Notes from Camp Crucible

As most of our readers here know, I'm at Camp Crucible this weekend with m. I'd anticipated not posting till I returned, but the program book claims that the nightly slideshows, photographed during the day by Pheroscope photography will be posted to the Crucible website, and it suggests we tell our friends to go there to "see what they're missing." So far it doesn't look like anything new has been posted, but I'll float the link out anyway: http://campcrucible.com/Voyage/front.html

Gods help us if they use my savage visage on film...not the best advertisement. The lovely m. has declined to be photographed. Last night's slide show featured two people that some of our dear readers may recognize, and one photo was actually pretty flattering.

Driven to Tears with Sarah Sloan

This is almost certainly the last post before Camp Crucible. I'm still going to recap the Dark Odyssey workshops, but I'll probably insert some Camp material as well.

So recapping Sarah Sloan's saturday morning workshop “Driven to Tears.”

A couple of notes from this workshop. Sarah mentioned Tristan’s new site. OpeningUp.net which is aimed at , polyamory. Good source.

Sarah also put in a good word for the sex/kink aware professionals site. Professionals, particularly Psychologists and Counselors, are very important, and this is an excellent site for finding a professional who can meet your needs in a non-judgmental fashion.

This was probably one of the best workshops of the weekend, and I’ve mentioned I love Sarah as a presenter. This probably came closest at really getting into some of the aspects of psychological play that I’ve found drive me. I left this workshop very emotionally jazzed, and that was notwithstanding the bloody mary I sucked down on the way out the door. It was more intellectual than some of the other workshops. Said Sarah “I like to use big words. If I paid $20,000 a year to learn a word, I like to use it.”

I think it’s going to be very difficult to give a linear account of this workshop because it wasn’t that linear. There was some audience participation and just a lot of interesting bits and pieces.

Sarah plays as both a top and bottom, and got her start in the formal leather community in Richmond, so spent a lot of time in gay bars polishing boots (as we’ll learn later). She was very forthcoming about her own emotions and experiences. One of the early anecdotes she related…and this was a very anecdotal workshop, was of a period a few years back where she found herself in an endless cycle of being in pain and was unable to cry.

I want to mention that Sarah is a pretty together person from appearances. You always get that in the Community…people who appear very together on the surface but clearly have some significant pain in the depths. But she’s not somebody who gives off an atmosphere of fragility. She talks very clearly and calmly about these things, and is entertaining and generally pretty upbeat.

At any rate, she called a top she knew, I believe I recall that she said he was a gay male top, and said, to paraphrase “Could you come over and beat me till I cry”

He was hesitant at first, and she discovered that it was because he was afraid of promising her that anything was going to change after the scene. I could feel this very strongly as it’s always been an issue for me. What happens if you do your damndest and fail to move someone. Again we’re hitting this old school approach of just beating someone very hard, but I think it’s true of mental play as well, and Sarah’s workshop went far afield of simple beatings.

At the time it was about the strongest beating she had taken, though she said, “I have since been beaten harder”…her summary “I wanted him to continue to hit me until he literally though my body wouldn’t take it anymore or until I told him to stop. “

This provided a foundation to talk about serious edgeplay of all sorts. The push in this workshop though wasn’t of flying or sending people away, but more the psychological aspects that are so important to me in terms of extreme play.

There was a lot of discussion on the trust issues. Sarah tackled what I see as the core dichotomy of being a Dominant: “How you are going to balance their need to trust you with inducing fear in them. “ This is an issue from the bottom point of view as well. “If you have to monitor ‘you’re hitting me too hard’ you can’t really let go and trust the top. Bottoms can’t let go when they do let go, Bottoms stop being picky”

“It’s an Inherent contradiction. I want to instill fear, but I want them to be able to trust me.”

Illustrating she mentioned a woman who had told her “What I need in a top is the exact opposite of what I need in a husband. I need to feel loved by my husband and afraid of my top.”

I think there’s room for feeling loved by the top to, but it’s something to be very careful with.

Some useful point of reference. Sarah suggested “the Top needs to know what you look like when you’re good, and what you look like when you’re not good. If when you push back against the restraints you’re struggling because you like it, or because you are really trying to get away and can’t safeword.” This hit something that I’ve always observed. Every submissive has different signatures, different tells, in how she responds to stimulus, so that you can tell by looking if she is processing it, or if things are going south. Learning to read an individual girl’s “tells” is sometimes difficult, but always rewarding, because it broadens the play you can risk doing.

There was talk of a lot of various types of extreme scenes, including psychological touchstones like incest and humiliation. One comment I thought was interesting is that “there is no outside gauge of success or failure on humiliation play.”

Sarah also mentioned “I know a lot of people who say they don’t or you should never use SM scenes as a way to process through rape, etc. Maybe so, but that’s going to happen. It’s going to jump up and hit you sooner or later if you keep playing.” And there is no reason it cannot be intentional. “You don’t have to get raped by a stranger to relive a rape experience”

I got a few interesting rules out of this workshop. Sarah suggested that it’s not uncommon to have a fairly big crash about three days after a big scene, which she usually handles with alone time. She also suggested following up a successful intense scene with something pretty light. She suggested ways to give a partner aftercare chores that help buffer them against crashing, like “get rest, eat a kit kat bar,”

There was some talk of the spiritual side too, with references to Raven Caldera who writes about BDSM as a spiritual tool through an “Ordeal Path.” Again, I’m not against it and I can think of worse things, but one reason I am involved in emotional release through sexual play is that I left behind the concept of emotional release and catharsis through religion and seek it through drama and intimate relationships with other human beings. So reintroducing religion into that equation isn’t something I’m really interested in.

A better framing for me in regards to this sort of edge/emotional play was “liminal space” http://parole.aporee.org/work/hier.php3?spec_id=19650&words_id=900 a fascinating concept I’ve been doing a bit of reading on. I think in this context the concept is to push into a mental and emotional space where transition can happen. This fits in better than strict spirituality with the idea that BDSM is a powerful vehicle for catharsis, and the focus of this workshop was Physical/Mental/Emotional catharsis.

One thing I found very constructive is that Sarah was not afraid to phrase hard questions. She also had a sense of humor, talking about a very analytical partner who will not stop talking during scene…so she gags him.

Some questions that were asked is “How far is far enough” and the comment was made that “You can only get so far into people’s heads,” a truth I’ve felt and lived. There was also discussion of thinking seriously about what you get out of extreme emotional play from either side.

There was a warning that this is not the sort of casual play you can just walk away from. Sarah felt you need to keep in some degree of contact, check in and make sure that your partner was doing alright, mentally and potentially physically… “Take them to the hospital a few days later when that hand doesn’t feel better.”

Talking about intense scenes, Sarah described a scene where after considerable discussion a breath control play partner asked her to choke him to unconsciousness…something that makes this a particularly relevant post with the release of Choking Jennifer in the erotic fiction area.

All in all it was a great workshop and I love Sarah as a presenter. Quotes by the way are attributed with permission.

Grand Theft Auto

So apparently all you need to know about dating is actually available through Grand Theft Auto. Who'd have thunk...

"[I]f you kill a girl through abuse, she will no longer be your girlfriend."

Serious Pain Sluts

Continuing my run through the workshops of Dark Odyssey, I am going to talk a little about Dossie Easton’s “Bottomless Pits: Serious Pain Sluts,” workshop.

I loved the concept of this workshop. The truth is that most of my partners aren’t/ and have not been serious pain sluts. I’m fine with that. I absolutely do not think you judge a submissive by how much pain they can “take” you judge them by what they do with whatever pain they choose to take. And if that is none at all, it’s still fine. D/s is not necessarily about pain at all. Even when I jokingly use the term “pain slut” really I don’t mean it in the full sense. It’s flattering to a girl and a woman who has taken a good bit of pain may like to hear it. But you know there are levels.

Still I’m intrigued by the concept, and I have played with one or two girls who did have a strong appetite for being hurt a lot, as opposed to just being hurt.

I have tremendous respect for Dossie Easton. For folks who don’t recognize her name, she’s a family therapist based in San Francisco, CA. Easton is the co-author with Catherine Liszt (Janet Hardy) of The Ethical Slut, Radical Ecstasy; When Someone You Love is Kinky, The New Topping Book; and The New Bottoming Book. Dossie and Cathy were my introduction to reading about BDSM, and born in 1944, Dossie is a legend in the leather community. Ethical Slut is sort of the quintessential starter book for Polyamory and even if I don't agree with all of it, I think it's a huge starting place, and has done a lot of people a world of good in just making them feel it's a normal, healthy lifestyle. Dossie's Bachelor Thesis says it all Sex is Nice and Pleasure is Good for You.

Easton is frank about her experiences with childhood abuse. She talked about a scene gone bad, where she “came to believe that it was actually non-consensual.” In that scene, she said “I am mostly looking at my father and saying ‘see how hard you can beat me motherfucker.’” This reminded me of a comment in Sarah’s workshop (which we’ll get to in a day or two) where she mentioned that “it is fine to say that you are not looking to re-enact rape, or abuse, that you’ve experienced. But one day they are going to come up.”

That said, the workshop wasn't quite what I'd hoped. It really concentrated an awful lot on the heroics of flogging. I think it was reflective of a sort of older generation of BDSM which revolved around flogger and whip heroics the way that Metal revolved around guitar heroics. Easton is sort of the Pete Townshend of getting flogged (how’s that for taking an analogy one step further than it should ever have been taken).

There was also an undercurrent of spirituality that’s a bit foreign to me. I respect people’s spiritual beliefs, but…I don’t get much involved in church religion and I don’t get much involved in alt-religion.

So lets focus on the good things I did get out of the workshop. First there was a reminder of a lovely quote from e.e. cummings about his promiscuous wife “She was a woman upon whom many men might go like a ship….” However I think the quote may underestimate the original bitterness of cummings sentiments.

A lot of the workshop focused on the concept of going to what Dossie calls “the forever place,” which is sort of an intense verison of flying.

Obviously this is somebody who knows whereof she speaks. She was beaten 7hrs 15 min without a break for her 48th birthday and 5 hours for her 50th. More significant than her professional creds may be a reference from a “Y” gym in SF, where a person who had never met Easton told a friend of hers that she was doing badly at tennis because she had “Dossie arm.” To have one’s name enshrined as someone who wears out arms may be a formidable quality in a bottom.

There was some good practical discussion of the problem that submissives who are “flying” don’t want to stop and Doms who try to make them stop are going to cause problems. “They think if they hit you harder you are going to want them to stop. And the sub is not going to want to stop. So how do you put scenes together.” Along those lines the comment “If a top is overprotective of a bottom that bottom cannot fly. But you must be willing to stop.”

There are other technical issues as well. The typical technique is to relax the shoulders and neck and use breath control to process pain. The recommendation is that you do something that is going to be really painful at the end of an exhale (this also limits the amount of air available for a scream). But the technique isn’t always what is needed. “Someone was telling me not to strain, and at that moment I was too endorphined to feel it unless I strained against it.”

There was discussion of the philosophical concept explored in some recent writing that pain is a natural visceral experience that our society has lost connection with because we are so good at avoiding it.

There was a general commentary on Doms who stop scenes because they are uncomfortable with them, and then blame it on the sub. An observant audience member said “it pisses me off when a top tells me ‘you need to stop’ when it is them that needs to stop.” This can be amplified by abuse. “Don’t tell bottoms that they are being a greedy pig if you are a top and you are worn out and have to stop. Bottoms already feel guilty for the attention they get.” The recommendation was a simple “We have to stop now," or "I need to stop."

One problem with these scenes is that there is not an obvious way to close. Dossie points out that “sometimes going to sex will close the scene, but sometimes it is disappointing,” and that if they’re disappointed coming off the high then equating sex with disappointment is not necessarily the thing you want. She also said that’s its common for orgasm to bring you out of “the space.”

Dossie recalled one scene where she was topping and the submissive seemed to feel a sense of failure calling yellow and saying “I can’t take anymore.” She said “I want five more will you give them to me” and said “Those five strokes made it from a failure into a triumph.” I recalled a very similar ending to a scene one evening…

One suggestion for ending scenes was to start counting strokes. “Counting strokes starts to bring the scene down and makes it finite” Having used that myself to end scenes that involved a lot of impact play where I didn't have a natural stop point, I'm very fond of that idea.

A bit of attention was given to the fact that subs in these situations forget safewords. One good suggestion was a Feedback safeword. “I will squeeze your hand. The harder you squeeze back, the more okay you are.”

All in all there was a lot to learn here, from practical advice “make sure everyone pees in advance,” to technique “moving into someone’s personal space is very effective,” to theory “sometimes it’s good to know what the vulnerabilities are…shared vulnerabilities are amazingly intimate.”

It was a good workshop and there was a lot to learn. I’d hoped to get a bit more into the psychology of pain sluttery, and the drives behind it, but what was presented was useful and the demo was well worth taking notes on as well.

I took away one other lesson as well. I think there are two trunks of BDSM play. One aims at creating an inner experience through a certain detachment. When you are being beaten for five or six hours by various people, I don’t think the relationship is with the person doing the beating. You are not controlling them. They may be getting something out of it, but that thing is a little distant for me.

I prefer the second trunk of BDSM, one that demands and promotes presence. Where there is an intimate experience between me and the girl I am working with, because I am who I am, and she is who she is.

I don’t want to deride “flying,” I think it has it’s place. But it’s not my core kink and I came out of this workshop understanding that better.

Advertising Note: It's seldom that an advertising campaign really hits home with me. I thought the Budweiser frogs were kind of funny, and sure the Gekko is cute. The Caveman can be amusing. But honestly none of those really gripped me. I never collected frog paraphenalia or watched the Caveman's Youtube videos. But now there is AT&T with "More Bars in More Places." That's an advertising campaign I can get behind.

Dead Whores and "Lot 98"

My friend who posts as Angeline DC on Literotica has posted Chapter 2 of her story "The Bidding of Lot 98." This is the second time in a couple of weeks I've pimped one of her stories, but I should note that it's the first time she's posted anything new since August of last year, and before that it was 2002. It just so happens when it rains it pours.

For folks who follow my interactive theatre events, this is the sequel to the piece that provided the inspiration, though not the actual background for the "Holland House" scenario(s), so that may be of interest.


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Dead Whores


Not too long ago Deborah Jeanne Palfrey went into a garden shed in Florida, put a nylon rope around her neck and spent the last few moments of her fifty two years of life kicking her life out on the end of it. For those of you who live on Mars (or to be fair in Germany), and have never heard of her, Palfrey was a madam of sorts. She didn’t own a gaudy house with Victorian furniture, but she booked call girls and provided them for sex to men in the DC area. This got her the name “Washington Madam.”

Palfrey was indicted and convicted for a welter of charges that spring from the fact that her business was illegal. When your business is illegal then doing it becomes racketeering, money laundering and using the mail for illegal purposes. For the record, Palfrey was no tyrant. She wasn’t really a madam either, she was an agent. She had clients who would pay good money and were presumably somewhat safe. She put young women with a college education and outside work in touch with them, and in return took a 50% cut, which considering she was advertiser, and ultimately carried most of the risks, seems not unfair.

Palfrey’s suicide seems to have been a willful act and maybe a comment. A woman with Palfrey’s contacts and means could not have been unable to arrange for a more painless exit, nor under any illusion that death on the end of a nylon rope would be pretty. But Palfrey had an intimate connection to another dead woman who died on the end of a rope for her crime of prostitution, Brandy Britton.

Palfrey told ABC News she would never go to Federal Prison. She’d told Washington writer Dan Moldea, who was considering writing a book about her, that “I am not going back to prison. I will commit suicide first.”

[Updated to include Palfrey's suicide note to her Mother and Sister

One might think she was cowardly, a Hollywood pampered queen unwilling to contemplate prison. But she spent eighteen months in prison for a 1993 conviction for running a Prostitution ring in California. So you have to believe that she knew what she was facing. She could expect four to six years. I do not know that if I faced being locked up as a fifty two year old man and spending the last four to six really healthy years of my life in Federal Prison, to emerge nearly sixty years old, I would not strongly consider a quicker and more permanent solution. At the very least she knew what she was facing.

But Palfrey isn't who I really want to write about. The person I really want to talk about is Brandy Britton, a person that even most friends who follow these things don't know ever existed.

Britton was a double major in biology and sociology, the first in her family to earn a degree. She was remembered as very bright. Her career suggests she was temperamental. She became a PhD and eventually ended up being dismissed from University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Britton may not have been an ideal person or an ideal employee. According to NBC News: In 1999, Britton lost her job at UMBC and filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the university. In dismissing the suit, which was is on appeal, a federal judge in Baltimore cited complaints about Britton from UMBC students and colleagues, and an accusation by the National Institutes of Health that Britton falsified data on a federally funded research project. Britton had taught sociology at the school beginning in 1994.

We don’t know much about why the gender-discrimination suit.  Normally I'm inclined to give some credit to people who bring forward gender-based suits, but the dismissal seems pretty stiff, I'm not aware UMBC has particularly bad practices, and her colleagues don't seem to have been particularly supportive.  There are statements that she’d had another suit against a previous employer.  Maybe she was wronged, and just didn't manage to make friends.  It's also possible she wasn't the sort of person you'd be sympathetic to, an embittered harridan, raging against others in her department and provoking hatreds, the sort of person everyone gives a sigh of relief to see go.

There is certainly some suggestion she was depressive and temperamental. My personal guess would be a depressive personality who covered for failures at work badly, and may have tended to come back too aggressively when questioned.  It's not an unknown pattern for people who are attracted to a secret sex life have trouble getting on well with others, particularly of the same gender in their enviornments.  The suits? I suppose if I lost my job my attorney would advise me to sue on any grounds I could come up with. If I was desperate and had a couple of kids and an expensive house, I might.

Like Palfrey you can color Britton as somebody who didn’t want to deal with how the other half lives. She was turning tricks to keep her $400 suburban home in Howard County, and working out of her house, which is probably what got her in troubles. The area she was working is not tolerant of anybody whose sexual habits stray too far from June Cleaver. And there’s a legitimate complaint about running a business in your home. But that’s small fine caliber antics.

Classically Liberal says: Busybody neighbors bare some of the responsibility. They noticed “men pulling up in fancy cars and staying only briefly”. What is missing? They didn’t notice any deterioration of the upscale neighborhood. They didn’t find drug dealers or other prostitutes hanging around outside the door. In fact they didn’t see anything except men periodically driving up to Britton’s home. But they suspected she was having sex and in America that’s practically considered tantamount to genocide. One can have sex, of course, provided they hide the fact and feel guilty about it.

Britton was publicly humiliated when the Howard County Police trolled her, set her up, raided her and arrested her. Interestingly her reaction seems to have been a war between defiance and despair. She cited a book on sex work and demanded a jury trial. I remember reading about the case and had hopes that despite all the safeguards in our criminal system against anyone actually getting a word out to question the basic validity of the laws we might see an extremely well educated, self-confident, sex worker with a clue as to the ability of the word “jury nullification” to bring a courtroom to a halt, take the stand in an open trial. She’d lose of course, but the punishment wouldn’t be that severe.

In her mind she’d already lost. Her finances were hopeless, and a local blogger believes that she was still doing sex work shortly before her trial to raise money. Her attorney says her house was in foreclosure.

I wish she’d fought, but it is a bit much to ask any human being to put themselves into the dehumanizing three ring circus of a court for our benefit. A part of me thinks she was cowardly. Palfrey thought she was cowardly and said it in very nearly so many words.

But there is more here than meets the eye. The Post says: She was a sharp researcher whose dissertation focused on abused and battered women who then found herself, a few years ago, filing domestic-violence charges against her second husband: "He . . . tied me up with strapping tape" and "stabbed me in the neck," she told police…. [Afriend] talked about Britton's fears that she would lose the house where she had raised two children, now grown, as a single parent and where she had been living with her two potbellied pigs, dog and two cats.

While anyone can end up with an abuser, her dissertation topic and subsequent choices suggest a pattern of abuse in her life. In the end the Law was her final abuser.

Britton had other signs of instability. Close friends suggest she was paranoiac. “…she believed, "they" were tapping her phones and bugging her home. It was too much, she said, and she found herself thinking: " 'I'm going to lay down and die. I'm so depressed.' "

In the end flight won out over fight. She hanged herself in the home she feared losing.

She’d worked for Palfrey, who was well aware of her death. The Chicago Tribune says Last year, Palfrey said she, too, was humiliated by her prostitution charges, but said: "I guess I'm made of something that Brandy Britton wasn't made of."

One cannot help but think that Britton was strongly on her mind in those last few minutes, before not breathing became her principal concern. In the end the two women died for the same sin…providing a sexual service to Washington men.

Monica Hesse had a rather compassionate writeup in the Post. She described the fate that befell the recipients of these services:

Maybe we feel sad because of the gendered irony. The powerful men whose names surfaced in the scandal, the ones who did not appear in the courtroom, who did not have to discuss their menstrual cycles publicly, have all remained unscathed.

David Vitter is still that good-looking junior senator from Louisiana. Harlan K. Ullman (creator of "shock and awe") is listed as a senior associate on the Web site of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Former State Department official Randall L. Tobias, who previously oversaw AIDS relief, promoting abstinence and a policy requiring grant recipients to swear they opposed prostitution, slunk back to Indiana after his resignation. There, he was appointed president of the board of the Indianapolis Airport Authority. The city's mayor said that America "believed in second chances."

Britton’s attorney, Flohr who said she was “kind and generous” asked “Her death underscores an important question: Was the public benefited at all by the resources spent on her arrest and prosecution?”

I wanted to write a rant on the injustice of the whole thing and instead wrote an obituary. I think this speaks for itself.

Now here is my two cents. These women committed the crime of having sex with strangers. They provided a service I’ve used. They took risks to make the service available and found plenty of consumers. Aside from scandal caused by legal investigation, they didn’t hurt anyone. Moralists can argue that they “hurt” the fabric of society by providing outlets for sex other than married life. For my part I am going to defer to Tristan Taormino who wrote better than I did about Eliot Spitzer’s choices in her Voice column.

All I will say is this. Brandy Britton may have been depressive, and had financial trouble. But I do not think that there is any serious chance that either of these women would be dead if it was not the case that our country makes prostitution a crime.

In most civilized countries, including Canada and Britain, neither woman was doing anything seriously criminal. Palfrey could be charged under “Procuring and living off the income of prostitution” In Canada, but enforcement is sporadic and rare, as the law is aimed at street pimps. A few changes to her operation to make it a portal would probably bring it under Candian Law. Britton would have had to do outcall, which I think we’d agree is not unreasonable.

I am not aware that life, or the state of morals in these countries is any worse than life here. And if it was, is it worth dying for.

It’s not just that. Humiliation comes up in the case of both women. Why should sex-work be humiliating? At best, some of the great courtesans of history are famous and honored. At worst, working the street, I don’t see it as any worse than any other low wage job. But we don’t treat it that way. Society provides plenty of people as customers to prostitutes, but it is humiliating to be one. I understand the social structures that dictated that approach, but like many things it needs to change.

I tend to take prostitution for granted. I dealt with it back in street days, and know from anecdotes and discussions that it’s much safer and more civilized in the era of Craigslist.

But in the end there are still people who get punished and they are not the people like me who use the services. They are the girls who provide them. And when it happens it makes my blood boil and I want to hurt someone but there is nobody to hurt and it would not do any good. So I write a blog post and preach to the choir. But on some level I feel if even one more person knows about these things, maybe it will matter.

So that's all I have to say. That I don't think this is right and it makes me ashamed for us all.

Shibari Workshop, Domain, Erotic Fiction

So at the urging of err hmmm...certain people, I have resurrected the old erotic fiction site, and got most of the material back up. There's an "Erotic Fiction" link on the left. This blog also has a domain now Gordonsdrysin.com which will host a permanent link to the Protocols and some other resources as well as the fiction. I'm probably going to float some of it to Literotica, but I don't think that Roncevalles belongs there.

The only thing I don't have is the 1928 Chapter 1 story. It once existed, got killed on my PC because it was composed at a bad time before I backed up to the Lee server, and is not in the Wayback Machine because it was never linked to a top level site. That's a shame, because I think that the Laura Roth/1938 stories were pretentious and amateurish for several reasons, though they were the first time I let any real brutality emerge in my writing. 1928 was an effort to try the same project, but without the pretention of writing from a female POV, and with a bit more honesty and clarity. But fate seems to have decided it is not to be. If anyone happens to have cached it, I'd be grateful, but I don't expect so, it wasn't up for long.

Except for Cocktail Date, I feel awkward showing most of the old work, but there is still a lot I like about the Laura Roth story, so, I'm going to let it stand as a monument to my youth.

The other more recent story is undergoing final revision which consists of getting someone I respect to tell me it's not pathetic. After that likely it will appear here.

Dark Odyssey - Shibari Workshop

It’s time to start backtracking through the notes I made on Workshops at Dark Odyssey, or it’s going to be time for Camp Crucible, and I’ll just be hopelessly behind.

So I‘ve already mentioned that the first workshop I attended at DO was the ropework introduction taught by Shibari Warrior. He’s a decent guy. I’d expected somebody who looked like Bruce Lee but he’s a pretty average looking Caucasian guy who doesn’t even look much like David Carradine in makeup. All practicality.

And he had a couple of pretty good practical hints I got, before I ditched due to my minimal interest in tying up another guy I didn’t know well.

For those joining this program already in progress, a refresher:

I audited the Shibari class, because honestly my ropework is not that great. I’d hoped to pick up a lot of teaching on rope. This was my one bit of moral cowardice. I went through the first half, but then they wanted people to pair up. S. wasn’t onsite yet, and I just didn’t feel like practicing ropework with a guy. I know, I know, I’m homophobic. Sorry, it’s some sort of bizarre aesthetic. I think I’d feel more comfortable sucking a guy’s cock than fumbling through ropework I don’t do well with a guy I didn’t know. Probably vanity.

Maybe I have an inferiority complex over my ropework. I visualize that I’ll have some girl tied up and this huge Japanese cross between a Sumo Wrestler and “The Big Unit” is going to come up to me with a rope and growl. “Your shibari is no good!” like in a bad kung-fu movie. In the worst versions of this vision his mouth appears to be moving in a way that doesn’t match his words. Seriously I’ve mostly dealt in just making women hold still. There is something deeply satisfying to me about a woman who is restrained because she is obeying your will. That said, tying up has it’s place, and you can’t do everything with chain.

So a couple of useful things to pass along.

1) People get cold from constriction. At some point I will inflict my rant on “cold weather scenes” but the bottom line is that people who are tied up get cold even more quickly than those who aren’t. So you can be fine and your sub can be freezing. Fluffy blankets. Warm playspace.


2) If you are doing ropework, you carry EMT shears. Right, we all know this. This is so that if things go pear-shaped we can cut the girl out before something bad happens, with the maximal application of bad being “she chokes to death and dies because you got a rope around her neck,” and any number of other unpleasant variations dangling underneath. These accidents don’t happen too often, but when they do, you want scissors. Rope is replaceable, your play partner is not

I can pick that up reading the internet. This is the sort of detail I actually go to classes to learn:

So our teacher pointed out that when he started out, he went to the trouble of getting a pair of black handled EMT shears. Because they look cooler than the white ones.

Now he uses white. Why? Because in a dark club in a dark bag the black handled ones stick out exactly like a camouflaged sniper in the jungle, which is to say not at all.

I additionally keep my shears in my blood kit. The blood kit (this contains needles, scalpels, mini-sharps container, etc.) is the only bag that’s not black. It’s bright red. So it’s easy to find. Also easy to tell someone else to grab “the red one.” I looked the other night and they weren’t there. Moved to the front pocket. Not a good thing.

He also talked about the quality of the shears. These are the shears that will cut roughly anything. He basically made the point they will cut anything once. If you use them to cut one rope they are probably fine. If you use them to cut someone out of constriction throw them away.

Also carry more than one pair (need to fix that). A certain number of them are crap and don’t work. You don’t know which so two from different manufacturers is a good idea. But he stressed, since they have short useful lifetimes, testing them is not necessarily the answer.

“Jay Wiseman may test his but cutting a penny and they will cut a penny. But I don’t know that after Jay has cut a penny with them, I’d want to rely on them to ever cut anything else.” Not me, just quoting. No offense to the redoubtable Mr. Wiseman.

Favorite other quote from the session was “Practice makes pervert” which the instructor said we could quote him on but wasn’t original.

I’d have learned more if I stayed around. I really need to work on rope. I know some people who are decent at it, but it’s just never been my specialty. Time to learn, really….