Impact play

What is impact play?

Impact play is the umbrella term for any BDSM act in which someone is struck on purpose and with consent, with a bare hand or with an object. It covers spanking, caning, flogging and whipping. What those things share is the blow, not a particular tool.

What impact play looks like in practice

Impact play almost never starts in a dungeon. It starts with a hand, during sex, without anyone giving it a name.

Take the most common form: a couple agrees that one lays the other over the knee. First ten minutes with the bare hand, from soft to firm, with pauses in which the skin warms up and reddens. Only after that might a paddle come into it. The whole scene plays out in one place, the buttocks, and rarely lasts longer than half an hour.

Set against that is the form that looks more impressive from the outside and works very differently anatomically: a flogger on the upper back, standing or over a spanking bench. Wider tails, more mass, a blow that lands deeper and stays less in the skin. Anyone who knows flogging from a play party knows impact play from this side.

The outcome of both forms is often visible. Drouin and colleagues asked 513 people what marks they were left with from BDSM and published it in Sexual Medicine: bruises are by far the most common, both deliberately made (36.7 percent) and accidental (56.5 percent), and the spots named most often are buttocks, arms, back and legs.

How impact play works

A blow does two things at once: it stimulates the skin and it fires up the stress system. That second part is where the effect comes from.

Wuyts and colleagues tested 35 Flemish BDSM couples during a real scene and compared them with 27 people in an ordinary conversation. In The Journal of Sexual Medicine they report that both cortisol and endocannabinoids rose in the receiving partner. In the giving partner the endocannabinoids rose only when power play was involved. Put differently, for the one taking the blows the pleasure sits in the stimulus, for the one dealing them in the control.

In their later systematic review in the same journal, Wuyts and Morrens sum up the whole literature and add something that explains why people get further than they thought: pain thresholds are higher in submissive participants than in others, and during a scene they can rise further still.

That shifting measuring stick is exactly the tricky part. What feels “manageable” halfway through a scene is not the same as what the tissue underneath can take.

And then the distinction every experienced player names first: dull against sharp. A wide, heavy object spreads the force over a large area and lands deep, like a thud. A narrow, light object concentrates the same force into a few square centimeters of skin and bites. On this site that difference is worked out in the piece on sharp and dull pain.

Why people do impact play

What people are after is almost never the pain. It’s the state you land in when the body claims all the attention and the head has nothing left to do for a moment.

That state has been measured. Ambler and colleagues assigned fourteen experienced players to the giving or the receiving role by dice roll and published in Psychology of Consciousness what happened. The one giving entered a state resembling flow. The one receiving showed the pattern that goes with transient hypofrontality: the thinking front of the brain grows quieter. In both roles psychological stress and negative mood dropped, and sexual arousal rose.

It’s also far more common than the image suggests. Herbenick and colleagues surveyed 2,021 American adults in a representative sample and published in PLOS ONE that at least 30 percent had ever hit or been hit during sex. For hitting and whipping they found no statistical difference between men and women.

• For the one receiving, the payoff is that thinking stops. Not as a figure of speech, but as a measurable effect on the frontal cortex.
• For the one giving, the payoff sits in dosing and attention: you read a body, and you get an immediate answer to every decision.
• For a couple, the gain is usually that a language emerges for something that used to be only fantasy, with a beginning and an end that are both agreed.

Sagarin and colleagues saw, in that same study, connection increase in participants who said afterward the scene had gone well, but in those for whom it had gone badly it went every which way: some of them felt further apart. Impact play amplifies what is already there. It fixes nothing.

How people do impact play

Almost everyone who does it seriously works in the same order: agree, warm up, build up, wind down, talk afterward.

The warm-up is the part beginners skip and experienced players let run longest. Ten to fifteen minutes light and rhythmic, usually with the hand, so the blood flow gets going and the skin grows more supple. Then comes the build-up, and that is about pace and repetition more than about force.

The variations within impact play sit mostly in the tool and the spot. Roughly four, and they rise in margin for going wrong:

1. The bare hand. The only way to feel exactly what you’re doing, because the blow reaches you too.
2. Wide and heavy. Paddle, flogger, belt. Dull blow, generous margin, plenty of noise.
3. Narrow and stiff. Cane, birch rod, thin switch. Sharp pain, welts, and far less room for a miss.
4. Single tails. Bullwhip, cat o’ nine tails. Speed instead of mass, and the only category you really have to practice on something other than a person.

What separates the careful execution from the sloppy one is not in the tool. It’s in whether you agreed beforehand which marks are welcome. In Drouin’s study 58.8 percent of participants said they allowed bruises in advance, while almost as many wanted to avoid them. So that is not a detail you sort out along the way.

Misunderstandings about impact play

“Impact play is just hitting someone.” The distinction sits in consent, build-up and aftercare, and those three are not cosmetic. Leave them out and you’re not left with a milder version but with something else.

“If there’s no bruise, nothing happened.” The medical literature shows the opposite. Echterdiek and colleagues describe in BMJ Case Reports how very intense striking of the buttocks and thighs, in someone bound tightly, can cause acute kidney failure through a combination of abdominal pressure and blunt injury. The warning sign is not the skin but the urine, and recovery can take weeks. That is exactly why numbers, force and duration ask for experience here.

“Experienced people don’t get injured.” Sprott and colleagues surveyed 1,398 kink-active people and found that 13.5 percent had ever sustained a kink-related injury. More worrying was what happened next: 58.3 percent told their GP or specialist nothing about their kink, and 19.0 percent postponed or avoided care out of fear of judgment.

“Harder is more intense.” The same force built up over a quarter of an hour reaches further than the same force straight away. That follows directly from the pain thresholds that rise during a scene: you build the space you play in yourself as you go.

What I see myself

Whipping is what I’ve spent the longest with. I have a whole range of tools, sharp and dull, and after twenty-five years it isn’t the force that still interests me but the rhythm.

“Hard” turns out, when you ask, almost always to mean “deep.” Those are two different dials. Someone who builds up over twenty minutes reaches a place where that same person, with that same blow in the first minute, would have asked to stop.

And one thing I hear no one say: the hardest skill in impact play is not hitting. It’s stopping at the moment it’s still going well, instead of at the moment it’s no longer going well. That difference decides how someone thinks about it the next day.

What you can do yourself

• Warm up for at least ten minutes with the bare hand before a tool comes into it, even if you’re both impatient.
• Stay on the fleshy part: buttocks and upper thighs. What lies around that is not grey area but simply no: the lower back above the buttocks sits right over the kidneys, and the tailbone, the hip bones and the spine have no padding at all.
• Agree beforehand which marks are welcome. Bruises are the most common outcome of impact play, and whether they’re allowed is a question for beforehand and not afterward.
• Build up in pace, not in force. More taps at the same level take someone further than hitting faster and harder.
• See a doctor if there’s blood in the urine after a heavy session, if someone passes far less water than usual, or with flank pain that persists. Say what happened, then; half of kink-active people don’t, and a doctor who doesn’t know looks in the wrong direction.
• Plan the wind-down as deliberately as the build-up. Slowly less, then stop, then aftercare. And the next day, one more check on how it is.

Read more about impact play

On this site the parts of this family are each worked out separately: spanking for the hand version, caning for the sharpest tool, and the article on the art of whipping for how a whipping session is built up. Anyone who wants to know why some people pay for this explicitly finds it in why I hire a BDSM gigolo to feel pain.

Outside this site, the systematic review by Wuyts and Morrens is the best overview of what is biologically known, and the study by Drouin and colleagues is free to read and the only one that systematically maps which marks people are left with and which they allow in advance.

Where this fits on my site

Whipping, spanking and pain play in soft, medium and hard are on my list of options, and I have the tools for it. If you want to try impact play without having to work out how to build up or what to stay away from, the page on the BDSM date sets out how such an evening is prepared.

Sources

• The Biology of BDSM: A Systematic Review. Elise Wuyts & Manuel Morrens, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 19(1), 144–157, 2022. Systematic review of ten studies; supplies the finding that pain thresholds are higher in submissive participants and can rise further during a BDSM interaction, and that the measured pleasure in the giving role ties more to power play than to pain play.
• Between Pleasure and Pain: A Pilot Study on the Biological Mechanisms Associated With BDSM Interactions in Dominants and Submissives. Wuyts, De Neef, Coppens, Fransen, Schellens, Van Der Pol & Morrens, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 17(4), 784–792, 2020. Thirty-five Flemish BDSM couples measured during a real scene, with 27 control participants; supplies the rise of cortisol and endocannabinoids in the receiving role and the rise in the giving role only with power play.
• Severe acute kidney injury due to violent sadomasochistic play. Echterdiek, Kitterer, Schwenger & Latus, BMJ Case Reports 2018, bcr-2018-224813. Supplies the finding that very intense striking of the buttocks and thighs, in someone bound tightly, can cause acute kidney failure without prior kidney disease, and that recovery of kidney values can take weeks.
• An exploration of marks/injuries related to BDSM sexual experiences. Michelle Drouin, Ellis Hernandez, Anthony Machette, Justin R. Garcia & Ryan L. Boyd, Sexual Medicine 11(3), qfad020, 2023. Study of 513 participants; supplies that bruises are the most common marks (36.7 percent deliberately made, 56.5 percent accidental), that 58.8 percent allow them in advance, and that buttocks, arms, back and legs are the spots named most often.
• Rates of Injury and Healthcare Utilization for Kink-Identified Patients. Richard A. Sprott, Anna Randall, Kevin Smith & Lauren Woo, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 18(10), 1721–1734, 2021. Survey of 1,398 kink-active people; supplies the figures 13.5 percent ever a kink-related injury, 58.3 percent no openness with their somatic care provider and 19.0 percent postponed or avoided care.
• Consensual BDSM Facilitates Role-Specific Altered States of Consciousness: A Preliminary Study. Ambler, Lee, Klement, Loewald, Comber, Hanson, Cutler, Cutler & Sagarin, Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 4(1), 75–91, 2017. Fourteen experienced players, randomly assigned to the giving or receiving role; supplies flow in the giving role, transient hypofrontality in the receiving one, and the drop in psychological stress and negative mood in both.
• Sexual diversity in the United States: Results from a nationally representative probability sample of adult women and men. Herbenick, Bowling, Fu, Dodge, Guerra-Reyes & Sanders, PLOS ONE 12(7), e0181198, 2017. Representative sample of 2,021 American adults; supplies that at least 30 percent had ever experienced hitting during sex and that no statistical difference between men and women was found for hitting and whipping.
• Impact play. Wikipedia. Supplies the definition of impact play as a practice in which one person strikes another repeatedly for the enjoyment of one or both, and the split between erotic spanking with a rigid object and erotic flagellation with a flexible one.

Related terms

• Sensation play. The neighboring category where the stimulus counts instead of the blow.

• Spanking. The most practiced form of impact play, where almost everyone begins, with the origin of the word.

• Caning. The other extreme of the same family: narrow, stiff and sharp.

• Flogger. The tool reached for most often, and what the tails do with the blow.

• Ballbusting. Impact play on the spot with the smallest margin of all.

• Bruising. The bruise as a wanted outcome, and how long it stays.

• Corporal punishment. The same act with a punishing aim instead of sensation as the reason.

• Aftercare. What should happen after a scene of impact play, and why that is no side issue.

• Cat o’ nine tails. The heaviest rope tool from this family, with or without knots.

• Marking. The visible outcome of impact play as its own subject, and what you agree about it beforehand.

• Warm-up. The first phase of every session, and why those ten minutes shape the rest of the evening.

• Over the knee. The most used position within this family, and what sits under the skin.

• Paddle. The flat striking tool from the row above, with its American punishment history.

• Plak. The same object in Dutch, with a school past that carries through into the language.

• Slapper. The loose-leather variant, built on noise instead of force.

• Predicament bondage. The setup impact play often comes on top of once it’s standing.

• Flyswatter. The lightest tool from this family, and the only one you can buy at the supermarket.

• Sadomasochism. The umbrella over giving and receiving, of which impact play is the best-known form.

• Tawse. The Scottish school object that only disappeared in 1987, landing wide and dull.

• Whip. The umbrella term for the tools with strands, with the four main kinds and the word’s history.

• Pain play. The wider category impact play is the largest branch of.

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