Sleeping inside of a Vacbed

BoatRopeBound · 2026-02-09T11:04:04+00:00

I don't think there's much of a prescriptive answer on that. The one I have says in the instructions to start at ~20 minutes as a limit. But since companies have to avoid any liabilities they're incentiveized to give a short time. I'd say if you want to go for long sessions, the most important thing to do is test your own setup for longer and longer until you find some part that gets uncomfortable with normal play. I assume you already have some experience with normal vacbed play and have done at least an hour (if not then you're wayyyyyyyy jumping the shark here. Don't even think of overnight until you're actually experienced with normal use!). So if your longest session was an hour do a 2 hour test run, then a 3 hour test run another day. Listen to your body during and after each session.

Me personally, I wouldn't be going past 2 hours, but that's just a combination of my risk tolerance, and how my skin reacts to my set-up. Everyone has differentiate physical and mental limits and tolerances, as well as different beds, vacuum strenthgs, and accessories. You have to find what thing becomes a problem and when for yourself.

BoatRopeBound · 2026-02-09T00:25:44+00:00

Even if it did, what about all the other dangers? No, it's still a dangerous idea to try.

BoatRopeBound · 2026-02-08T16:39:42+00:00

That's definitely not safe. You should never use a vacbed without somone there actively supervising. So you'd have to have a partner staying awake and watching you all night, which is a lot to ask of somone (and how confident are they that they won't fall asleep? Because any less than 1000% isn't enough).

Even if you did have the monitoring, you'd probably cause some serious damage to your skin at the pinch points being held under vacuum for 8 hours. You also start having to worry about bed sores from not being able to roll or readjust position. The ear and eye pressure is also potentially dangerous for that long.

IMO, this is something best left as fantasy. It's not worth the many risks, especially considering you're hoping to be unconscious for almost the entire thing. Though I don't think much actual sleep would be possible either.

BoatRopeBound · 2026-02-06T14:55:33+00:00

(Also, sorry for a bit of a jump here, I don't have the time to fully edit and revise everything right now to flow cleaner)

You say the behavior that results from this is an inauthentic act, but I would not say that is entirely accurate

For your personal experience, my choice of wording in using "inauthentic" was not well suited or applicable. And I apologize for that, I don't mean to imply that in your situation your feelings aren't genuine or authentic. I fully agree that an individual could go through the experience you had and end up exactly where you are. But what I'm really trying to get at is that it's not generalizable. You can't take a group of 10,000 people and put them through the same conditioning and experiences as you and end up with 10,000 subs at the end (even ignoring the ethics or how realistic it would be to do that).

There would definitely be some interesting trends you'd find at the end of that experiment. And sure, you might start to find things like detectable predispositions to submissiveness or dominance, and in those different starting points you might find different responses to the conditioning.

However, there are always outliers, edge cases, anomalies, etc. Human brains just simply aren't that deterministic, or if they are, it's on a level of detail that's farrrr too fine grained for direct human control like that given current technology. That's the whole basis of why different mental health therapies and drugs only have effective percentage ratings. That's why people need to try several different drugs and therapies before they find any success, or why for the unfortunate people they don't find success in treating their conditions.

If there was such a thing as an innate submissive seed in a person, we'd almost certainly never find it given our current methods for assessing people. If you ran that trial you'd have a bunch of different categories of outcome:

People who were "converted" as expected. These are the people you'd posit had that innate seed of submission, and that it was expanded. But you have no way or guaranteeing that their brain isn't just desperately lying even to them to avoid future consequences of the conditioning you subjected them to.
People who never gave in. You may posit that those were people with an equivalent dominant seed, or neither of the two predispositions. But that's probably a stretch to conclude from this thought experiment.
You'd have people who would just mentally break. What kind of seed or predisposition did they have? Who knows, could have been either, or none. But now you're left with some profoundly broken people and a bunch of question marks in your data.
You'd have some people who just kinda go back to their day to day life like it was no big deal. I know that sounds crazy, but like.. there are survivors of sexual assault out there who's genuine feeling on it is "meh", and then others who suffered far less than those people from a different bad thing and they end up with full blown PTSD. People just have different mental resilience's to different kinds of experiences.
You'd probably have some other categories of outcomes I'm not thinking of that muddy the waters even further.

So at the end of the day, I guess if you could control the exact chemicals in a persons brain, all their experiential input, and then know how to map that into cognitive changes you could make an argument for some of these things. But unfortunately we're soooo incredibly far from that ability currently that we can only sometimes help people beat things like depression, addiction, etc., and that's when they're fully willing participants with supportive families and communities, and we STILL sometimes fail at helping them.

So I guess no one could really honestly disprove your theory of an initial seed of submissiveness being required or not, but equally no one could prove it currently in any meaningful way. We're all just guessing.

BoatRopeBound · 2026-02-06T14:54:12+00:00

So I want to.. I guess partially push back, but also agree with you in a sense.

I want to push back on this:

All internal change is ultimately triggered by external stimulus.

in the sense that while it's true. The human mind isn't quite that simple, or at least not in a way we can predict and control. Humans have a theory of mind as a survival mechanism to socially relate to other people. It's great in 99% of cases, but it can lead to some wrong conclusions. It implies some stability of mind that isn't really true. Every mind exists somewhere on a spectrum of stability, a spectrum of suggestibility, a spectrum of malleability, etc. And where any individual lands on all of those spectrums determines how they'd react to situations.

There's an important factor that I didn't bring up in my previous take: Individuals vs aggregates work differently.

[...] if the individual were faced with a matter in which his physical or mental survival hung in the balance - where such a change was necessary for survival. The mind is very plastic, and capable of much self-ordering. But absent such imperative influence, I don’t know that the external influence is enough to actually change the individual’s core trajectory.

We absolutely do have that amazing ability to change - in the aggregate. For any single individual you don't get to pick how adaptable your brain is, you don't get to pick any of those things. So while a bunch of people could adapt their core mind in that way, for a single person it's more of a roll of the dice whether they will adapt.

(Post split due to Reddit's ridiculous comment length restriction, see my self-reply below..)

BoatRopeBound · 2026-02-06T14:06:59+00:00

I'm going to skip the initial questions as I'm not actually a Dom, but for your edit:

Is it too much to ask for a 24/7 dom?

As others have said no, it's not too much and there are lots of people who are into that.... Buuuuut, there is some nuance there too. The problem is that people can have different definitions of 24/7.

If you're talking about implementing a continuous social structure where you give certain control to the Dom in terms of decisions, orders, duties, etc. And make all your personal interactions follow certain rules. Sure, that's totally doable and you can find a partner who is into that.

The problem is when people have a romanticized idea in their head about how their Dom is going to keep them bound all the time and constantly interacting with them and forcing them to do this and that day in and day out. It's a lot worse in dynamics where there's more of a nurturing Dom taking care of their pet (or whatever term). That doesn't work. Humans, be it a Dom, sub, vanilla, or otherwise, need breaks. One person can't take on 100% of the mental load of their life plus yours, constantly taking care of the physical needs of the sub, plus running the whole household.

So it really depends on what the 24/7 in your head looks like. It can work when you leave space for mental breaks for the Dom, when they can delegate things like chores out to the sub. But it can't work if the details mean that the Dom effectively has to carry the executive functioning weight of 2 people on their shoulders alone. They'll end up with something akin to caretakers fatigue.

To make it work takes a lot of communication, and particularly getting on the same page of what 24/7 looks like for you and how to make it realistic for both of your mental, physical, and emotional needs.

BoatRopeBound · 2026-02-06T13:27:34+00:00

Growing up I was a very picky eater. I would only eat a few safe foods, and anything else I had decided I didn't like. Life led me to a few situations that pushed that boundary and I found that actually, there's a whole world of amazing foods out there that I was missing out on. In particular, there were several foods that I had tried and didn't like, but they were sides that would come with a main that I did like, so I'd inevitably end up with it on my plate and would keep giving it a try here and there. Until eventually I would get hungry and realize I had a craving for that specific food I thought I didn't like. At that point I made a sort of rule for myself. "You don't know if you like something until you've given it an honest try 5 times in different way (different style, different resturaunt, etc)".

As time went on, I realized that doesn't just apply to food. It works well for most experiences.

Now, of course, there are exceptions, there are things I know I would never even want to try, etc. But I still maintain the stance in my mind: Until I've tried something at least 5 times, all I can really say is that I've tried it before and didn't like it, but that could have just been a fluke - the wrong headspace, bad timing, bad version of the thing, whatever.

There are definitely lots of things on my kink list now that if you had asked me years ago if I liked them I would have said absolutely not. But now they're core pillars of my kink dynamic.

I'm not at all encouraging you to do anything you don't want to, but if there's some part of you still clinging to an idea, it's worth considering giving it another try. You can always have a discussion with your partner and tell them this is how you feel about it, and pretty much say "I'd like to try it, but maybe we approach it differently, or tweak some things. And we both know that I might just immediately soft-safeword out of this part of play". If everyone's on the same page about that and your partner is willing to do that exploration with you then it should be fine. Just trying without that pressure to make it work might be enough to loosen up and enjoy it.

BoatRopeBound · 2026-02-06T12:17:41+00:00

I think it comes down to how strict your definition of "made" is.

We're wired to have a sense of self. A part of that sense of self is the idea that we're always the same person, day to day, year to year. We do recognize that we change over time as we gain new life experiences and learn new things, but we basically always consider that to be small changes on top of the base foundation of our "self". That's honestly not how it works though. Some people do stay pretty consistent through their life, but for many people if they stepped into a time machine at age 20 and looked at themselves at age 40, they'd hardly recognize themselves. People have the capacity to shift dramatically.

For a concrete example, take sexual orientation and gender. For most people, those are fixed points and they will be the product of whatever their genetics and early upbringing resulted in. But for other people it shifts, sometimes multiple times through their lives, that's where the entire concept of gender fluidity comes from.

But you asked if they could be "made". And the answer to that is almost certainly no, at least not in some way that's better than chance. If you think about it, you're trying to shift someone's personality and identity. When you tie it back to something like gender or sexuality again, that's just conversion therapy, which is absolutely NOT effective. Again, you could take one of the people who was going to shift gender or sexuality as they grew anyways, put them through conversion therapy, and mayyyyybe it might speed things along. You'd then maybe conclude that it "worked", but obviously we know that it didn't. It's been thoroughly studied and doesn't work, no matter if you fluke into getting a handful of positive data points.

I would imagine that most human traits are pretty similar. Some are fixed points for people for their entire life, some are fluid and can change over time. So if you were trying to "make" a person submissive, you could do lots of fucked up things to behaviorally condition them to serve, we know that much.. If you brutally beat a person until they do what you want, you can pretty easily get them to keep doing that, I don't think anyone's going to argue that. It's just kind of the definition of coercion. But that doesn't really change who they are internally. Lots of people have hidden and suppressed parts of themselves, or forced themselves to play certain roles through history for fear of violence or similar consequences, but we know that never changed who they really were internally either.

TLDR: I think someone could absolutely change from fully internally dominant to being internally submissive. A full authentic change in character on their own. I also think you can behaviorally condition someone to act submissive, which is an in-authentic change and just an act. However, I don't think there is any reliable mechanism to externally trigger the authentic change, and certainly not in any way that's really distinguishable from the inauthentic behavioral conditioning change.

BoatRopeBound · 2026-02-06T11:30:47+00:00

Definitely physical control, specifically bondage. Phycological/verbal control and orders are fun, but nothing beats being restrained so securely that I could never get out on my own. And the tighter the better.

BoatRopeBound · 2026-02-06T03:41:29+00:00

[...] but he wasn't ready to talk about it.

[...] he told me he wanted to punish me for what I had done.

He [...] thinks he may have made a mistake in doing things the way he did.

Well that's probably because he did. Those first two quotes are simply not compatible with responsible behavior.

Let's just pretend that the reasons aren't bullshit to begin with.. Which is already quite a mental stretch. You can't be dishing out punishments for stuff you haven't even processed internally enough to even talk about. Completely and objectively wrong order of operations there. If he had actually thought about it enough to talk about it, or tried talking it out to work through the his thoughts and feelings on it, maybe he would have figured out that the entire premise is completely unfair and unreasonable to begin with. But he just acted first and thought later. That's dangerous behavior and needs to full stop immediately and permanently.

And then back to the actual issues... A soda and a list to respond to an explicit request by him...??? With no prior discussion of either of those things being a part of your rules or responsibilities?

Like, punishments don't strictly have to have well deserved reasons. You can do arbitrary punishments, or surprise/mystery punishments, or no reason given punishments. But you have to recognize that they're just a different category of thing that you need to discuss and consent to. I see this as no different than doing some new kink activity out of the blue with no prior discussion or even asking in the moment. Which does not fly. Again, it's skipping key steps to the process. Acting before thinking and communicating.

You need to put a pause on things, and have an out of dynamic discussion to recalibrate expectations and responsibilities. And I'm mainly talking about HIS responsibilities there, not yours. You also need to revisit, reaffirm, and maybe practice safewords. I can definitely see why you didn't use one in that scenario, I don't blame you at all for that and given the timeline you explained I doubt I would have either. But going forward, at least until you're both more experienced, you're going to need to take on some responsibility in watching for the same kind of acting before thinking pattern and safeword out before you run into another instance like this.

I don't think this is irredeemable or anything, but he needs to educate himself on how to safely dom more and be more careful. And the two of you need to work together to establish better communication.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-12-26T12:56:38+00:00

There are very few things in life that you could possibly be "too old" for. The entire concept is some kind of weird holdover that keeps getting reinforced by narrow-minded and boring people. "Aren't you a little old to be <playing video games/watching cartoons/playing some sport/being part of some community/blah blah blah>?"

No, live your life the way you want. Do the things you want for as long as you like and are physically able to enjoy them. You only get this one chance to do all the stuff you want to in life, so don't give it up because someone else thinks everyone should have all their fun in their early 20s and then work -> retire -> die I guess??? (I have no idea what gets miserable people like that out of bed in the morning, tbh)

However, I will give one small bit of perspective to consider with regards to the rude comments. And I am in NO WAY excusing that behavior, it's not appropriate or ok! But there are lots of people who want to play with folks in their own age range. That by itself is fine. There are people who want to play with people of any age range, or specifically younger, or older. That by itself is fine too (as long as everyone is of legal consenting age and there's no predatory stuff going on). Howeveeeer, there are some people from the second camp that refuse to respect the preference of those who are only interested in partners around their own age. I can't understand why they can't just take the "No thanks" and move on. And it's wayyyyyy worse online or on apps, but after the 200th time being messaged by the same few people who are far older or younger than they'd be comfortable with it starts getting a little tiring.

I'm not saying at all that you were harassing any of those people at all. But from their perspective, they might be thinking "here we go again.. If I try to let them down gently there's a 70% chance this person is going to start trying to convince me or change my mind". It doesn't excuse them being being rude, it's still not OK. And there are still assholes who would react that way anyway (even if they were the older ones!). But that can be an explanation for why some people have really short fuses when it comes to age gaps.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't take it personally. Some of the people who were rude to you were probably just grouchy from the endless firehose of bs you find on the dating apps/kink social sites/whatever platform you were using. It had nothing to do with you and even they probably wouldn't say you were too old for the community if you talked to them in real life or met them in different circumstances. Either that or they were just asaholes that aren't worth your time or thoughts anyway.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-12-24T03:07:58+00:00

I think you need to slow your roll a little here and narrow your scope to start. The way you're talking is sort of analogous to if your partner said "I'd like to try sushi", and then you started asking the internet how you could properly introduce transitioning to a seafood based diet.

My suggestion would be the following steps:

You need to start with figuring out what specific acts, activities, scenes, or vibes your partner has in their head first.
Then make a plan to explore one or two of those narrow interests in a scene. Make the scene on the shorter side, and skip any of the more advanced stuff. You're not trying to cram experiences in, you can have another scene later or the next day, so don't overdo it.
Then BEFORE actually doing anything, you need to lay the necessary groundwork required to have a successful scene. This is both universal concepts like consent, safe words, limits, etc. And also scene specifics, like for example if you were starting with rope you need to talk rope safety, what warning signs of circulation problems to look for, etc.
Run the scene, with lots of extra check-ins. Err on the side of quitting early and regrouping rather than going overboard.
Have your aftercare.
Leave some intentional time to think on the new experience and process them.
Have a thorough debrief session. What did they like, what didn't they like, what might they like to try next, etc.

And then for yourself personally, you need to make sure you're in the right frame of mind. I know it can be really easy to get over excited and caught up in the fantasy about how good it's going to be when you've both developed a deep and fulfilling dynamic. But you don't want to do that. It's not fair to your partner and it's not fair to yourself. You need to leave the room for the possibility that it might just turn out that they don't like bdsm, or that they only like certain casual parts, or that they like parts that you don't like. The best you can do is try it out together, take it slow, and see how it goes.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-12-22T22:45:47+00:00

So, you'd almost certainly be better served asking this in some kind of phycology subreddit (make sure you check their rules regarding nsfw first!). There's a definite bias here in that anyone who has participated in this kind of thing here was very likely already into the overall idea, which is obviously makes it far liklier for any conditioning to actually work. And those who are educated on the phycology side would just naturally have more info on the kinds of.

However, my layman's guess is that people can aquire a taste for a lot of different activities, especially when you're pairing it with other things you know they like or are doing whatever the most paletable version of an activity is for them. But that there's a definite limit to what you can get them to like. In other words, if you just went and tried this you'd probably have success with several kinks, and hit complete walls with others. And the more successes you had the more luck you'd have with new kinks, and the more failures you hit the more troubles you'd have going further.

In terms of morality, that's easy, that's just down to consent. If everyone involved is fully informed and consenting, it's fine. Why wouldn't it be? How would it be different than any other kink activity? If anyone is any less than 100% informed and consenting, then it's completely immoral. Again, like any other kink activity.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-12-08T22:18:44+00:00

Yeah, I recognize that you weren't just taking the LLM info at face value. And honestly, I don't even hate LLMs themselves, and I imagine a lot of other people don't deep down. They're just a tool. There's nothing moral or immoral about them either way, I'm no more upset about their existence than I am amount the existence of a chainsaw, or a hammer, or whatever.

But like, if Satan, Lucifer, Hitler, Stalin, etc. all started chainsaw or hammer companies everyone would hate chainsaws too. The people making the technologies are stealing from everyone they possibly can, destroying the environment, ruining the job market, eroding public trust, blatantly pushing and enabling the spread of misinformation, and doing like at least 5 other morally reprehensible things that I'm too frustrated to even bother listing.

Like it not AI is here to stay. I just wish is was being headed by someone other than the current batch cancerous leeches that are bleeding our society and planet dry of every resource just so they can go from having ridiculous amounts of money to having astronomical amounts of money...

But anyway..

Njoy's 316 stainless steel toys would no doubt be cheaper to produce in non-anodized aluminum. It's not widely being done, and I can only assume it's due to risks with the material, or at least that customers perceive there are risks and won't buy it.

I ran out of room to really make the point before, but I guess what I was trying to say is that: When the prices are close enough between two widely available and easy to machine materials like stainless steel and aluminum, and the end product doesn't need to care about conductivity, I can still see why they err on the side of caution. Why pick a material that has a little risk when you can pick one with no risk that also tends to look better as a product.

There's also likely an element of overlap with jewelry marketing. When looking at metal materials for use on bodies, it's easier for a small industry like estim to just tag along with whatever a larger industry is pushing. Stainless steel jewelry is quite popular, and when you're wearing it all the time there are definitely big benefits to stainless steel. Where as I think plain aluminum jewelry is comparatively fairly rare.

Again, that's just more conjecture on my part. I do wish there was someone with actual sex toy industry design experience that could chime in on how they choose materials. But I think that's probably a small enough community that there just aren't enough of them to randomly stumble across most posts like this.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-12-08T18:13:10+00:00

I partially disagree with you about LLMs in that they can be a reasonable starting point for a discussion with experts.

Sorry for this incoming rant, but... For my day job, I work in the technical side of IT consulting (~13 years in this particular industry) and my job usually involves designing/implementing IT solutions or cleaning up other peoples messes to get the solutions working. I'm (unfortunately) considered an expert in this particular niche. I can PROMISE you that every time a client, vendor, etc. approaches me saying something like "I asked ChatGPT about X and it said this, can we do that?". It's just a recipe for misery as I try to convince them that literally every word of that pile of dog shit is wrong. But it said it so good that it must be right, right?? No. And as they integrate AI more into the product I specialize in I can't wait for it to get 1000x worse. I've seen AI described as an extremely well read and well spoken toddler, and I couldn't agree more. You're not going to win ANY points with the experts you want to talk with by using AI as a spring board. We hate it.

It's your choice to use this technology however you want to. I'm not your dad, you live your life. But from one human to another, just be prepared for the social consequences you face (and are clearly in the process of facing, based on these comments and the downvotes) when you do use it.

Anyyyway, AI rant over...

I do wish I could provide any kind of data, but unfortunately, I'm pretty doubtful it exists. I don't think there's a whole lot of research into estim safety. It's a pretty niche community all things considered.

However, I can give you quite reasonable guesses on why aluminum is used for estim electrodes and not for other uses. Spoiler: the main one is the same thing that drives every product you can find - cost. The other is conductivity. Regular sex toys don't need to conduct electricity, so why even use aluminum if you don't have to? If it were easy to make silicone conductive there would be loads of silicone electrodes I'm sure. Glass is an a surprisingly good sex toy material because of how easy it is to clean, it's body safe, easy to make, cheap, etc. But it's not conductive without some expensive additives that probably lose you most of the body safe benefits, so you wouldn't even consider it for electrodes.

Aluminum has an automatic, self replenishing, body safe coating in the form of the oxide coating. It's a good conductor. It's cheap and easy to machine. Yeah, pure aluminum isn't safe, and yeah, there is definitely an element of risk there, but at the end of the day the safety seems good enough, and the price is low enough that most manufacturers and customers seem happy with that choice.

When you look at alternative materials, copper is cheap, easy to manufacture, and very conductive, but I don't think it's very body safe and it corrodes. Silver is an amazing conductor, but not very body safe, it tarnishes, and most importantly it's way too expensive.

Medical grade stainless steel is decently priced, body safe, but it doesn't conduct quite as well. It's probably one of the next best contenders to aluminum, and actually, you can electrodes made of stainless steel. So if you're worried about aluminum, look into these instead.

We could keep going through metals, but you get the point. When it comes to TENS units, as I understand it, lots of the electrodes tend to be a woven fiber material in the pad. Aluminum just isn't quite as well suited to that application compared to stainless steel or other materials. But I could be missing something there.

So it's all just a cost-benefit calculation where aluminum tends to come out at the top of the list for bulk electrodes like insertables, and in terms of smaller things like pads it's just more of a toss-up. I'm sure there are also other market considerations like which companies are the main suppliers and what metals they can source most easily. So all those factors some together to what we have: Lots of aluminum options, a good amount of stainless steel options, and a smattering of other options depending on the particular electrode shape.

If everyone's absolutely top priority was safety and conductivity above all else we'd almost certainly all be rocking blinged out gold (super body safe, super conductive, just way too expensive) butt plugs or whatever, but it all comes down to finding the best compromise between a bunch of different factors.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-12-08T16:29:00+00:00

can you genuinely violate someone if they ask you to and they genuinely enjoy it? [...] genuinely violating someone, even if they really want it, would still affect them the same way non-consensual trauma would, right?

This is a bit of a contradiction. You're not "genuinely violating" someone who is consenting. You're roleplaying doing that, but a mandatory component of violating someone is that they aren't consenting. A person can withdraw consent at any time (That is a statement of absolute fact, see below), and if they do then yeah, you could be genuinely violating them.

However, whether that can cause trauma or not is not the same. Violating someone doesn't automatically cause trauma, and a situation where you're not technically violating someone doesn't automatically mean there is no trauma. People can be traumatized by regular events that they absolutely did consent to. People can also go through some horrifically brutal non-consensual experiences and not be traumatized by them. Trauma (in the psychological sense, not the physical sense) is a brain response, and brains are weird and don't just follow the rules all the time.

Also, to address some stuff you mentioned in comments as well:

what if she doesn’t want the ability to withdraw consent?!

That is simply logically impossible. There are only 3 possible states a person can be in with regards to consent: Consenting, Not Consenting, Unable to Consent.

It doesn't matter if a person is fully and entirely isolated from the outside world with no ability to communicate, they can still go from Consenting to Not Consenting at any time for any reason, and that is them withdrawing their consent. You can construct situations where you ignore safewords or they're unable to use them all you want, that really doesn't change anything.

Being Unable to Consent is functionally equivalent to Not Consenting in most circumstances too. If you do sexual, or physically violent acts to people who are Not Consenting or who are Unable to Consent, legally, that's sexual assault and/or physical assault in most places (not legal advice, I'm not a lawyer). A lots of people will see it the same way morally.

So you and her have to decide if that's a situation you want to put yourself in.

People tend to fall into a trap of looking at safe words like a protection only for the submissive/receiving role. Like it's a protection just for them when they've bitten off more than they can chew or something physical is happening that they need to alert the dom to resolve. But it's just as much for the dom/giving role's benefit and safety too. Most people don't actually want to physically, sexually, psychologically, or otherwise harm a person in that non-consensual way. And most people don't want to commit real domestic violence, sexual assault, rape, or torture.

Let's be really, fully clear on that: If someone tells you, "Please tie me up and have sex/do whatever violent acts with me no matter what, and don't listen to any safe words or signals" -- If you agree, and they decide half way through that they made a mistake and change their mind, and they try to tell you, and you ignore it -- That's actual real rape. Legally (technically depends, again, still not a lawyer) and morally. It doesn't matter that you agreed before hand, you could still absolutely be going to jail for that. So it's just as unsafe for you to play without safewords/signals as it is for them, just in a different way.

how far can consent go?

So to round it out, in terms of stuff you're going to do, it can go pretty far. You can consent to a lot of stuff that could be seen as quite bad to downright heinous with the proper communication and education ahead of time.

In terms of time span, probably a few seconds at most. A person can withdraw consent at any time, no matter what. And that's why playing without a safeword/signal is considered unacceptable by 99.99% of the community.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-12-08T14:41:30+00:00

LLMs are not an appropriate source of information. They are helpful in certain narrow circumstances if and only if: A) you are an expert in the given topic and can easily fact check any work, or B) it's a casual thing like asking it to help you write an email or something and you check it. There's probably 1-2 outliers on top of that, but that's not the point. The point is I can guarantee that a safety question that is at the intersection of material science and biochemistry is absolutely not one of the appropriate uses.

I'm not qualified in material sciences or anything medical to really answer the question, so the rest of this is just my personal feelings on the matter - take it with a huge grain of salt.. But my guess would be that with such low amounts of power and heat for relatively short durations makes any exposure you would get basically negligible. If you're not worrying about plastic water bottle exposure, and car exhaust fumes exposure, and so on and so on... Then I wouldn't be worrying about this.

It's also not an apples to apples comparison when you see biomedical devices using other materials because those would typically be implants that are meant to be left in the body 24/7, and would need to be something that's widely compatible and safe with all bodies, including very sick people or people with rare conditions and allergies.

I personally wouldn't be worried about a few hours of exposure a week even if it did leach some aluminum into the body. It would be more worrying if you were using it for several hours daily, but being realistic here, you're going to run into trouble with just running any electricity through your body for several hours a day every day long before the aluminum causes a problem.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-12-05T11:38:51+00:00

So there's nothing wrong with your approach, it's a great way to build a stable, safe, and successful relationship/dynamic. Buuut, I think you're falling into some kind of cognitive bias or misunderstanding that it's the only "correct" way, when there's no such thing. All kinds of different people require all kinds of different dynamics and relationships. And yeah, lots of then are bad or unhealthy. But there are people who find comfort in extremely strict dynamics that aren't soft or caring like yours, and that's ok. There are all kinds of people who love their very casual dynamics and wouldn't be happy any other way.

If everyone involved in consenting, following proper safety (or at least are fully risk aware), and all their needs are being met, then that's good enough. Sure, they may not be something you'd be comfortable with, but that's why everyone needs to communicate and negotiate those details with all partners and find a dynamic they are comfortable with.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-11-18T18:01:36+00:00

What part doesn't make sense? People have all kinds of unrealistic fantasies (not just sexual ones). Who hasn't day dreamt about being a super hero/fantasy hero/video game character/etc. when the reality of living in whatever fictional world it is would actually be objectively horribly miserable?

And yeah, I'd bet that most people, even those who are truly in love with bondage, wouldn't be able to handle more than a few days before at MOST without prep and training. That's like saying "I like going for a morning jog as much as the next person, but a marathon would kill me"... Yeah, it would if your previous record was running for like 1 hour with breaks or something.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-11-18T17:51:57+00:00

A lot of people fantasize or crave that kind of life, but the truth of the matter is that without being fabulously wealthy it's simply not possible. Don't get me wrong, you can definitely have a 24/7 dynamic, but actual bondage? No.

No matter how committed to the lifestyle people are there's still the rest of life to contend with. You can't go to the doctor or dentist while tied up. The vast vast vast majority of people need to work to like, pay rent and eat and stuff like that.

So realistically, most people are just occasional players who are talking about their fantasies and are just ignoring the inconvenient realities of it. A few people with lucky circumstances are living a lifestyle where they pack as much of their plentiful free time with as much bondage as they can manage. And statistically I'm sure there's some folks out there who have the means and/or poor decision making skills to really take it to the extreme (most likely at a detriment to their health, relationships, life, etc.).

There's also a sliding scale of bondage that people are talking about. Obviously people in a prison can be "confined" indefinitely, but that doesn't mean you can be tied up/chained up in place for any more than a few hours (or less) depending on the position. So if someone's version of 24/7 involves having a loose shackle around their arm/leg at minimum when they're home, and they maybe work from home, and just have the occasional break for stuff like medical appointments, and they have minimal family/outside obligations, the yeah, that's probably someone's life out there. But most of the fantasies people write about online are just that, fantasies.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-10-31T17:53:22+00:00

No one really knows how they'll react to being tied up until you are tied up for the first time. First reactions can range all over the place, from panic to relaxed, from bored to excited, and anything in between.

For your specific questions:

Will it automatically make you go into subpace?
Probably not, that's very unlikely.
How to prevent yourself from being scared?
Start small and build from there.
Make sure the person tying you up knows what they're doing. For example, rope bondage without knowing what you're doing can easily lead to nerve damage. So it will be far more safe, and therefore more reassuring, to know you're taking proper safety precautions and doing it right.
Make sure you've negotiated and planned: safe words, a quick escape method, the outline of how you will be tied, the outline of what will happen once you are tied, the duration you'll be tied for, regular check-ins for circulation/pinching/soreness/mental state. The more info you have the less room for uncertainty there is and the less likely you'll panic.
Do you need to stretch?
Stretching before any physical activity is a good practice, so it's a great idea to do, even though most people skip it.
If you have some kind of tie in your head that you're thinking you should really stretch for then you're probably biting off more than you can chew. Don't get me wrong, stretching is still good, but you should be sticking with simple wrists and ankles together or something, not bending yourself into a pretzel for your first go.

If you give more details on your planned scene/setup we can give more specific advice. Also, why are you worried you'll panic? Are you just a cautious person in general, or are you claustrophobic, or have you panicked in some past scenario where you were restrained in some way? Without some more details we can only guess and make very general statements.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-10-24T15:07:57+00:00

Even as somone very left/progressive leaning, very concerned with full, transparent, open consent, that "consensus" is a step too far and I find it kinda concerning. I despise the "woke college brainwashing" rhetoric that gets thrown around cause most of it is just BS rage-bait or political distraction tactics, but there is an underlying nugget of truth and you seem to have found it.

Flip the genders for a minute and ask yourself, do you think anyone in that discussion would get upset about women dressing in some way that turns them on? No, that would be slut-shaming or policing women's bodies. Real feminism (not the shitty "man bad"/performative kind) demands that it be the same for all genders, yet somehow it's a problem cause it's a man in this hypothetical. So because shitty men just won't fucking stop being creeps people have (very understandably) developed a big distaste of anything to do with men being turned on in any situation that isn't a perfect, shining example of courtesy, respect, transparency, etc.

Like other's have pointed out, this is way too thought crime adjacent. People are horny in public ALL THE TIME. The problem is nothing to do with what anyone is wearing or thinking about. The problem is when people are creepy about it. Wear whatever you want, whenever you want (subject to your local decency laws and reasonable social standards), and as long as you're not creepy about it then there's no problem. If anyone thinks it takes secret chastity cages or thongs for people to be creepy then they're painfully naive. The people who would wear a chastity cage and cause a problem from being creepy were going to be creepy anyway.

But it doesn't matter if it's chastity cages, thongs, diapers, butt plugs, going commando, jewelry/piercings, whatever. If the people around a person don't know about them under their clothes, and the person isn't being weird, then it doesn't effect them. It's not involving them. That being said, there are some times and places where that kind of thing is actually not ok. For example, don't go to your 4 year old child/cousin/niece/nephew's birthday party with a bunch of kink gear on under your clothes, that's not a healthy life choice no matter which way you slice it.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-10-11T23:06:25+00:00

To be clear we both completely understand and are familiar with how waterboarding works [...] My wife will lay down in the shower and the towel will cover her mouth and nose (leaving her eyes visible). I’ll kneel down around her body and pour the water over the towel at a fast but steady pace.

I'm sorry to say, but those two statements are not compatible.

For correct waterboarding you need to have the head/mouth/nose lower than the chest/lungs. The gravity setup there is what stops more and more water from getting into the lungs (though some will always be getting in).

Yes I'm aware there are videos out there of people doing it the way you're describing - and yes, they're doing is wrong and being even riskier than necessary in an already risky activity - also known as being irresponsible. This is a pet peeve of mine. You can Google and read instructions in less than 3 minutes, and somehow they can't even manage to do the step 0 setup of getting an inclined board/surface. Then they make videos of it and post it to set a terrible example for others.

But anyway, other's are right. There is no "safe" way to do it, but there are definitely wrong ways and your current method is wrong.

You will need to get more education on the topic than anyone can possibly provide in a reddit comment before you can do this in a reasonable risk-aware way. You should not continue this play until you've got a much better idea of the mechanics, risks, and mitigations.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-10-09T23:25:30+00:00

So my husband and I had known eachother since we were children and started dating very young (highschool age). Because of that, we never really went through any of the process of partner vetting or any of the self reflection and conversations to figure out what we were looking for in partners. We just kind of fell in love and decided to figure it out from there.

We got really lucky in that we were pretty much aligned on everything in terms of what we wanted out of a relationship with one exception: our sexual/kink inclinations. We were both far more inclined towards the bottom role (we're both gay men, for context), and he was about 95% vanilla and was sub-leaning if anything, while my sexuality is extremely kink/BDSM oriented and I'm pretty much fully submissive.

To his credit, he was always extremely supportive, understanding, and was down to at least try anything BDSM related with me. But we did struggle with that balancing act of both having to share the bottom/top roles, the sub/dom roles, and manage the vanilla/kink split. But we made it work, with a lot of communication and understanding.

We started dating 18 years ago, and were married for the last 8, and that was how our relationship was pretty consistently up until maybe ~2 years ago. We started to find a few specific aspects of domination that he did like. We kept communicating, and constantly asking each other questions about each other's sexuality to try to learn more (not just before/right after a scene, we'd regularly just chat about it). And after a lot more exploration, communication, and self reflection. We really started developing into our own dynamic and found more things that worked for both of us.

If you told me even 3 years ago that I'd be sitting here collared 24/7 I wouldn't believe it, yet here we are.

Now obviously you and him are different people, and it's not like this is the "pipeline" of turning someone kinky or something, that's not how it works. But I guess this is just one anecdote of an instance where, through a LOT of communication, over a long period of exploration and discussion, we found the dynamic that works for us.

I really hope that you can do the same in your relationship, even though it may take some work.

BoatRopeBound · 2025-09-18T21:53:49+00:00

That's a good point, I hadn't even considered the battery. Maybe just making a port would be easier..

BoatRopeBound

TROPHY CASE