Photo by Flickr user otbayley. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Having just repeated myself with a serious post from my pile of drafts here’s a non-serious one from the draft pile I’m… pretty sure I’ve never brought up before. It’s based on observations while hanging with my children in a mid-western municipal swimming pool this summer.

So on a sweltering mid-west day the relatives we were visiting suggested we go visit the nearby swimming pool to cool off. We agreed instantly, especially since our children and theirs were going stir crazy in the too-small-for-two-families house, effectively trapped inside by the heat.

Once I’d finally cooled off in the water long enough to be able to think clearly again I started watching the local youth playing their half-flirt/half-showoff games by the diving boards. They were all pretty accomplished divers (to my relatively untrained eye anyway) but at one point one of the young men upped the ante by yelling at another to do a belly flop. The man on the board took the challenge and landed a whopper, let out a huge groan when he surfaced, and then challenged the rest to follow suit as he swam to the side.

Maybe eight or ten, mostly men but a few hardy young women as well, followed suit. Some people went more than once. My observation? Even through a summer-long tan a belly-flop leaves red marks on the down-side of the body. If you’ve ever landed a belly flop yourself you gotta know it just plain hurts, and some of these people were really trying to get some air before their landings. But between the adrenaline, cheering and being cheered on, and just the general camaraderie they… Ok, I can’t say they didn’t mind that it hurt, it just didn’t bother them that it did.

Not the way, say, they would have seriously minded getting a similar all-body whopping as corporal punishment in a different setting — say, instead of school detention.

That’s sort of the difference I’ve noticed between BDSM and ordinary physical abuse as well — attitude, and maybe arousal and adrenaline make a huge difference.

Not a huge insight, I’m sure, and probably an eyeball roller for people more in to spanking than I’ve ever gotten. But something to remember while processing one’s reactions, and possible triggers, while contemplating consensual BDSM.

One question, though. While I’m sure I could Google up a porn site somewhere that’s got nothing but naked people doing belly flops (so confident, actually, that I’m not even going to bother looking) I wondered then, and I’m finally asking now…

Ever heard of a lazy top telling their sub to do belly and/or back flops? Any subs out there who’d think that would be hot? (Because, seriously, anything inside anything dungeon-y in the midwest in the summer has got to be some kind of miserable-hot, not hot-hot.)

Thanks in advance.