19th January 2026: Just the Whip

firstly, ow.

secondly, okay, so, let’s break it down.

yesterday i did the Just the Whip scene, which some of you may remember from my bizarrely titled essay about so-called consensual so-called non-consent. the rules were thus:

• no warm-up
• no safewords
• 35 minutes
• just the whip

the 35 minutes was down from the hour planned because of logistics (our spotter had somewhere to be at half two, we were meant to start at half one, i thought we were starting at two, we ended up starting set-up at half one and were ready by five to two). i was informed it was an hour until aftercare for reasons only known to the top, my flatmate, but i’ve gently requested them just to be honest about that kind of stuff because it makes me feel crazy.

at any rate, the rest of it went basically as intended. i was cuffed up to a suspension frame. i could stand fully on some tatami matts and my feet were free to move around. i was just wearing this cutesy negligée that really did nothing to stop the whip but served to keep me a bit warmer than i might otherwise have been. i got water and lucozade as needed. i went to my kp shift afterwards.

as i write this, i have some disjointed thoughts about some of it. maybe some of it will develop into more meaningful writing, but for now we can take this as both a breakdown of what happened and a gesture towards what’s next.

the first minute, or “on dubious consent”

so i was a bit worried about the scene, as you might expect, right? the whole thing started as an argument about whether whips hurt. i told my flatmate that they, in fact, did not hurt, and he insisted that they did. within the first minute i had conceded the point and was more-or-less begging for him to be done, or at least to go a bit lighter. he did not do that. i think he might have gone harder when he saw how scared i was.

there’s this weird kind of dynamic regarding public scenes and consent. we did this one at a semi-private party, so i think at any given point there were a half dozen of my friends watching me. they were all aware of what the scene was beforehand, and in fact had been teasing me about it for the weeks of build-up. there was a lot of psychic investment in the whole thing – which is just to say that like, people cared about the scene happening.

so, since both my flatmate and i had hyped up the scene with our friends who then fed that psychic investment back to us, it would have been kind of a faux pas for things to end within the first minute, or even for things to slow down. i think mine and my flatmate’s project in kink is to act as the antithesis of every 101 and all online kink advice and every class on best practice you might receive from any given popular educator. we are very edgy, yes. it is very dumb, yes. if jackass is the dudes rock equivalent of kink, we’re aiming for the dykes rock equivalent of jackass. but the point i’m trying to make, really, is that there’s a social expectation that this spectacle will happen. people have taken time away from the rest of the party and opted for this over their own play plans. it would suck for me to freak out and negotiate down at the last minute (even the last hour, days, week), in a way that doesn’t really happen with doing this type of scene at home. everyone would understand, sure, but everyone would equally be disappointed – because you know, like, you can’t help that if you’ve been excited about something, as much as we like to pretend that’s not the case sometimes.

so we end up with something like the reverse of that meme where jesus doesn’t consent. the scene is impelled by social pressure mixed up with everything else. where then is our vaunted consensual non-consent? even before my consent was violated (if there was a distinct point where that happened), the consent i was given to, say, be put in the cuffs wasn’t exactly freely given. lack of opportunities for withdrawal notwithstanding, that i was surrounded by some of my closest friends goading me on complicates what we mean by consent. i think, on a personal level, i am very sensitive to what my friends think, and i also think that the social pressure in this scene was there almost by design so that the scene happened at all, but i am sure there are other kinksters who factor in how many people care about their own scenes happening when they start having second (or third, or fourth) thoughts – and i think it’s worth reckoning with to what extent, and for whom, that can be considered consensual in the way we tend to want “consent” to be construed.

the first ten minutes, or “on fantasy & pain”

this scene fucking hurt. i actually cannot recall this part super clearly so take everything with a grain of salt here.

i didn’t scream at the first hit. i did scream at the second. pretty soon i was going up to my flatmate and saying “okay, no, you’re right, i concede the point, we can be done, can we be done, i’m done, i really don’t want to do this, can you go a bit lighter, can you hit my legs a bit, please, you were right,” only to be met with more pain. i then started shouting at him and saying i was going to kill him. at one point a pal, S—, asked me, “yvette, what colour is a fire extinguisher?” which took me a moment to process before i replied, “red.” i got hit again after that, and i said to the crowd, “there you go, it’s non-consensual now.” i got pretty quiet after that.

part of why it took me a moment to process S—’s joke because was because i couldn’t think. so, my flatmate gets like fully dissociated when he i fuck him up like this. his eyes can’t focus on anything and he goes real quiet and non-responsive. it’s just like complete depersonalisation. i get depersonalisation and derealisation sometimes. sometimes everything just gets too huge in my head and i can’t make sense of it and i don’t understand how i got here, like i’ve just been dropped into this body at just a moment, or nothing else is real around me: the world has turned to a mess of colours and shapes. this scene was kind of the opposite of that. i could only focus on what i was physically feeling. it was, actually, exceptionally grounding. i don’t think i’ve ever felt more present in my body – in a bad way, to be clear. every idea i had about the scene fell apart immediately, and every fantasy of what whatever was happening to me meant never came together.

after i shut up i was pretty fixed on just breathing properly and balancing. the pain i was experiencing was a kind of (i don’t really know how to describe it) system shock because so many blows were going to my chest and back. i put my foot up on my knee and stood to the side so my flatmate had limited options on how to hit me (not that that reduced the pain, just made it slightly more consistent than moving around). i was like that for about five minutes and had no thoughts aside from the breathing and the balance and the pain. i should probably explicate the fantasy thing, i think.

so i’m not going to just explicate my understanding of some of the discussions had in sex, or the unbearable cause i’m not a theorist and this is a blog post, but briefly, fantasy is how one is able to construct meaning and assign relations. we can observe this most clearly in a really normie kink scene. so, like, imagine a daddy dom has a woman over his knee and is calling her a bad girl as he spanks her. now, she’s not actually a bad girl, but the scene exists to play out, to temporarily make real, this fantasy that she is, and that she deserves to be punished, and that the daddy dom has the power, and all this other stuff. but, the spanking and the bad girl only mean what they mean because the fantasy incorporates them into itself. it’s a two way street. now, if we go further into this hypothetical woman’s past, maybe we see that she stole some candy as a kid and her actual dad spanked her about it and called her a bad girl. the thing is, that all exists in fantasy too. the punishment exists to reify the fantasy, and the fantasy exists to make sense of the punishment. this feels kinda basic and stupid when i say it, but like, i just want us to get on the same page here.

now, when i was up there getting beaten, there wasn’t really a reason for it. it didn’t mean anything. the few meanings i had considered – fantasies i had constructed of the catharsis, how maybe i would cry, how i would be degraded in front of my friends – all fell apart. firstly, those things just didn’t really happen, but also i just couldn’t hold them in my head. the whole fantasy was negated by the insistence of this overwhelming and continuous pain, something that was beyond my comprehension, something real. i cannot even really describe the emotional impact of checking into some extended present moment because that stuff failed to cohere. again, it all became meaningless as the hits kept coming.

and then i almost passed out.

the next twenty minutes, or “on endurance & scenecraft”

so at about the ten minute mark i asked my flatmate to let me down cause i thought i was going to pass out. he did, which i guess is NNC in action. it must have been clear enough that i wasn’t faking it, which gives a nice positive example of my whole “you can just communicate and don’t actually need safewords for this kind of play” schtick. he uncuffed me and i fell down pretty hard and let my head hit the tatami mats and shut my eyes and considered having a nice nap. i was just like, crumpled. it was really very pleasant.

my flatmate was going to call it there, which makes sense considering i was getting tunnel vision and super dizzy. but i got back up a minute or two later and asked to be put back in the cuffs. again, i think this is the cashing in of the crowd’s social investment to some degree. you could say i wanted to keep going, but mostly i think, i didn’t want it to stop.

i’ve talk with M— a bit afterwards about the kind of endurance side of things. for the next twenty minutes, until i felt like i was going to pass out again and had to be let down to collapse for a moment, it was as hard as it had been. i held onto the ropes above my head to take my weight more actively through my shoulders. i also sang (my flatmate tried to gag me and then i got out of the gag and asked for it to be taken off cause i was in so much pain i thought i was going to throw up at points), which helped immensely. sorry to those at the party who got a full pelt reindition of my version of suha (“i love my body, i love the desert, please let me remain…”).

there’s a particular kind of skill to and a particular kind of mindset for this sorta thing. M— pointed it out that it’s the same with sports, which i had brought up with my flatmate in advance of the scene. i was doing a lot of 5+ hour long bike rides by myself on a fixed gear while homeless last spring. those, to be clear, weren’t really fun. the giant one where i came south down loch long with all the hills was torture, and my water bottle had exploded just for funsies. this kind of felt like that, being halfway down a road where the only way out, really, is through. there are no bus stops, there are no trains, there are no taxis ready to come pick me up. it hurts and i had to keep hurting myself to get through it. and i did another one the next week.

something there is similar to here, right? except a bike ride you can justify with improved cardiovascular fitness and sexy calves and shit. this adds up to less than nothing. but still, we’re focussing on the similarities here. and i think there’s something particular about learning the techniques to bear with it, not just to collapse and stay on the floor until the ropes come down too. there’s something to saying, “okay it was ten minutes before i actually couldn’t take it the first time, how do we go longer?” that’s all part of why i disagree with R— about scenecraft.

my flatmate and i have been accused of not caring about scenecraft. we have been called some more disparaging things (with love, i hope) but the bulk of R—’s criticism is that there’s no intricacy to what we’re doing, the ideas involved are pretty shallow, and there’s none of the tension and release that creates an interesting experience. i was thinking about this in the shower, and i feel like this criticism is the equivalent of comparing primer to tenet.

so, for those who are unaware, primer is a 2004 feature length sci fi film about time travel made almost entirely by one guy on a seven thousand dollar budget, which it made back more than a hundred times over. tenet is maybe the stupidest time travel film i have seen in cinema made by christopher nolan on a modern blockbuster budget and it has robert pattinson in it. i can tell you now, and presumably you’ll believe me, that primer is the better film – but you’re not at the box office asking for the next showing of tenet for the same reason you’d badger your best pal to show them this indie film that will blow their fucking mind.

i would like to defend my sense of scenecraft in the way that i sometimes feel compelled to defend nolan’s sense of filmcraft to film snobs. i like chantal akerman and three hour long films where nothing happens as much as the next letterboxd user, but tell me that the miniature work in interstellar didn’t make you forget that you were on earth in some dingy cinema, tell me that the explosion in oppenheimer wasn’t genuinely overwhelming. it takes real craft to doing populist cinema effectively, creating something that has mass appeal but is still affecting to witness. i kind of see what my flatmate and i are doing in our kink a similar sort of way. there’s no conceptually interesting entanglement of sensations that dynamically builds and relieves tension. there’s no roleplay that is engaging or funny or whatever to watch play out. it’s just a big stupid thing we’re doing that fucking hurts.

and yet! i have to get back up off the floor. i have to find a way to stay up longer the next time. i have to calm my nerves enough to get into the cuffs, to make sure i can’t back out. on for the top too: to start hard, to push through anything i might say or do to make them stop, to know when they need to stop for a better reason than just because i want to, to keep it up, blow after blow, not letting themselves get self-conscious or tired or worried. my flatmate and i have had to practice kink for over a year together, find a particular kind of lifestyle dynamic together, and engage with a vast quantity of kink discourse together to figure out how we’re actually doing this and what we need for it to be okay – for it not to result in me posting a call-out on fet, or dead, or something.

maybe what we do is lowest common denominator kink. still, tenet topped the box office.

the last five minutes, or “on arousal”

i got back up off the floor a second time for the last five minutes, even when my flatmate said we could just call it. usually, i think in a normal style scene, this is where there’d be the release of that tension, the worst bit, or the best bit, or whatever. obviously here there was nothing like that: it was exactly as bad as it had been at the start, which was as bad as it could possibly get.

which, as i said, that tension and release isn’t really the point, but like, i can’t really be clear enough when i say that the scene was not at all arousing. i did not find one second of it hot.

sometimes when i bottom impact, there’s this wonderful point where the endorphin rush kicks in and everything melts and it all feels really really good. i guess i’m aroused in like, an intimate physical sense during that, but it’s not like i’m erect and want to cum about it or whatever.

i was also not erect and wanting to cum about it during this either. part of that is due, definitely, to the dissolution of every fantasy i could have surrounding the scene (including in the moment constructing it as a “scene” and not just a reality i was experiencing unmediated). however, even in the build-up i didn’t find it hot.

i guess there’s this weird dynamic with the crowd again. having a bunch of people be vaguely wow’d by what i’m putting myself through and think it’s impressive (if weird), is not actually very degrading. i certainly don’t get off on anyone having a high opinion of me. this is maybe something to examine later but i think i specifically get off on disappointment. please don’t read into that too much.

at any rate, this is kind of awkward in constructing a scene because the whole sense of it is, if anything, reputation building rather than reputation destroying (even if it destroys my sense of having a reputation and my identity and all that stuff in the scene itself – what i mean here is more outside of the context of actually getting hit). how do you construct a scene that’s disappointing by design? or, if the scene itself isn’t disappointing, how is the audience made to feel disappointed somehow in the sub? part of the issue of being friends with so many open minded kinky polyamorous trans anarchists is that they’re fairly sexually liberated about everything. getting cucked still kind of hits because people do actually find that humiliating, as opposed to how we can all agree that drinking piss is just drinking piss at the end of the day. similarly, for a scene to work there needs to be some degree of buy-in from everyone. an issue with the drinking piss scenario, outwith the lack of social valuation placed on the act itself, is that while i’m sitting in a bathtub staring up at L— who is waiting for the piss to come, L— is also standing on a bathtub with her cock out staring down at me waiting for her piss to come. honestly i think it’s just as degrading for everyone unless the top can disavow their self-satisfaction and/or the fulfilment of satisfying the sub. i still find it hot, to be clear, but a large part of that is because of how sensual it is.

my point here is that i’ve figured out how to do kink that i don’t want to do, but it’s more of a challenge to do it with someone i don’t want to do it with. this maybe should be the subject of a separate blog post when i’ve though through my feelings here a bit more.

anyway, the time elapsed, the cuffs came off, i collapsed on the floor. no tension, no release, no arousal.

aftercare, or “on aftercare”

i could barely fucking stand. S— had to help me to the aftercare room where i was shaking for about half an hour. lord love haribos for aftercare snacks.

emotionally i was just, like, fine. it was all so meaningless such that i had basically no response to any of it. it just hurt. i really didn’t like it when my flatmate hit my neck. that was the only bit that made me really actually angry and i said i wasn’t still angry with him. he seemed more emotionally affected by it all than me, honestly, proving my maxim that “only tops need aftercare”.

i managed to go to work afterwords. i’ve had my flatmate put moisturiser on me both last night and this morning, so my skin isn’t completely fucked, even where it has been torn apart by the whip. the bruises are a really interesting pattern also. super speckled across my back with stripes across my sides onto my breasts. my legs have nice black bruises in front. my dick has a bruise as well, which i don’t care either way about really.

what’s next

in true deranged kinkster fashion, i have immediately started planning my next big thing like this. i am tentatively calling it the dog-pole scene. it’s being designed to address some of the issues with this: long set-up time, needing to collapse too often, barriers to just letting me collapse which paused play. the current idea is with some rope work to bind my hands to my feet, and a second top who has my neck in an animal control pole (made a bit more comfy with some rubber tubing or a built in collar), i can be on the ground for the scene but still have someone to make sure i’m upright and exposed when i need blows straight to the chest. this is what i consider my sense of scenecraft, i guess: it’s no fun for anyone watching if they can’t see my face while i’m getting hit.

i don’t know why i immediately want to do another scene. i don’t know why i did this scene. it hurt. it wasn’t hot. i had a bad time immediately. honestly, it’s the second worst time i’ve had having anything resembling sex (creds to my rapist for the number one spot there).

and yet, all there is for me to do is get back up and into the restraints.