“What are your limits?” is one of the first questions you’ll hear if you’re new to kinky dating or the BDSM scene—for good reason. Limits are a fundamental part of BDSM and are more nuanced than they may seem. In this post, I’ll explain what they are and how to set them, with personal stories that show how complicated they can be in practice.
Hard Limits and Soft Limits
Limits are BDSM boundaries that your partner needs to be aware of during a scene, and they’re often categorized by severity level:
- A hard limit is an explicit boundary that shouldn’t be crossed.
- A soft limit is something you’re not dying to try but might be OK in some contexts (proceed with caution):
- Something you’re curious about. I set mindfucks as a soft limit during negotiation with a domme. In the scene, she said she was cutting me, but used a Wartenberg wheel, which didn’t even scratch me. In the end, the midfuck wasn’t really my jam, but I was glad to have explored this type of edgier play. These types of soft limits can be clues about how to create a moment of erotic astonishment.
- Something you don’t like, or don’t like in large doses. Soft limits like these might be relevant during a disciplinarian-style scene. For example, lower-thigh spanking, which many spankos dislike, is a classic “mean” choice for reward and punishment roleplay.
- Something you’re apathetic about. This could include things you don’t have experience with or things you do more for your partner’s enjoyment than your own. For instance, a sub might prefer a dom to use their hands instead of paddles for spanking, but the implements might still be acceptable if the sub knows the dom loves to use them.
Soft limits are also where intentional limit-pushing tends to occur. This is common with bottoms who like to see how much they can handle. Pushing limits could be as simple as asking your partner to spank you a little harder next time. But it can also refer to risky play—such as slapping, punching, knife play, or CNC—and should be limited to partners who trust each other and themselves deeply. In either case, it’s always a good idea to be comfortable using both a “slow down” safeword (like “yellow”) and a “stop everything” safeword (like “red” or simply “stop”).
How to Set Your Limits
Although BDSM checklists are fun for bonding with your partner or learning a bit about yourself, identifying 20 extreme kinks you never plan to do probably won’t come in handy in a scene. Do we need to strictly exclude puffy coats, cake crushing, and thermonuclear sensation play in your typical bedroom scene? Probably not.
Lists of specific interests and limits are particularly backwards for beginners, who can’t rule out what they’ve never heard of. Nobody can name needles as a hard limit if the idea of needles has never crossed their mind. Instead, describe the scene you’re imagining and ask questions about desired feelings, sensations, and other turn-ons. Make it hot. Someone who can’t name a single implement can still tell you they want to feel powerful, controlled, or cherished. (For more on this, see our 6 questions to ask before and after a BDSM scene.)
When discussing limits, consider the following:
- Goal feelings: Are there feelings or triggers that are off-limits that conflict with your desires? For example, if you like to be embarrassed or degraded, you might still want to set a limit to avoid dehumanizing language.
- Sensations: Instead of a catalog of tools, think about sensations, materials, and where you want and don’t want to feel them. Even if you love both stingy and thuddy feelings, you might not like them between your toes.
- Turn-offs: Make it clear when something just doesn’t do it for you. For instance, honorifics like Daddy and Mommy are a huge turn-on for some people but make others cringe.
- Physical and emotional context: Always remember to bring up any physical or mental changes from last time, whether it’s a weak knee or feeling sensitive about something that might come up in dirty talk.
Your limits may also change over time or shift based on the scenario, your state of mind, or new experiences. There’s an old joke that goes, “What’s the difference between a limit and a kink? About three months.” It’s much more important for your partner to understand your limits here and now in the context of the scenes you intend to do.
Pushing Your Limits: How to Decide
If you’re considering pushing a soft limit, these questions can help you decide whether it’s worth it:
- Whose interest is it? There’s nothing wrong with doing something to please your partner now and then, but some caution is warranted. Ask yourself if you’re doing this because you genuinely want to explore it or to grudgingly please a partner.
- Do you want the fantasy or the reality? Plenty of things are scorching hot to imagine but less so in reality. Many newbies fantasize about rope suspension, for example, thinking it’s cozy and comfortable, while the reality involves managing the pain of ropes that are digging into your body. Practice out of scene in a controlled environment first.
- Can you try a less intense version first? When pushing limits, take small, incremental steps. If you’re adding new kinds of impact, don’t jump straight from a soft doeskin flogger to chainmail whips. Try new or more intense activities briefly, or out of scene, before you add them to your repertoire.
- Can you stop while it’s still good, and decide tomorrow whether to continue? BDSM educator Jay Wiseman’s advice for a first session works for any experiment: End with both people feeling slightly frustrated that they didn’t go further. Then, the next day, away from the fog of arousal, decide together whether to repeat it, take it further, or drop it.
Although it’s always fine to call “yellow” or negotiate less of an activity during a scene, think twice about negotiating higher stakes in the heat of the moment—your future self might not appreciate your snap decision.
Doms Have Limits, Too
Less experienced doms might tell you they don’t have limits or haven’t put much thought into it. Part of that could be ignorance or posturing, and part of it is what one commenter on r/BDSMcommunity called the steering-wheel problem: The dom drives the scene, so if they hate something, they just never drive there.
But there are many situations where doms’ limits need to be on the table as well. Early on, Mimsy wanted dirtier dirty talk than I was comfortable delivering. I wasn’t willing to say misogynistic things I don’t believe, so we worked out a way to use the language that felt true to me and still worked for her.
Limits on specific acts aren’t the only kind that matter; how a partner behaves in a dynamic can cross them too. I once had a partly long-distance discipline dynamic, where a brat’s constant rejection of my directives became dead ends for play and a limit for me. We agreed that egregious bratting would be met with a “required” verbal scolding over the phone, which we both enjoyed.
Intense Play vs. Violation: How to Tell the Difference
Early in my kinky exploration, I became friends with a top-leaning switch we’ll call Hannah, who occasionally topped me with elaborate physically and mentally punishing scenes. The friendship was explicitly platonic. One evening, after dinner and far too many drinks with Hannah, we went back to her place to play. I said up front that I was dating other women and didn’t want marks.
The scene included a great deal of impact play, hair pulling, and threats, sending me into a state of subspace that exacerbated my drunkenness and caused an overwhelming feeling of floating bliss and vertigo. The finale included a humiliating safeword mechanic: Hannah wouldn’t end it until I said, “I will suck your dick, mistress.” It took some doing, but she got it out of me. Then she kissed me, and after some awkward moments, invited me to dominate her in bed. The sex was fine, but the aftermath was uncomfortable, and in the shower the next morning, I saw that I was more severely bruised across my chest and arms than I had been from any of our previous scenes. It took me several weeks to realize that Hannah had scripted the night as the intense start of a romance. She apologized for pushing boundaries afterward, but the friendship fizzled, and I avoided BDSM for over a year largely as a result of this encounter.
So which parts of that night were violations?
- The marks: Yes. I’d said up front I didn’t want them.
- The alcohol: It’s complicated. Nobody forced a fancy cocktail into anyone’s hands, but a top should measure both partners’ sobriety when deciding how far to take the scene.
- The “forced” phrase: Not at all. Elaborate verbal safewords, confessions, and begging mechanics are common in interrogation-style play. A plain “red” would have ended the scene immediately, and we both knew it. The element was extreme, theatrical, and completely within the limits of our dynamic.
- The sex: No, but it’s complicated. I didn’t feel violated by the sex per se, but alcohol and subspace to the point of vertigo wasn’t the best moment to take the relationship to the next level. She shouldn’t have offered, and I should have declined.
When a top crosses a hard limit, it’s a consent violation, whether or not they meant to. But a violation isn’t the same as an extreme scene. A scene can be painful, humiliating, or theatrical and stay entirely within agreed-upon limits.
But even when both partners negotiate in good faith, limits can only cover what’s anticipated.
When Limits Aren’t Enough
The strangest night of my early days in the scene involved plenty of negotiation. It just didn’t include everyone in the room.
I’d met my date, a woman we’ll call Sera, the day before. We talked through kinks and limits in depth, and by the time we arrived at an infamous Bushwick sex party, she’d already smacked me into outer space, which was great. Then we had a couple of drinks, and a man who lived in the house passed around shots laced with “party favors.” I wasn’t exactly ignorant of this, but the expectation was a warm, fuzzy, horny buzz. I got more than I bargained for. After a short threesome with the guy who handed out the shots and a little one-on-one time, I noticed that Sera had passed out. A minute or two later, so did I.
Neither of us were out for long, but my memory had dissolved into fragments—a basement, a shag carpet. At least an hour was simply gone. It took me 14 years to realize this was a blackout. I have a vague memory of the man awkwardly starting to apologize, but I was too confused to understand what I was hearing.
So which parts of that night were violations?
- The party favors: It’s complicated. Sera and I knew the shots came with something extra, and we expected a buzz. But mixing alcohol with what was likely GHB is a recipe for blackouts, and the man handing them out knew far more than the partygoers.
- The threesome: Probably. Neither Sera nor I was alert enough to truly consent. I later learned that the man who provided the drug had a reputation for initiating similar drug-laced threesomes. Though I don’t believe anyone was harmed that night, this is a cardinal sin of BDSM: Don’t involve people in your kink without their consent.
- The one-on-one sex: No. Given that we were both under the influence and we were attending an orgy together with plans to have sex, there was no victim.
- Whatever may have happened during the blackout: We’ll never know what happened while we were blacked out. I woke up in a different room than I’d started out in with no memory of how I got there. Neither of us saw any signs of foul play, so to speak, but if something did happen to us during that lost hour, it was definitely a violation.
These stories are a reminder that limits only work within a context of trust. Negotiation handles the known risks; everything else comes down to watching out for each other, keeping your wits about you, and choosing spaces where someone enforces the rules.