I like safewords. I use them … not necessarily a lot, but frequently, within the context of our mostly-bedroom kinky scenes. Sometimes I get defensive about this, perhaps because safewords easily become a focus or a symbol of the limitations of the SSC mantra, or emblematic of a “just in the bedroom” sensibility. The topic seems to come up somewhat regularly in the local scene, where the discussion keeps going to and fro between safewords as an important part of doing kink safely, and safewords as unnecessary for more experienced (or often by implication, more real) kinksters. There’s also the thought that safewords won’t help when the shit hits the fan and may even provide a false sense of security to the dom, but otherwise there isn’t all that much discussion about what it means to safeword or how their use affects play.
My lover and I are both long time roleplayers, of the geeky gamer type, and we have the obvious safeword: “offgame”. (I think I might have used “hold!” a time or two when I haven’t had time to stop and think about it.) And I’ve been known on occasion to tap twice, martial arts style, in that borderzone between ingame and offgame where the body has had enough but the mind isn’t clear enough or fast enough to react. These meta-level communications, maybe safewords maybe not, serve different purposes for me, and I don’t think I’ve grasped all the possibilities or implications of them yet.
Lately I’ve been wondering if this kind of safewording I do is different from that usually meant by the term, and whether safewords in general or even in this personal usage are useful for me. One of the reasons I do BDSM, one of my goals that is, is to get into an altered headspace where safewording gets difficult. A headspace maybe related to that Dw3t-Hthr describes (?), though I’m not very far along the road yet. For me, the path winds through physical pain and the acceptance of its inexorability, through hurt, maybe comfort, and possibly humiliation. I don’t know yet, really.
Thing is, the way I use safewords is easy for me even well into the scene. Not easy emotionally, necessarily, since I get into this space of not wanting to disappoint or speak out of turn, but easy cognitively. I can say, “offgame, I’ll probably get panicky soon” even when I’ve collaborated my way into a headspace where the panic is triggered by the sense of helplessness, of not having the right to protest. I’ll say that and usually only then get panicky and hyperventilating. Why do I do that, what’s the use of it?
(Let me digress here a bit. “Offgame”, as I’ve heard it used in role-playing game communities, refers to a level of reality outside or away from that which is collaboratively created or accepted by the players as real within the game. Knowledge and shared understanding of the boundary between ingame and offgame gives the players the security to immerse themselves as fully as possible in their characters and in the experience of the game: it becomes possible to experience and act out very intense and/or very complicated emotional states and identities and relationships and states of being without endangering the ordinary reality. Whether you play with dear friends or relative strangers, it’s important to be able to ask “hey, offgame, is it okay for you if my character gets really angry with yours” if the immersive experience seems to get more intense than previously agreed. The offgame level of communication can also be used to enhance the experience, when the players use it to negotiate narrative events or nuances of interaction.)
I think at least partly, retaining that slim hold on the ordinary level of reality gives me the safety to immerse myself in altered headspaces more easily. The skill of drawing and redrawing the boundaries of ingame and offgame does transfer to kink, perhaps because I’ve practiced immersive experiences in the context of tabletop games since I was a teen, and I’ve gotten slowly used to carrying the meta-level along. It gets easier with time to switch between them, without losing the hold on the immersive state. Knowing the offgame reality is out there does make it safer to explore inner worlds, and thus safewording to say, for instance, that I’ll probably get panicky soon may be a way of comforting myself, reminding myself of the boundary, even as it provides possibly-useful information to the dom. It does not yank me out of the submissive headspace at all, which is something of a mixed blessing at best.
What I wonder is, is this way of using the safewords useful, in light of my goal of altered experience, or does it get in the way? If and when I can safeword reasonably easily even when I’m in headspacey, is it just a residual effect from all that deliberate playing with shared realities, or does it mean that some part of my head is resisting the path even as I’m engaged with walking it? Would I be able to go further if I didn’t stay aware of the offgame level? And is that even a meaningful question in the context of mostly-bedroom kink, where the whole point is that it’s not the sole reality?
I can’t answer this for you (and I just now found your blog, so I know even less than a normal reader might), but the way you use safewords seems completely reasonable to me. Being aware that there is “another level” sounds very sane.
Thanks for the comment — I appreciate your point of view very much, esp. since I’ve been reading your blog with interest for some while
I guess I feel a bit confused and defensive about the “true submissives never safeword” meme that I keep seeing at times in the local scene. While I don’t have much interest in being a true anything, I have this niggling worry that I’m Doing Something Wrong. I do have a serious tendency to overthink pretty much everything, and it’s sometimes hard for me to get the monkey brain to stop for long enough to actually get into the scene… so I wonder if this safewording thingy is another symptom of that or just the sane thing to do. Or possibly somewhere in between.
“True submissives never safeword” is pure b.s. if you ask me. It really just depends on how people have set up their relationship and what works for them (and of course people are often wrong about what will work).
Some people don’t use safewords because they’re perfectly capable of expressing whatever the problem is in plain English (“my foot has fallen asleep” or “I think I’m about to pass out” or “ow!”) and they trust their partner to respond appropriately. (What’s appropriate varies from relationship to relationship.)
Some people don’t use safewords because they become non-verbal in the types of situations where safewords might ever be used anyway, so the idea of a safeword is just a false kind of security.
Some people use safewords because they are short and easy to remember compared to trying to quickly explain exactly what the problem is (especially if the problem is something like “I’m starting to feel emotionally really bad and I don’t know why,” where the bad emotions interfere with their own expression). And some people use them because they are (as for you) sort of “outside” of the scene, and so don’t get as tangled up with questions of obedience or submission or what have you. And some people use safewords because they like to be free to say things like “stop, please, no, I hate this” without their partner stopping, so it’s good to have a way to say “no, really stop” that is unambiguous.
In my relationship, Joscelin can always use a safeword to get me to stop and find out what’s going on, and then it’s up to me to decide what happens next. In other words, his safewords aren’t absolute. But this was something that didn’t happen until over a year of being together, and it’s this way because he likes to feel like a slave who really, truly has no choice. (All the same, if he tells me something is not a good idea, I’m almost certainly not going to proceed.)
Safewords are just a tool, IMO. They don’t guarantee safety (duh) but neither are they insubordinate. Nobody worth bottoming or submitting to wants to harm you, and if safewords help with that, then that’s great.
Sorry to write a novel
I hate how easy it is to get caught up in models of how relationships “should” work when they are actually all different.
I was also really intrigued by Dw3t-Hthr’s post, especially as it related to headspace and the divvying up of responsiblity between partners. The ‘offgame’ idea is interesting (I’ve seen the equivalent in PBEMs of ‘out of character’ or ‘ooc’), since it seems like for you and your partner it allows you to stay in headspace and communicate something out of that space.
Something I’ve been wondering about (and writing about) is what the equivalent for a dominant person is of a submissive person going do deep into the immersive experience that they can’t be responsible for safewording (I’m using that as a measure for how deep they are in the headspace rather than as a value judgment). How and when and under what circumstances can a dominant partner have that kind of experience when so often they are the ones doing the tying up and the beating?