Tight Bondage and Intoxication
As you have come to appreciate bondage and other SM play is a powerfully charged and often potentially dangerous environment. Adding additional risk factors may heighten the passion of the BDSM play session, however there are some risks which should never enter into BDSM play as the risks far outweigh the benefits as an unfortunate accident could easily result in the permanent physical damage or the death of one or both players. With this in mind we continue our exploration of common bondage and SM risks.
Risk Factor Number Three: Painfully tight bondage. Sometimes pain can be appealing and even erotic, especially during bondage, but when a good pain becomes a bad pain, bondage play should stop immediately. Regardless of how much the submissive craves to tight bondage, it is risky to bind someone so tightly that numbness and/or tingling results, especially when the tingling of numbness remains after bondage is removed. If feelings of numbness persist for the person in bondage, this indicates the use of painfully tight bondage. To be fair, most bondage causes some tingling or numbness, but bondage should never be so painful that the numbness does not disappear immediately after the bondage is removed. In order to determine when bondage is too tight, you will need to communicate with your bondage partner or make sure that the bondage is not restricting the submissive's circulation or painfully digging into their flesh. As a rule of thumb, do not submit a person to bondage for more than two hours without releasing their limbs or changing their position. This avoids loss of circulation and minimizes the possibility of the submissive suffering from positional asphyxiation. Bondage to body areas at which one feels a pulse should either be done with extreme caution or preferably not at all, especially where the neck is concerned. Bondage which places lateral pressure on the veins in the neck may lead to the Carotis Sinus Vein reflex causing immediate unconsciousness (bondageproject.com).
Risk Factor Number Four: Playing while intoxicated. "According to the National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependency, 105,000 Americans die annually from alcohol-related causes which could include everything from falls to drunk driving accidents to cirrhosis of the liver" (Go Ask Alice website). Unless you want to be another statistic, keep alcohol and other intoxicants out of your bondage or BDSM play. Alcohol and other intoxicants do lower one's inhibitions making role play seem easier, but the lowering of inhibitions comes at the price of impaired judgment, increased reaction time, and loss of motor control all of which can add up to a serious bondage accident or death. You do the math. Jay Wiseman writes in the Erotic Bondage Handbook: "It has become very obvious to me that intoxicant use was an "essential co-factor" in many [bondage or] SM-related disasters and that had intoxicants not been used it is quite plausible that the incident would never have happened. Based on my research, I have concluded that intoxicant use by any person in the [bondage or SM]scene automatically increases the degree of risk by one level, and that intoxicant use by both people automatically takes the [bondage] scene up to the "extreme" degree of risk" (75-6).
Onwards to dealing with abusive doms and isolated area bondage play...