Ignore play

What is ignore play?

Ignore play is a BDSM scene where one person deliberately acts as if someone who is present is not there, for a length of time set in advance. The other can feel and hear everything, and gets nothing back. In the scene it also goes by the plain name ignoring.

Where the word ignore comes from

From the Latin ignorare, “to not know,” and that is not the same as looking away. The verb carries the sense of taking no notice, of treating something as if it were not a fact. Lewis and Short give the related noun ignoratio as “want of knowledge or acquaintance, ignorance,” with examples about not knowing a place, the law, the truth, or yourself.

That older sense lays bare exactly what an ignore scene does. No attention is being withheld. The other person’s presence is treated as if it were not a fact. Anyone who has ever been ignored that way knows the difference at once.

Why ignore play hits so hard

Because being shut out is one of the largest effects social psychology has ever measured, and it barely depends on anything.

Chris Hartgerink, Ilja van Beest, Jelte Wicherts and Kipling Williams pooled 120 experiments with the ball-tossing game Cyberball in PLOS ONE, together good for 11,869 participants. The average effect of exclusion was large, with an effect size above 1.4, and it held up regardless of the number of other players, the duration, how often the ball was thrown, and regardless of the participants’ sex, age or country.

That is where the warning about an ignore scene sits. Turning the dials does little. Shorter, with fewer people, or with a game added does not make it gentler. What makes the difference is that it stops at a moment you agreed on beforehand.

Why people ask for it

Because it is the one scene you need to buy nothing for and be able to do nothing for.

• For the one being ignored, the whole evening shifts toward attention. Every sound from the other grows large, and a single look back feels like something you earned.
• For the one doing the ignoring, it is heavier than it looks. You read on while tracking exactly how it is going, and that takes more attention than handling a whip.
• For a couple, this is the cheapest way to try out power play. Nothing to buy, no technique, no marks on the skin.

The edge is sharp, though. Hartgerink and colleagues found that prolonged exclusion turns into resignation: flatness, low mood, the sense of not being worth any attention. That is precisely what a short scene must not reach, and it is why the end time is fixed in advance rather than decided along the way.

What people get wrong about ignore play

“That is just the silent treatment.” The difference is sharper than it sounds. Going silent and withdrawing emotionally inside a relationship counts in the literature as a form of partner abuse. An ignore scene has a beginning, an end, and consent. The silent treatment has none of the three.

“Nothing happens, so it is mild.” The research says the opposite. There is nothing to fix your attention on, and that is exactly what makes it heavy.

“Ignoring just means paying no attention.” The word says something else, and that is exactly why it fits. Ignore comes from “not knowing”: nothing is being withheld, the other person’s presence is treated as if it were not a fact.

What I make of it

I am Victor, gigolo, more than twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Rules for behavior I like to agree on, and waiting is part of what I do.

The time gets misjudged, every time. Someone who asks for an hour is already somewhere she did not expect to be after ten minutes. So I keep it short and would rather build it up over several sessions than push through in one evening.

And the name does work. It is easier to ask for “ignore play” than to say “will you ignore me for an hour.” That is what a scene word does. It lifts the request out of a household argument and turns it into something with a name.

Where this fits

Curious how heavy something like this feels without having to plan a whole evening around it? A short ignore scene inside a broader evening is the usual setup. The page on the BDSM date lays out what such an evening is made of.

Sources

• The Ordinal Effects of Ostracism: A Meta-Analysis of 120 Cyberball Studies. Chris H. J. Hartgerink, Ilja van Beest, Jelte M. Wicherts & Kipling D. Williams, PLOS ONE 10(5), e0127002, 2015. Gives the scale of the meta-analysis (120 studies, 11,869 participants), the finding that the average effect of exclusion is large (d greater than |1.4|), and that it generalizes across the number of players, the duration of the exclusion, the number of balls, the type of needs scale, sex, age and country, and across intra- and interpersonal outcome measures.
• ignoratio. Charlton T. Lewis & Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, via the Perseus Digital Library. The standard dictionary of classical Latin. Gives ignoratio, -onis, feminine, derived from ignoro, with the meaning “want of knowledge or acquaintance, ignorance,” the note that the word is frequent in Cicero and rare elsewhere, and the examples ignoratio locorum, juris, veritatis and sui.

Related terms

An ignore scene rarely stands on its own. What surrounds it is about the same silence, held in place by different means.

• Humiliation. The wider field an ignore scene usually falls under.
• Corner time. The same silence, but with an assigned spot to stand in.
• Human furniture. The variant where someone is ignored and serves as an object.
• Service-oriented submission. What such a scene is often built around, so there is something to do.
• Boundary. Where the end time and the stop signal get set.
• Aftercare. The coming back afterward, which after this scene in particular takes more time than people expect.
• Speech ban. The mirror agreement: there you stay silent, here the other one does.