I figured it would all hit me with the dark desire to actually do all the stuff I was reading about. And things certainly escalate from that initial relative innocence, to what I can only call extreme depravity.

By the end of the book, Simone and two of her lovers are kidnapping a priest out of a confessional and raping him while strangling him to death. Simone, who appears to be completely amoral, decides she wants his eye, and she has one of her lovers run it over her body while she’s fucking the other, and eventually inserts it into herself.

I’m going to be completely honest here and say there are things about that scene that turn me on. There are also things about it that horrify me to the core. I am and always have been a hundred percent clear that I would never want to do that in real life. But I’m pretty sure I masturbated to it as well.

This is important for anyone involved with erotica, or indeed sexuality, to know: thinking and doing are different things. In the Bible, Jesus warns, “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Maybe so, but I think it’s vital to distinguish between whatever that is and actually taking the action.

Story of the Eye was what showed me I did have limits. There are and were mechanisms inside myself that would stop me naturally from going forward with certain sorts of sexual depravity. For example: I don’t actually want to hurt anyone else (non-consensually). What’s more, I discovered limits in my mind (thoughts that make me uncomfortable rather than turning me on). While they go farther than the limits of my behavior, they still represent a horizon.

All that made me feel safer. It gave me comfort, and made me feel less helpless.

I think a lot of people try to shut off obscenity, as if it will necessarily have a corrupting influence. But I think it can be good to see that there is a horizon beyond which one will not sail.

I can’t tell you how good it felt to know that at least one person, Georges Bataille, could go farther in thought than I ever would. It’s a grandiose thing to think one’s own debaucheries are the most monstrous possible, but at dark times, before I knew enough about the world, I believed it.

In an afterword to Story of the Eye, Bataille has some interesting things to say about obscenity. He refers to “a profound region of my mind, where certain images coincide, the elementary ones, the completely obscene ones, i.e., the most scandalous, precisely those on which the conscious floats indefinitely, unable to endure them without an explosion or aberration.” Later he calls this the “breaking point of the conscious or, if you will, the favorite place of sexual deviation.”

It really interests me to think of obscenity as the “breaking point of the conscious.” That explains why we all have different definitions of what it is, and it also describes its value. I think, if one can bear to, it’s a good thing to find one’s own breaking points and probe their nature. It helps to know what it’s like at the edges of oneself, to feel defined by those spots, exhilarated by them if that’s what happens, and ultimately less vulnerable from the knowing.

Breath and Time

By Sharazade (Guest Blogger)

There are some branches of yoga philosophy that hold that each person is born with a certain number of breaths. When you have breathed the last pre-determined breath, you die. Therefore, lengthening your breaths, and slowing your rate of breathing, will also lengthen your life.

I’m not sure if I believe that on a literal level—and if I did, it would be a somewhat panic-inducing thought. Every time I jogged a mile and quickened my breathing, I’d be thinking, “Darn it! There goes a month at the end!”

But metaphorically, at least at some level, it does work for me. Some things in our lives are limited, and some certainly seem limited. For writers, two of the biggest are ideas and time.

It’s a question non-writers put to writers: “Where do you get your ideas?” We all know of writers who seemed to have only one book in them—Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights), Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind), Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird). Some authors write many books, but seemingly only one story (no, I’m not naming names!). Some authors who seem downright prolific still worry sometimes that they might have dried up or become repetitive.

When you write in one genre, such as erotica, there’s an increased risk. How many different ways are there to have sex? Fortunately, quite a few—but arguably not an infinite number (or at least, not an infinite number of credible ways).

Fortunately, though, sex—good sex—isn’t about acts, it’s about people. And if there aren’t an infinite number of people, there are at least a good many more than I’ve ever met. Even one person is so much more than one, because you’re constantly changing in reaction to circumstances and experiences. People who have been having more or less the same type of sex with the same person for many, many years (and I am one of these) will say it’s a “you can’t step in the same river twice” sort of thing. I don’t think you could have the same sex twice even if you tried.

Nor is language to describe a variety of people doing a variety of things for a variety of reasons limited. I’m not even opposed to using clichés in erotic writing, as I’ve written before, but those who are needn’t worry that English (or any other language) has been all used up. The classic “poor scholar’s test for plagiarism” is to put seven words of the suspected sentence between quotation marks and plop it into google. That’s also a nice testament to your own originality. It’s encouraging to put your own phrases into google and watch them not come up. Just as painters can still paint unique pictures of flowers, and songwriters new odes to love, so can we still put words together in fresh ways.

So that’s the good news. But there’s another way to see the breath metaphor—as time. We don’t know how many hours have been allotted to us, but we do know there’s a limit. There’s a lifetime limit, and shorter, more pressing limits: only so many weeks before a deadline, only so many days before the weekend, only so many hours before bedtime.

Few writers make a living solely off writing. Instead, writing competes with other, often more lucrative pursuits. My “other job” is editing; and if I have an assured $60 - $75 an hour to edit this, versus a potential $50 if I sell a fiction story… and the mortgage is due in X weeks… Most writers, though, are working a 40+ hour a week job, plus commuting time, and have friends, families, sports, hobbies, and other commitments, and around these they must fit their writing. It can seem circular, sometimes—in order to justify more time writing, the writing should pay; but the writing won’t pay until you can spend more time on it.

Even writing interferes with writing. There is the story crafting itself, but then the editing and revising, then the letters to agents and publishers and anthology editors. Once a story or book is sold comes the blogging and social networking and asking for reviews. Sometimes the “writing to support the writing” takes as much time as the writing.

Whenever I come across that yogic saying on each person having only a certain number of breaths for his/her lifetime, I’m reminded of an old episode of the television comedy “Get Smart.” It doesn’t matter how, trust me, but somehow Max and the Chief get locked inside an airtight room-sized bank vault. Somehow they know the room contains only enough oxygen for them to stay alive for an hour. Once this is established, Max begins vigorously exercising: jumping jacks and push-ups and the like. “Max! What are you doing?!” asks the scandalized Chief. “Hey. You use your air how you want to, and I’ll use mine how I want to,” Max replies.

Now, it would be selfish of us to use up other authors’ air, I mean, time (by pestering them with email or phone calls when they’re working, for example), but yes, we do get to choose how to spend our own hours. We can spend them writing, or revising, or thinking, or relaxing, or experiencing things to later write about, or eating & exercising & sleeping to stay healthy as we write. Everyone will choose a different way to spend those hours. The only mistake, I think, would be to lose sight of the fact that our time—our breath—is limited, and that our choice of how to spend it should be deliberate.

Bio: Sharazade is professional writer, editor, and consultant, with more than 15 books published under another name. She divides her time among Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the U.S. Not surprisingly, her stories tend to feature some aspect of travel--modes of transportation or exotic locales. She enjoys stories that are realistic enough that they might have happened and fanciful enough that they might not have. She values communication, adventure, exploration, passion, and love. Her first collection of erotica, Transported: Erotic Travel Tales, was published by Fanny Press. It is available from Amazon.com Smashwords and Barnes and Noble.

Find Shar at her blog on writing and reading at http://sharazade.fannypress.com.

You might be wondering just what will I actually do?

I know, I am a bad, bad, bad Gripper. I missed the last two weeks, and this post is coming in way late in the day. All I can say is - Student Teaching. Yeah, figured that you would understand.

All week I have been reading the posts from my fellow Grippers, and when I had a spare moment, I have commented. And I have to say, I can see what each of them is saying.

As for myself, well the title should say it all. My husband likes to tease me that for an erotic writer I am the most prudish person that he has ever met.

I don't like (having tried at least twice)/won't try (total ick factor) so many things, several of which I have no real worries about because he wouldn't ask me to. Among these are:
* sex in public
* hardcore BDSM
* pain-play (lowest threashold for pain in the world!)
* EA (see my comment to Lisabet)
* animals just don't turn me on
* nor do people under age, and as I am getting older, under age to me is getting older to - I am sitting at 25 right now
* the standard no-nos: golden showers, scat, necro (although zombie sex, I might be able to find a spin on that one LOL), incest (my sisters just aren't that hot), and so on
* this list can go on ...

... and on ....

... ... and on ...

but I won't bore you with it. Just to say that I am a tad bit more adventurous in my writings than in real life, as you can tell with some of my D/s, and BDSM stories. Prude, remember?

But my Kinky Limit today ... Breast torture.

Yep, that's right.

I have two buddies, whom I love dearly, who used to write for a site devoted to breast torture. Paid good. I thought about it. I debated it, especially with mounting student loan debt. But in the end, I just couldn't do it.

I an write about some things that I will never do in reality (such as mild blood play involving gay kinky D/s vampires as in Blood Slave, and a lesbian couple having sex in a peep show booth, like a story in Private Eyes and oh so many more - all available from Phaze.com). I have even debated an alternate pen name that isn't in any way accociated with "me" for some of the more taboos stories, but I haven't had a good enough story idea hit me that calls for it. So far, I have been cool with everything I have written being associated with me.

When it came to breast torture though, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't write a story where a women got off on having her breasts tortured, and her sig other (male or female) liked doing such things as cutting, binding, piercing, etc her breasts.

Not that I am knocking it for those who do enjoy it, because like I said, there is a LOT of things that my prudish ass just won't do but that I will write about because I know some do enjoy it, nor an I knocking those who write it but might not get off on it. But I reached a personal limit there.

Maybe it is my pain threshold, maybe it is my fear of bloodborne disease, maybe it is the fact that I just don't find blood sexy. Who knows.

But for me that is a major limit. I can say without a doubt that you will NEVER read anything by me that involves breast torture in the more intense sense. I have dabbled with wax, and nipple clamps, but that it the upper limit.

Squick City

By Lisabet Sarai

When it comes to perverse sex, I'm pretty broad minded. There isn't much that I wouldn't consider, at least in a literary or fantasy context. (The real world is something else. It has been a while since I've had the chance to test my actual physical or psychological limits.)

I've written enemas and golden showers (my editor made me excise the latter) and yes, it turned me on. I find incest, especially among siblings, embarrassingly hot. Necrophilia? Well, let's just say I can see the appeal, at least in a fantasy role play like Kathleen's story “Chill”. Bestiality? How can anyone who's ever been licked by a cat or admired a stallion not consider the erotic possibilities? I've never written a BDSM story about knife play, but I've read a few that made me shiver with arousal. (Tess Danesi's “Lessons Slow and Painful” in Fast Girls is the most recent example that comes to mind.)

Eating come? Sure, why not? Rimming? Thrilling, in the right circumstances. Diapers? I've written that into at least one story (“Poker Night”, in my Rough Caress collection). There's a scene in Ruby's Rules where a character gets fucked with a champagne bottle and another featuring clothespins on the labia.

There is one kink, though, that I can't imagine writing, because it scares me silly, despite the fact that I gather it's fairly popular. I'm referring to “breath play”, otherwise known as erotic asphyxiation. In case this isn't familiar to some readers, breath play is basically getting off by being strangled, smothered, or otherwise deprived of oxygen.

I found in my research that there are physiological reasons why hypoxia (the shortage of oxygen) is pleasurable. Supposedly, being deprived of oxygen produces a giddy, hyper-lucid or hallucinogenic state that greatly intensifies the experience of orgasm. According to some sources, the resulting state of bliss is as addictive as cocaine.

Sorry, but I'll choose other methods for my hallucinations.

In the context of a BDSM relationship, breath control obviously carries an emotional charge as well as possibly involving physical pleasure. The sub is literally offering her life to the dominant. I can understand the excitement of that level of trust, intellectually, but I still can't imagine ever be willing to participate in a breath control scene—even though it would pain me to refuse anything to my Master. It's so far outside my comfort zone that I don't think I could even write about it, at least not convincingly.

Yet some authors do. Rachel Kramer Bussel's story “Your Hand on My Neck”, in her acclaimed anthology Please, Sir, is about erotic asphyxiation. Rachel's an accomplished writer with a definitely kinky bent, and I usually resonate with her tales, but this one left me cold. I found it disturbing as opposed to arousing.

And yet...part of me hates to accept that there's anything I couldn't eroticize, if I tried. When I saw Charlotte's topic for the week, I was tempted to push myself and try to write a short piece focused on this, my most serious squick. (Actually, it goes beyond “squick”, which seems to have the connotation of disgust. My reactions to the suggestion are closer to terror.)

Then I thought about all the other stories on my mental list, waiting to be written. Better I should devote my scarce writing time to something more appealing – like gang bangs or face sitting, suspension or branding.

Everybody's got limits, right?