I’m a big fan of tit play. It’s one of my favorite ways to play with a boy because unlike most forms of pain play, it’s quite easy to do even if you don’t any special toys for it. That means it’s a great form of play for novices to explore.
Tit play can be done with any (or all) of the following:
Fingers
Tongue/lips
Teeth
Cloth pins
Binder clips
Tit clamps
Riding crops
Suction cups
And more!
Of these, the first three are free and the others are generally fairly cheap to acquire. So if you’re a novice, this is a form of play you can get into quite cheaply, which in my mind is a good thing. Building a great toy bag is pricey, but you can go quite a long way with simple toys.
There is, however, an important thing to understand about tit play. Some people’s nipples are ‘hardwired’, meaning that their nipples respond to tit play with pleasurable sensations. Guys who are lucky enough to be hardwired often report that tit play quickly makes them hard. However, other people are not hardwired, meaning that their bodies don’t convert tit pain into pleasure. My tits are hardwired. I LOVE having my tits worked. But one of my regular boys’ tits are not hardwired; he just doesn’t find having his nipples worked over to be pleasurable. So while some tits respond really well to torture, others don’t. (In my experience, guys who enjoy having their tits played with typically also enjoy other forms of erotic pain, so when I’m talking to a prospective novice sub, I will often ask if they enjoy having their tits worked on. If they answer yes, I usually consider them a good candidate for other forms of torture.)
Can nipples become hardwired with training? I don’t know. Certainly regular play can make tits more sensitive than they used to be, but I don’t know if regular play can ‘convert’ a pair of nips or not. Piercing a nipple often makes it more sensitive, but that doesn’t guarantee that it will make the play more pleasurable. (If any of my readers have had success with converting a guy’s nipples, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!)
Another important thing about tit play: unless you’re dealing with very experienced nips that are used to serious pain, you gotta start slow. This is a general principle in erotic torture, but it seems to be most true for nipples (at least in my experience). The trick is to start with gentle sensations and then gradually get harsher. As it was explained to me (and I cannot verify the truth of this because I don’t have any medical training), the nerves that carry pleasure are the same nerves that carry pain, but they can only transmit one signal at a time. That means that if you get the nipple firing off pleasure signals, you can gradually shift over to pain but keep the nerves sending pleasure signals, creating the delicious ‘hurts so good’ sensation that masochists love. Eventually, though, the nerves realize they’re sending the wrong type of signal and switch over. So good tit play requires finesse.
You want to start by stroking, licking, kissing, or sucking on the nipples. Even someone who isn’t hardwired may find this stage really enjoyable. Get that nipple feeling happy. Then very gradually get a little rougher with it; bite it gently, suck harder or start to gently pinch or twist it.
Slowly increase the aggression level, but as you do, pay close attention to the boy’s body language, noises and expression, because they will give you a good sense of how they are experiencing what you’re doing. This is important because there’s no real objective way to know exactly whether what you’re doing is gentle, rough, pleasant or painful. What feels gentle to an experienced sub might feel very harsh to a novice. A sensitive pair of nipples might respond to even a very gentle stimulation while a less sensitive set may require more aggressive treatment to get any real response.
In particular, there are a couple signs that I look for that tell me I’m getting to the good stuff. I look for a boy to take a sharp breath, for his eyes to widen, and for his body to stiffen up. These usually mean that the sensations have become intense enough that they aren’t purely pleasurable anymore but that they are hovering at the pleasure/pain threshold.
Once a novice boy hits that point, you have two choices—keep playing at that level or get more aggressive. If you keep the sensations at roughly that same level, you may be able to draw the experience out for a while, whereas if you get more aggressive, the experience will become more intense, but it get to the tipping point faster. Once the boy hits his tipping point, the sensations will cease feeling pleasurable at all and will simply be painful. Some subs can keep going with that, but most novices usually need to stop at that point. Basically, once you hit the tipping point, that nipple is quite possibly done for the session (at least in my experience). It usually takes a considerable time before the nipple ‘resets’ and is ready for more play
Although you can just keep upping the harshness, a better tactic (I think) is to take the boy for a ride on the tit-coaster. Get aggressive, then back off and give him a breather, then resume and try to get a little harsher than before and then back off again, slowly escalating until he hits the tipping point. This has the virtue of allowing for longer play.
Tit Play with Clamps
If you have toys like clothes pins or tit clamps, I usually like to do a little warm-up with my fingers or teeth first before adding any sort of clamping, because most clamps will feel painful on a pair of tits that haven’t been warmed up. So spend a minute or two with digital or oral manipulation before adding a toy.
A general rule with clamps is that you should plan for a maximum of about 15 minutes of clamping. Clamps compress the tissue and cut off the blood flow to the nipples, which means that if you leave the clamps on indefinitely, even if the sub can handle the experience, there is a risk of nerve or tissue damage.
But the 15 minutes rule isn’t consistent across all forms of clamps, because a lot depends on how harsh the clamp is. In my experience, clothes pins are the mildest (although there’s a lot of variation here depending on how the pins are designed), purpose-built tit clamps are generally somewhat harsher than clothes pins, and binder clips are harshest (I usually can’t handle more than a minute or two of binder clips, but I barely notice some clothes pins). Different types of clamps have all sorts of variations, including alligator clamps (which have teeth like jumper cables), clover clamps (which get harsher the harder you tug on them), clamps with adjustable tension, and so on. Even if you’re not personally into having your tits played with, I strongly recommend that you try any form of clamp or clip on your own tits first; it’s important for a dom to understand what sensations the toys he uses generally produce.
One fun feature of clothes pins is that they act like ‘tit handles’, making it easier to pull, twist, and pinch the nipples. Once you put them on a sub you can flick the pins with your fingers to briefly intensify the sensation. I sometimes like to play This Little Piggy, going back and forth between the tits, with each piggy getting harsher attention than the previous.
Many clamps have chains connecting them that can be used to tug on the clamps, hang fishing weights off of them, and so on. If the sub is tied down, it’s not too hard to tie the chain to something that ensures a constant pressure on the tits. Or put the chain in the sub’s mouth.
When you take any sort of clamping toy off, the clamped tissue will spring back to its proper shape and there will be a sudden rush of blood back into the tissue. This usually results in a brief but intense jolt of pain. There are two options when you get to this point. First, you can just yank the clamp off (not recommended for binder clips, which need to be opened by pressing down on them) and let the sub handle the raw pain. Or you can tell the sub to take a deep breath just before you take the clamp off; that will usually help them manage the pain a bit.
Nipples that have been clamped usually become quite sensitive afterward. Depending on how much of a sadist you want to be, you can keep manipulating them or not, but in general, the threshold of pain will drop considerably after clamping, meaning that even gentle stroking might be too much for the sub. Even pleasurable sensations like feather tickles or tongue licks can be unpleasant after clamping.
In general, err on the side of gentleness until you’ve learned how a particular sub’s nipples respond. If the sub tells you that you’re being too gentle, you can always ramp up a little, whereas if the sub tells you that you’re being too harsh, you may have pushed the boy past his threshold. And since once you hit the tipping point, that nipple is out of commission for the scene, if you go in fast and hard, your window of play will probably close fairly quickly.
Other Types of Play
But clamps aren’t the end of the road. There are other types of play. You can also flick the nipple with your fingers or with a riding crop, or slap it with your open hand. Repeated light strikes may seem mild at first, but repetition will gradually make for a very intense session as the nipple gets more and more sensitive.
A very different type of tit play involves suction cups. These can range from tools intended to draw out snake bite venom to cups designed to enlarge and soften the nipples of nursing mother to hand-turned pumps. What all of these toys do is use suction to draw blood into the nipple, causing temporary swelling. Consistent application of these devices (in 10-15 minute bursts) over months can cause nipples to grow permanently, which some guys find really erotic because they often become more sensitive as well.
Safety
A few warnings are also in order. Nipples that are aggressively played with will sometimes develop a crust or thin scab on them over the next day or so; the nipples are ducts designed to release fluid, so when aggressively stimulated, they sometimes do that. That’s not uncommon. I’m not a medical expert, so I can’t explain what’s going on medically, but it’s part of the body’s healing process and is not in itself something to worry about, although it generally indicates that the nipple is healing and isn’t ready for more play. Just be gentle with the nipple for the next week or two and you’ll be good to go. And again, exactly what ‘aggressive play’ is will vary from sub to sub.
On a more serious note, it isn’t hard to find images of guys doing electro play with the electrodes attached to their nipples. That is a serious no-no, because in electro play, the current runs between the two electrodes. Since the heart lies between the nipples, wiring both nipples will cause an electrical current to run through the heart, which has the potential to disrupt the heart, since the heart is regulated with electrical impulses. If you really want to attach an electrode to the nipple, use the right nipple (further from the heart) and attach the other electrode to some place where the current won’t cross the chest (like the cock or the right buttock).
As a side note, the general rule about sex toys applies here—if a toy is going to be used on more than one person, it needs to be cleaned before it is used on someone else. Since nipples may produce blood or other fluids during play (especially if you’re being rough or using a clamp with teeth), it is theoretically possible to transmit STIs, although it’s not a major risk. Just make sure that you clean the surfaces that come in contact with the nipple with a water/bleach solution or other appropriate disinfectant.
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