Wasknijpers

What are wasknijpers?

Wasknijpers (English: clothespins) are the ordinary pegs from the washing line, used in BDSM as the cheapest kind of clamp on nipples, folds of skin, labia, or scrotum. They are not adjustable, so you dose with the spot and the number. How to build that up and how long they may stay on is on clothespins.

Why the spring is the whole spec

Because there is nothing else to adjust.

A peg has no screw, no ring, and no settings, so what you feel depends entirely on the spring between the two legs. That was exactly what manufacturers advertised. An advertisement from the Friese Wasknijper-Industrie in the Provinciale Drentsche en Asser courant of 22 March 1948 offered wholesalers “First-class BEECHWOOD CLOTHESPINS with a very strong STAINLESS steel spring.” The wood is the handle; the spring is the product.

From that follows the only real choice. Beechwood pegs with an old, soft spring are mild; tight plastic pegs from the household shop clamp considerably harder. If you want gentler, you do not buy a different size but a different brand, or you look for a spot with more skin.

What else you should know about wood is that it is porous. A wooden peg cannot really be cleaned, so with me wooden pegs go after one person and the plastic ones stay for anything that has to be rinsable.

The object itself is older in the Netherlands than the newspapers writing about it. The oldest of 1,280 newspaper occurrences of wasknijper is in the Rotterdamsch nieuwsblad of 27 December 1928, in the Rotterdam police’s list of found objects. Among the keys, glasses, and gloves stands “Clothespin,” and two lines further down in that same list, a “whip.”

The same object in rehabilitation

A clothespin is also a measuring instrument, and that is no joke.

In research on arm prostheses there is the Refined Clothespin Relocation Test: someone moves three clothespins from a horizontal surface to three positions on a vertical pole, low, middle, and high, and researchers measure the time and the deviating movements. There is no scoring; the outcome is compared with that of people without a prosthesis. The same property that makes the test useful makes the peg useful in a playroom: there is exactly one way to open it, and that takes a measured grip.

Where this fits on my site

Of everything I bring, this is the only thing you already have at home. A handful of pegs from the kitchen drawer answers the question of whether pressure pain is for you, before you order anything. How an evening like that is built up is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Review and critique of current testing protocols for upper-limb prostheses. A call for standardization amidst rapid technological advancements. Siegel, Battraw, Winslow, James, Joiner & Schofield, Frontiers in Robotics and AI 10, 1292632, 2023 (PMID 38035123, DOI 10.3389/frobt.2023.1292632; full text read via PMC10684749). Provides the description of the Refined Clothespin Relocation Test: the participant moves three clothespins from a horizontal surface to three heights on a vertical pole, with the time and the compensating movements measured, without conventional scoring and with a comparison against participants without a prosthesis. The authors note that the test has existed since 2016 but that no published reliability study of it exists.
• Advertisement of the Friese Wasknijper-Industrie. Provinciale Drentsche en Asser courant, 22 March 1948. Newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, read word for word from the OCR. Provides the offer to wholesalers of “First-class BEECHWOOD CLOTHESPINS with a very strong STAINLESS steel spring,” which shows that the spring and not the wood was the selling point.
• Gevonden voorwerpen. Rotterdamsch nieuwsblad, 27 December 1928. Newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, read word for word from the OCR; all 1,280 occurrences of wasknijper were retrieved and sorted by date, and this is the oldest. Provides the entry “Clothespin” in the list of objects handed in at the Rotterdam police stations in the week of 14 to 20 December 1928, among keys, purses, glasses, and gloves, with a “whip” two lines further down in that same list. A second early occurrence, De Telegraaf of 27 November 1938, describes a lady’s handbag with “a clothespin, covered in leather” as its clasp.

Related terms

Wasknijpers are the cheapest version of clamps, and clothespins carries the practice, the dosing, and the time limit.

• Clothespins. The same object as a toy, with building up in numbers and the second wave of pain when taking them off.
• Clamps. The overarching category, with the four model families side by side.
• Zipper. A row of these pegs on a string, with the peak at the moment you pull it loose.
• Nipple clamps. The tool this is the household stand-in for.
• Alligator clamp. The sharpest clamp from the same family, with the time rule that belongs to it.
• Breast torture. The play in which clothespins count as the mild end of the range.