Think Before You Kink

Session planning can be a controversial topic in the BDSM community. Some kinksters believe that planning is the enemy of spontaneity, and that some of the most magical moments come from identifying and capturing unexpected opportunities. For the most part, they’re not wrong. On the other hand, it’s impossible to achieve any complex long-term goal without some degree of forethought.

As in most cases, the answer is somewhere between the extremes. Do some degree of planning for your scenes simply because that works better, and leave yourself open to whatever enticing paths reveal themselves along the way. On that note, let’s jump into how I might plan a session with a semi-hypothetical sub named Jackie this Saturday.

Vision

Just as a contractor would never start building something without an idea of what the completed structure should look like, it’s important for a Dom to have at least a partial vision of how his well-trained slut will speak, sit, walk, crawl, suck, fuck, and cum.

In a nutshell, my big-picture, long-term goals for a sub include teaching her to welcome whatever sensations I choose to inflict, to recognize her sole purpose of serving and pleasing me regardless of her own preferences or comfort, and to derive her greatest pleasure from truly selfless service and unrestricted ownership.

Training targets

With this vision in mind, the next step is to identify the undesirable characteristic that stands out the most and start chipping away. After only four sessions with Jackie, an eager and adorably sweet blonde, we’ve made solid progress with verbal protocol, blowjob technique, orgasm control, and some other odds and ends. For our next session, my primary target will be her habit of protecting herself with her hands when she isn’t fully restrained, sometimes even pushing mine away when I’m spanking her ass or probing her pussy.

Now, in most cases, when a guy is hitting your ass hard enough to leave marks that last for a week, this is a pretty natural reflex. But in the BDSM context, where Jackie’s ass, her pussy — and her hands, for that matter — are my property, this is the kind of huge no-no that makes a Dom say to himself, “Oh my god, you are in so much trouble when I eventually get around to correcting that.”

Well, sweet little Jackie, “eventually” is scheduled for this Saturday.

Execution

Once that goal within a goal has been identified, the next challenge is to figure out how to achieve it. There are probably dozens of ways to provoke Jackie’s overactive hands and then punish her for using them, but only a few will incorporate the right mix of incentive and consequence that will help me chip away at this unwanted mass on my human sculpture.

In this case, I’m thinking I’ll restrain her in a standing position in the middle of my floor, chaining her collar to the ceiling and her ankle cuffs to the walls on either side (Important safety notice: Don’t even think about chaining anyone’s neck to the ceiling unless you know damn well what you’re doing). Then I’ll lock her wrist cuffs together behind her back, slide my remote-control vibrating egg into her pussy, and make it abundantly clear that I expect her hands to stay positioned right in the small of her back, leaving her ass fully exposed. I think I’ll gag her too. The incessant begging I know I’ll be in for can be fun, but it won’t be very productive. Plus, there’s nothing quite like the sight of drool dripping from a sub’s chin and dribbling down her chest. Trust me.

By switching on the vibrator and spanking, whipping, and caning her ass at just the right intensity, I should be able to give her the perfect level of stimulation—just enough to turn her on immensely and send her into five-alarm ass-protection mode. When those hands crash the party, I’ll turn off the vibrator and do something I know she hates: attach a pair of clothespins to her hyper-sensitive breasts. Then I’ll turn the vibrator back on and get back to work on her ass until more unwanted movement invites me to add more clothespins.

By the end of this simple exercise, chances are very good that Jackie will have a chest full of clothespins, significantly improved hand control, and a beautiful stream of drool running all the way down to her dripping wet pussy.

Final Assembly

With two or three little exercises like this on your itinerary, the next step is deciding how one flows into the next. This is where too much planning can start to make a session feel overly scripted, so it’s best to focus on general practicality. If some of the items on your agenda require cuffs and chains and others involve some nice restrictive rope work, for example, it’s best to group your cuff-dependent activities together so you don’t have to keep taking them off and putting them back on again.

It’s also important to vary the positions you use. A sub can only kneel on a hard floor or hang from her wrists for so long before too much soreness or numbness will undermine the effectiveness of your training and potentially lead to an injury. Drawing up a quick mental outline will help you eliminate unnecessary work and ensure that your sub feels only the pain you intend to inflict.

Jackie can sometimes be a bit nervous before our sessions, so I like to warm her up with some restrictive bondage and moderate pain to put her in the right headspace. In this case, I’m thinking I’ll start her in a standing spread-eagle position for some spanking and cropping. From there, all I’ll have to do is lock her wrists behind her back for the little tutorial I described. After that, we’ll do some anal training and blowjob practice, both of which require consistent repetition to produce results, and both can be performed in fresh positions that will give tired parts of her body a break.

For the grand finale? That’s easy: I’m going to fuck her senseless like I always do. I’m pretty uncreative that way. Sometimes I have a sub hold a position and apply some form of discipline if she moves, but since I will have already done that with the hands thing, I think I’ll give her a break and tie her to my soft comfy bed in some completely immobilizing position. By this point, I think she will have earned it. Unless she doesn’t…

Fog of War

They say every general has a perfect battle plan until the first shot is fired, and the same is true for a well-prepared Dom until the clothes come off and the collar goes on. You can always count on the unexpected, and the best Doms are able to turn these surprises into even better ways of achieving their training goals.

So, if it’s impossible to anticipate every variable, and we know we’ll be throwing out a big chunk of our plan each time, why bother? The point of planning is not to carry out that plan to the letter. The real value of this process lies in taking the time to understand where we want to go and how we’re going to get there. Asking and answering those questions is what allows us to react to the unexpected in more intelligent and productive ways.

Bottom line: far from spontaneity’s enemy, planning may just be its BFF.

Drew Thomas (@DrewT323) is a dom living in Los Angeles.