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Chapter Thirteen
Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid

The woman is totally naked with her wrists secured to a suspension bar high above her head. This poses her body in a manner that displays her delicious features those pouting breasts with nipples erect, those long, lovely legs that drive me wild, that divine cunt which even now displays small beads of lubrication . I’ve enjoyed fondling her to get her excited, but now I reach into my toy bag to pull out – the cattle prod.

Her eyes open wide in a moment of terror She starts to squirm and tremble. Yes, she remembers. She negotiated this with me, hut this is the real thing. She knows about the convulsing shock it can produce in her body. She can’t help letting a soft “No! Please!” escape from her lips. She could say the safeword, but there is excitement for her there too.

I let the vicious brass tips of the cruel instrument run across her breasts… her nipples… her inner thighs… her smooth ass. She follows these movements with soft moans and a pleading look on her face. She has to wait for that moment – that moment of shock.

I then stand directly in front of her. We look into each other’s eyes. Within this field of view I place the instrument so we can both look upon it as we look at each other. I then unscrew the hack end to show her that – there are no batteries inside!

The Basic Emotions Used in Electrical Play

From time to time I’ve been heard to say, “The mind is a wonderful thing to waste.” To an extent this sums up the psychology of electrical play.

Even though electricity has been with us for more than 120 years and even though it is important in our daily lives, electricity still frightens us. Now I’ve worked with electricity for all of my professional career and have done really stupid things like working with live wires, but despite all my knowledge and experience and, yes, luck, I still jerk back when I see an unexpected spark. My anxiety level also goes up when I smell that characteristic smell of burning insulation. I’m experienced; I can only imagine how frightening electricity is for someone who has little knowledge about it.

And for many people electricity is terrifying. I remember playing with one submissive with a violet wand – a beginner’s toy by many people’s standards. Even though she agreed to play with me, she trembled when we started. During our play i purposely did a light electrical scene and explained what I was doing with her. I even demonstrated how if I touched the gas bulb directly to her skin, she would feel nothing. Despite all of this gentleness and explanation, she was frightened and trembled to the end of the scene.

This fear of electricity is the one of the two major things we play with or must concern ourselves with in electrical play. Even though we may have been doing electrical play for a long time, we never get blasé about it.

Fear is part of the fun of electricity play – but if the bottom gets too scene will end badly. The trick is to walk right along the edge of the bottom’s fear.

The second major psychological factor in electrical play is the sensation. Many people play with electricity as often as they can because the sensations they get from it to them are pleasant (or at least desirable). Some people enjoy everything from the light, tingling sensations they get from a TENS unit to the moderate, muscle-jumping sensation of a relaxicisor to the intense sensation that comes from a cattle prod or a telephone magneto. Some people get almost addicted to it, like some people get to a good flogging.

Before starting with any play, the play partners need to have some level of trust in each other. This is especially true with electrical play. An important component here is negotiation.

In negotiation a bottom should have some sense that the top knows what he s doing. The bottom should also be scrupulously honest about her health matters such as heart conditions, prior experience, etc. She should also let her prospective top know what she would like to get from the scene.

The top should also get a sense of the prospective bottom s fear level and fascination with electrical play. The bottom may be frightened out of his wits, but he is so fascinated by the prospective play that it will contribute to the scene’s energy.

Experienced tops and bottoms who do any kind of edge play are well aware of this aspect of negotiation. If you are new you should become familiar with the 16-point negotiation technique in Jay Wiseman’s SM 101. Because you’ll be dealing with electrical play, the specific health questions shown in Chapter 10 should be incorporated in your discussion. I would also highly recommend that you determine who in the room (besides the bottom, of course) has CPR training, and whether that person wilt be available to lend such assistance in the scene in the relatively unlikely event that it’s needed.

For an intense sensation electrical play scene, the FEAR-FASCINATION-TRUST aspects work like a triangle (see fig. 32). The pleasure of the scene will be broken if any of the three legs of the triangle is broken.

Figure 32

To get the maximum pleasure out of the scene, the top must balance the fear against the fascination to maintain the bottom’s trust. That means that the top must put his full attention on the bottom and the scene. The top needs to know and understand what she is doing, where the current is going, how the current is likely to affect the bottom’s body, and how the bottom is responding – physically and mentally. The top also needs to be prepared to immediately notice and take care of any physical and/or psychological emergencies that may develop.

The bottom is equally responsible for letting the top know what’s going on with him. The bottom should communicate, through safewords and other codes he agreed on during negotiation, anything that seems wrong or not working for him.

Even with highly experienced and tong term heavy play partners who do so-called “no-safeword” scenes, there is always some mode of communication that prevents serious injury.

This communication and attention between the top and bottom is very important. When done properly, such a scene is a beauty to behold. It is also something that rarely happens for newcomers in the scene. This intimacy is something that you need to learn through experience and by making mistakes – preferably non-serious ones.

Notes for New Tops and Bottoms in Electrical Play

Sometimes the question comes up for tops, especially for newcomer tops: “How do I keep all of these factors – the three H “P’s,” paying attention to my partner’s responses, where is the current likely to go, how do I use this toy – in mind when I play with my partner and still let the scene flow?” There just seem to be too many things to keep track of.

Consider how you learned how to drive (assuming you’re an average, reasonable, and responsible driver). When you started out everything seemed overwhelming – watching traffic, shifting, listening to the driver’s-ed teacher… and your driving showed it. There were the jerky starts and stops, gunning the engine, driving over curbs and flowerbeds and the like. But as you gained skill, proficiency, and confidence, the braking became smoother, the turns more easy, etc. The location of the shift lever and the brake pedal and the headlamp knob became less conscious and more reflexive. Now you’re at a point where all you need think about consciously is your route: the actual mechanical skills of braking, turning, and even responding to stop lights and speed limits seems automatic. Actually your mind is still working on these skills, but not on a conscious level, unless there is a problem – like the overheat warning light going on. Then your attention focuses consciously on how to solve the problem.

This is what happens as you become more proficient in any play, including electrical play. That is why I want you to have a good understanding of what you’re playing with.

It is for this reason that t recommend that all new tops starting to play with electricity start slowly. There are fewer factors to deal with, and you get more enjoyment out of your early scenes. Soon enough you’ll be amazing your friends with the fantastic scenes you’ll be doing. Of course, you’II be too busy concentrating on your partner and the scene to concern yourself about being a showoff.

For the newcomer bottom to electrical play, don’t get the idea that all you need to do is be a receiver. Electrical play is edge play. You have a great deal of responsibility too. Having done some non-electrical scenes would help you understand the negotiation, play, and communication process. You can then watch experienced players do electrical play and see what fascinates you. You should also be aware of your fears about electrical play and talk about them with your prospective top. Ask yourself the general question, “Do I trust this prospective top?” (If you don’t, look elsewhere.) Also, know your health situation – particularly about your heart.

Since electricity carries higher physical and psychological risks than most other kinds of play, it’s best to start slowly and work your way up to more intense play over several sessions.

During a scene if you don’t feel that the top you’re playing with knows what he’s doing, call your safeword. It’s not just a case of being “better safe than sorry;“ it s a case of being “better safe than dead.”

Responses

The following is a reasonably detailed, but not exhaustive, list of responses that bottoms experience when playing with electricity. (You can also refer to the table on P. 90.) This serves as a rough guide for tops and bottoms as to what can be expected. If you have a different experience, you should not feel that you’ve failed your top; what’s important is whether you like the sensations and the experience, not how you compare to some other bottom, Tops, recognize that your bottom’s peculiar responses may be different that what is shown here. That is why you need to pay attention to your bottom.

The most typical response of a bottom to electrical play is the sensation. As we’ve seen in Chapter 9, the sensation depends on nerve stimulation. It also depends on the current available and the number of nerves stimulated.

One of the first sensations some people report from something like a violet wand is a feeling like ants crawling over the surface of the skin when the gas bulb is dose enough yet a spark to the skin is not drawn. (You can feel a similar sensation by holding your forearm close to the front of your TV’s picture tube.) Many people report this to be a pleasant sensation, but a few find it annoying and don’t like it.

Moving up the sensation scale is the continual skin tingling you get when a violet wand bulb has sparks jumping to the skin, or from a TENS unit. Typically the tingling sensation for lower currents is characteristic of alternating currents; DC currents typically give more of a burning sensation. TENS units are DC pulses; even though they don’t actually go negative like AC currents, they feel like AC currents.

TENS units often have controls that control the intensity, the duration, and the frequency of the stimulation. Thus the top has more control of the stimulation.

Thus by intensifying and easing off the stimulation, he can “play” the bottom like a musical instrument.

The sensations of electricity play range from very mild, pleasant tingling through intense and disabling pain.

Next you move up to the higher currents where you get muscle involvement. This level of stimulation most often comes from relaxicisors and the more intense telephone magnetos. The bottom is aware of twitching muscles that are under someone else’s control. Depending on the size of the contact pads (see Chapter 9) the feeling of the sensory nerves being stimulated can vary anywhere from a pleasant tingle to intense pain. Typically relaxicisors use large area electrode pads, thereby producing more of a tingle. Telephone magnetos generally use small area electrodes and thus produce more intense pain.

When you get to the really intense sensation toys like cattle prods and tensor units, the sensation is really one of sharp, intense, localized pain. With a cattle prod the duration of this is brief as the bottom (if he can) jumps away from the prod. The cattle prod is often used in bursts, but it can be continuous.

The sensations of electricity play range from very mild, pleasant tingling through intense and disabling pain.

With tensors or stun guns (personal defense shockers) the application is usually continuous. The bottom will very often be disabled and collapse for five to IS minutes when she receives a five-second jolt. That’s what stun guns are designed for.

At an entirely different sensation, there is the warming sensations experienced by those bottoms being subjected to diathermy equipment. These machines were designed for heating the interior tissues of arthritis sufferers. As such, properly used, operating r and maintained machines will not cause damage. A gentle warmth will be felt by the bottom. Such warmth can be pleasurable or anxiety-producing, depending on other things happening in a scene.

Almost all bottoms fed some level of fear response during electrical play. For the experienced electrical play bottom, the fear may have been overcome; he’s more interested in the sensation. If a bottom, however, is especially fearful, the top needs to work at that fear edge to keep the bottom’s trust and hence the scene going. Working at such an edge requires special diligence in paying attention to the bottom’s responses. Usually at such an attention level, the intimacy becomes very close.

Fear from a new bottom is often something a top must deal with. A top can start off with simple, lower intensity scenes to build up a bottom’s trust level so that she can handle successively heavier scenes. Clear negotiations are especially important at the early stages.

For some bottoms the fear of electrical play stems from an early childhood trauma such as child abuse by electrical torture. This can also be the case of former prisoners who have been electrically tortured or by recent electrocution victims. Often such people don’t want to participate in electrical play. For them the fear far outweighs the fascination. However, if some repressed memories of such traumas come up during electrical play, the top must be prepared to abort the scene and bring the bottom down from his psychological crisis.

Trust is a big issue during any edge play. This is especially true of electrical play. As with any trust issues, it depends largely on the communications between the partners rather than the top impressing the bottom with her skills. The bottom must always communicate with the top about what’s happening with him. He should let his top know that a limit is either reached or slightly exceeded. The top should be very responsive to this information. Intensity and/or pace should be varied as needed. If the scene-ending safeword is called, of course, the whole scene should be ended and the bottom brought down from the scene.

If trust is lost it will be hard for those partners to play again.

Another psychological factor in any play but especially in electrical play is intimacy. Because of the concentration and attention the top has on the bottom, and because of the high level of communication between them during a rather in- tense scene, a deep intimacy develops between the top and bottom – if just only for the duration of the scene. After all t these two are sharing some pretty heavy feelings with each other even during ’light” play. Such level of intimacy also re- quires that the top stay with the bottom after the scene is completed to assure that the bottom is definitely out of scene space.