KOTW: Experiments with Bastinado

I did one "Kink of the Week" post during the summer, and since then, I haven't participated.
This is just because I was having a hard enough time keeping up with my regular posting, let alone try to add in something with a *gasp* deadline!

For those of you who don't know, Kink of the Week (or KOTW) is a feature on my friend Jade's blog. Every week, she posts a particular "kink" as the theme. These things are sometimes activities, materials, practices, ideas et cetera that a person might fetishize or enjoy as part of their kink play. She then invites other bloggers to write up their opinion, interests, ideas or "take" on this topic. Everyone's links are posted to the KOTW page, so readers can get a variety of opinions on one topic.

It's a bit hard for me to write these posts sometimes because I see my kink play as being fairly limited because my fetishistic interests are pretty straight forward compared to some people. That said, I have dabbled in a lot of things and I do have thoughts on basically everything. That's the beauty of having a brain, isn't it? :P More importantly, I like the *idea* of KOTW. I like having a variety of minds come together and describe their thoughts and feelings. I like the fact that instead of it being a thread on a forum somewhere or a place where you can comment on her blog, Jade allows us each to showcase our own work. We write and format our posts in the style that's natural and comfortable for us, and we do it in our own spaces on the internet. When we invite others to read our KOTW posts, it draws attention to each person's blog or site and allows us to find people whose thoughts and words are powerful and important but who we would not normally encounter.

For these reasons, I've decided that I'm going to try to make myself write about the KOTW topic each and every week, though, even when the kink is something that I don't fetishize or usually practice. I don't know how much I'll have to say about these topics, or how great my post will be, but we'll try it.

Relatedly, this week's topic is Bastinado.

Bastinado isn't something that I've ever fantasized about. I think this is probably because even though it's a traditional form of corporal punishment, it's very removed from the domestic/institutional corporal punishment base of my fantasies. It feels darker, to me, but it doesn't fit with the dark parts which draw me in. In general, the basis of my darker interests is always a change in theme or intensity, not a change in the style of play. Then there's the fact that my feet are very sensitive and because I'm very clumsy, I've injured them a lot of times. There's nothing particularly exciting about a sensation that I associate with accidentally hurting myself.

Still, I've experimented with getting hit on the feet on two different occasions. The first was during the very start of my relationship with Malignus. During the time that we first started sceneing together, we tried a lot of things that I had never done before, many of which we would never do again, just for the sake of experimentation and new experiences. One day, while we were hanging out in his living room (this was before we lived together), he grabbed my foot and applied a sharp smack to the bottom of it with a wooden spoon. I found the sensation of this to be something which I can only describe with one word: "invasive." I don't mean that it was invasive to my personal comfort zone that he did that or anything like that. I found the pain to be invading my body in a way that I'd never experienced. Because the hurting traveled up the body of my foot, the feeling seemed more akin to a foreign object entering me in a place where it wasn't meant to than just feeling sore. I thrashed around, trying to shake the feeling out of my foot. This kind of sensation made me very uncomfortable and almost a little disturbed, like some shockwave of hurt was wiggling around in my body.
We never did that again.

Target? 

The second time that I experimented with this was very recently. Someone with whom I was playing asked if he could hit my feet very gently. I decided to try it, to see if gentler, more percussive sensations would be different. Besides, it had been years since my previous attempt at it, and my tolerance for different sensations had increased. So we tried it. He used a leather paddle to lightly strike the bottoms of my feet, avoiding the arch and the toes. I wouldn't call the sensation pleasant, but I didn't have the same reaction that I did last time. It felt very similar to being struck on the hand, although it was being done in a much less intense way than my previous hand-striking experiences. It hurt, and but it radiated in a traditional pattern. Afterwards, it felt a bit odd to walk around on tender feet, but the feeling dissipated quickly.

Maybe you could give warmup strokes over socks, to make a foot-baring ritual and borrow from the spanking routine?

I don't see myself playing this way much in the future, but I am starting to understand why people who enjoy it might. I think that for some, the unusual, almost exotic nature of it could be exciting. Of course, if you're into feet, then that's a huge bonus. One of my friends described the feeling of being caned on the soles of her feet as sending shockwaves through her body which felt similar to the sensations that she felt during orgasm, and therefore she finds it tremendously arousing. I would imagine that both this positive reaction and my initial negative reaction would have been caused by the layout of nerves in the foot: she's just getting struck on nicer feeling ones than I was. Or perhaps they're the same and the feeling that I found invasive and frightening feeling excite her.

I've mentioned this idea before, but I always find it very humbling when I play around in a kink other than my own. I can get to feeling very tough indeed when it comes to taking spankings. I can have a very high tolerance (I say "can" because in a vulnerable situation my tolerance is laughably low). It almost fills me with awe at how much things hurt me that *aren't* on my bottom or thighs, and my bastinado play experiments are a good example of that. Still, I think that when I want that feeling of being shocked by how painful something is, I think I'll stick to something that I find thematically more interesting (like my hands).  ♥