Number 14 wears leather gloves. When we go out for dinner – we always go out for dinner – he makes a show of taking them off and putting them on the table beside him. He’s calm. I’ve never heard him raise his voice, or get agitated, or even visibly excited. Number 14 is the domliest dom I know, and I’ve never had sex with him.

Why is he on the list? I don’t usually include people I haven’t actually fucked, but the things he’s done deserve more credit than the catch-all title ‘play.’ Play can be anything from a quick spanking at a party to a full-blown throat-fucking in a dark alley. The latter, I think, deserves a bit more credit.

He likes to find places that are private but public. Hidden nooks and doorways where he can press me into the wall and order me not to make a sound. It’s incredible what a pair of leather gloves and a calm demeanour can do to stop me from making the noises I’d usually revel in.

On the hunt for one of these places once he found what looked like an abandoned room just outside the entrance to a block of flats – just a door in a wall that took us into a place no bigger than a cupboard, with broken glass bottles on the floor and no lights.

He put his hand over my mouth and whispered to me not to make a sound, then yanked my skirt up and my knickers down and touched me until I was trembling and could barely stand.

Every time someone walked past the door, or I breathed too loudly or made any noise, he grabbed my throat and stopped me breathing until they’d gone. He kept doing this, then stopping, then doing more, then stopping, until I was so weak and frustrated that I was crying, and had we been somewhere no one would have heard us I’d have been begging him to fuck me.

When I got to that point he pushed me down until I was squatting on the floor and shoved his cock into my mouth, always maintaining his total silence and calm.

He held my hair with his leather-gloved hands and shoved himself right into my throat. It didn’t take long – after a few minutes, just as I started to choke and bruise, he came hot and hard into the back of my mouth.

Ever the gentleman, he walked me to the train station and held me up when I stumbled.

Red. Purple. Stop. やめて. Dead puppies.

Whatever your kink, if it extends beyond ‘tie me up with silk scarves and tickle me with a feather duster’ chances are someone’s suggested a safe word at some point. I think safe words suck, and here’s why:

They encourage you to push yourself further than you might like.

There’s a challenge implicit in a safe word. A safe word says ‘this is the absolute limit, as much as I can take. If you do anything more I will die/call the police/punch you into the sun.’ And so when you know that there’s a word you can use at any time to make it stop, all you’re trying to do is prevent yourself from using that word.

A safe word implies that you’re playing just to see how hard you can take it, so you want to prove that you can take it as hard as possible. You are superwoman – undefeated in all 12 rounds of this sex. He’ s beating/fucking/electrocuting you so badly that you’ve never been in so much pain – you’re gritting your teeth and biting your tongue and hating every miserable minute of it. Boy, you have never won at sex so hard as you’re winning now.

The challenge is not the fun bit – the fun is the fun bit. If you have a safe word that encourages you to push yourself to the point where you don’t like it, you might as well call ‘red’ right at the beginning and sneak off for a wank – you’re more likely to have a good time.

They curb your imagination

Hurting someone is a challenge, and one of the most difficult things to get right. You have to know roughly what they like, what they hate, and wobble uncomfortably on the high-wire that runs between those two things.

You also, if you want me to really love you, have to do some stuff that’s just for you. I might hate being caned (stupid stingy unsexy ouch fuck fuck ouch) but if you love it then it’s awesome, and I’ll grin and bear as much as possible, and even sneak in some brattiness between strikes if that’s what gets you off.

So yes, there’s a lot to balance. But sadly with a safe word there’s less incentive to work at that balance. If you give a girl a safeword, that’s a free pass for you to do whatever you like until she yells ‘stop’, which means that she and you miss out on the joy that can be had from playing around in that grey area – pushing things she doesn’t want to be pushed, into places she might not be keen on you pushing them.

They require negotiation

Anything that delays the sexual act, or requires chatter and discussion of a practical nature, will kill my drive pretty quickly. I love the pre-sex preamble where you chat about things you have done and talk about stuff you both find hot. It means that when you do get into bed you can experiment with the new knowledge you’ve acquired.

But if you chat around sex in order to tick things off a bizarre safety list, it’s no fun at all.

“So, you like to be spanked? OK. I’m going to spank you, and I’m going to start really gently, so let me know on a scale of 1-10 how much that hurts. And if I do anything too hard just say ‘red’ and I’ll immediately stop and give you a nice cuddle and a hot chocolate.”

See? It’s just not sexy. There’s no uncontrolled passion in that. As soon as you have to codify it and lay down rules, the spontaneity is ripped out of it and you end up fucking like you’re following an IKEA furniture construction leaflet. I don’t want to know that you’ll stop when I ask, I don’t want to know exactly how many strokes you’ll give me before we have a rest and a chat about my boundaries. I want you to do things you like, things I like, things you think we might both like, and see at what point I start tearing the walls down.

“So what turns you on?”
“This one time a guy bent me over and paddled me till I cried, then fucked me in the ass while he called me a ‘good girl.’”
“Take your fucking pants off.”

Attaboy.