E-stim: a route to rapture

Videos of people being tortured with electrical stimulation are boring. Unlike most other BDSM treatments, you can’t see what’s happening. You can see someone responding to something, but the electricity itself – and thus the intensity of the treatment – is invisible. Usually, you can’t even see how the dominant is twiddling the knobs on the machine.

 

In contrast, real-life sessions including e-stim can be truly exciting. They are quite difficult for the domme handling the knobs and dials to judge, and I recall a session with Phoenix in which we couldn’t get the level right – it was either too little or too much, and she was rather frustrated with me. Generally, though, as I get more and more turned on, I need, and can take, more electricity. It is difficult for the domme to keep pace with that. And of course one’s capacity to cope with the current will vary from session to session.

 

Unless you request otherwise, the domme will start with the current at a low setting, and then gradually turn up the volume, asking if you can sense anything yet. If everything is working well – which is not always the case at first – you will start feeling a prickling sensation through the body part to which the electrodes are attached. At a very low level, you may feel the individual "prickles" of electricity, but that will soon change as your domme turns the knobs on the machine. The prickles will speed up to become a buzzing, and will become more intense – more than you think you can bear, perhaps. But try to embrace the intensity: soon, as you become more and more aroused, you will find that you can cope with more and more electricity. Eventually, the buzzing coalesces into waves of sensation passing through you, and you can delight in "riding the waves".

 

E-stim is probably one of the most flexible forms of BDSM. You don’t need much equipment, so you don’t have to be in a well-furnished studio to enjoy it. And it can be delivered to and across many different parts of the body, in a wide variety of waves, or random sequences. My favourite is a predictable long drawn-out wave which is (almost) impossible to bear at its peak, before the current diminishes to a comfortable level and then starts inexorably increasing once more. Remember to breathe!

 

Surprisingly, e-stim can hinder an orgasm: it can be difficult to climax if waves of electricity are passing through your cock, but not at a rhythm that will let you cum. There have been sessions in which the electricity has reached a high level of intensity, and I’ve been ordered to masturbate but then have to stop wanking so that I can concentrate on breathing and coping when the wave of electricity is at its peak. Or I have to let go of my cock because the sheer amount of electricity makes my hand judder uncontrollably.

 

One of the reasons I first contacted Lady Phoenix back in 2014 was because she listed “e-stim” as one of her skills. In fact, she was just starting out as a dominatrix, and that claim perhaps to some extent expressed an ambition on her part, but we experimented, and the very first session with her entailed incredible e-stim through my body, such that I’ve never been able to repeat the experience. I don’t know what she did (I recall that it involved a buttplug – and we soon learnt that the electricity won’t flow if there’s a condom placed over the buttplug!), but once we got things working, the electricity spread through my entire abdomen, and came in slow waves reaching an intensity that I could barely handle. I was so focused on coping with the sensations that there was no space in my mind, in my body, for anything else. I had arrived at what Roy Baumeister calls “the destruction of the self”, and the BDSM community knows as “subspace”. 

I hope that this description lets you grasp, even if you can't see, the potential of e-stim: used well, it can take you out of yourself into a different consciousness. And perhaps that’s why e-stim videos are so unsatisfactory: I’m not sure that it’s possible to capture such internal rapture on film.