Safety

Spanking is very safe. That’s why it’s been used as a punishment since the beginning of time: you can whack someone’s bottom very hard indeed, and it can hurt a great deal, but if you whack in the right way with the right sort of utensils there will be no lasting damage.

This doesn’t mean that there are absolutely no risks.

Let’s suppose you get up in the mood for spanking and discover that your spank buddy is available. Good news! You drive over and the two of you enjoy a hard, long spanking, and follow that up with some hot sex.

But is this all safe? Of course not! Any automobile ride is risky, and even with a condom you can catch a sexually transmitted infection from the sex.

Nobody has ever gotten HIV from a spanking. The most serious physical problem I’ve been personally acquainted with was my own case of spanker’s elbow. Yes, it got so bad I needed surgery. Take it easy on your arm, build up gradually, and you should be able to avoid that.

Back to general safety. The most important risks are not related to spanking itself but to people you do not know well and to activities that aren’t exactly spanking, such as bondage. Let's start with the big one, people who know how to act like the man of your dreams but who secretly want to do you serious harm.

Axe Murderers:

How to avoid meeting one or if you do meet one how to stay clear of the axe

I’m writing this to the woman who is interested in meeting someone online. There are hazards with people you meet at BDSM events as well; that's a topic for another day. Men have safety issues, as well, but their problems aren’t as serious, especially if the man is doing the tying up and the woman is being tied and spanked. Maybe I’ll write about the man’s safety if I get enough requests . . .

There is a lot of information online about meeting people safely. This is my own perspective, and I encourage you to look around for more information. You need to find a system that feels right to you. The fora on bondage.com have lots of discussions about this, and of course Google will help you find your way.

When you think hard about the safety rules, you’ll realize they are imperfect. There is always some way a determined person who is very clever and a good liar could harm you. Of course, you could also have a bad situation with someone you meet through friends or at church; the only way to be perfectly safe is to stay home with the door locked. Unless there's a flood or a fire.

But if you follow the safety rules carefully, you can reduce the odds of bad outcomes by a lot, and hopefully the bad guy will go after someone else who is less careful. Follow the rules, follow your instincts, and your biggest danger will be emotional turmoil or romantic disappointment . . . and I have no rules to prevent that! As my friend Mrs. Mish once said, “There are no safe words for my heart.”

I’m going to go through the process of meeting one another online and then in person with special attention to safety. The meeting process increases both parties’ knowledge, understanding, and comfort in steps.

Getting to know each other moves by steps from e-mail, to telephone calls, to meeting in a neutral place. Finally, if all of that goes well, you will find yourself over his or her lap. But there are those preliminary hurdles to pass first.

We start with e-mail, of course, which should tell you a lot about each other. Preferably several e-mails.

The next step is a phone call. Your identity should be protected for this. In order to do that, you should call either from a phone you don’t usually use, or block caller ID. He shouldn’t have more information about you than he needs to have at the time. There is an asymmetry here, since of course you have *his* phone number, but that’s a realistic reflection of the greater margin of safety that you, as the woman, need.

When you first meet in person, get together at a restaurant with a clear agreement that this meeting is just to get to know one another. At this time there is no reason for him to know your last name or any other specific details about you. Even if you both feel the chemistry is perfect, don’t make a final decision about meeting for a spanking until after you’ve gone home. That way you have time to heed any subtle misgivings, any red flags from your intuition, that otherwise you might suppress.

The first time you meet for a spanking, and for as many times after that as you wish, you should have a safe call. This means that someone knows where you are, calls you on your cell phone during the scene (perhaps more than once), and sends the police if you don’t answer with the code reply for “I’m really OK.” There’s more information about safe calls in various sources, I’m not going to repeat all of it here, but it’s worth doing.

You should have safewords during a scene; I like to use yellow and red. I personally don’t feel they are really part of the safety rules, but rather the scene rules. I discuss safewords in detail in Pain and Safewords.

Finally there is the question about the tempo of these steps. You should never feel rushed (that is definitely a warning sign!) but it is a good idea to move along steadily. This prevents you from building mental images of a perfect person in your head and spending too much time in fantasy la-la land. It’s better to meet in person, rather than spending a prolonged time on just e-mails, because you will have a much better idea if you are really compatible.

Home