The Fine Art of the Romantic Bruise Selfie

Content note: this post discusses, and contains photos of, bruising – only the happy, consensual kind, but bruising nonetheless. I encourage you to take care of yourself and skip this one if that’s tough subject matter for you.

 

“Aftercare” in kink is a somewhat nebulous concept, deliberately so: its definition varies from kinkster to kinkster, as do its purpose and scope. I know people for whom aftercare is, by necessity, a lengthy cuddling session filled with kisses and compliments – and I also know people for whom it is “Thanks for the good time; see ya!” followed by street meat and a volley of texts to a friend. It can be whatever you want it to be, as long as it works for everyone involved.

It’s important to remember, too, that aftercare can be an immediately-afterwards thing, or it can be a quite-a-while-afterwards thing, or both. The blissed-out cuddle sesh after a kink scene might satisfy your body and your snuggly neurotransmitters, but your rational brain might want additional aftercare a few days later in the form of, say, a text dissecting what went right and what went wrong. Sometimes those texts contain pictures of bruises.

It’s been said (I think by Jillian Keenan?) that bruises are to kinksters what hickeys are to vanilla people: tangible proof that a particular encounter happened, that someone likes you enough to have marked you in this very romantic and/or erotic way, that you are desired and desirable. Sending “bruise selfies” the day after a scene – like sending “hickey selfies” the day after a makeout session – can convey a flirty message: I like you and I like what we did together.

But bruise pics also serve another, more kink-specific function: they’re a way that a submissive or bottom can communicate more info, post-scene, to their dominant or top. “Even though what you did to me probably would’ve looked scary, dangerous, or even abusive to an uninformed outsider,” these photographic missives seem to say, “I loved it, I’m glad we did it, and I love the results.” Tops are being immensely vulnerable and brave when they communicate their desires and then act on them; sending bruise pictures is one way of showing them that their bravery was well-received and was worth it. This can teach them, over time, that it’s okay to be even more brave, even more often.

“It makes me proud of our time together and I love knowing they’re thinking of me.” -@stryker_von

“When topping, it’s an affirmation that they had a Really Good Time and are still thinking about it. That’s a great feeling! As a bottom, it feels like a little wink to our complicity in a scene – “Look at what we did to my body, together. Isn’t it pretty?” -@tinygorgon

“I sometimes get self-conscious and worry that I have hurt them too much. My other reaction is wow, they endured that much for me and were so wonderful 😍” -@cewa1308

Once you go out into “the real world” with your bruises, you’re apt to encounter all kinds of pushback – family might scoff or stare if they spot the damage, doctors might pry or even assume you’re in an abusive relationship, and your other partners (if you have any) might wonder why you didn’t leave them more real estate on your skin for marks of their own! But in those first, pure moments of mutual bruise enjoyment that ensue when you snap a pic the morning after and send it to the bruise’s creator, you don’t have to feel guilty or self-conscious about the perverted masterpiece that has bloomed on your body – you can just bask in its beauty together.

Taking pictures of your bruises is also a gift to your future self, because – if you’re anything like me – someday you’ll love having a record of your kinky journey over the years. I’m less prone to bruising now than I was in my early twenties, in part because I simply don’t play as hard as I used to, so I love paging through my old bruise shots as a reminder of how strong I am and how much I am capable of enduring. The people who gave me those marks have mostly disappeared from my life, but the memories, and the photographic evidence, remain – allowing me to celebrate my own resilience whenever I revisit them.

I’m insecure and perpetually unsure if I’m actually a “good submissive.” But in those photos, I can see evidence that I am, in stark black and white. (Or black and blue, as the case may be.)

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Sexy Snaps & Photo Booth Flirtations

Being in a new long-distance relationship has me pondering ways to create intimacy across vast expanses.

I know it’s possible because I’ve felt it. Sometimes partners who lived just a quick streetcar ride from me made me feel distanced, shut out, because their hearts were walled off to me; comparatively, my darling in New York pulls me close to him via texts, images, and filthy phone-sex soliloquies. Intimacy can exist wherever you make space for it, wherever you fight for it.

We’ve been playing with digital intimacy in many forms – salacious sexts, obscene FaceTime calls, adventures with app-controlled vibrators – but I’m also drawn, lately, to combining analog romance with the digital. Photo booths are a prime example of our cultural hearkening-back to the analog: like gifting your partner a vinyl LP or sending them a handwritten love letter, snapping instant photos together in a darkened booth is a hot hit of vintage romance.

Here are 5 sexy, kinky, and/or sweet things I’d like to do involving photo booths…

“Strip” tease. I could be ordered to get as naked as I feasibly could in a photo booth, showing off first my lingerie and then my skin. I’d be respectful, making sure no one walked in or got close enough to see – but I’d have to do it, some way and somehow, because my beau’d told me to. I’d grab the strip from its slot surreptitiously on my way out, and slide it into my purse before anyone could see. Four little naked Kates, arranged so neatly for a suitor’s later consumption.

Bruise archive. In many of my past kinky relationships, part of our protocol – whether informal or more official – was the taking and sending of bruise photos in the days after particularly intense scenes. It’s a way to stretch out the sadomasochistic intimacy of those encounters for days or weeks after they occur. For dominants, I hear it can also be nice to receive confirmation that your submissive not only likes their bruises but is proud of them, wants to show them off, wants to make them last. If I had a photo booth in my neighborhood, perhaps I’d instate a tradition of heading there the day after a good beating – and the week after that, and so on, until the marks had faded – to capture my bruises blooming into glory. What a charming album that’d make.

Cuteness quartet. It’s nice to receive a “traditional” gift, like a DVD I’ve been wanting, a gift certificate to my favorite store, or a soft sweater in my power colors. But I’m even more thrilled by personalized and offbeat gifts. I could see a partner snapping a few photo booth strips of himself for me, making all my fave faces and wearing that shirt that makes his eyes look extra blue. Maybe he’d slide it between the pages of a book he thought I’d like and mail it to me, like the photos were an afterthought, a mere bookmark – but I’d know better. I’d see in the shots how much effort had gone into them, and I’d know that meant he cared. A lot.

Date documentation. I love romantic traditions: these little touchstones we return to again and again, simply because they bring us so much joy. That diner you always go to after all-night fuck-fests; that movie you watch together every year around the holidays; that one alley you can’t walk past without making out in it for old times’ sake. I like the idea of taking photo booth pictures together at meted milestones in your relationship. I’m a sap, so I’d probably tape them into my journal, or have them framed.

Phone sex. A photo booth would be an interesting place to call up a beau and have them breathe hot and heavy in your ear. You could capture your authentic reactions to their words – gasps, blushes, moans – and snap your lapful of photo strips on your smartphone to send them. And hey, not to get crass, but I wonder what happens to photo booth ink when the strips get splattered in cum…!

What sexy/kinky/sweet things would you like to do in a photo booth?

 

This post was sponsored by the lovely folks at Ninja Photo, who will rent you photo booths across Canada and so many other places!

5 Bruises I Loved and Lost

Heads up, babes: this post deals with bruising and other visible signs of (consensual) injury, as well as self-harm. If that’s tough subject matter for you, please feel free to skip this post!

 

“I’ve never spanked anyone before,” Dane mentions offhandedly as we’re hanging out before our porn shoot.

“Oh,” I say, and my stomach drops. “Um, that’s fine, it’s not too hard to learn. I trust you.” I take my Tantus Pelt paddle out of my bag and show her how it works: the momentum, the swing, the snap. It’s been a few weeks since a partner’s used this mean little thing on me and I’m excited to bend over for my hot new friend in front of a rolling video camera.

What I don’t say, and later wish I had: Start slow, and work your way up. Warm up the area with gentle smacks til it’s red and glowing, before you progress to harder wallops. Spread out the impacts, instead of focusing on one spot. Rhythm and consistency are good, but give me time to breathe. I think these things but don’t communicate them. I said I trust her, and I do.

The scene goes better than I ever hoped or expected, given how nervous I was when we began. She teases and spanks and fucks me over a wooden coffee table in the airy afternoon light. But that paddle. Oh, that paddle.

There is a point, somewhere during most spankings, when I cross the threshold between safe, tolerable pain and pain so intense it scares me a little. This threshold is the reason I can’t spank myself effectively: I’ll never leap across that line myself. I need someone to push me.

Dane is bossy and authoritative and mean, and gets me crying within minutes. The silicone paddle rains down relentlessly on my reddening ass. And then she picks a spot on my right cheek and just wails on it. One hit after another, til the pain is a white-hot emergency alert in my brain. I think, I can’t take much more of this. Then I think, No, really, this has to stop. And then a deeper, stronger voice in my head says: No. You can take it. You can take just a little more.

I do. And eventually it ends. I’m left with the best bruise I’ve ever had, a crimson emblem of what I faithfully endured. A blotchy splotch that proudly announces what a very, very good girl I am.

Dane cuddles me on the couch. Caitlin brings me a cupcake. I’m grinning, glowing, good.


Depression comes in waves, arcing over the shoreline of my mind so ominously that I usually see it coming from yards away. I can arrange my schedule so the worst of it will hit when I’m alone, sobbing in bed, shoulders shaking, self-worth crumbling in polite privacy. I mask these desperate spells from my friends whenever I can. But sometimes I can’t.

One night in July, I’m at a party with Bex, Georgia, and a few other friends. But it’s the saddest party I’ve ever been to – even sadder than the surprisingly jovial secular shiva we held when my grandmother died – because I can’t stop crying.

Depression tells you lots of lies, the most pervasive one being that you are unendingly sad, have always been, and will always be. It tells you the tears you cry are justified, because everything is terrible and life is pain. It tells you the glimmers of happiness you once knew have been extinguished and were illusory anyway. It wrings the light from your spirit. It takes everything from you, most crucially, your hope.

So as I cry in front of my friends and they attempt to comfort me, none of it really works. “We love you,” they say, and my depression-brain says, Yeah, but the people you WISH loved you still don’t love you. “You’re a good person,” they say, and depression whispers, Bullshit, you’re garbage, they’re just humoring you. “You’ll feel better in the morning,” they predict, and depression insists, You will never feel good again.

What I need, when I’m like this, is to cry very hard for a while and then to be jolted out of my sad, salty rut. I need a distraction, a shake-up, a gear-change. So when Georgia says, “Do you want me to hit you?” some part of me perks up because I know that has worked in the past and it might work again.

I bend over the end of the sofa like a good girl, and Georgia – armed with my KinkMachineWorks Lexan paddle – begins to knock the sadness out of me via my ass.

When I’m sad and I don’t want to be sad anymore, sometimes I think of the saddest thoughts I can possibly imagine, in an effort to push the sadness through my veins faster so I’ll be rid of it sooner. If I’m crying over a boy, for example, I might force myself to think, “He doesn’t love me, he’ll never love me, he doesn’t want me the way I want him and he never will, I’m not good enough for him, I’ll be alone forever, and it’s only going to get worse from here.” Crying harder speeds up the process so I can get on with my life sooner – and spanking can serve a similar function for me. The pain gives me a tangible reason to cry, so I cry harder, feel my feelings deeper, and move through them quicker.

“I love you, babe,” Bex says to me while Georgia spanks me. “You’re being such a good girl,” Georgia says between hits. One friend holds my hand; another strokes my hair. I keep my face planted in the sofa’s upholstery and I cry and cry and cry.

And when it’s all done, I feel a bit better. And I have some epic bruises to remind me that I helped myself by letting my friends help me.


One night by myself in my room, depression sneaks up on me. I didn’t see you come in, I tell it, and it hisses back, That’s because you’re a stupid, silly girl who doesn’t know anything. I can’t argue with that.

Sometimes my depression comes alongside a restlessness: I know I need to do something to alleviate the uncomfortable feelings in my body and brain, but it’s not immediately clear what. When I’m coping well, I get out my journal, cry in a hot bath, go see a friend, or curl up with snacks and an episode of Sherlock. When I’m coping less well, I think about hurting myself.

The jury is out – by which I mean, my therapist is unsure – whether my self-spanking counts as self-harm. I don’t really do it to punish myself, to feel more alive, or to enact suicidal ideations, all common reasons people self-harm. I think I do it because it distracts me from the “bad” thoughts and feelings in my head, and because I know spanking has historically alleviated my mental health symptoms. It’s a last-ditch effort to snap myself back to stability.

On this particular night, crying numbly in my desk chair, I just start smacking my thigh with the back of my hand because it feels like the right thing to do. I do it so hard, and for so long, that I worry I might break my hand. I switch hands, and do it some more. I keep going until I’m sufficiently bruised, and the dark whispers in my head have calmed.

The bruise I’m left with is a chaotic mass of speckles, and I instantly hate it. It’s ugly, but I know I wouldn’t think that if a partner had given it to me. Each time I catch sight of it, I’m reminded of how I failed myself, how I let myself down by coping poorly with the feelings that rain down on me. I try to forgive myself, but in the meantime, I wear boxers around the house instead of my usual bikini briefs, so I never have to see the evidence of what depression wrought on my body.


When I was younger, I thought I’d hate one-night stands because sex felt too intimate to share with a near-stranger. As I’ve grown up, I’ve learned so much: sex doesn’t have to be intimate, and there are other valid reasons to hate one-night stands (which I kinda do). But it turns out that for me, kink feels too intimate to share with a near-stranger. It feels like an infringement, a mild violation, an incongruent aberration.

One cold night in December, I go out for drinks with a passably smart-‘n’-sweet Tinder boy. Our hours-long conversation brings out the details of my life that usually emerge on dates like these: I’m a sex writer, I review sex toys, I write about my kinks, and those kinks include spanking.

When I invite him over to my place after drinks, he makes a logical leap that any reasonable person could make: I like spanking, therefore, I want him to spank me. During our lukewarm hookup, he lands a few hard smacks on my ass, and I make noises of delight – because, physically, this feels like something I’ve enjoyed before. Emotionally, less so. He is nobody to me. I don’t care if he wants to punish me, or thinks I’ve been bad, or wants to make me feel good, or wants to give me what I want. I give zero shits what he thinks of me, and therefore, with him, kink feels irrelevant.

In the morning, we chat a bit via text, and he asks, “Is your butt even in the least bit sore?” It’s a vanilla-dude question, designed to determine whether his untrained hand even made a dent in my seasoned-kinkster ass. I look in the mirror and there is, faintly, the outline of a handprint. Red finger shapes against my creamy white skin. I text him a picture, though I doubt he even cares.

The bruise is mild, and only lasts a few days. So I spend those days thinking about how gross it feels to be bruised by someone I barely know. One-night stands are okay if I can hop in the shower afterward and wash away their sweat, their spit, their cum. But a bruise stays, and remains both mine and theirs until it fades. I love bruises when they make me feel “owned” by someone I want to own me – but a random-ass stranger from Tinder does not own me and should not bruise me. I glower furiously at the handprint for days, wishing it had come from someone else’s hand.


My fave fuckbuddy is extremely vanilla, but he’s also what Dan Savage calls “GGG“: good, giving, and game. He doesn’t “get” the whole spanking thing, but he’ll still do it if I ask – often quite enthusiastically – and I love that about him.

One night in a New York hotel room, we can’t figure out how to open the bottles of apple-ginger cider we brought with us – and we’re high, which makes this quandary even harder. “Let’s go to the front desk and ask if they have a bottle opener,” I suggest, reasonably, to which my FWB replies: “Okay, but you have to do the talking, because I am way too high to talk to a stranger right now.”

We make a giggly pilgrimage to the front desk; the attendant there doesn’t have a bottle opener either. So it’s back to the drawing board (after a meandering journey through the hotel lobby, mezzanine, and basement, laughing maniacally like the stoned delinquents we are). Once we find our hotel room again, we scour it for any and all objects that might function as a bottle opener: a pair of tweezers, the edge of a countertop, a thick bedsheet crumpled in a palm.

Eventually, grasping at straws, my gentleman-friend opens the wardrobe in the corner and pops out the silver metal bar holding up the clothes-hangers. “Oh no, you broke it!” I chirp, my high-brain momentarily unable to process that he did this on purpose. He grins at me in that roguish way he has, and jokes, “Those were load-bearing hangers.” I collapse into ganja giggles on the bed.

The metal bar works. He’s able to push the gaping end of it against the ridged edge of a bottlecap until the cap pops clean off. He hands me the bottle and gets to work on opening one for himself. I sit cheerfully, sipping my cider, one leg dangling off the bed and one draped over his thigh. We clink our drinks together and sip in the comfortable silence of two people who like each other – two people who just simply, uncomplicatedly, happily like each other.

And then I pick up the hanger bar and start whacking myself on the thigh with it, because of course I do.

He laughs darkly in his throat, because he knows me and he knows what’s coming. “Oh, you kinksters and your pervertables,” he says out loud, or maybe just in my memory because that’s the sentiment I sensed from him in my periphery. I take another swig of my cider and put the silver bar in his hand. “You should hit me with this,” I say.

He does. The cool metal lands stripes of pain along my thigh, still hitched over his. His thwacks are more earnest than I’ve ever felt from him; I think he’s finally figured out that when I ask to be hit, I want to be hit. Stoned, tipsy, gettin’ beat, and sitting beside one of my favorite people, I can’t recall many moments as purely, perfectly happy as this one, right here.

a thigh bruise“I want you to give me a bruise,” I tell him, but he’s vanilla and probably needs a little more instruction, so I continue. “Pick a spot. Hit that one spot again and again, starting soft and building up til you’re wailing on it.” I wrap both my arms around the one of his that’s not holding our impromptu impact implement, and press my face into his shoulder. “I might scream, but it’s okay.”

He does exactly what I’ve asked him to do, just like he always does; it’s one of the reasons he’s my favorite FWB I’ve ever had. As the bar slices through the air and onto my thigh again and again, my man-friend mutters in my ear about the way jazz drummers hold their drumsticks. He’s playing me like an instrument. His tone of voice reminds me of a doctor who tells you a cheerful story about elephants or fairies to distract you while he sets your broken bone. I don’t want to be distracted from the pain being rhythmically administered to me, but I like the sound of his voice, the closeness of it, how completely and totally safe I feel with this man who is hurting me at my request.

There you go,” he says, and stops. “Look at that. Wow!”

I glance down at my thigh and see a thin streak of red, set in beautiful relief against the paleness of my skin. I’ve never seen my thigh look so gorgeous. In the days that follow, I keep hitching up my skirt to take a look, running my hand along the slightly raised mark, pressing the painful spot through my leggings on the subway to remind me that it’s there.

It makes me feel owned, and small, and safe, and happy. It fades, and I want it back. I want it to last forever, like a tattoo. But the nature of bruises is that they don’t last. Like the tumbling petals of a dying flower, they are perfect in their life and in their death. I am always sad to say goodbye to a bruise, and always happy to have had it at all.