Soft limits, hard limits, personal boundaries, personal fears. It doesn’t matter if we’re kinky or vanilla, every single one of us has things that we’re comfortable and not comfortable doing sexually; lines that we don’t want crossed, things that we adore doing. And it’s most certainly the case that one person’s ‘hell no!’ is another person’s ‘hell yes!’ That’s a good thing. If we were all the same, life and sex would be terribly boring. What intrigues me, however, is how our comfort levels and perceptions of what we do and don’t like, can and can’t tolerate, can – and often do – change over time.

Now, before I go any further with this train of thought, I’d just like to make it really, really clear that hard limits should always, ALWAYS be respected. No exceptions. They are not there to be pushed. They are not there to be ‘broken though’. A hard limit is a prohibition, a definite no-no. End of story. And a hard limit remains so until such time as the person whose limit it is chooses of their own volition and without coercion for it not to be.

Public service announcement out of the way, let’s continue.

One of things that I am coming to realise the longer I explore my sexuality is that the devil is very much in the detail. And the gulf between the aforementioned ‘hell yes!’ and my safeword is actually much wider than I originally thought. Not because I’ve been sloppy in articulating what I’m okay with and what I’m not or because I’m getting kinkier (I don’t think I am) but because identifying the things that arouse is a bit like going off to explore the jungle. You take your map with you and it defines the terrain you’re going to cover, but the route you follow to your destination often ends up revealing a multitude of alternate trails and tracks that you just have to go back and explore. And on occasion, those offshoots lead you to places you originally sought to avoid.

Some time back, I discovered that I had an aversion to prickly sensations, thanks to that devilish little device, the Wartenberg Wheel. This instrument isn’t a hard limit for me but holy crap is it something to be endured. For whatever reason, my mind has no problem with the pain generated by the sting of a crop, but it cannot seem to climb on top of the sensation a Wartenberg elicits, even when used very, very lightly. It’ll come as no surprise, then, that my experiences with it led me to believe that sharp things, other than that barely tolerated little terror tool, belonged on my hard limit list. (You should see the performance when I get a splinter and M has to hook it out for me with a needle. You’d think he was hacking my foot off with a rusty axe.)

Then I read something the other week that made me think I need to re-examine my feelings. It was an intensely erotic edgeplay scene from Cherise Sinclair’s latest book Edge of the Enforcer between a sadist named deVries and a non-masochistic sub. In a nutshell, said sadist restrains said sub on a kitchen counter using her half-removed jeans, throws a tea towel over her eyes, and then proceeds to utilise the knives in the butcher’s block for something other than cooking.

 

“I like being called Sir. Master works once in a while.”

“Sir, you wouldn’t really–”

“Shut up, babe.” He touched the point of the knife to her nipple. Just so she could feel the point – not nearly enough to draw blood.

Her pounding pulse jiggled her little breasts, and she was hardly breathing. Nice. Just right.

He laid the hilt on her stomach and positioned the hefty bare blade between her breasts. “You planning to move?”

Her no was so low he barely heard it.

“Didn’t think so. Gonna have some fun now … Warning, babe, you wriggle and I’ll amuse myself with the blade instead.”

 

You get the idea.

As the scene progresses deVries gets more wicked. There’s some light scratching. Some pretty evil head-screwing. And while I wasn’t so sold on the rest of the novel, I read this scene three times in quick succession because something in it was shouting ‘HOT!’ at me very, very loudly; making the kinky part of my brain sit up and go ‘Hmmm’.

I’m still not absolutely sure what it is about it that’s appealed to me so deeply. I’ve read edgeplay scenes involving knives before and, while I’ve appreciated them and the sentiment and psychology behind them – Maren Smith’s Holding Hannah, for example – it’s definitely been a case of YKINMK. Perhaps it’s the delivery, the way the scene is carried out rather than the implement(s) used in it? The way Lindsey, the sub, is blindfolded so crudely? The way she is restrained? Whatever the appeal, I do know that it is making me think very, very hard about what exactly it is I don’t like about the Wartenberg. My current ponderings suggest that my exclusion of ‘sharp things’ during play may have been far too broad. And this is where I come back to my ‘it’s all in the detail’ statement. A prickle is very different to a scratch, just as the thwack of a flogger is very different to the bite of cane. It seems so obvious in hindsight that the two sensations are really quite different beasts and yet I’ve been lumping them together into the same bucket.

It just shows that the brain doesn’t always see what’s obvious.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had such a reaction to a bit of text, either. If you read my post The Violet Wand Diaries: Part One, you’ll know that my curiosity around electrical play sparked off (sorry, couldn’t help myself) in much the same way. It just goes to show that context and delivery have a huge role to how we perceive various kinks.

Even more interestingly, M, who, like me, doesn’t tend towards edgeplay, read this scene at my request – after initially taking a step backwards at my pre-read CliffsNotes overview – and had a very similar reaction to it, albeit from a Top rather than a bottom perspective. Clearly, something in what is described is calling out to both of us, perhaps tapping into an undercurrent in our play that we’re both unaware of. Go figure. He’s not a sadist. I’m not keen on sharp things. And yet we both read a scene involving both and go ‘ooh!’

I sense a boundary shift on the horizon.

*Since writing this post, I have been keeping an eye on the reviews for Edge of the Enforcer on Amazon and Goodreads and am intrigued to see just how many people have responded the same way I did to the play in it given that it has a relatively mainstream readership. In the words of one reviewer:

“I have to admit, I’ve never been into edge play, but the mindfvck [sic] of the knife play scene was seriously steamy.”

You can read various the various reviews here (Goodreads) and here (Amazon).

 

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