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. Continue reading →