Basically you’re getting a double whammy effect. One is that tens units enhance endorphin production in the body. And two, your muscles ‘accommodate’ to the stimulation you are giving them. HUH? Okay.. I’ll try to explain it in more basic terms.

First the easy part of this electro play double whammy. Endorphins are the chemicals that your body produces in response to stimulation. They prepare your body to fight or flight. It’s something you can’t really control, it’s automatic. When you are physically stressed it just happens. The cool thing for us BDSM types, it that endorphins raise your pain threshold. You can read that as “noticeable stimulation threshold’. The same nerve ending that give you the feeling of ‘pain’ are the same ones that give you the feelings of pressure or heat or well any sensation really. Pain is caused when a lot of those nerve endings are stimulated at once. What endorphins do it make it take even more nerve endings to be stimulated to give you the same amount of sensation. So, essentially if you increase endorphins, you don’t physically feel as much. So the same reason flogging and other SM activities need an increase in stimulus to keep the sensation level the same, works as far a a tens or electrosex unit too.

To explain the second part of the estim double whammy, where your muscles ‘accommodate’ to the stimulation. Your muscles get ‘tired’ as you stimulate them. This is technically where you’ve got chemical depletion and physiological changes with in the muscle working at the same time. If you’re a geek type, but not a biologist, I’ll try to give you a quickie explanation of how a muscle and thus estim works…

The way an electrical signal works through nerves and muscles.. the electrical signal travels very very fast along the myelin nerve sheath (dendrites) when the signal reaches the end of the cell (axiom) the electricity triggers a chemical reaction at the axiom tip. That reaction dumps calcium and/or sodium (don’t remember which) in to the space between that nerve cell and the next cell (a nerve or muscle).

For a nerve cell next door… the chemical reaction occurs kind of in reverse and a new electron is spit out that travels along the dendrite… ta da… You can think of a nerve like a wire in the wall of your house.

If the neighbor cell is a muscle cell then the increase in the sodium next to the muscle cell triggers a chemical cascade in the muscle cell wall that releases calcium inside the muscle. This causes little fibers inside the muscle to bunch up (contract). You feel this contraction of the muscle and you see your muscle twitch or bunch up. Now you’ve got a lot of sodium and calcium free floating in the body inside and around the muscle cells. The body has to ‘reabsorb’ that stuff so it can use it again. This process requires other chemical in the body which take time to make. Also, in muscles the re-adsorption chemistry produces lactic acid. I’m sure you’ve heard of that. It’s what makes your muscles feel sore. Too much lactic acid changes the pH inside the muscle cell and then the calcium trigger stops working, your muscles stop contracting (because they can’t the chemical chain is broken) and WA LA you’ve exhausted your muscles.

That is why when you play with estim, you end up turning up the juice to keep the sensation of the effect level. You’re changing your physiology as you play and ‘exhausting’ your muscles ability to contract. So, you have to put in more stimulation to get an effect to occur.

To sum it up… when you play with e-stim, you have to turn up the juice because your exhausting your muscles and you’re getting an endorphin high.

Now all this supposed that you are playing with fresh batteries in your electrosex or tens unit. If your batteries are old you could just be using your batteries up too. LOL.

Okay now for the shameless plug… Check out the e-stim electrosex or whatever you want to call them toys at www.extremerestraints.com. We sell a lot of boxes and electrosex accessories and estim attachments to go with them.

I found a really cool thing today. It made me think, I mean really think. Do you really KNOW yourself? Or do you just think you do?

Checkout the Harvard Implicit tests. You’ll see if what you say you think is what you really feel deep down. They have demo tests on sexuality, gay versus straight, gender and career, race, skin tone, weight.

I took several of these demo tests and I was pretty much spot on except for one test. I am going to have to do some thinking and see if I agree with the results. I can’t say I like what the test results were. That said, these are only tests made by people who also have their own biases… so they should be taken with a grain of salt.

All week I’ve had an email thread going with a friend of mine. He helped us at a major vending event in Los Angelos at LA Pride. He came to me saying he was really disillusioned with the BDSM scene. Quite a few businesses like ours had demo’s set up. People could try out things like flogging, estim / electrosex, and even the hardcore could try out needle play.  My friend ran across a few self proclaimed ‘doms’ who were invited to feel our electrosex estim setup. They refused saying things like ”I’m a dom, I don’t do that, I do that to people.” It came across more like (to quote my friend) “I’m a big nancy who fears new things.”

I think he probably got it right. Any ethical top or dominant that I would want to play with would have tried it out first, would have wanted to know the sensation (even if they found it detestable and horrible) so they could understand it and know how to use it. I certainly try out everything that I am going to do someone.

Except I can’t exactly put something on my cock. I don’t have one. At least not a real life flesh and blood cock. So I make do. I try out the stuff anyway as best I can.

Those “Nancy Doms” are either new to the scene or they just don’ t get what being a dom is really about. They won’t be getting into deep headspace that full trust and consent with your partner requires. I fell sorry for them. They really are missing out.

My mother made me aware that she thinks all S&M is abusive. She’s wrong. It isn’t. Her frame of reference is stereotyping. There are definitely people who commit abuse (also called domestic abuse) and call it SM or hide abuse under the guise of SM. But there are way many more ‘vanilla’ abusers out there in the world. In my journey I learned a lot about my self and what not to accept from people in my life. S&M was a great healthy turning point for me. Through my BDSM journey, I have learned how to identify abuse and not accept it in my life. I learned how and why some of my needs led me to the wrong people.

I think part of me was always seeking people who would ‘hurt’ me in a good way, but I didn’t know what to search for (much less that I was even searching for it) and I landed into the wrong kind of relationships. The hurt was very unhealthy psychologically for me.

In my life, I have both been the victim of domestic abuse (both physical and mental) and I have also been a practitioner of S&M. It’s probably not so odd that my involvement in S&M came at the end and after the victim era in my life. My S&M journey has included much learning.

Learning about the communication. Learning about the subsequent trust that can develop from that communication. Learning that every human has the right to expect to be respected. Whether you are a top/dominant or bottom, submissive, you have the right to say no, the right to be respected, the right to set the rules. Even those in master/slave relationships have communication and ‘rules’. These ‘rules’ define the relationship and both parties need to be fully accepting and willing of those rules.

Looking back, the key differences that I see between abuse and SM are:

SM is voluntary. It involves mutually defined parameters, lots of communication, setting boundaries or limits, mutual trust, personal growth, mutual pleasure, builds relationships, benefits both parties, is safe, is responsible, includes full knowledgeable consent of both parties. When it is over, both parties are happy it occurred and often want to do it again.

Abuse is involuntary. It can be physical or mental. It involves being out of control, unwilling (unconsenting) participation, lack of control, no respect, divides relationships, victim has no control, no limitations, etc. It involves intentional intimidation of one partner over the other. It tends to have a cyclic nature, escalate over time, leads often to the isolation of the victim. Often there are lots of apologies that it will never happen again.

Sadly there are a few SM practitioners who are abusers, who violate the trust and boundaries set with their ‘play’ partners. Thankfully most SM organizations (SM in the sense of including leather, BDSM, fetish, etc) are aware that there are bad apples in every bunch and take great pains to educate their members both about the difference between BDSM (SM), abuse and safety issues concerning different types of activities.

I am proud to belong to several organized groups who actively work to educate and encourage their members to use “safe, sane, and consensual” behaviors, and do not condone abuse in any fashion. Most organizations actively encourage victims of abusers and abusers to seek help. Most also do their best to remove abusers from their ranks. They also will warn new or novice people to avoid those abusers.

Being involved with a group is a very good idea for people new to the concept and exploring BDSM and SM for the first time.

If you read my blog article called “Newbie very disillusioned with the BDSM scene because of wannabe ‘doms’”, then you know about my friend who is trying to learn all he can about BDSM and SM. He also told me he was a bit disillusioned with the booth across the way because they were tying people up and flogging them gently. He said that it seemed confusing. He kept thinking, “alright, whip them if you’re going to whip them already. It was like a Hot Topic/Goth version of BDSM.”

I completely understand the business across the way being ‘gentle’. In a public venue with lots of vanilla people around and also with new adventurous novices, I would also be very gentle to start out. I posted a short article yesterday on “how-to-give-a-good-first-flogging”

But I digress. The question at hand was ‘why didn’t they really whip them?”

One really important thing to remember…. in any kind of pursuit. A good rule of thumb is “Leave them wanting more”.

As a person who participates and also sells floggers, we vendors want to encourage exploration and show interested people what it can be like, not scare the living shit out of them. (I really recommend not doing things that hurt or scare the shit out of you). Also think about this… it’s okay almost everywhere to kiss in public, but it isn’t okay to get down on the sidewalk in front of Walmart and have a major naked sex marathon. Same with a public venue. It’s okay to give a taste, a teaser, but it isn’t okay to do things that are major intense. You don’t want to the living daylights out of a new person who’s just watching.

At an event like LA Pride, there are a LOT of gay people. There are a lot less people into BDSM. So… the numbers of bdsmers who understand and enjoy flogging are only a small part of the crowd. In essence, there are a lot of ‘newbies’ hanging around.

And as far as the volunteer who is having the experience… think of the first time you tasted coffee or beer, it probably tasted pretty icky. But a lot of you as grown adults like coffee and/or beer. I think of the time time I tasted Drambuie. It was kinda weird tasting, I wasn’t sure if I liked it. But I really love the stuff today. I like it in coffee, I like it straight up, on the rocks, mixed with scotch into a drink called a rusty nail. But I’m sure if I had gotten drunk on Drambuie the very first time I tasted it.. I would detest the stuff today.

The other thing to think about… is the laws in the location where the event was being held.
The laws concerning what is allowable in public are different everywhere. I know of a state where in City A where it is okay to be naked in a bar but you can’t be spanked. In City B, you can be spanked but you can’t be naked. You have to know the legalities of the location where you hold any event. I”m not from Los Angeles, so I don’t know what rules governed the business vending at LA Pride. However, I am sure they all complied with the laws. We are in business to make a living after all. Losing everything because of a little fun in a vending booth would really bite.

To sum it all up on why didn’t they whip harder in public:

1. It was a public place, even though the volunteer consented, passerby’s didn’t. So the flogger didn’t want to offend them.
2. Wanted to leave the newbie with a feeling of “wanting more.”
3. Maximize exposure. wanted to be able to give the largest number of people the experience. not enough time to do a proper warm up.
4. Public laws may play have played a role.

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