Hood

What is a hood?

A hood (Dutch: hoofdkap) is a cover that closes off the whole head or part of it, taking away sight, hearing and a piece of your own identity. A hood is a tool for sensory deprivation. Anyone who has one put on loses more than sight alone; the overview of what’s happening in the room disappears too.

What a hood does to someone

A hood presses both the buttons claustrophobia is made of.

Radomsky, Rachman, Thordarson, McIsaac and Teachman built the Claustrophobia Questionnaire in 2001 on the hypothesis that claustrophobia consists of two distinct but related fears: fear of suffocation and fear of restriction. A hood hits them at once. It lies over the airway, and it closes off. The Dutch validation of that same questionnaire put nine situations to 23 people, with suffocation, restriction or both, and that last category is exactly where a hood falls.

How often it goes wrong has been counted outside BDSM. Napp and colleagues followed 6,520 consecutive patients who had an MRI scan; in 9.8 percent a claustrophobic event occurred. A scanner is not a hood, so that figure isn’t a prediction. But it does give the order of magnitude: about one in ten people gets stuck in a closed space they stepped into voluntarily.

How a hood is used in a scene

Rarely as a first step, and usually as the capstone of a build-up.

The usual order is blindfold, then earplugs or music, then the hood. What I see myself is that the hood goes down best when someone is already lying down or tied and no longer has to think about where they are. The article hoods and sensory deprivation describes that sequence in more detail.

What you lose under a hood is also your voice: talking goes badly and being understood goes worse. So communication shifts to touch, and people usually agree a fixed tapping pattern before the hood goes on.

What to watch for with a hood

• Ask about the MRI scan beforehand. “Have you ever had one, and how did that go?” is the most useful question you can ask, because for most people that’s the only closed space they’ve ever lain in.
• Agree a time and say it out loud, because the sense of time is the first thing that disappears under a hood.
• Keep talking to someone who can’t see, even if you only say you’re still there.
• Take the hood off at fast, shallow breathing, even if no safeword sounds; under a hood that word often doesn’t come out.
• Don’t stack. A hood plus a gag plus being tied is three restrictions at once for someone who doesn’t yet know a single one.

Where this fits on my site

Curious what it’s like to see or hear nothing anymore, but not sure you can handle it? Then that’s exactly something to discuss beforehand instead of finding out on the spot. The service page about the BDSM date describes what a build-up like that looks like.

Sources

• The Claustrophobia Questionnaire. Adam S. Radomsky, Stanley Rachman, Dana S. Thordarson, Hugh K. McIsaac & Bethany A. Teachman, Journal of Anxiety Disorders 15(4), 287–297, 2001 (DOI 10.1016/s0887-6185(01)00064-0). Supplies the hypothesis the questionnaire is built on and tested with in four connected sub-studies: claustrophobia consists of two distinct but related fears, the fear of suffocation and the fear of restriction.
• Analysis and Prediction of Claustrophobia during MR Imaging with the Claustrophobia Questionnaire. Adriane E. Napp, Judith Enders, Robert Roehle, Gerd Diederichs, Matthias Rief, Elke Zimmermann, Peter Martus & Marc Dewey, Radiology 283(1), 2017 (DOI 10.1148/radiol.2016160476). Prospective eighteen-month single-center study of 6,520 consecutive patients. Supplies the figure of 9.8 percent (640 of 6,520, 95% confidence interval 9.1 to 10.6) for a claustrophobic event during an MRI scan. This figure is about a scanner and not a hood; it stands here as an order of magnitude, not a prediction.
• The Dutch Claustrophobia Questionnaire: psychometric properties and predictive validity. Ilse Van Diest, Dirk Smits, Dorien Decremer, Leen Maes & Laurence Claes, Journal of Anxiety Disorders 24(7), 2010 (DOI 10.1016/j.janxdis.2010.05.003). Supplies the confirmation of the same two-factor structure in Dutch, and the setup of the second sub-study in which 23 participants were each exposed to nine claustrophobic situations with elements of suffocation, restriction or both.

Related terms

• Deprivation. The principle the hood is the heaviest tool of.
• Blindfold. The step that comes before it in a sensible build-up.
• Gas mask. The hood where the breathing itself is steered too.
• Bodybag. The same two fears, but around the rest of the body.
• Breath control. The line you cross the moment the breathing opening is covered.
• Gag. The restriction most often stacked with it, and why that’s rarely a good idea.
• Latex. Where the rubber comes from, why it shines and whose skin it shouldn’t touch.
• Mask. Only the face covered, with anonymity as the goal rather than deprivation.
• Sensory deprivation. The concept above this one, with the time limit and the problem of a safeword no one hears.
• Vacuum bed. The full-body version, which you can’t free yourself from.