Dominance Escalation: Safety and Common Mistakes

In part 2 of the Sexual Dominance Escalation series, we touched on a few essential principles you need to cover before engaging in the rare form of art that is sexual domination. In this article, we go through a few elements that will ensure your experience isn't clouded or interrupted by matters relating to safety and comfort.

Communication

A woman's body is the most reliable source of how she feels in the moment. Most women have been conditioned, either societally or through relationships with inexperienced men, to preserve the man's often-fragile ego by not communicating their true level of enjoyment. As a sexually experienced man, it's your job to perfect your ability to witness certain cues that inform you of her current mental and emotional state.

Common things to look out for include her breathing patterns, the dilation of her pupils, how flushed her cheeks are, and how she responds to your commands in the bedroom. Pay close attention. Those signs are enough on their own to tell you when to slow down or give her more comfort. They are not enough on their own to tell you when to escalate. For that, check in.

You don't need the cliché "oh, you like that, baby?" fishing for a compliment. Leave that for the untrained Joes. A truly dominant man reads her like an open book and doesn't need her to stroke his ego to know he did well. Checking in on her is a different thing entirely, and you never stop doing that.

A few good orgasms tell you she's enjoying herself so far. They don't tell you what she wants next. Ask, or watch for a clear signal, before you advance.

How to Safely Pull Her Hair

Here you need to have a bit of physical intelligence and understand how different places on her scalp are more appropriate for pulling. Most women I've come across have had negative experiences with other men who tried to imitate what they've seen in porn by tugging the girl's hair from the top of the scalp, which led these poor women to develop a certain level of aversion to the act.

Get your hand to the back of her neck, not from the crown. Form a solid grip that distributes the pressure across as wide an area as her hair length allows, and gently pull to gauge her reaction. Her arousal tells you she's enjoying herself. It doesn't tell you she wants more intensity. For that, get an active signal, like the hand-on-hand check described in the choking section below, or simply ask. If you're not getting a clear yes, hold where you are.

Do a light version of this during the foreplay stage to see if she might have concerns or if she might not be ready for having her hair pulled later on. You certainly don't want to do this to someone new without first introducing it at the earlier stages, as it might disrupt the momentum later on.

The Proper Way to Choke

Don't just grab for her throat. That's not confidence, it's carelessness. You're not supposed to block the air pathway. The point of choking is to induce a euphoric state by blocking the blood circulation through the main arteries.

As with hair pulling, introduce this in the playful foreplay stage and gauge her reaction: if she's not into it, she's most likely going to tell you. Showing her that you know how to safely do it will greatly comfort her and allow her to feel safe in your presence, regardless of her previous experiences with bad lovers.

During sex, gently place your hand on her neck without squeezing. If she places her hands on top of yours, signaling you to squeeze a little harder, do that. If she brushes your hand away, take that as an indicator she's not into it or not ready for it at the moment.

Safe Words

This is one major component that's often left out of this kind of play. Safe words allow your woman to take on more submissive roles while having the ease of mind that she could slow things down or change course when things take a route she's not ready for yet.

It gets a bit trickier in certain situations, such as being gag-balled and unable to communicate verbally. That's when you need to be extra careful to watch her body language and gestures.

Don't heavily rely on safe words. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, women have been conditioned to step on thin ice when dancing with your ego. Before anything begins, make sure she fully understands the purpose of the safe word and that your ego is divorced from the situation. Stay alert and constantly gauge her reactions.

Bondage

Tying up and Shibari is a whole different art that I will need to write a full article on. If you're new to this, get a pair of padded cuffs so the metal won't hurt, and use ropes made out of soft fibers that won't cause too much discomfort.

Pay close attention to where your ropes are tightened and ensure that blood flow is normal. Practice this with your partner in advance if you're new to it, and understand that there is an element of incremental improvement to such a skill.

That's it for the common mistakes part. Stay tuned for the next chapter on Brat Taming!

Reading About Safety Isn’t the Same as Practicing It

Rope tension, blood flow, checking in without breaking the moment: these are things you can understand from a page and still get wrong the first time you try them for real. That’s true of any physical skill, not a knock on you.

The workshops exist for exactly this: a real teacher watching your hands, not just your understanding, correcting the gap between the two before it becomes a habit.

See upcoming workshops →