Blog

“I have no limits”: the understandable appeal of being the bottomless sub

When someone says they have no limits in their kink, I give them so much side eye.

I haven’t seen many other subs in action, because I don’t go out to play parties much, but when I was doing phone sex, I heard that sort of thing a lot. These greedy subs would phrase it as a tolerance for pain or humiliation—even though I could tell that they’d never done face-to-face, paddle-to-ass play ever—but really they just wanted to be forced to take a cock the width of the entire known universe into their hungry little butthole.

No shame in having a hungry butthole, but if that’s all you want, then just say it and admit that you do have limits after all.

I laughed at my phone-sex clients for their notion of being the perfect sub, the bottomless receptacle for whatever jizz and verbal abuse I could hurl at them during our few minutes together. They could just ask for whatever they wanted; they didn’t have to say “I have no limits.” They could actually have asked me to shove the entire universe into their ass, and without cracking a smile, I would have described the bumps of the asteroid belts and everything.

The human brain is built to play around with mad pangalactic fuckery, but that wasn’t enough: my clients wanted me to see them as being able to take anything and everything, and they had very specific words for that: “I have no limits.”

I could write it off as sheer macho posturing in the face of often “effeminate” fantasies. There is also a compelling gonzo component, when you take “no limits” to logical extremes: you could die from four inches thick and not enough lube, but yes, LET’S GO FOR THE UNIVERSE IN YOUR BUTT.

But hell, I have been known to say “I can take anything” to my partner, and I know damn well that’s not true. So why do I say it? What is that fantasy about? What is it that I’m trying to say?

For me, at least, I’m an overachiever. I want to do better than anyone else. I also imagine that I know what my partner is getting out of topping or dominating me, and I want to be the best target for topping that they’ve ever had. I want to show off, I guess. My ego is there in my submission in a hundred different ways, in the internal tasks that I set for myself: not to move, not to flinch, not to cry at all or not too loud. I want to show to my partner what a good girl I am, that I won’t jump.

But it is not only ego, not by a long shot. With my partner, as with no one else, there is a strange cyclical alchemy of pain and love. I love him so much that I want to give him the gift of my utter submission, to take everything he can dish out. When I endure it, and he sees that endurance and praises me for it, my love expands more and I want to give him even more of that, show him that. And so on, around and around and back and forth.

Thankfully, he knows when to stop, even if I haven’t said my safe word. I am that in love with him that it feels like I could go on forever there, and he knows it, and he also knows that someone gets to put down limits when I am that far gone in my love/pain spiral, and he is that someone. He understands, I think, the space I want to go with my submission.

My body has limits, but my heart does not. I have to balance between the two, and he will catch me, either way.

*****

My heart has no limits, and neither does my artistic imagination. My budget does, though, and that’s where my patrons come in. By pledging a little bit of money on Patreon per blog post I create, you help create sustainability for my work in sex-aware theatre, storytelling, and writing. Do that thing, if you’ve got the money. It goes a long, long way.