Limit

What is a limit?

A limit is an outer edge agreed in advance in a BDSM scene: one named act, together with what may happen to it. A limit is hard when nothing may happen, and soft when something may happen under a stated condition. Limits are set down before any play, and they hold until the two people revise them together.

How a limit works

A limit only works once it carries a condition. A subject on its own is not one.

“Hitting” is not a limit. “Hitting with an open hand on my backside, yes; with an object, no; in my face, never” is three of them. The same subject is hard for one person and soft for another. The difference sits in the sentence around it. Write down “tying me up, yes, as long as I can see my hands” and you give permission and a rule for carrying it out in the same breath.

Dulcinea Pitagora sums up what marks a BDSM exchange and calls consensuality the agreement both to take part and to honor each other’s respective limits. In her description those are not two things but one. A limit you write down and then ignore is not half an agreement. It is none.

Where the word limit comes from

From a path along a field, and it is older than the word boundary.

According to the Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands, the oldest Middle Dutch record of limite is one from 1273, in the sense of a plot boundary. The word was borrowed from French limite, and that in turn from Latin līmes, genitive līmitis: a boundary path, a boundary line. In Middle Dutch it referred only to the natural edges of pieces of land.

Then something happened that explains why Dutch ended up with two words. That geographical sense grew dated and was taken over in early modern Dutch by the Low German loanword grens. What limite kept was the figurative sense that arose in the same period: restriction, upper edge.

That charge is still there. A speed limit, a credit limit: each time a maximum that someone has set. That is why the word fits an agreement made act by act, because a condition comes with it.

What do you get out of setting limits?

What you get is that nothing has to be improvised along the way.

For most people the pull of the play sits in not knowing what is coming, and that only works once it is settled what will never come.

• Whoever is on the receiving end does not have to think along, because the rules for carrying it out sit in the agreement rather than in their head.
• Whoever is in charge can improvise inside a fenced-off stretch, and that is easier than improvising in the open field.
• Couples filling it in together usually find that the soft setting is the most interesting box: that is where it says what can happen once something is arranged around it.

Pitagora describes how practitioners treat a successful scene as one in which limits are tried out: deliberately seeking out the agreed frame, coming close to the edge without crossing it. That goes wrong the moment two people read “coming close” differently.

How people set and adjust their limits

At three moments, and the third is the one most often forgotten.

1. Before. Go through it act by act, with the setting and the condition against each line.
2. During. Briefly check whether the agreement still matches what the body is doing, usually with a check-in.
3. After. In the talk afterward, work out what needs adjusting for next time.

That three-part pattern is not something the scene owns alone. Gunning and colleagues studied in Sexuality & Culture how couples living with a chronic illness or a disability set up their sexual communication, and saw that they use the BDSM model for it: talking about boundaries before, during and after intimacy, and letting the agreements move with what is possible that day. Their conclusion is short: agreements between people shift and change, and so they ask for revision and ongoing talk.

Without illness or disability it goes slower. A limit that has not been revisited for half a year describes someone you were half a year ago.

Limit, boundary or safeword

“Limit and boundary are the same word.” In practice almost, in use no. Boundary is the broad word for where a person stops, and it belongs to a human being. Limit is the list word: it belongs to one act and carries a setting.

“A limit is a safeword for the advanced.” No, and the two complete each other. A limit works beforehand and is an agreement; a safeword works during and is an emergency brake. Pitagora points out that a safeword can signal a crossed boundary as well as the wish to stop for any reason at all. If a scene keeps going after the safeword is used, then by that same account it is no longer play but violence.

“Soft means you can still talk your way past it during the scene.” That is the costliest mistake. Soft means a condition was agreed in advance. Stretch it on the spot and it becomes a consent violation.

What I notice myself

I am Victor, gigolo, in the BDSM world since 1990 and trained as a psychotherapist. What I most often miss on a filled-in list is the little word “provided”.

There is a “maybe” against an act, and that is where it stops. But maybe is not a setting. It is a question still waiting for an answer. These days I ask about it as a matter of course: under which condition does this turn into a yes. Often it turns out to be one thing. In daylight, say, or with clothes on.

The second thing: almost no one names a time limit, even though in the English jargon it is simply one of the types. How long may this last, and when does it stop no matter what. That is the agreement most often missed afterward, right when an evening runs better than expected.

How to lay down your limits

• Write the condition that makes it soft behind every soft limit, because without that condition it is not an agreement but a feeling.
• Say per act what may happen instead of only what may not; the room that is left is where the evening plays out.
• Agree on a time limit, even if it sounds odd to you, and say what happens at that hour.
• Agree on how you check limits during the session, with a check-in or a color word, and who is responsible for it.
• Treat every attempt to stretch a soft limit on the spot as a stop, and not as a negotiation you are still inside.

More on limits

On this site, boundary lays out the broad idea, kinklist shows the form on which you fill in a limit per act, and hard limit gives the four English types.

Off this site, Pitagora’s overview article is free to read; it explains why spoken consent became the norm in BDSM and where the line with coercion runs. How the same negotiating works when a body differs from week to week is in the study by Gunning and colleagues.

Where this fits on this site

If you would rather write out your limits with someone who works with them daily, that is part of the pre-talk with me. The preparation covers what we go through beforehand, and the BDSM date covers what does and does not happen after that.

Sources

• limiet. M. Philippa, F. Debrabandere, A. Quak, T. Schoonheim & N. van der Sijs, Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (2003-2009), consulted via the Etymologiebank. Gives the oldest Middle Dutch record of limite ‘plot boundary’ from 1273, the borrowing via French limite from Latin līmes, genitive līmitis, ‘boundary path, boundary line’, the fact that the word first appeared only in the plural and referred solely to the natural edges of pieces of land, that this sense grew dated and was taken over in early modern Dutch by the Low German loanword grens, that limite took on the figurative sense ‘restriction, upper edge’ in that same period, and that the singular appears only from the seventeenth century.
• A Preliminary Investigation into Intersections of Sexual Communication in Bondage, Domination, Sadomasochism and Disability. Jacqueline N. Gunning, Valerie Rubinsky, Ashley Aragón, Monica Roldán, Taylor McMahon & Angela Cooke-Jackson, Sexuality & Culture 27(4), 1163-1179, 2023 (DOI 10.1007/s12119-022-10058-8, open access). Full text read via Europe PMC. Provides that communication in these encounters stresses the importance of discussing boundaries before, during and after intimacy and adjusting needs accordingly, the first of the four recommendations, thinking through needs and boundaries amid changing symptoms, and the conclusion that agreements between people shift and change and therefore call for revision of boundaries and ongoing communication.
• Consent vs. Coercion: BDSM Interactions Highlight a Fine but Immutable Line. Dulcinea Pitagora, The New School Psychology Bulletin 10(1), 27-36, 2013 (open access). Full pdf read. Provides the description of consensuality as the agreement to take part in a BDSM exchange and to honor each other’s respective limits within it, the finding that practitioners treat a successful scene as one in which limits are tried out. The deliberate seeking-out of the agreed frame, coming close to boundaries without crossing them, and that a safeword can signal both a crossed boundary and a plain wish to stop, where carrying on past the safeword makes the act non-consensual.
• Limits (BDSM). English Wikipedia. Used here only for the English division into four types of limits that the fact table refers to; the entry has carried a banner asking for more citations since August 2013, and is not used here for a factual claim.

Related terms

• Boundary. The broad word that limit is the list variant of.
• Kinklist. The form on which you fill in a setting per act.
• Dom list. The same exercise from the giving side, with its own limits.
• Hard limit. The English division into types, with the must and time variant added.
• Soft limit. The soft setting, and what “soft” means outside the scene.
• Check-in. The tool that tells you during the session that a limit has shifted.
• Consent violation. The name for what happens the moment an agreed limit is passed anyway.
• Contract. Where limits end up once an agreement lasts longer than one evening.
• Squick. Why “that turns my stomach” is not yet a limit.