How to Be Kinkier: More Adventures in Adult Playtime Page 15

  Following the Leader: Mentorship

  Mentorship is a frequent topic in the kink world. What’s the point of having a mentor when there is a plethora of books and Internet articles that you can glean information from? Books and online material are great resources; they come packed full of all kinds of information that can be very valuable—but there is something irreplaceable about learning one on one with a mentor you can look up to, someone in real time who can answer your questions and show you techniques that a YouTube video just cannot convey. How do you find a mentor and how exactly can a mentor help with your kinky explorations?

  A mentor should have walked your path before: a submissive or slave should seek out a submissive or slave mentor, a Dominant should seek out a Master. It is a teacher/student relationship. Mentors should not only be masters in their subject, but patient, supportive, respected, people oriented and effective teachers. That last one is key. Many people are natural superstars in the scene with flogging, whips, fireplay, aural seduction and so on, but unless they can convey the specific skills that make them “superstars”—show another how to dissect and approach their style or technical skill—then they won’t be able to pass it on effectively. Most mentors I know are quiet and thoughtful. They are not always the biggest, baddest Domme in the room. They listen to questions carefully and then give a complete answer. They assess your skill level and decide where you can go in your next step. Unfortunately some of the best mentors are so good that their time is limited and it is hard to find one that is willing to take on a student.

  Having a good mentor can take you places you never thought you’d end up!

  When role-playing as Little Red Riding Hood, make sure the Big Bad Wolf eats you (out), just like the story says.

  A mentorship should never be sexual in nature. If your “mentor” wants to get in bed with you and you’re game, then go right ahead—but then find yourself another mentor because a sexual dynamic will compromise the educational aspect. It always does. This situation should not be confused with a partner/friend/fuckbuddy/play partner dynamic where you are learning and sharing with each other; people will always exchange idea and techniques. I am referring to a very specific learning model known as mentorship. Good mentors are a wonderful resource and if you learn your own skill set properly and with sincerity with the guidance of a mentor, you may find yourself ready to take on a protégé of your own in a few years. Really great mentors are also people who understand that no matter how advanced they are, they are committed to lifelong learning themselves, constantly sharpening their skills and refining their own BDSM practices.

  Finding a Mentor: Where to Look

  As you gain access to the community, take time to get to know the people that are most established and see what they have to offer in their particular area of expertise. I recommend asking them, politely, three to five specific questions when exploring whether they would be interested in becoming your mentor. For example:

  Who mentored you or where did you learn?

  How would you approach a particular situation of personality clashes between a Dominant and submisive?

  What do you believe to be the best qualities of a Master or a slave?

  What would mentorship look like to us?

  These kinds of questions will give you an idea of their methodology. Then if you think it is a good match, you can politely ask if they would consider taking you on to help you develop your skills. What I don’t encourage is depending only on an online mentorship—you need to get offline and into the real world. A mentorship can be part time in nature; given the demands that life puts on us, sometimes that is all it can be. People online can claim to be anything you want them to be; find a mentor in the real world, with a reputation for conducting him or herself in an honest, straightforward manner. Later on, once a mentorship relationship has been established, the Internet can be a valuable tool for keeping linked. Is it possible to have more than one mentor at a time? Yes, provided they know about each other and the information they are giving you isn’t contradictory.

  If you are going to try fisting, make sure you are both horny as hell and then use tons of lube. Go slow and steady and concentrate on breathing and relaxing.

  Depending on the nature of your relationship to your mentor and factoring in issues of time and proximity, he or she will probably be able to put you in touch with other people and resources that will help you develop and learn. A mentor should be encouraging of you developing a varied skill set, and he or she should not be threatened by other sources of learning. If your mentor says any of the following, you might want to reconsider the relationship:

  I am one of the TRUE lifestylers in the scene.

  I have been around since the beginning and know everything.

  No one is as good as me.

  It’s okay, I learned all this from a master in Europe, we msn all the time!

  A really good mentor should embody all of the values that you admire and never stop his or her own learning process.

  Helping Them Find Their Footing: How to Be a Good Mentor

  There will come a time when you have refined your own practice and gained sufficient skills that you feel you are ready to take on a protégé. How do you know you are ready to be a mentor and how do you structure your teaching so that a protégé can take advantage of your knowledge and learn on his or her own in the process? My personal experience in being a mentor focuses on one person per year. I believe that any more than that will mean spreading yourself too thin. Online you will see people who have lots of designations, like “In a house with a relationship, mentoring, training and topping submissive/pet CandiGrrl.” That sounds like way too much work to me and way too many hats. I prefer a simpler public approach to my mentorship that is based on my experience as a professionally trained educator. Online isn’t as important as real-life experiences where you can talk, discuss, interact, watch and learn from someone who has been down the same path as yourself, just earlier.

  Facing Page: You should choose a mentor who embodies traits that you admire and carries themselves with grace and confidence.

  A good mentor will find out what you’re interested in and help you find yourself within that realm.

  Be uncomplicated but not easy.

  As a mentor you should be respectful and polite and encouraging as you share your knowledge, but you should also allow for the relationship to be dynamic. No doubt your protégé will suggest new and improved ways of doing things you have demonstrated; don’t take this as an attempt to one-up you—encourage him to explore and expand his knowledge, but also be ready to offer feedback on what he is doing, how it might be improved or whether or not it is potentially unsafe. Your protégé needs for you to be straightforward and honest in your encouragement and assessment of her ideas and performance. You should offer challenging feedback sandwiched between positive reinforcement—the Oreo method described in How to Be Kinky: A Beginner’s Guide to BDSM. There is no reason someone has to reinvent the wheel, but there is also no law against using that “wheel” to their advantage. Once I demonstrated how to do a specific type of Japanese bondage harness called a box tie for my protégé. She took that knowledge, practiced it over and over and a month later at a rope group meeting showed me how she had improved on the traditional tie with her own flair. I see my role as that of a guide and facilitator, and you should too.

  Always do as you’re told…

  Because it sticks only to itself, bondage tape is absolutely perfect for trying out new positions.

  I formally work with one person a year to help them find their path as a Dominant or Master/Mistress, a dynamic that works best for my personality and allows me to give my protégé the attention he or she deserves. It’s gratifying to me when their own skill sets eventually outshine mine and they go on to bigger opportunities. If you are a great mentor and teacher, the student should eventually outshine you. This is the biggest compliment that they can pay you. Your time in someone’s life ca
n be as long or as fleeting as both of you like; what lasts are the lessons taught with sincerity and respect. As a mentor, you will have feelings and emotions too, but if your protégé goes on to be a bright superstar in the scene, remember that he or she did it in part because of your influence and you should be encouraging, provided they reached their position respectfully and with good old-fashioned hard work. The biggest part of being a mentor is the ability to take a large skill and break it down into a series of manageable steps, be it hard or soft skills—more on those in a moment.

  Following Respectfully: Being a Good Protégé

  I can’t discuss mentorship without also talking about the flip side—being the protégé. It is natural that you are eager and ready to learn everything you can from your mentor but you don’t want to be annoying. How do you strike a balance between asking thoughtful questions and behaving like a yappy dog at someone’s heels? You need to be able to be respectful and polite. Anyone worth being a mentor will let you know exactly how much time he or she will have available for helping you develop. A mentor will take the time to let you know where the boundaries are—specifically at a fetish night. You might be invited to shadow him at an event, either to assist or just to watch. What you shouldn’t expect is for the mentor to spend his entire evening babysitting you. Be a complement to your mentor as requested and she will in turn help sharpen your skills and approach to the lifestyle. If he has invited you to be a part of a scene so he can do a demonstration in public, don’t ever question or criticize his decisions in public unless there is a large breech of safety involved. Ideally if he or she has asked you to be part of a public scene, he will have already discussed the evening ahead of time. You both should have a private time set aside afterward for questions and answers. If you have been given certain responsibilities to perform when assisting him, do so with good will. You will have your own ideas about how to approach playtime or service, and the mentor should encourage you to express and explore them, but if he is demonstrating something specific and has you involved, then it is because he wants you to have a specific foundation upon which to build.

  Facing Page: The skills you will learn as a protégé will keep your kink life fulfilling and exciting for years to come.

  1 This is a very easy gag to make. All you need is a piece of dowel, two ball gags and some wide ribbons. 2 For the side-by-side position, loop some sexy ribbon over the end, around the back of the first submissive’s head and then to the middle. 3 Go around the back of the head of the second submissive and then split the ribbon around the wooden rod. 4 You don’t need to over-wrap the ribbon. Tying it off at the end is a great finish. 5 Make a pretty bow; neatness counts!

  6 The facing forward position follows the same wraps, only with their positions being opposite. 7 Wrap the ribbon around the back of the head of one submissive, then up around the wooden rod… 8 then around the back of the head of the second sexy submissive. 9 Split the ribbon around the wooden rod and finish with a bow. 10 Ready to go!

  If you are attempting fisting for the first time, slow and steady wins the race, rather than treating the prostate like the speedbag in a boxing gym.

  Neither the mentor nor the protégé should ever exhibit anything but a positive manner in public. There may be times when you have conflicting ideas and as a protégé you will have to accept that your mentor might not have the same ideas about how to approach a situation; you must defer to their experience and then take what you can from it, handle it with dignity and grace and remember that respect is a two-way street. Once I had a disagreement with my own mentor regarding a situation where a slave was bad-mouthing her current Master in public at a munch. I felt the slave should have been taken aside in private and made to understand in no uncertain terms that her behavior was unacceptable, whereas my Mentor believed that she should be confronted, aggressively, in public due to her pattern of past behavior. Later on after the munch he shared with me that particular slave had a habit of bouncing from Master to Master whenever a new one came on the scene. She was self absorbed and would bounce to another scene soon enough and that the current Master she was with was too inexperienced to deal with her self-destructive and selfish behavior. I was glad that he and I discussed it later and I saw that as his protégé it wasn’t my place to disagree in public but support him and get more of the back story afterward to better shape my own understanding of the scene in that particular city, where I was merely visiting. While my mentor and I have relaxed the teacher/student roles over the past fifteen years, to this day I still consider him a wonderful resource and more importantly, a sounding board as I continually navigate my way along. If you embrace the concept of lifelong learning you will never be without new skill sets to master or to share.

  At every conference you will learn something new—then be eager to test it out!

  Microbondage on body parts such as the feet can be a fantastic way to shake up your routine a little.

  Needle play

  Activities like needle play show the possibilities of how much fun and hot more kinky play can be. Play piercing, as it is also called, is used for endorphin release and body decoration. It is considered edge play in the BDSM and Kinky community. These images demonstrate where you can go once you learn how from someone experienced and have obtained the necessary medical training; they are not a substitute for hands-on, real life training. Blood play has a higher risk factor associated with it in regards to blood health related issues and infection and both the top and bottom have to understand and accept that it is an activity with higher risk before engaging in it. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper training before you go get all “stabby” on your partner. Included in your training should include a discussion and understanding of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MSRAs) and other bacterial strains that can cause complications. Forewarned is forearmed.

  It is important to know the difference between sterile and clean. The needles and sutures we use come pre packaged and are sterile: meaning that it has gone through a process in an autoclave that has killed any living micro organism on it. It is not a readily available service and you will need to know a Dr. or Vet or a body piercing/tattoo shop or purchase one yourself which are in excess of $500. An oven, boiling water or dishwasher is not a substitute for an autoclave. It is essential that the equipment that punctures the body is sterile. Clean on the other hand means that it has not gone through this process but it is a clean as we can make it. Objects like disposable surgical sheets and gloves are clean but not sterile. We use a combination of both of them in order to reduce the chance of infection. Whether or not they are clean or sterile, these are one-time use only objects and should be disposed of in the proper manner when finished.

  Disposable hypodermic needles are thin, cheap, disposable, sterile and best of all come with a plastic cup on one end that the syringe fits into but for what we do with them acts as an ideal handle and prevents them from being pushed all the way through the skin. Needle gauge or diameter is categorized by a descending numerical system and have a colored end that corresponds with its size. The diameter number increases as the thickness decreases. They are also available in a variety of lengths. For this demonstration, we are using a 22 gauge needle that has a blue cap and its length is 1.5 inches. All disposable needle boxes are clearly labeled. We like this diameter because it offers more control than the thinner needles and is right in the middle of the pain range. The lower the diameter the thicker the needle and the more skin it has to displace which equals more pain. 22 gauge is a perfect size when first beginning.

  1 Have a nicely organized kit where you can see all of your equipment. 2 A disposable surgical sheet will have a plastic backing on it in order to protect the surface from blood and other bio-waste. The clean area that you are preparing to pierce must never come in contact with the sheet or anything other than the sterile equipment and your gloves. 3 Place this plastic backing face down on the area you are working on so that any blood or fluids ar
e caught by the absorbent side which should be facing up, against the person’s body. 4 Spread the sheet to cover the entire area you are working on top of. 5 It is important to have a Bio-Hazard Sharps Container to dispose of your needles and sutures.

  6 Prep the area with an antiseptic solution. We used Dexiden 2, applied from sterile gauze, but a comparable antiseptic is fine. Do not dry the surface; the area does not need to be dry to proceed. Once you are gloved, if you touch anything non sterile—your hair, face, kits, etc—you must re-glove. 7 Now that the area has been cleaned it is time to begin. We have chosen the breast area because it is nice and fleshy. If your submissive isn’t already anxious about the needles after preparing the area, they will be once you pierce the skin. You are aiming the needle to just pierce the skin and not the underlying tissue. You don’t have to go deep and you will be surprised at how resilient the skin is. A firm steady push that is controlled is how you want to proceed as it enters and then exits the skin. 8 After the first one is in, it gets easier for the submissive. The nervousness and build up to the first one is over and now they can relax and enjoy those endorphins as they start to flush through their body. 9 Add more in a pretty pattern! The first time you do it you will be surprised at the lack of blood. Occasionally you will hit a vein that is close to the surface and that is ok. You can pull it back out and try a different spot. The blood that comes out should be bright cherry red, not dark oxygenated blood.

  10 We like to pierce right up and onto the areola and through the nipple. 11 The nipple is extremely resilient and you will need to push harder. Aim the needle at the base of the nipple. Keep the pressure firm and steady, resist the urge to jab or shove. The submissive will find this a more painful area than on the broad surfaces of her skin. Encourage them, reassure that you are proud of them and they are very safe in your care. 12 Your submissive might squeak a little at this one! Be sure to be very comforting and gentle with your words. 13 After we have pierced the nipple, we continued the pattern in a clockwise direction. Don’t be disappointed if your submissive can’t take more than a few needles on the first play date. Give them time to work up to it. Breaking the ice for the first time in a controlled and steady manner will give you both a chance to build trust and work up to a larger number of needles in future playdates.