What Is It About Impact Play?

With her ass lit up red from well over 300 strokes with a heavy flogger, her cum dripping down her legs,  her mind floating in a hypnotic sub-space fog, she moans as my cock fills her ass.  

“Mark me Daddy” she coos.  

The cane stroke startles her for a moment, before she moans with pleasure as my cock again fills her ass  and my cool skin presses against her red-hot cheeks…she is cuming hard as she asks again to be marked  “mark me Daddy.” In our scenes, she is marked and then ass fucked until she asks to be marked again.  The cycle repeats until she stops asking or until I am so aroused that I cum. This week she welcomed 10  strokes of the heavy cane. She is a proudly marked collared slut.  

Impact play is ultimately a form of energy play. Kinetic energy that the implement delivers to the  bottom, who in impact play is referred to as the catcher, from the person wielding the whip, the  thrower, varies based on the skill and the amount of energy used to throw the whip. What occurs in the  receiver’s body with the impact is an interesting neurophysiological and psychological/emotional  phenomenon. What makes a masochist a masochist is the association of pain with pleasure. And at the  same time, there are people who do not identify as masochists who enjoy impact play. With that in  mind, consider that the first time a flogger/whip lands on the skin, the pain receptors, technically called  nociceptive mechanoreceptors, are stimulated to fire. They send their message of pain up to the brain  using a slowly transmitting message pathway of unmyelinated nerves. Think of it as if the pain message  is on a slow train to the cerebral cortex delivered by a chemical process of neurotransmission. If you  have ever bumped your shin hard, you know exactly what I am referring to. The message of pain gets to  the brain eventually, and with repeated strokes of the flogger, that pathway is chemically depleted. At  the same time, there is another process occurring that creates a chemical irritant to the nociceptors.  This time at the level of the capillaries. In the case of an unseasoned bottom, the capillaries fail and leak.  The blood that leaks will lead to bruising around the area. Deep bruising on a fresh bottom will spread as  the blood drains with gravity. In a seasoned bottom, this redness is transient, and reflects a slightly  different process which I will come back to. Local bleeding produces lysosomal enzymes in the  interstitial spaces, which create chemical pain as those lysosomes irritate the nociceptors. When you  press on a bruise, it hurts because those lysosomal enzymes are out in the interstitial tissues rather than  encapsulated in in the lysosomes in the blood vessels where they belong. In the seasoned bottom, the  local redness is in part due to the normal cooling mechanism of the body. Local heat causes redness as  blood comes to the surface so that cooling can occur, and heat can dissipate. The main advantage of  “warming up the bottom” is that the fluid filled tissue is very tolerant of impact play. With my slut, we  play almost every day and her ass gets very red, but a short time after we play her skin color has  returned to normal. There are no lasting effects of the impact play on the local tissue.  

Just a short note on pain interpretation. As best we can tell, pain is an emotion. We experience the  emotion the way we do based on many things from our upbringing to our nature. My mom was  incredibly stoic. She barely flinched when she cut her and badly and had to have stitches without  anesthetic. I have had a dental filling replaced without an anesthetic by just using visualization to  manage the pain of dental work. The point is that we all interpret pain differently.  

As a flogging scene begins, I gradually build up the intensity of the impact and the ass literally warms up.  The combination of repeated blows of a gradually increasing intensity brings enough blood to the area to allow the blows to land on tissue that does not deform sufficiently to fire off the deep pain receptors  and the sensation of impact play is normalized recruiting the normal sensory pathway, which is  delivered via high-speed electro-chemically transmitting myelinated nerves. Think of this as the fast  train. Imagine that the two pathways get to a station, and at the station, there is a gating mechanism  which gives priority to the rapidly conducting nerves, so the pain transmission is overwhelmed by this  new input and the sensation experience of the catcher changes to a sensation that is interpreted as  pleasurable, or at least, as a more normal sensation.  

Its that shift that moves the experience from one of punishment to one of pleasure. The impact imparts  kinetic energy that the catcher internalizes as erotic, sexual and arousing. This occurs because in the  cerebral cortex, the pain input is received, and because pain is an emotion, like happiness or sadness,  how it is received is up to the interpretation of the catcher. It is in this state of being in a hypnotic trans  that the catcher interprets the impacts as pleasurable, erotic or sexually arousing.  

The implement I choose to mark my slut with is the cane. I have a long history with the cane, both in  being caned as a child in school as well as an implement to enforce a discipline or impart a punishment. I  choose the cane as the implement I use to mark my slut as an act of love. She wears her marks with  pride, and she chooses to be marked on her terms. We have created a paradigm where she puts herself  forward for marking in our high protocol scenes and during the scene, I mark her when I am confident  that she is, in fact, prepared and ready to be marked. She occurs to me as ready for marking when it is  clear to me that she is experiencing a deeply hypnotic state or what we know as “subspace”, and that  her ass has been warmed up with hundreds of strokes starting with light and progressing to heavy, and  after I have flogged her on two or three separate occasions building up to the intensity each time  leading up to the marking. Once she is warmed up to my satisfaction, I alert her than marking is next so  she can prepare herself, then I give her one firm cane stroke with the heavy cane. I choose the heavy  cane because she is a seasoned bottom and in order to mark her, I need to make sure she develops a  deep bruise. What follows for us is that it’s up to her to request that she be marked again. Giving her  this choice has opened a new avenue for her to explore her masochism and her capacity to expand her  enjoyment of our impact play. There is a lot of power in her choosing to be marked. She is empowered  to test herself and she is immensely proud of her marks. To illustrate this, note that in the past, she only  tolerated up to 3 or 4 strokes before she limited out, with this new paradigm she is now requesting up  to 10 strokes and talking about asking for more. I have one more thing to say about the marking. The  intensity of the cane strokes pulls her out of her hypnotic trance for sure, so we have created a way to  manage the marking process, and then after the marking process if complete, I incorporate all the tricks  I have to create sexual pleasure for her so that she is able to return to her trance state. Marking for us is  not an act of punishment or discipline. Its part of our dynamic and its part of our agreement to live a  Total Power Exchange. In our dynamic, she belongs to me and I mark my belongings. With that said, I  have postulated that because she experiences orgasms with flogging, that before long, and especially as  her cane strokes grow in number, she will also experience orgasm with cane strokes.  

What is interesting about impact play is that there are all sorts of implements to enjoy experimenting  with. I have had the experience of topping a dedicated and long experienced masochist who was fulfilled  by suffering. She was more interested in being hurt than she was in having an orgasm. There is nothing  wrong with that, and that is not where we are in our current dynamic. As a sensual sadist, my interest is  in using implements that allow my slut to explore her sexuality, and her masochism as her full self expression. She is a sensual masochist. Not looking to experience pain for the purpose of suffering, but rather looking for pain that arouses her in the context of an impact scene. We have discovered that she  is partial to the heavy flogger. It brings out her inner slut and she has enjoyed the experience of as many  as 1200 vigorous continuous strokes with the heavy flogger. She is not, as it turns out, partial to the  riding crop, or the paddle or the wooden paddle which seems to be distracting for her. She finds a  rhythmic flogging to be what she desires to keep her in subspace and in full arousal. She finds that the  experience of intermittent strokes or strokes that surprise her tend to “break the spell” as it were. That’s  not her jam. She wants predictable impact play that allows her to explore the depths of her masochism  and her journey in subspace and rhythms that maintain the hypnotic and erotic state of mind seem  more suited to her sexual inquiry.  

Thinking about floggers, there is a continuum from light floggers to heavy, to cat-of-nine tails, to snake  whips to single tails to bullwhips.  

The natural progression is that in the case of throwing and catching whips, there is a progression that  requires skills. Luckily, the skills build from implement to implement. Also, there is a difference between  punishment and sexuality. In this writing, I am speaking about sensual sadism while using whips and  floggers for hypnotic impact play. This is the way we use the flogger. The impact play scenes we engage  in are erotic and hypnotic by nature. This means that there is loud music and the rhythmic strokes that  build up from lighter to heavier are predictable to her and timed with the music. Because I can increase  the intensity on a gradient without changing rhythm or by suddenly changing the intensity too  dramatically, I can keep her in that hypnotic trance state for a long time. The below threshold intensity  of the rhythmic flogging that we engage in helps to both create a hypnotic trance, and to sustain the  experience such that I can increase and decrease the intensity of the flogging so she can ride waves of  pleasure during our play. The only unpredictable variable in our use of the flogger then is the duration of  the flogging. What I never do is “shock” her with an unreasonably heavy strike so she comes out of the  hypnotic trance she is experiencing.  

The choice to move from flogger to cat-of-nine requires the learning of a skillset to keep all nine fronds  of the whip on target. This is amplified in difficulty by orders of magnitude with each successive whip as  the number of fronds goes down, and the length of the whip increases, requiring one to use more force  to get the whip on target with each transition from one whip to the next. By the time you get to single  tails, you are dealing with a whip that can move at subsonic speeds imparting a massive amount of  kinetic energy to the catcher with each stroke. There is no advantage to whip a catcher at super sonic  speeds, that is to say, to crack the whip on the person, and even a sub-sonic whipping, where you crack  the whip just before it impacts the catcher, imparts a significant amount of kinetic energy to the catcher,  who’s skin will likely break unless they are very experienced at catching high intensity whips.  

The definitive work on whips is “Whips in the Dungeon: Singletail Technique” by Dex who also has an  extensive video library and who regularly hosts educational sessions on whip play on Amazon. Dex  maintains a Patreon for a lot of his very worthwhile content too. You can find that here:  https://www.patreon.com/witd. And you can access his Whips in the Dungeon video library that  accompanies the text here http://witd.houseofgraves.com/witd/. If you want to learn to be a proficient  whip thrower, I strongly recommend the Dex method that progresses you from one whip to the next  most difficult whip on the way to the single tail. Dex has a couple of Youtube channels and a facebook  page that you can follow him on. All of those links are available on his fetlife page. Just search for Dex. 

There are two participants in our impact play scenes. The thrower (me) and the catcher (her). In our  scenes, we use impact play as in integral part of our sexual encounters. I use chain bondage, and her  obedience to create a deep dive into hypnotic subspace, and along with hypnotic erotic flogging, take  her to that place where her sexual self-expression occurs in her submission and her unconstrained  exploration of herself as a masochist. It has been there, in that experience of subspace, that our sexual  encounters take on the form of an energetic exchange where we find ourselves occurring not as two  people, but as a single sexual creature. This experience is brought about after a long bout of rhythmic  flogging that pushes her deeper into that frame of mind. The deeper she goes, the harder I can flog her.  The harder I flog her the more she cums, the firmer her butt gets and the more she tolerates cane strokes.  

I have had vastly different experiences with impact play over the years. I have used impact play as a tool  of discipline where submissives who seek guidance choose escalating sessions of corporal punishment to  keep them accountable. In those instances, there is not a long warm-up and the submissive is told to  simple bend over and pull her panties down before being caned. I have also, as I mentioned, been  served by a submissive who needed to suffer in order to be fulfilled sexually. She wanted to be surprised  by intense punishment scenes with unpredictable impacts that shocked and surprised her for example.  

Impact play is something that you can do with or without association with sexual intimacy. People who  are dominants might themselves also enjoy impact play as catchers in addition to being throwers. The  main thing it to remember is that consent is everything and the negotiation that allows the impact scene  to progress should include agreements around safe words.  

In our dynamic, we use Red and Yellow. Others use a number scale, and so on. The number scale is way  for people who do not know each other well to be in communication during a scene. The thrower might  feel that they are using a force that occurs to them as a 7/10 while the catcher might only be  experiencing the impact as a 3/10. The number scale can help them get aligned in their interpretation of  the intensity. The key to a successful scene is that the thrower and the catcher MUST be in  communication, and there must be trust so that the catcher knows that the thrower will honor their  safe words.  

Play safe!  

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