Ask a bored, formerly Jewish, overly opinionated submissive

[thesummerqueen]

Oh yes. Bruises, sore (usually) or pulled (rarely) muscles. If you're careful, you take the violence only as far as you wish. When I got my flogger, one guy who was going to use it on me told me that he wasn't going to hit me till I bled. I had no problem with that - it made me laugh when he said it - but people do go that far. Some go in for electrical play or piercing or all manner of painful stuff. It's just a part of it - you can take the pain out of it entirely if you want. At it's heart, BDSM is a power-exchange. The rest is trappings.