If you’ve ever typed: “How do I Dom myself” or “Rope Bondage for One” this musing is for you.
TW: There is a brief mention of surviving sexual abuse. If that’s a challenge skip right to the Soloing section below. Please protect yourselves, my beauties.
Coming out Kinky
I embraced my kinkster identity a bit later than most. I’m an incest survivor and carried a lot of crappy messages about sex, love, and intimacy into adulthood. Recovery was a pain in the ass. It involved diligent, often grueling, therapeutic work and a lot of pizza.
That story is for another time.
What’s important, is that when I finally untangled it all, I embraced my own sexual needs. I set out to learn my body and mind with the help of my amazing honey. Let’s call him Mr. Crispy. Mr. Crispy is a gem.
As I was learning how I enjoyed expressing my sexuality, I found out I’m a kinkster. The challenge was that Mr. Crispy is a vanilla dude. He’s willing to try things, but his hard limits cross into some of my “I want to try that” spaces. It’s all good. We’re big-time communicators, so whatever comes up gets processed and explored.
Mr. “won’t you be my neighbor” Rogers was right “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.” (Yes, you just read a quote from Mr. Rogers in a musing about kink. Deal with it.)
How do we make it work? We talk about things in detail with honesty and care for ourselves and each other. We’re monogamous by choice because that’s what works for us. If Mr. Crispy is into trying something, then we try it, and for the things that hit Mr. Crispy’s squick-button, I fly solo.
Soloing
Exploring kink on your own is a dance that involves research, knowing your limits, and taking the mantra of safe, sane, and consensual to heart. No one wants to find you dangling naked from a doorknob, dead-as-dead because you wanted to try breath play on your own.
STEP ONE: Research: Learn how to do things safely. There are hundreds of how-to books and blogs out there. Here are some suggestions to get you started:
- Bellesa is an incredible site that is working to empower women by encouraging them to embrace their sexuality and engage their sexual expression without shame or apology. The Collective page offers information galore about health, relationships, and sex. Full disclosure, my beauties, your darling Ms. Stagg contributes to the Erotic Stories section of the site. If you haven’t read my Mound of Gaia series, you should check it out and spend some time discovering the work of the other marvelous writers who contribute to the site.
- The amazing folks at Love Honey have a YouTube channel: Love Honey TV. It offers Vlogs about everything from how to put a condom on a penis to how to use a flogger.
- The Dominant Guide and The Submissive Guide each have hundreds of enlightening articles about domination, submission, self-training, and self-care.
- Kinkly publishes fearless explorations of sex, sexual health, and kink. The contributors are all about making sex and kink mentionable and manageable. There are blogs, Q&A’s, guides, and reviews. Go fall down the rabbit hole.
- The Savage LoveCast is a podcast by the author, LGBTQIA advocate, and sex-columnist Dan Savage. If you’re not sure who Dan Savage is, please find out. He and his husband founded the It Gets Better Project. Dan has been writing and talking openly about sexuality and sexual expression for decades. His podcast is done in a call-in format and he offers sound, thoughtful advice about all manner of sexual expression, including kink.
- Your local toy/fetish boutique (if you live near one) can be a goldmine of information. Take a trip and ask some questions. Most of the time the folks who work in those spaces are knowledgeable, kind, and are willing and excited to share what they know. If talking to folks IRL feels overwhelming, work up to it by starting on the internet.
Go forth and find out what turns you on and how to do that to yourself without getting injured, traumatized, or dead.
STEP TWO: Know Your Limits: Pleasure, however you find it, has a powerful effect on your brain. You need to have an idea of how your particular kinks may affect you before you push your own limits. There are great checklists out there to give yourself a picture of your own soft and hard limits. This article from The Dominant Guide has links to all sorts of BDSM checklists to get you started.
Once you’ve learned how things work, then start playing, but start slow. Spanking is great. But paddling yourself into a frenzy with no aftercare plan is a recipe for disaster. Sub-space and Top-space are real things. If you don’t know what those are, then you need to go back to step one – RESEARCH.
We all have baggage. Be aware of what you are carrying into a solo scene so that you don’t come out the other side traumatized by something you did to yourself. And sometimes, even with the best preparation, you may end up in a space that feels overwhelming. That is why you need a solid aftercare plan for yourself, including someone to reach out to (IRL or virtually) if you are struggling. Which brings me to step three: taking the mantra Safe, Sane, and Consensual to heart.
STEP THREE: Taking Safe, Sane, and Consensual to heart: Safety. I said it earlier, soloing your kinks has the potential to be an amazing experience, but you need to do it in a way that doesn’t end in trauma to your body and/or your mind. For example: if you want to practice self-bondage, leave one hand free and have safety scissors within reach at all times. Never practice breath-play by yourself. If you are spanking yourself, never spank the area around your kidneys.
Know your kinks. Know your body. Know your mind.
Sane play. Pushing your emotional and physical limits is thrilling but don’t push yourself into spaces you are not ready to go. If something gives you icky belly, don’t do it. You have nothing to prove to anyone. Kink play is about exploring your connection to pleasure not challenging some deeply ingrained core belief or physical limitation that is going to leave you wrecked in body and mind.
Let’s say it again: Know your kinks. Know your body. Know your mind.
Consensual. Do not involve others in your self-play without their permission. EVER. If you want to go out into the world wearing a remote control vibrating butterfly, knock yourself out. That could be delightful. But DO NOT hand the remote over to some unsuspecting friend or lover or stranger and ask them to press the button without telling them what it is. That is engaging someone else in a sexual act without their knowledge or consent. That’s not exploring your kinks, that’s the definition of sexual assault.
Learning what turns you on is an an incredible adventure. Revel in your desires and give yourself permission to find your pleasure. It’s worth it. I promise.
Thanks for reading, my beauties.
Be well, Be Wonderful, and Be You.
Anne Stagg 