I don't negotiate at all. I often go into an experience having no idea what they are into. This is just the way I do it -- I would rather find out, as I go, based on his reactions, where the limits are.
How many people do total negotiation based play, vs those that don’t really negotiate at all?
Do you negotiate more if the person is new to the scene?
What if the person is totally vanilla? As a femdom, I know trying to negotiate with a totally vanilla man for his first scene will do more harm than good. Why bog him down with details? Give him a way out, and leave it at that.
(Mind you, initial scenes with no-experience partners for me consisted of light bondage, light pain, roleplaying. Not total sensory deprivation, heavy flogging, degradation, and isolation.)
I don’t negotiate at all. I often go into an experience having no idea what they are into. This is just the way I do it — I would rather find out, as I go, based on his reactions, where the limits are.
I feel comfortable doing this because as I said before, I don’t start off with anything heavy anyway. Negotiation to me has always been body language, breathing, the look in his eyes, and subtle cues.
I might ask questions during a scene to get feedback and use that to determine where to go.
With more experienced partners, I am often presented with a list of dos and don’ts. I call this “forced negotiation.” Sure, I want to know if the person has a real aversion, hard limit to something, but I don’t want to be given a list of everything I like to *find out* as part of my exploration. What fun is that?
Sometimes I might have a conversation — at dinner, on the phone, etc. and it could be considered a form of negotiation. But it is not worded like “Is it ok if I do this? Do you have anything against X? Is Y a hard limit? What about z?”
It’s more like a discussion of fantasies, and “What would you do if”s…It’s like going through a scene verbally, testing the waters. But the bottom line is, just like with straight negotiation when someone might say “x is fine with me”, when you discuss what they would do if something happened to them, they might be fine with it in the comfort of a restaurant or the telephone, but when presented with it face to face, they might have an entirely different reaction.
One even *they* could not predict.
I would never rely on, “Well, he said it was OK when we negotiated”. It’s all about instinct and reading signs of distress.
For those that use formal negotiations, how does it help once you are in the situation and the reactions of the sub do not match what the sub said during the negotiation?
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