Control Triptych: Touch

Three Layers of Control: Touch, Voice, Glance

This is going to be the first part in a three part series.  When I am training a new submissive, I rely on three of the five senses to keep her where I want her.  The other two senses are certainly involved in everything that we do, but using taste or scent as a means of control is difficult. Scent is much easier to employ than taste, but most of the time the things that evoked by scent are visceral, immediate, and tend to trigger or reinforce memory.  I can use scent to help me get a submissive into subspace, but it’s rarely something that I can use to instruct.

 

Touch: the fast path to victory.

The easiest and most direct way to control my submissive is through touch.  It really requires no finesse at all, it only requires intent and confidence… well, and some physicality.

It also requires virtually no training.  While every person is different, and people act and react during sexual situations or even the non-sexual elements of a scene with different responses, there are some commonalities that I’ve been able to identify and exploit over the years.  While none of these techniques are universal, most of them can be employed to good measure on almost anyone – of either sex, from what I’m led to believe.

Just like with any method of employing force, there are varying ways to use touch to your advantage.  By far the easiest route is simply to employ brute force.

I’m not a small man.  I’m six feet tall and currently weigh in at a slightly overweight but extremely solid 16 stone.  This means that I get to throw my size around quite a bit.  There are very few women that I have met who are anywhere near my size and I have not yet taken a male submissive to this point in my life.  I doubt that I ever will, but if I do, it’s likely going to require me to learn many, many new things.

Beginning in junior high school I started wrestling competitively, both in school sports and freestyle events. In the late 1990’s I was training to be a Pankration fighter.  I was hopeful of snagging a slot on the Olympic team since they were bringing the sport back to the modern Olympics for the first time in Athens – minus the glass shards and all…  While I didn’t get selected, and I had a very abbreviated and not terribly successful run as an MMA fighter, I did learn an awful lot of useful things and I would still venture to say that it makes me a dangerous man.

Apart from bragging a little bit, the purpose of the above statement was to reinforce the fact that I have much experience as as grappler, I have learned basic pressure points, and I know the value of a rapid and not necessarily high-powered strike.  These are definitely things that I employ in scene, but also just when I am having sex.

So – while using physical force is certainly the easiest way to get someone to do what you want them to do, it is definitely not the safest.  Please use caution whenever you play.  Know your strength, know your partner’s signals, have a defined safe word and safe gesture and use them.

While there are gestures that I may perform as part of a command and sometimes those gestures involve touch, when I speak of three different levels of command, and how touch represents the first of these and has the lowest barrier to entry, it is not that sort of touch for which I am speaking.  

It is a much less subtle and more brutal touch that I am talking about here…

Grab her by the throat, step into and behind her to put your calf behind her knee, lift and push and then catch her with your other arm as she’s about to fall.  If you plan this right, she’ll be on her back, preferably on a bed or something else similarly well suited to fucking, with you hovering over her and your hand on her throat.  If you can’t seal the deal at this point, there is no hope for you anywhere.

Of course – you don’t do ANY of that shit if she isn’t expecting you to move on her.  She doesn’t have to know exactly what you have planned, but she does have to know that you’re going to basically attack her.  However, I guarantee you that the results will be better if she doesn’t know exactly what you have planned.  

But it’s not just sex that I’m talking about here… you can use touch – firm or light – as a method of control in almost any D/s situation.

If I want my submissive to kneel for me, and she fails to do so the first time I tell her to, maybe because she didn’t understand that yes, I did in fact expect you to kneel right in the middle of the aisle at Target, or maybe she’s just being bratty, but no matter what her reasons for failing to kneel, I can usually get her to do so without saying another word.  She has to have heard my first command or she’ll just be confused by my actions, but usually if she doesn’t respond to my command, “kneel for me, bunny,” I can put my hands on her shoulders and apply a little bit of pressure and she’ll do what I want.  If that fails and the setting allows for it, I can move behind her and gently apply pressure to the backs of her calves, right below the knee, with my boot.  

This will almost certainly get the point across.

If that still does not produce the desired result, I can grab her hair and increase the pressure that I apply with my boot.  It will cause her to be off balance and bend at the knees as she begins to drop.  I can then use my hand in her hair to guide her slowly to where I want her to be.

And if that still fails to produce the behavior I want, I can move to the front of her, put my right hand on the front of her throat, my left hand on the back of her neck, and stare her in the eyes as I close off her carotids with my thumb and forefinger, which will eventually cause her to become lightheaded or even pass out.  Then I can do whatever I like to her.

This maneuver requires a great deal of trust and training, however, and I would not recommend it to someone who has not seen it demonstrated in person and has had many chances to practice.

But using touch as control does not require overpowering either…  

Occasionally my submissive can be a bit bratty.  When that happens and I’m not feeling like dealing with it, a quick light slap across the face will almost always get my point across.  If I’m a bit more tolerant of the brattiness, I’ll slap her ass instead, but that has a tendency to encourage more brattiness – a reaction that appears to be almost universal among bratty subs, but one that I still don’t completely understand.

So – if you want the brattiness to continue or even intensify – smile and smack her ass.  You don’t have to say a thing.  If you want the brattiness to cease, slap her across the face – lightly.  Too much will encourage a fight or flight response and you’ll have a fight on your hands.

Part of this has to come from experience, unfortunately, and every person is different.  I’m sure that I’ll hear from someone who is going to tell me that slapping her face will increase her brattiness as well as from someone who will tell me that a smack to the ass will pull her out of her bratty tirade.

Touch is most effective in combination with voice and glance as well, but it is the crudest and most easily employed without predefined rules in place.  Like anything in this world though, it will require some practice to get right.

Next week I’ll talk about command voice and how to intone things for maximal effect – employed with some pushing and prodding taken from this post as well, but this post threatens to get too long if I keep talking.

 –  Rant

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