It has been a little while since I have answered one of the many fine questions asked on twitter so I thought I’d try tackling another one.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on limits – negotiating, hard/soft, when it’s good/bad to try and push them and how..
Yesterday I wrote about the BDSM Checklist and how we use it as an ongoing guide (I even have it open right now reviewing what her past answers have been) it is a useful tool for reviewing limits and I can see that there are a few that need revisiting. A prime example would be ageplay. On her initial list it was marked as a hard limit. That she was a woman and wanted to be treated like a woman and not a child. But we have discovered through talking about various different fantasies and seeing where they lead that this is not a limit at all but something that just hadn’t been explored. I will leave the details of just how we (yes we, it was on my list too) arrived at a different place (I will confess that this post did make me hard) than where we started for another post.
For us any discussion about limits requires… well an actual discussion. Neither of us just gets to say no, I am never doing that without a chat about our reasoning behind it. This helps each of us understand why this particular kink doesn’t work and why we can’t do it. For some the rational is easy to understand. Molly hates the cold, nothing will make her safeword faster than if she is chilled to the bone. Nothing to argue about there right? Except…
There is some temperature play that does work for her, chilled glass dildo, the cold of the blade of my knife against her skin. None of things would have ever come to light without a test of her limits, the trick is how do you get there? It can get tricky with some of these things because discussion of kinks can often give away future possible plans and that can really ruin the surprise, on the other hand you don’t want to make the surprise be that after discussing the hard limit on no about kidnapping and that maybe it might be fun, that you go and plan a kidnapping for her and she maces you. That isn’t the good kind of surprise!
It is about patience and slow progress, about the little things that skirt the edges, you test and evaluate. Whisper what you might like to do to push a boundary and check the response. Wait a while and bring it up in discussion, analyze the answers and wait. That slow walk to understanding if they really are hard limits or if there are edges that can be played with. Sometime there are not and other times there are delightful little filthy secrets that you get to poke and prod.
All of these thing apply to my limits too (what, you don’t think Doms get to have limits? Well we do) and in the end the best short answer I can give to the question is to never stop exploring, even those hard and difficult and seemingly brick wall limits often aren’t as firm as they might seem at first glance and who knows what you might be missing if you don’t even discuss them.
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