First off.... is it "safeword" or "safe word"?
That aside, I have recently been reading through the archives on Pervocracy, including this older post on safe words.
My first thought, after the author mentioned that she'd spent the whole class terrified that she'd blurt out "red" instead of blue was how I recently (intentionally) blurted out "red" when a friend was tickling me in public. To him, friendly tickling. To me, all tickling pretty much lands in sexual territory because it makes me feel terribly out of control. But the thing about tickling is that people often don't take you seriously when you say stop. I usually give people one "not joking, don't tickle me" before I start intentionally hurting them. (Pinching, elbow to sternum, knee in balls, scratching, ect.) I was pretty sure this guy was gonna catch my drift though, and one syllable stopped the tickling dead in its tracks. I think I *will* use it in the future, despite the risk of other people catching the drift of my proclivities. Because chances are, even if the tickler doesn't necessarily get it right away... some one will.
The other part of my reflection on this is in response to some of the comments on that post. People propose using 'aardvark' and such as safewords; it's the "it should be jarringly incongruous" line of thought. Someone brings up the post where Mistress Matisse recommended "vomit" and "lawsuit" as safewords. Her point, though was that safewords should have intrinsic meaning- it was "vomit" for someone being spun around and "lawsuit" for in general because people know that are for making people stop doing shit. Or that lawsuits are serious.
For me personally, I recently had real, actual, in person, kinky sex for the first time. Well, not counting the times when I've tried to get vanilla partners to do it and nothing much happened. And I have to say that the scenario put forth in the comment thread, where one of the guys says that when he's topping, he specifies the safeword for his subs to use (and it's a weird word), seems fucked up.
My partner and I agreed on "time out" for a pause in the action/check in, "yellow" for approaching a limit/ having a hard time for real (but dont necessarily stop), "red" for stop what is in progress (stop hitting me, stop fucking me) and don't resume because too far for real, and the actual words "safe word" for full stop, untie me, scene ends everything ends, I'm gonna need cuddles and reassurance.
I picked those. And after having gone through with it, over the course of a couple weekends I used "time out" once, "yellow" a handful of times, "red" once, and "safe word" never. I don't know what it'd take to get me to cop to actually saying "safe word" but I suspect I'd already be injured. We actually added "yellow" at the last minute and I'm glad we did, because I had the world's hardest time bringing myself to say red, either. Because I didn't wanna be a quitter, because I didn't wanna fuck up the scene, because those words are so very jolting. And that's playing with a partner who'd caress me and praise me immediately when I called any of those things.
I'm not sure there's anything that could get me to choke out "aardvark" in the middle of a scene no matter how badly I was doing. It seems like the bottom should pick??
