What's a Safe Word?

How to Use One...

by Rob Jellinghaus

One of the thrills of BDSM is that it can stretch your limitations. If you enjoy this sort of play, you can naturally find yourself trying more and more new things, accepting greater and greater levels of sensation, doing and feeling more than you've ever done or felt before. But the process is slow and gradual, and people are not telepathic.

It may be that you are the bottom in a whipping scene, and your Top is whipping you, and suddenly it doesn't feel good anymore!! And you want them to stop!!! That is what a safe word is: a word that means "This isn't working! This scene is going wrong somehow! Please stop!"

A safe word needs to be taken seriously. Sometimes you may be playing with a Top you don't know that well, and if they do something to you don't want, it's important that you have a way to let them know, immediately. Especially if you're tied up or otherwise made helpless.

Everyone has their own favorite safe word. I personally use "Yellow!" to mean "something's too intense; I need you to lighten up, but I don't want to stop the scene," and I use "Red!" to mean "I'm in trouble and I want everything to stop now, no more games, scene over, let me outta here!"

Some people just have one flavor of safe word, and use "aardvark" or some other weird word they'd never say in the context of a scene. At many parties, the universal safe word is "Safe word!" It's up to you. All it is, is a safety valve for when things get out of control. If your Top doesn't respect your safe word, it's a safe bet that they won't respect other limits of yours, and you will need to decide whether you want to play with someone who doesn't acknowledge your boundaries.

Using a safe word can be hard to do sometimes. It's important to realize that no one is perfect, and if you as Top do something that squicks your bottom (i.e. pushes beyond your bottom's limits -- "squick "is a recent bit of ssbb jargon), it doesn't mean you're a bad lover or a bad person. It only means that you ran into a limit you didn't know was there, or you were tired or disconnected and not in tune with your bottom. It happens to everyone from time to time.

If you as Top feel burned out and want to stop the scene suddenly, or you get a powerful reaction you weren't expecting and aren't sure how to continue, you can use a safe word too; safe words aren't just for bottoms! If you as bottom feel like your Top is pushing you, and you don't want to play anymore, it's not fun, that's when you want to use a safe word -- your Top will be glad you used it to tell them where you were at.

A safe word is just a communication tool, nothing more, nothing less. If you're playing intensely, it may feel hard to stop the scene, to come back from the edge via a safe word. But if you need to, that's what they're for. Some Tops deliberately push their bottoms until their bottoms call safe word; this way, the bottom gets the experience of using it. A safe word that's never used can seem unusable, which isn't a good property for a safe word.

Sometimes a Top will want to gag you, whether because you're being too noisy or they want to increase your helplessness or you've been being impertinent or whatever. You may still want a safe word to let the Top know when a rope is too tight or the nipple clamps are pinching or whatever. Some people put a handkerchief in the bottom's hand; if they let go and the handkerchief falls, they know there's something up. I personally use the old SOS signal: three loud yells spaced evenly; "Unh! Unh! Unh!" No gag I've ever seen can stop all noise, and that signal works even if my hands are in mittens or a strait-jacket and unable to hold anything at all.

Before playing with someone, it's a good idea to negotiate, not only what safe word you want to use, but how you'll handle it if you need to use the safe word. When you're just getting into S/m, it's almost inevitable that some scenes will end prematurely or abruptly. If you acknowledge this possibility in advance, and talk about what kinds of comforting or remedy you might like, it'll make recovering from a mishap a lot easier and more pleasant. And because a scene goes wrong is no reason to think that you or your partner is fundamentally bad or untrustworthy -- mistakes will happen.

(If your partner doesn't want to hear your concerns about the mishap, though, or if they belittle or deride your concerns, you may well be unable to avoid future mishaps. If your relationship doesn't learn from painful experience, it may not be ready to handle doing BDSM. Of course, this kind of processing is a vital part of every healthy relationship, BDSM or not.)

Not every BDSM player uses safe words. Some people into BDSM don't find them useful for the style of play they prefer; more straightforward communication suffices for them. Some partners find their need for a safe word gradually diminishes as they come to know each other better. Some people do BDSM in which the bottom doesn't want to have a verbal escape route, for the duration of the scene. (This "no-safe word " play is also sometimes called "edge play.") One thing that you'll learn about the BDSMlmnop scene is that styles vary wildly, and peoples' experiences are astonishingly diverse. But for many people beginning their explorations (and many who've explored enormously), safe words have proved very helpful.

Based on materials written by Rob Jellinghaus; © 2000;