Guest Post with Ivory Quinn on SAFE WORDS

Hey all! I've got Ivory Quinn with me and she is going to spend some time chatting with us today about safe words. What they are and how to use them. Please feel free to bookmark this post to use as a reference if ever needed!  Take it away Ivory! ***
Hi all, Ivory here! I’ve been asked to write a guest post about safe words and the importance of them. It’s kind of a difficult topic to write about because it’s so intrinsic to the BDSM world and to the concept of power exchange as a whole.
 A safe word is basically a unique word that is agreed upon by all people partaking in any scene. If, at any point, any participant calls it out, whatever is happening at that time stops. Sometimes that means the end of the scene, sometimes it means a time out until the participant is ready to continue. It’s unique to every relationship. There is a traffic light system that is in common use in many places. Green is “I’m okay, carry on.” Amber is “I’m getting close to my limits, just fyi”, and Red is “Stop. Stop now”.

You’ll notice that I’ve used the word “participant” rather than sub or bottom. Tops/Doms can need or have safe words too. Just because they’re the dominant partner doesn’t mean that they don’t occasionally delve into things that are too deep and dark for them, especially in the early stages of a new relationship. There are times when a sub will come to you and ask you to do things that maybe you’ve never tried before or aren’t really sure how far to go with. Of course you can always just walk away and do something else, but perhaps you’ve been jarred out of the mood or you’re too distressed to continue. Tops are human. They make mistakes. Perhaps they lashed just a fraction too hard and drew blood where they didn’t intend to and it freaked them out. The key point of BDSM is communication. It’s all about communication. If you’re not happy and want out, safe word. From either side of the exchange.

There are only two basic rules regarding safe words. The first is that it should be something unique, something that you’re not going to call out by accident in the heat of the moment, but also not so unique or complex that you panic and then forget what it is. The second rule is that the power of the safe word is absolute. It doesn’t matter what’s happening, how involved people are, or what you agreed on before you went in. If someone calls a safe word, all play stops immediately and without any recourse.

If you safe word and the other person doesn’t stop, then you need to get out and get help. That person is abusive and not playing by the rules. I’ll repeat it again – the power of the safe word is absolute. There is no excuse for not respecting it. Any person that fails to obey it is abusive and you cannot make excuses for them, or expect them to play by the rules in future. There is no excuse for ignoring a safe word and in doing so, the sub’s trust can sometimes be damaged beyond all repair. If you cannot trust the person breaking you down with a single tail, the lifestyle suddenly becomes a very frightening and dangerous place. That’s part of what was so important about the scene at the end of Blue – he had to know that he could trust her enough to respect his safe word because his trust had been broken before.

The best kind of safe words are the ones that never get used. A good Dom will know you and should be able to read you well enough to skirt the edges of your endurance without going over. If a safe word does have to be used, there’s no shame in it for either side of the power exchange. It happens. People are only human. It’s okay to just dust yourselves off and try again.

If you’ve read my books, you’ll be thinking to yourself that it’s all well and good for me to talk about safe words when I clearly broke all the rules at the end of Redemption, when Noelle was in the play room. I have two things to say to that – the first is that it’s fiction. It doesn’t have to represent life in all its facets. The second is that there are relationships where safe words aren’t used. They’re rare and they require an insane amount of trust, but they’re out there.

These relationships are most commonly known as a total power exchange or TPE. The concept of them makes me uncomfortable for a lot of reasons, mostly because they’re too open to abuse and injury. That’s a personal opinion though. Take Noelle, for example, in that last scene of Redemption. She’s told Blue that she cannot accept anyone coming in her mouth. It’s a squick, one that she fears would make her vomit. In walking into that room without a safe word, there would have been no comeback on Blue if he had decided to force her to swallow. It was her choice to be there without any safety net to call a halt to proceedings. Not having a safe word makes you vulnerable to your nightmares. You have to trust the person you’re with more than you’ve ever trusted anything in your life to not take you further than you can endure.

In most D/s relationships, it’s actually the sub that has the power. They choose what they can or cannot submit to. At the end of the day, they can safe word and walk away at any point. In a TPE, the balance is shifted towards the other end of the spectrum. The power of the top is absolute. They can do what they like and the sub can cry and scream and ask them to stop, but the sub has no get out of jail free card. You usually find TPEs in couples that have been together a really long time, where they know each other’s limits probably better than they know their own. The sub has to trust absolutely that the top will never push them further than they can go. The top has to trust themselves enough to know that they would never take more than they should. It’s the kind of relationship that only works with two people that know themselves well and are confident in their love for the other.

I hope this has given a little bit of insight to those of you that were curious about safe words. They get mentioned a lot in novels these days, but they’re never really completely explained. This, of course, is barely skimming the surface of the emotional depths of safe words and the using of them, but I hope it’s been helpful!