Sex for adults! It’s a time-honored sexy tradition. It appears in ancient fertility festivals, Victorian adult sex, and modern porn. Impact games have been around for a long time, and it’s fair to say they’re not going away anytime soon. But no one is born with a riding adult sex toy in their hands. Impact games can be fun if practiced safely, but they require prior knowledge and a lot of communication. So let’s go through the basics, including how to get started! Impact play is any type of consensual sensation play that includes whipping, hitting, adult sex, or any other type of aggression where one person hits the other for mutual pleasure and enjoyment. You can use your hands, a repurposed tool (such as a wooden spoon), or a toy designed for spanking. Most commonly, spankings are aimed at the adult sex. One reason is that the buttocks are a very safe area to spank because they are packed with a lot of fat and heal quickly, and also because it is a place where sexual contact generally occurs. Other common spanking areas include the thighs (as with the buttocks, there is a lot of protective fat here), the upper back (often used for whipping and spanking), and the upper arms.
Blows should not be delivered to the lower back (where the kidneys are located), abdomen (where other internal organs are located), throat, or neck. Some people enjoy hitting the soles of the feet (called bastinado after an ancient torture technique), breasts, genitals, face, etc. However, these are more advanced and can cause injury if performed improperly. In other words, they are generally outside the scope of this introduction. When you’re first confronted with the idea of adult sex and hookups, it may seem a little counterintuitive. Young children are told, “It’s not okay to hit your friends! It’s not uncommon for people to look at BDSM and think it’s abusive at worst, or a little uncomfortable at best. Even people who are interested in adult sex may feel uncomfortable about wanting to be spanked by someone.
Of course, impact play is consensual. If it’s not consensual, it’s not a game, and that’s the whole point. After all, impact play is about experimenting with sensations. That said, the reasons are as varied as the people who do it. Some are masochists who get pure pleasure from pain in some form and sadists who enjoy voluntarily inflicting pain. Some who enjoy power exchange understand that it is a tangible way of relinquishing control to the top, who can decide what sensations the bottom should receive. Some like the humiliation aspect. Some get satisfaction from sex from an adult. Some think butts are amazing. Some seek subspace, which is a kind of pain-induced endorphin rush, similar to the “runner’s high” often experienced by marathon runners. (Some people don’t want to reach subspace under any circumstances, which is entirely true.
