Whip Basics

By Mistress Michelle Peters

When you come right down to it, a whip can be a downright dangerous thing. They are made to do primarily one thing: take the energy of a swing and magnify it into the tip, so that the tip will exceed the sound barrier and crack. (Good ones are, anyway.) To compare, floggers probably reach around 70 miles an hour. Maybe 90 miles an hour with a particularly hard swing. A single-tail, on the other hand, can reach seven hundred miles an hour without very much effort at all. A louder crack can go anywhere from seven to nine hundred miles an hour and up. That's a lot of energy to be right there in your hand.

Whips can cut. Cowboy artists peel bananas slice by slice. A common practice tactic is to cut cards. You can cut your bottom quite easily if you try. When a whip cracks, that harmless-looking poofy little piece of nylon is capable of cutting through anything up to and including soft tin. Human flesh is rather low down on the list. Cutting play partners accidentally can lead to emergency room visits and increased difficulty in finding new play partners.

Don't be afraid of the whip. Do respect the whip. If you're afraid of the whip, you'll need to conquer that fear in order to go anywhere as a whip handler. If you don't respect the whip, you'll learn it quickly enough after getting a few notches on your ears and cuts on your arms.

Go slow. You don't need to crack the whip in order to hit someone with it. You can have a very satisfying scene with someone without the whip ever even coming close to the sound barrier. Cracking a whip and hitting someone with it are two completely separate things. It'll still hurt plenty.

Be conservative. A newly minted whip user should make Newt Gingrich look like a liberal. If you have any qualms at all about your skill, have your bottom wear a leather jacket, leather pants (jeans make an acceptable second choice) and a full-face motorcycle helmet with a face shield. You should wear the same. A hat with a brim combined with safety goggles makes an acceptable second choice.

Don't overpower the whip. Whips do what you tell them to do. If you throw the whip particularly hard, you are telling the whip to keep on going. If you don't wheel around with it, the whip has no choice but to wrap around you and eventually collide with you or something else in its path. Start with a light, slow touch, and you can easily pick up the speed and power when your form is good.

Never throw a single tail of any kind at someone or something you are not looking at. It sounds obvious, but I see it. If you have to look away, stop the whip or aim it into the ground.

In practice sessions, go slow enough so that you can see where the whip is going. When you throw it, make the whip follow a straight line, so that you can tell where the whip is going to land. You'll learn to correct your errors. At first, you'll probably overcorrect, and that's fine. If you understand how to correct, you'll learn the proper degree of correcting as time goes on. Analyze your errors. You'll get it quicker than you might think.

In order to get your accuracy down, you'll need a target to hit. Your first target (in fact, your first hundred or so) should be inanimate objects. (Although tempting, sleeping submissives are not considered inanimate objects. This is considered cheating.) Freshly laundered towels make an excellent choice: you can usually find some way of hanging them to the height you want, representing someone's back, behind, or wherever you plan on hitting. This also gives those submissives something to do running back and forth to the laundry machine to fetch you your towels. Another equally acceptable choice is a fuzzy stuffed animal. Both of these will get lines on them where you hit them, so you have a visual record of where you hit. And there's something really therapeutic about bullwhipping your kid's stuffed Barney. You can also try to flip a light switch on and off. While the glee of dancing around in the dark when you do it is fun, this technique will cause you to mark up your wall with black streaks, and your housemates may object.

To get up to the higher levels, you'll need to learn exactly where the whip is cracking, and you should be able to make the whip crack wherever you want it to crack. This can be easily done with chalk dust or water. Wet the popper down or roll it in the chalk dust. When the whip cracks, the water or chalk will make a visible puff. This can provide a few oohs and ahhs.

Wraps can be fun in play, but they are not for the novice. You can play with wraps when you can make the whip crack wherever you want it to. In a nutshell, wrapping involves cracking the whip as close to the part of the bottom you wish to wrap as you feel comfortable: once the whip's energy is expended in the crack, it will wrap harmlessly around the bottom's arm, leg, or whatever you've chosen to be in the path of the whip. The better you get, the closer you can come to the bottom. However, overestimating one's ability to wrap can result in slicing your bottom's leg (or other part) open. Wraps should be done only on a bottom's arms, legs, or waist. Wrapping a neck is dangerous, since most of the bottoms out there prefer to keep the cables, tubes and vessels in it in good repair.

'Bad' wrapping is the same as a flogger--when the whip curves around the bottom and you hit an area you might not have wanted to hit. Keep the length of your whip in mind. As you get better, you can get a guesstimate of where the whip is going to land--but you can never be sure.

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