Purpose of this article. #
This article aims at providing a decent introduction to why people would engage into rather intense impact play, and is targeted towards people who are not familiar with impact play.
Folks in research of more precise technicalities may want to jump to the next chapters of this series.
Disclaimers. #
I am not and do not claim to be an authority on impact or pain play in any way. Any contradictory opinion you may hear from a fellow practitioner is as good as mine.
In this article I use fancy medical terms to look serious, like metabolism, endorphins, opioid or frying pan, but in reality I am even less medically qualified than my dishwasher, so be tolerant with my probably incorrect over-simplifications.
Context. #
My wife and I are into impact play, and we love to play in front of an audience. Hence, we travel a lot to attend BDSM-related parties. On these occasions, we meet a lot of people, and many are not familiar with what we do.
Indeed, those events are sometimes hosted in non-bdsm locations (usually swingers clubs), and we sometimes meet people who are outside of the BDSM world.
Even for people who are part of the BDSM world, which encompasses many things, our way of doing impact play sometimes raises interrogations.
I’ll hence start my series with a longer-than-expected article summarizing what we do and why we do it.
What we do. #
Impact play is a subcategory of sadomasochism.
It can be roughly summarized as “using tools to inflict pain on targeted skin areas in order to provoke a variety of responses”.
One of our particularities, which may be difficult to get until you watch us play, is that impact play is central in our practice, where for other people, it is secondary.
To explain this well, let’s first assume that the objective of engaging in sex or kink is to experience pleasure from it. People are usually looking for a set of precise things to experience pleasure. For example, a submissive may experience pleasure in the feelings of submission, humiliation, ownership, degradation, or in serving coffee. Those will be their primary source of pleasure.
Those primary sources of pleasure can be enhanced by secondary sources of pleasures. To continue with our example, for our submissive, getting whipped, slapped, spanked, or made to serve soluble coffee, can be used as a way to increase the feeling of humiliation. This person is not necessarily looking to receive those treatments per-se, but getting those treatments by their dominant will enhance the feeling that they are seeking and will give them pleasure. The fact that those spankings, slaps, whip impacts, or awful nescafe logo, are themselves pleasant for the submissive is, in this context, irrelevant.
My wife and I play in a way where impact play is central, in the sense that it is the pain itself that is the pleasing element. We do incorporate some other elements as well (some light bondage and some submission markers which we enjoy) but those are secondary. The main pleasure that we derive comes from impact play itself.
Now, do not read this the wrong way. This paragraph does not aim at establishing some form of hierarchy of purity of play, nor to do some kind of preaching around the supposed centrality of impact play.
Rather, it aims at giving a frame of reference so that you can evaluate how relevant the content of this website is in your own situation.
Indeed, this series of articles will not contain advice on how to incorporate impact play in order for you to experience more pleasure with something else.
Conversely, my approach in this series will be to place impact play at the center, and eventually provide advice on how to incorporate secondary elements into it to make it more enjoyable.
Now, let’s cover why the hell someone with all their sanity would engage in sadomasochism.
Why do we do it. #
For us, impact play is ultimately a form of metabolic hacking, that allows my wife to enter a state of trance, and at the peak of it, to experience a form of ecstasy at every hit. From an outsider’s perspective, she may look like she’s experiencing a high, and we’ll soon see that in fact, she actually is, from a metabolical standpoint.
This trance that she experiences, and the feelings associated with it are the major reason why we are doing what we do. It is not for sex (as I have observed that the sex drive decreases as the trance intensifies), it is not for submission, it is for the trance.
Here is what our sessions look like : we start by a very slow warmup where I spank her with either my hands and a light leather paddle. At the end of it, she is very relaxed, and the impacts are still painful if I go harder. Then we do two or three real sessions with floggers or more powerful tools, during which I gradually increase the intensity. At the end of it she is usually in the trance-like state that I mentioned earlier, and with every impact she feels a high degree of pleasure, alongside the modulated pain accompanying the hit.
Some theoretical background. #
Now if you’ve read until here, you should start to wonder if there is something wrong in my wife’s mind.
How could someone in their right mind experience actual pleasure from receiving pain ? That sounds antithetic, right ?
Well, wrong. Even if that is a completely normal thing to ask, I can assure you that my wife is perfectly fine, and that you could probably experience the same thing, if you were willing to give it a try.
Indeed, there is some practical evidence that impact play is actually a simple form of metabolical hacking which acts on the nervous system’s pain/pleasure processing, and that the high that the receiver experiences is just the body’s natural reaction to the impacts.
The rest of this section summarizes elements that can be found in the following paper (that you can open by clicking on its title) : Physical Pain as Pleasure: A Theoretical Perspective
This paper gives a theoretical skeleton to what impact play practitioners just “feel”. I encourage the reader to take a look as it will give much more details than my short summary below.
Let’s break down what happens in your body when you do impact play.
First, it all starts with an impact. Nociceptors at the surface of your skin are activated after receiving a hit from the participating hand, paddle, flogger, whip or chopping board. Those nociceptors convert the impact energy into electric signals directed towards the central nervous system (vagueness intended) for it to hopefully process them if you’re not unconscious yet.
The first aspect of this processing relates the metabolical reaction to the impact. After registering the sensory signals, your brain generates a metabolic response, by secreting various fun chemical products in your body that mediate how you feel. Let’s break down the main ones and explain what they do in a very simplified way :
- adrenalin : BAD : brain response to imminent threat, prepares you to fight or run.
- opioids : GOOD : modulates your pain sensitivity / prevents you from feeling the pain.
- cannabinoids : GOOD : alters your mind state / gives you a high.
- dopamin : GOOD : operates on your reward system / makes you stay until the next impact and come back for the next session.
- cortizol : DUNNO : indicator of your physical (and not psychological !) stress.
The second aspect of this processing relates to the psychological reaction to the impact. Years of expensive evolutive research have told us that a brain’s job is basically to keep its owner alive and one subtask of this is to properly assess danger. Once your brain has registered the impact, it starts evaluating its danger level. This processing is as vague and complex as you can be, and depends on multiple factors, which we can regroup in a precise scientific category named “you, the context and whatnot”. Important factors are :
- your desire to be in the situation you are in.
- your current level of fun in this situation.
- your sexual arousal.
- more generally, your current emotional state.
- your feelings towards the person who caused the impact.
- the relative intensity of the pain in your current state of mind.
- your pre-existing mental conditioning and experiences regarding receiving this kind of treatment.
- unrelated potential threats, more generally, the environment.
Those factors will determine how you will perceive the pain, which will impact both the perceived intensity of pain, as well as the level of pleasure that you will derive from it.
Threat mode. #
In the previous section, I briefly mentioned adrenalin, which I will summarize here as the marker when the brain enters threat mode.
It is essentially what happens when your brain identifies an imminent danger, that you should react to either by running, or either by fighting.
Everyone is different, and I only play with my wife, so it may be that some lucky bottoms are able to incorporate threat mode in their play, and to derive pleasure from it. But in my wife’s case, entering threat mode essentially means end of session as :
- threat mode provokes fear and urgency to flee, which immediately takes her out of the scene.
- threat mode has a persistence of at least 30 minutes which realistically prevents us from resuming our play when she has calmed down.
Hence, one of our primary objectives when we play is to carefully avoid putting her into threat mode.
Some practical takeaways. #
From the previous section, we can derive some important concepts of impact play, which should sound familiar to folks that watched us.
Those concepts are in fact consequences of this simple axiom : our objective through impact play is to hack the pain processing system to put my wife in a state of extreme pleasure. In more serious terms, our purpose is to maximize the opioid / cannabinoid production and minimize or ideally nullify the adrenalin production.
First, as stated earlier, we want to avoid adrenalin / threat mode at all costs. This has a couple of consequences :
- we start slowly. VERY slowly. Our warmup lasts around 20 minutes with a very gradual increase. This is to progressively get the brain used to repeated pain stimuli, and to avoid it triggering threat mode when the pain intensifies.
- we target very precise areas (the middle of her butt cheeks), which are less sensitive, and that she is accustomed to receiving impacts on.
Second, we want to maximize the pleasure intensity, so once she is warmed up, we try to make the best of it. At this point, she still feels the pain but it is processed in a way where she derives an intense pleasure from it, and where she basically cannot enter threat-mode anymore. Hence, we intensify.
Third, the body’s opioids/cannabinoids production has limits. First, it cannot sustainably last forever. Overall, we usually play for at most two and a half hours. Second, it needs regular breaks to replenish. We usually split our play in three or four parts (warmup, fun and more fun) with ten minutes breaks in between. This is the time that works best for us as :
- it allows the body to regenerate its hormone secretion capabilities.
- it does not last long enough to require another warm up.
Fourth, when we play, the core of what you see is in what you do not see. As we covered in the section dedicated to the psychological aspect of pain processing, there are a lot of psychological factors which can both increase the level of pleasure and reduce the level of pain, or do the exact opposite. Added to trust and love, which play a huge role, conditioning before and during the scene is also important. I will probably spend a good amount of time elaborating on this aspect in the next chapters.
Final words. #
I hope that this article will help interrogative folks to get a clear picture of what impact play is, and why it can be pleasurable.
The next chapter will be targeted towards those who are looking for advice to get started in the best conditions.