a series of indulgences

That's okay, what you're wearing looks good on you.

You need to take a lot of breaks doing anything intimate because you're easily overwhelmed?

I understand, I'm just happy to be here with you.

You're on medication that impacts your libido/makes reaching orgasm really difficult?

No pressure, tell me what feels good for you, and if you get frustrated we can do something else together.

Sex isn't going to look the same for everybody and that's fine, that's normal.

Sometimes you don't orgasm, sometimes you need to stop because your mood changes out of nowhere, sometimes you get really self conscious and need accommodations to take your mind off of it.

Punishment belongs in scenes not in dynamics

Punishment will not increase a desired behavior, punishment will not improve obedience, punishment is not a useful or effective tool for training

Punishment will cause serious long term psychological wounds, punishment will foster resentment over time, punishment will incentivise hiding mistakes

If what you want is to do serious psychological torture as a form of play then OK there's a place for punishment. If you want the catharsis punishment might bring without the wounds then do it in a scene under a few layers of fantasy.

The way that punishments are viewed as "bdsm 101" is one of the worst things about the broader bdsm community

As a degrader and a sadist it's so hot that some subs will be as pathetic as you want them to be... so don't fuck around with their emotions outside of that, that sub is already literally playing with and altering their emotions for your benefit and pleasure. You're overstressing the emotion muscle if you do and rest is essential to any healthy exercise.

You're not giving their feelings any time to rest and recover if you cause emotional distress outside of playtime and you're not giving them the safety and security to play with their emotions again. If you consistently play with humiliation, degradation, or other forms of psychological sadism, you need to be aware of this and plan accordingly.

Avoid big talks or heavy topics immediately after, and do things that will lift your partner's mood in the days following an intense scene even if their mood doesn't need a lift. While you can't see it, by doing that, you've essentially put an emotional ice pack on a sore muscle.

It's easy for doms to understand that some subs are turned on by embarrassment, shame, humiliation, degradation, objectification, etc. That is an easier concept to grasp. But I think that's a bit of a simplified way of putting it and a more accurate way to explain what's going on is that some subs experience embarrassment, shame, humiliation, degradation, objectification, etc from their dom and are turned on by it.

I think putting the emphasis back on the painful emotion the submissive is putting themselves through is such an important distinction that needs to be made more often. Sometimes the fact that the sub is still experiencing these very powerful negative emotions during sex or scenes (for your benefit by the way, doms) gets lost in translation when someone says "it makes me horny when you humiliate me."

But they're NOT just horny when you humiliate them, they're still also humiliated. And for those of you saying "well duh, of course" please just trust me when I say, as a dom myself who went through learning this and has helped so many other doms learn this, that most doms are absolutely not making this connection at all and that's why my post above has been reblogged a bunch of times by both doms and subs.

As a dom, what we are incorrectly assuming is that the input is 'humiliation' and the output is 'horny' based on what we see and how our sub reacts when we play like this. We are not registering that they are also still humiliated because in the moment they're acting horny. It's an easy logical error to make due to faulty observations and this mistake isn't just limited to male doms in my experience. A lot of folks from all walks of life don't quite grasp this at first. And once you do grasp this you can give better aftercare.