The (New and Improved) Loving Dominant (29 page)

The “no play above the waist” I previously subscribed to is now less draconian. The instructions provided with TENS units (much more on these later) often show pads on the lower back and some accessory manufacturers provide nipple attachments for the units. However, it’s still a good axiom. Electricity causes muscles to contract. The heart is a muscle. In fact, it is a very sensitive muscle. According to Underwriter’s Laboratory, as little as one microampere (one millionth of an amp) can disrupt the heart rhythm. It seems sensible to keep electricity away from that particular organ, doesn’t it?

Add to this, that electricity does not always travel in a straight line. It travels along the lines of least resistance, and no one, as yet, has come out with a fool proof way of charting those in a specific human body.

So, we play the odds, and a good way to do that is to keep the shocking stuff below the belt. Fortunately for us, that’s where most of the “fun bits” can be found.

I’m a big supporter of people learning CPR, but I’ve heard occasional comments, particularly concerning electrical play, that I feel demand a warning. These comments usually go something like, “Oh, I don’t have to worry about that, I know CPR.” The implied assumption is that if a heart problem occurs it can be fixed with a few chest pumps. The human body is not like a Windows-based computer. It isn’t just a matter of rebooting and going on with whatever you were doing before. CPR is valuable in the same way a seat belt in a car is valuable. Both save lives. Neither is a guarantee. You wouldn’t ram your car into a wall simply because you have a seat belt on in the same way you shouldn’t do dangerous play simply because you know CPR. A chilling statistic is that the survival rate from unaugmented CPR (no defibrillator or such) is less than fifty percent. It’s valuable, but it isn’t perfect.

Technological progress has added another rule to electrical play. The cardiac pacemaker was invented in 1958, but when The Loving Dominant was first being written, it was still relatively rare. That’s no longer true, and electricity in any form and pacemakers don’t go together. You don’t even need to touch the body with an electrical source to drive the gadget out of its silicon mind. They are sensitive to the radio waves produced by many electronic devices. The best rule here is if the submissive has a pacemaker you probably should avoid electrical play of any kind.

One toy gets to break all the rules, except the pacemaker one. The violet wand plugs into the wall and can be safely used almost all over the body. It was originally manufactured at the beginning of the previous century as a medical device which claimed to cure everything from gout to impotence. It didn’t cure anything, but hurt just enough so people felt it must be good for them. Fortunately, it is still being manufactured. It can often be located in barber supply stores where its overt purpose is to give “stimulating scalp massages.”

Because it uses exceptionally high-frequency electricity that doesn’t enter the body cavity and presents no danger to the heart, you can use it everywhere on the body except the eyes. Because the output is directed through a gas-filled tube, there is no danger if the unit shorts out because the glass won’t transmit the lower frequency electricity of the line current.

The machine consists of a plastic tube, about a foot long and two inches in diameter, containing a Tesla coil. One end has the power cord and an adjustment knob and the other has a cylindrical opening into which attachments can be inserted. As noted above, many of the attachments are hollow glass tube, which glow bluish violet and give the wand its name. When these attachments are brought near anything, a spark will jump to the object. The effect is like that from walking across a nylon rug with rubber shoes during dry weather and touching a door knob.

The spark is relatively harmless. With some people, it can produce a tiny burn, particularly if the electrode is held over one place for a while. Also, because the output can be rich in ultraviolet, the skin can become slightly sunburned. The current easily penetrates clothing, a convenient feature when one is playing in a club where nudity is forbidden. Also, if the cloth contains metallic fibers, the current will run along them, spreading the shock and making the fibers twinkle like tiny lightening bolts. A small warning: twice in all the years I’ve been playing with wands, I’ve had the submissive’s clothing catch fire. In both cases, she was wearing a fuzzy material like angora, and she had been a heavy user of hair spray which might have gotten on the sweater. Neither incident caused any serious damage, but they’ve caused me to shy away from using wands near this kind of material.

However, you can use this effect to ignite alcohol on a submissive’s body in a fire scene. Generally, I’ve found that to get a reliable ignition the alcohol has to be warmed a bit. Usually, I do that by lighting the surface of the bowl of alcohol I’m using and letting it burn for a minute or so.

One interesting technique is for the dominant to grab the attachment when the unit is turned on. If it is gripped directly, there will be no spark and no pain, but then by reaching out toward the submissive, he or she can “fire” sparks from a fingertip. Since there is a bit of a sting when the spark leaves as well as when it arrives, I like to control it with a small piece of wire or a coin held between two fingers. You can also use a Wartenburg wheel, which has an entirely different sensation when used with an electrified dom.

Another interesting toy for the charged-up dominant is a cheerleader’s pom-pom. You can get the kind that is made from Mylar-coated plastic. Hold the wand in one hand and the aluminized pom-pom in the other. You can either drop- and-draw the strands or use it like a flogger. If you want a more intense effect, drape the pom-pom over the comb attachment of the wand and let the strands directly conduct the electricity. However, be careful. Used this way, you aren’t part of the circuit so if you hit yourself on the backswing you’ll get the same shock as your partner.

Because holding the wand this way can be tricky, accessory manufacturers have produced a contact pad that fits under your belt to give you a hands-free link to the wand. When looking for such a pad, I recommend you only consider those that have a segment of ceramic as part of the current flow. This will protect you in the unlikely event that the Tesla coil shorts out in the same way the gas-filled tube protect your partner.

There are lots of things out there that can give a pleasurable zap without resulting in a call to the paramedics. One mistress uses a single nine-volt battery to deliver tiny but noticeable shocks to the tips of her submissive’s cocks. She uses no amplifier or wiring. She just pushes the battery onto the dampened skin.

Fortunately for those who enjoy more technological gadgets, back in the early part of this century, quacks were fascinated by electricity. There were a multitude of devices manufactured so that the quacks could give people a tingle of electricity and a lot of lies.

A good friend of mine, Goddess Sia, has such a device. It is called an Electreat, and it looks a bit like a flashlight.

It takes two flashlight batteries and can deliver quite a jolt when the sliding control is all the way up. What it was claimed to accomplish, no one seems to know, but her submissives are quite outspoken in their enjoyment of the stimulation it provides.

Another one I’ve see actually wraps the balls in a metal mesh before delivering some substantial shocks. Again, I don’t know what it was supposed to cure, but I’m sure that I’d be yelling, “I’m cured! I’m cured!” shortly after it was turned on.

Up until the 1960s, one company manufactured a passive exercise machine called the Relaxacisor. It worked (or rather didn’t work) by stimulating the muscles with tiny electrical impulses. Here the erotic charge is not from conventional electrical shock, but from the disconcerting feeling of having ones muscles performing without having willed it. Some couples have reported combining the Relaxacisor with conventional vaginal or anal sex with considerable success.

TENS units (Transdermal Electrical Neural Stimulator) are battery-powered units that are legitimate medical devices. Doctors use them for pain management.

They put out a controllable series of DC pulses that are intended to interfere with the pain receptors. The sensations can vary from a tingling and twitching as the current takes control of the nearby muscles to a pretty substantial zap. While the original TENS units are prescription items (but can be picked up used at flea markets and online auctions), a mini-industry of kinky types has sprung up supplying both the box and electrical butt plugs, urethra probes, dildos clips and clamps.

The typical TENS unit has two channels. This means that two pairs of positive and negative electrodes can be placed on the body. Each channel has a separate intensity control, usually located on top of the unit next to where the wire for each channel connects. In addition, most units have two other variable controls, one for the pulse width (how long the current is on for each “blip”) and the other for the pulse rate (how many “blips” per second). These two work on both channels simultaneously. Generally, the controls allow you to set the unit to give from between two and 150 pulses per second and to have the current stay on from fifty or sixty microseconds (½0 of a second) to 250 microseconds (a quarter of a second).

The conventional TENS unit comes with stick-on pads. One pad represents each end of a circuit that flows through the body between them. These are excellent starting toys and represent what are called mono-polar units. This means two will be required to complete any circuit. Bi-polar units have both the positive and negative poles on the same toy.

For example, if a mono-polar dildo is inserted in the vagina, no current will flow until another mono-polar toy (let’s say a pad on the small of the back) attached to the same circuit on the TENS unit is put on the body. However, a bipolar dildo will work just fine with the current flowing from one pole on the tip to the other pole on the base.

One troublesome “feature” of TENS units is that different brands often have differently designed plugs. Some use the standard bipolar jack also used for personal tape players and iPods, but others use proprietary designs that mean you can only use accessories from that company or find a converter that changes the proprietary design into a standard jack.

Fortunately, if you’re reasonably handy with a soldering iron you can make an adapter, because the pins that attach the TENS unit to the pads are standardized and the same size as a 3/32” subminiature plug (Radio Shack #274-245). The pins are mono-polar so you need three jacks. Let’s call them A, B and C. You can start by running a wire from either pole of A to the top pole on C and another wire from either pole of B to the bottom pole on C. Then, you can connect one pin into A, the other pin into B and plug the bi-polar plug from the accessory into C.

One injury I’ve seen turn up regularly in TENS play is a small burn because the toy didn’t have good contact with the skin, and instead of the current flowing smoothly into the skin, there was a spark every time contact was broken. The best way to deal with this is to use a conductive gel on the toys that is designed to fit against the skin and a sex lube for the insertable ones. Special care needs to be taken with the ones designed for urethral play since this area is particularly sensitive to infection. The recommendation here is for the use of a sterile surgical lube.

A favorite electrical interrogation device around the world is the old hand crank telephone. Turning the crank sends a substantial charge down the line. Interrogators in Cambodia would remark that they “would have to call information” when they were about to use this technique. Pepperpot generators in old-fashioned telephones can be used in the same way.

There are two ways of reducing the stimulation level produced by these devices. The first is simply to turn the crank slowly. The faster the crank is turned, the more electricity is produced. The second is to remove several of the U-shaped magnets. Because of the current being used, burns are common, particularly if the method of contact is thin like a wire. To minimize the chance of burns, TENS-type pads can be used. Electrical burns can be very painful and slow to heal. Not many would find them erotic

Another popular shock device is a cattle prod. In general, these produce too much of a shock for most submissives. However, the shock can be reduced by removing one or more of the batteries and replacing them with dowels wrapped in aluminum foil.

When I wrote the first edition, I was sure the so-called “stun guns” powered by nine-volt batteries had no place in BDSM play. I strongly believed the electrical impact they produce was well beyond the threshold I consider safe. At that time, I hadn’t encountered many electrical players, but I did I know of one submissive who was traumatized when her dominant used one on her. Although she had a substantial ability to transmute pain into pleasure, she spent several hours in a state of semi-shock after a single application. However, in the intervening time, I’ve found a number of people who have played with this sort of toy successfully. My primary use of these units is for intimidation play. Sort of a “show but don’t touch” rule. However, I have felt the output of several stun guns without ill effect, and I have known a number of submissives who have enjoyed this level of intensity. It’s not for everyone, but I’m not going to insist on a blanket condemnation any more.

Obviously, with any toy you are going to use, electrical play is one area where a dominant is required to test any stimulation on himself or herself prior to using it on a submissive. This doesn’t mean you are expected to enjoy the experience, but it tells you better than anything else what the sensation is and where it ranks among other toys. This axiom also serves as a valuable check against over-enthusiastic tops.

Suggested Reading

Toybag Guide to High-Tech Toys,
John Warren, Greenery Press

Catheterization

Catheters have been used by human beings for centuries. Some ancient Chinese carvings even indicate that they may have been first used as sexual toys. Ah, the infinite ingeniousness of humanity in getting its collective rocks off sometimes awes me.