One of the thrills of D/s is that it can stretch your limitations. If you enjoy this sort of play, you can naturally find yourself trying more and more new things, accepting greater and greater levels of sensation, doing and feeling more than you've ever done or felt before.
But the process is slow and gradual, and people are not telepathic. It may be that you are the bottom in a whipping scene, and your top is whipping you, and suddenly it doesn't feel good anymore!! and you want them to STOP!!! That is what a safeword is: a word that means "This isn't working! This scene is going wrong somehow! Please stop!"
A safeword needs to be taken seriously..
Everyone has their own favorite safeword. For example the traffic light system "Yellow!" to mean "Something's too intense; I need you to lighten up, but I don't want to stop the scene," "Red!" to mean "I'm in trouble and I want everything to stop NOW, no more games, scene over, let me outta here!" Some people just have one flavour of safeword, and use "aardvark" or some other weird word they'd never say in the context of a scene. At many parties, the universal safeword is "Safeword!" It's up to you. All it is is a safety valve for when things get out of control. If your top doesn't respect your safeword, it's a safe bet that they won't respect other limits of yours, and you will need to decide whether you want to play with someone who doesn't acknowledge your boundaries.
A safeword is just a communication tool, nothing more, nothing less. If you're playing intensely, it may feel hard to stop the scene, to come back from the edge via a safeword... but if you need to, that's what they're for
Sometimes a top will want to gag you, whether because you're being too noisy or they want to increase your helplessness or you've been being impertinent or whatever. You may still want a safeword to let the top know when a rope is too tight or the nipple clamps are pinching or whatever. Some people put a handkerchief in the bottom's hand; if they let go and the handkerchief falls, they know there's something up. Some use the old SOS signal: three loud yells spaced evenly; "Unh! Unh! Unh!" No gag can stop all noise
Before playing with someone, it's a good idea to negotiate, not only what safeword you want to use, but how you'll handle it if you need to use the safeword.
Not every D/s player uses safewords. But for many people beginning their explorations (and many who've explored enormously), safewords have proved very helpful.
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