so, I think most people who are interested in bdsm on some level are aware of two kinds of pain - good pain and bad pain. pain you want to have and pain that's bad and takes you out of the space. but there's a third kind of pain, the sort that committed masochists tend to enjoy - "love to hate" pain, if you will.
for me, thuddy, deep pressure pain is a pain I enjoy directly - I can endure it with little issue, and it makes me feel good. I absolutely cannot abide pain that threatens my joint stability or causes grinding/aching in my shoulders and arms, and it takes me out of the scene/headspace when I feel this - I have to be very careful with rope, and to hold my legs in the exact right way so my knees don't lock at the right moment.
But stingy pain, the sort of pain that comes from a wet palm, or a single-tail whip, is a pain I hate - it takes everything I have not to squirm away from it, but it's also the pain that takes me furthest over the edge. When that kind of pain hits, it's flying - I'm out of my body, suspended by the blow and blown by the aftershocks.
It depends on the personality and people involved, of course. With my partner and I, I think we started hitting that level by accident, after the (beloathèd) shock-stick discharged badly on my clit during a scene - not enough to seriously harm me, thankfully. (My partner spent the next day testing the shock stick over and over until he identified what it was that caused it, and how to replicate it, so he would never do that by accident again, and so he could replicate it at will. Have I mentioned how much I love him?) But after that moment, the scene reached a whole different plane of existence.
I'm tagging this as a writing resource, because this could absolutely be useful to other writers not into bdsm themselves. Part of the goal of this blog was to offer other people an inside look/thoughts from someone who's been involved for what's getting close to eight years (gagh, time flies). BDSM, and specifically leather, is one of the defining aspects of my identity and how I navigate the world, and I've spent...a lot of time thinking and talking about it,