Helen: You can’t possibly know how you’ll respond to something until you try it.
Jessica: I happen to disagree. I happen to think, if you know yourself well, you can gauge how you’re going to react to something…
Helen: You know how you’ll react to everything?
Jessica: Pretty much, yes.
[Helen suddenly kisses her; Jessica falls silent, shocked]
Helen: I guess you’re right. You seem to know yourself pretty well.
This dialogue from the movie Kissing Jessica Stein sums up exactly why it took me so long to realize I liked doing cock & ball torture (a.k.a. CBT, not to be confused with cognitive-behavioral therapy). I thought I knew myself well enough to already know, more-or-less, which kinks could appeal to me and which simply couldn’t. But I was wrong about that.
My first CBT experience
My first few penis’ed partners had no interest in genital torture – and to be fair, neither did I – so it wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I encountered someone who wanted me to hurt his dick.
He brought it up during a late-night handjob. We hadn’t been dating for very long, and I was still trying to get a grasp on what worked for him, so to speak. I hadn’t been able to make him come yet, despite ample effort and interest; I had only occasionally laid beside him in bed while he got himself off instead.
Tonight I’d wanted to give it another go, but his dick still seemed unimpressed. So I floundered, technique-wise, trying anything I could think of, until… he put his hand on mine, to pause my stroking, and said, simply: “Pinch the skin as hard as you can.”
I remember thinking: As HARD as I CAN?! Are you SURE?!
But lo and behold, when I picked a spot on his shaft and followed his instruction, within seconds he was coming all over my hands.
That relationship didn’t last long, for a whole host of reasons (some sexual, some less so), but it taught me some important lessons that I would take with me into the rest of my sex & dating life – including that dick pain could be a turn-on for some people, and that apparently I was one of those people.
Why I like CBT now
It’s been nearly a decade since that initial pinchy handjob that kicked everything off, and I’ve done a fair bit more CBT since then. I’m certainly no pro, like the ballbusting experts you’ll see on clip sites and at certain fetish parties (you know who you are!), but I do it semi-regularly and with relish. Here are a few reasons I like topping for CBT…
• Hurting people who want to be hurt is hot! I wouldn’t enjoy slapping someone’s dick around unless they really, really wanted me to, because masochists’ desire for pain and positive responses to pain are what make the interaction sexy to me, for the most part. Someone begging you to hurt them, if you’re both into that, can be as hot as someone begging you to fuck them, and for the same reasons: it means they want you and they trust you. That’s high praise!
• Penises are culturally weighty. Slapping someone’s cock is really different from slapping, say, their ass or their face. Not only does it feel very physically different because of the different concentrations of nerve endings involved; it also feels pretty different psychologically for both the top and the bottom. People’s feelings about their own genitals may relate to their understandings of gender, power, desirability/attractiveness, and more, and all of that may come up during CBT play (which is part of why pre-negotiation and aftercare are so important!). Likewise, I know my own feelings about CBT as a top are influenced by cultural baggage I’ve absorbed about dicks; over the course of my life, I have felt afraid of them, fascinated by them, desirous of them, and often some combination thereof, so it’s an interesting experience psychologically to inflict consensual pain on one.
• New routes to pleasure/orgasm are cool! Few things are sexier to me than seeing someone being overwhelmed by pleasure, especially unexpectedly intense pleasure – and even though I’ve made my partner come many times by slapping their cock at this point, I still find it astonishing every single time. Aside from that one experience with a previous partner that I described above, neither my spouse nor I had played with this kink to this extent before, so it feels intimate and sweet that we’ve found this new-to-us way to share pleasure through pain.
How about you, dear reader? Are you a CBT aficionado, or is it a bridge too far for your delicate, uh, sensibilities? 😉
This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.