What's a Safe Word?

One of the thrills of BDSM 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 safe word is: a word that means "This isn't working! This scene is going wrong somehow! Please stop!"

A safe word needs to be taken seriously. Sometimes you may be playing with a Top you don't know that well, and if they do something to you you don't want, it's important that you have a way to let them know, immediately. Especially if you're tied up or otherwise made helpless.

Everyone has their own favorite safe word. I personally use "Yellow!" to mean "something's too intense; I need you to lighten up, but I don't want to stop the scene," and I use "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 flavor of safe word, and use "aardvark" or some other weird word they'd never say in the context of a scene. At many parties, the universal safe word is "Safe word!" 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 safe word, 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.

Using a safe word can be hard to do sometimes. It's important to realize that no one is perfect, and if you as Top do something that squicks your bottom (i.e. pushes beyond your bottom's limits -- "squick "is a recent bit of ssbb jargon), it doesn't mean you're a bad lover or a bad person. It only means that you ran into a limit you didn't know was there, or you were tired or disconnected and not in tune with your bottom. It happens to everyone from time to time.

If you as Top feel burned out and want to stop the scene suddenly, or you get a powerful reaction you weren't expecting and aren't sure how to continue, you can use a safe word too; safe words aren't just for bottoms! If you as bottom feel like your Top is pushing you, and you don't want to play anymore, it's not fun, that's when you want to use a safe word -- your Top will be glad you used it to tell them where you were at.

A safe word 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 safe word. But if you need to, that's what they're for. Some Tops deliberately push their bottoms until their bottoms call safe word.  A safe word that's never used can seem unusable, which isn't a good property for a safe word.