Tristan Taormino - The Ultimate Guide to Kink - BDSM, Role Play, and the Erotic Edge

Douching is necessary for three reasons. One: Most of the people who like ass play do not, oddly enough, like shit. Two: Even a partially full bowel can cause contractions that make penetration painful. Three: Feces with a gritty texture should not be ground against the delicate lining of your rectum and lower bowel. People who enjoy scat have their own sets of techniques, mores, and safety precautions that are beyond the scope of this article.

The top also ought to spend a similar amount of time in preparation. Do some yoga, meditate, journal, do what you need to do to put yourself in a good frame of mind, with lots of energy. Don’t show up with a cold or a rotten attitude. You will be using your body just as much as your partner uses theirs, so pay attention to your own well-being. Eat some protein before you play so you don’t get a big crash in your blood sugar. Groom your hands. Remove every sharp cuticle and trace of fingernail. Do this even if you are going to be wearing gloves! The lining of the rectum is not very thick; puncturing it can have dire consequences in terms of infection and bleeding. So if the tip of your glove breaks, for any reason, make sure that there is nothing abrasive on your fingertip that can cause harm. This also alters your hands and turns them into sexual symbols with the potency of genitals.

Once you and your partner are together, do whatever the two of you enjoy to get turned on. There’s no rule that says you have to throw yourself into a sling in the first five minutes. Tops who like to get off may choose to have the bottom make them come before play, to take some of the edge off their nerves. Some bottoms find that an orgasm helps them to relax. For others, coming just makes them lose interest in any more sex.

The topic of drugs and alcohol inevitably comes up during a discussion of preparing for the main act. If you’ve read any leather community history, you will know that drugs used to be a very big part of the gay men’s fisting scene. In fact, doing fisting without them was practically unheard of. MDA was a popular relaxant then, but people also drank alcohol, popped Quaaludes, did crystal meth, dropped acid, snorted coke, swallowed a variety of prescription sedatives and muscle relaxers, and came up with other unique and sometimes scary combinations. And, of course, the brown bottles of amyl nitrate (or after that became illegal, butyl nitrate) were ubiquitous.

I’ve been clean and sober for nearly 20 years, but I can’t lie to you: being intoxicated did help people relax, shed their inhibitions, and dilate their orifices. But the high level of drug use also led to addiction (which I define as repeatedly trying to get high when it stopped being fun a long time ago), overdoses, unwise selection of partners, imprecise communication, blunted pain, overuse of the back door, and a lot of depressed and sore mornings after spent with one ice bag on the forehead and another between the buttocks.

If you are a pervert and an addict in recovery, you have no choice but to learn how to enjoy your wicked ways without the use of mind-altering substances. This probably deserves its own chapter or even a book. But if you are not an addict, I see nothing wrong with one drink (and I do mean one). There are many people who would disagree with me. The politically correct injunction is not to drink or use any drugs when you play. This may be an ideal, but it’s not the way many people actually have sex. I think we are doing poor sex education if we don’t look at how erotic behavior actually takes place, and offer people interventions that are reasonable. If you don’t know your own body well enough to understand what kind of psychotropic substances you can ingest without harm, you are an arrogant novice or willfully ignorant, and nothing I can say will help you. Unfortunately, I still see a lot of us engaging in self-harm, perhaps because we feel guilty about our deviant sex lives, or we’ve got a lot of baggage from fucked-up families of origin, or perhaps our friends are giving us stupid advice and pressuring us to do as they do. I want all of us to have scads of fun and love in our lives with as little damage as possible. Be careful of your precious self. If you need to get injured, emotionally obliterated, or killed to fulfill a wrongheaded, romantic idea of your own doomed specialness, it’s not as if you won’t be able to find a bunch of villains who will oblige you. Dammit.

Assuming you are a sensible person who has managed to line up an opportunity to misbehave, you can maximize your chances of a good experience by paying some attention to the environment where you meet. Some of us like to get our freak on at group sex events. If you’ve got access to that luxury, well and good. Hopefully the space will be clean and unlikely to draw the wrath of the vice squad by doing stupid things like admitting minors. A good sound system and the above-mentioned music help a lot as well. If you are playing in private, setting the mood doesn’t have to mean constructing your own dungeon in a spare bedroom. Just clean up the room you are going to use, get rid of the dog bed and pictures of Grandma, and create a play surface. One solution is to cover the bed with a plastic sheet and then put something with a nicer texture on top of it. Some folks have invested in portable stands and slings. Other accessories include a couple of stacks of trick towels, some squeeze bottles of water, a large supply of lube, and any toys you might want to include in your Voyage to the Center of the Earth. Useful toys include vibrators, ass plugs and dildos, tit clamps, bondage restraints, genital whips, or cock rings. Don’t forget condoms (to keep the toys clean) and gloves.

One of the most important items on this list is the lubricant. The classic of the 1970s and 1980s was, of course, Crisco. You knew you were with a cheap date if he showed up with generic vegetable shortening. When the AIDS epidemic got under way, the use of water-based lubricant became important for other types of sex, because oil can weaken the latex in condoms. Some fisters will swear that water-based lube is not thick enough and doesn’t last long enough to make for a friction-free ride. I’ve seen recipes for mixing water-based lube with shortening, which allegedly gives you a product you can wash out of the sheets. (Don’t count on it.) With experimentation, you will come up with your own answer. But I’d like to point out that you can use the thicker, longer-lasting grease if you are not going to need safer-sex protection later on. If you aren’t going to be using condoms to contain sperms-and-germs, and if you are using nonlatex gloves, oil-based lube won’t be dangerous. Keep in mind that the grease is going to linger in your tail for a few days, so think about what your sex life is going to include after the current date.

Remember that lubricant can be a source of disease transmission. If you have a big container of it, put some in smaller containers that can be discarded after play is done. Some people use paper cups; squeeze bottles or pumps are also handy. Just make sure that any lube you’ve touched is never used with another partner. Even if you are both healthy, the bacteria and other microorganisms from the colon could make somebody else sick.

Keep the room nice and warm. Cold makes muscles tense up, and your asshole is a muscle. For most of us, decent music is also very erotic and helpful during tough bits of the play. It can lift the mood and strengthen the bond between players during nonverbal moments. Keep up with what’s current in the clubs and make your own tapes or buy good ones. Think of it as lubricant for your ears.

What is the best way to position your bodies? Slings became popular because they created a weightless sensation, and the top could move one back and forth, like the rocking of a cradle. But many people don’t like them. It can be hard to make a good pillow for a sling, and who can ignore a crick in the neck, no matter how loud their prostate is humming? Some bottoms do better if they can get up on their hands and knees. I think it’s good to keep the option of changing positions, since moving the whole body will also affect the target orifice.