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bad sexual communication, I want to offer some positive examples of sexual
communication from my life.

* * *

1) Low pressure and leather belts. Years ago, when I was pretty inexperienced in the
community, I had a single BDSM encounter with a gentleman in his home. We met at a
BDSM discussion group, arranged to meet later at a cafe, and went home from there; as
we exited the cafe, I took his driver's license and texted his full name and license number
to a friend. (I think more people should do this, frankly -- in fact, more non-BDSM
people should do this when they go home with strangers from bars.)

We sat together on the public transit and quietly discussed the upcoming scene: he asked
me many, many questions about what I was okay with and not okay with. Questions like:
"What do you have experience with?" "Could you go into that more?" "What do you
like?" "What makes that fun for you?" "Is there anything you really don't want me to do?"
He asked a lot of the questions twice, too, which I think is a really great strategy
especially with new partners. People don't always have their heads together enough
during these conversations to answer an S&M question properly the first time, especially
if it's a broad and open-ended question like "What are the things you really don't want to
do?"

I made it clear that I just wanted a BDSM encounter, that I wasn't up for oral sex or
vaginal sex or anything like that. He'd never had a BDSM encounter that didn't involve
orgasm, so it was a new concept for him, but he was cool with trying it.

After our long discussion of boundaries and limits, we made it to his apartment and
settled in. He got out some equipment, including a collar, and he said: "While you're
wearing this, you will obey everything I say. Do you have any final boundaries to set?
Anything you really want me to do? Anything else you don't want me to do?" I said no,
and he snapped on the collar. (We did have an agreed-upon safeword, though -- so I had a
way of interrupting the proceedings if I really needed to.)

It was an interesting encounter, partly because he was looking more for dominance
(giving orders) than sadism (inflicting pain), whereas at the time I was looking more for
masochism (receiving pain) than submission (accepting orders). So we started out with
him giving me a bunch of orders (primarily to fulfill his kink), and then in the end he hit
me a lot with a leather belt (to fulfill mine). At the time I was still figuring out where the
boundary was for me: whether I identified as a submissive or only a masochist; how
much submission and masochism were intertwined. That night showed me a lot about
how one can create submissive energy within a pre-defined space, even with someone
you barely know.

Afterwards, when I was done crying, he took off the collar and we went to bed. (By that
time of night, I didn't have a way back home from where he lived, so I had to sleep over.)
We chatted about random things, neither of us quite tired enough to sleep. Within half an
hour or so, he realized that there was no way he was ever going to get to sleep unless he
had an orgasm, but he also understood that I didn't want to have sex with him, so he
didn't try to push that. Instead, he said: "I really need to have an orgasm before I can get

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