Not Above the Waist!
I’ve already begun to get some notices from people questioning my placement of the electrodes on Arielle’s breasts during the last Ropecast review of the Deluxe Digital Power Box from Extreme Restraints. Allow me to address this issue here, before it gets out of hand:
Everybody says no E-Stim above the waist!
Actually, they say “not recommended” and “general guidelines” and the like. It is true, there is some risk of putting any kind of electricity in the area of the heart - especially in the case of pacemakers. I am not advocating the use of e-stim of any kind above the waist.
Then why did you do it, Graydancer?
Well, in researching for different ways to use it, I went to a lot of different places - and one of them was Kink.com’s Wired Pussy. The people that work there are very concerned with the safety and health of their models, and I mirrored the placement of the pads in several cases with photo shoots, including the ones on the breasts.
But those are healthy, strong, young fetish models! Most people can’t do the things they do!
True, very true. However, Arielle is a young, healthy, strong dancer, and as such I determined that the risk, such as there was, was minimal. In other words, this was a “risk-aware consensual kink”, and should not be used as a suggestion for play. Make your own educated decisions based on your own situation.
Kind of like Sir C is fond of saying, “She didn’t die. The scene was a success.” View the MPEG to see the technique in action.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
I got to sit in this morning on a presentation from one of the lawyers from Taser(tm) where he explained that the frequency and pulse width of a signal designed to stimulate skeletal muscle contraction is way below that of what is required to stimulate the kind of muscle tissue that makes up the heart. They then showed videos of older police officers with an electrodes taped to one foot and the opposite shoulder getting hit hard enough to cause their entire body to seize up for five seconds, with no ill effect other than some sore muscles. I think that the likelihood of a low power device like an e-stim posing any kind of significant risk to anyone not wearing a pacemaker has been vastly overstated, although with good intentions. Just my 2 cents.
June 6th, 2008 at 12:10 am
Most people that do electro long enough to feel confident about it feel that it’s relatively safe to put a trode on either side of the nipple, but stay away from sending current across the chest by putting one trode on each nipple. Some people claim to have felt heartbeat abnormalities when going nipple to nipple, and PES (Paradise Electro Stimulations) claim to have seen it on an EKG.
Generally the concern is that you’ll put stress on a genetically weak heart - probably similar risk to someone dying after running a marathon after being otherwise healthy.
June 7th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
What I was worried about in my email was not so much that you were doing something that has some (arguably small) risk, but that you weren’t also demonstrating that you were aware of the risk.
June 7th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
I appreciate that, Nobilis, and that’s why I posted the blog entry and did most of a podcast about it. Even though it would have disrupted the “scene” to have done it in the last podcast, I could have done it before or after. I’m glad you (and quite a few others) brought it up.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:54 am
The whole “above the waist” guideline is based on the assumption that the audience has zero understanding of anatomy and electricity. It’s short and easy to remember. The problem is it’s got loads of exploitable exceptions once you do your damned homework on the subject, and suddenly the people who only know the bumper sticker rule are in a tizzy over relatively safe play. Sad that the people with more understanding get muzzled by people who only know the paint-by-numbers rules. Good for you for not caving in to that nonsense.