Shock Tactics, Part III

The violet wand is usually classed as an electrical toy because it's powered by electricity: indeed it is the only mains-powered electrical toy that can be used safely. But unlike other electrical toys it doesn't work by applying current directly to the body: there will be no effect if the terminal is placed on the skin itself. Instead the energy is converted to a form that will jump the air-gap between the terminal and the body as a spark, a phenomenon technically knowing as arcing.

Since this arcing looks, sounds and feels similar to that caused by static electricity, as you might experience, for example, while wearing certain shoes on a certain kind of floor when you touch something metal or another person, most people believe that violet wands are static electricity devices, a misapprehension repeated on almost all the factsheets about them. But in fact they are rather more like a short-range radio transmitter, based on a Tesla coil that emits a form of energy known as Radio Frequency (RF) radiation.

The wand is another relic of the earlier part of this century, when every quack in the land sung the praises of the allegedly miraculous therapeutic powers of electricity. Today most of these applications have been discredited, but wands do have a vanilla use in some forms of beauty treatment, and it's for this reason that they are still available from a tiny number of manufacturers.

In the US, only the Master High Frequency company of Skokie, Illinois, still makes them, but they can be difficult to track down, and expensive to buy new, as much as US$350-400. A small British manufacturer called Don Jackson makes basic units for the beauty trade at around GBP150. Some perve shops stock them but at an even higher premium. The best source is the second-hand market: keep an eye open in small ads papers and at flea markets and car boot sales, and you may pay GBP50/US$75 or less, though make sure you see the unit working.

Most wands consist of a box containing the electronics and the Tesla coil, the wand itself, which is attached to the box with a cable, and a number of differently shaped attachments. In some models the electronics are built into the wand itself, but these are not ideal as they can be heavy and easily overheat. There will be an on-off switch and some form of intensity or volume control; usually the on-off switch is a button that has to be held down continuously for the wand to function, and sometimes an elastic band is provided to help achieve longer periods of use.

In older units, the coil is insulated in wax, which, if the wand is operated for over fifteen minutes continuously, can melt and cause the machine to burn out. Newer units don't suffer from this problem, and it is possible to get a coil replaced with a modern, plastic insulated version.

A violet wand is capable of only one basic effect: an RF spark, which, provided the wand is held close enough to the skin, but without touching, will jump across to the bottom's body, even passing through clothing. Basically the bottom feels a sharp, tingling, almost cutting sensation similar to that from static, but variations in both sensation and intensity can be achieved in a number of ways:

• by changing the target area of the body: discharging onto the front of the thighs, for example, is more likely to feel ticklish than painful, but discharging onto the nipples or genitals is rather more challenging. Drawing the wand slowly over different areas of the body will teach everyone a few lessons in the way sensitivity varies.

• by changing the output level using the control on the wand. This will increase the amount of energy discharged and therefore the sensation.

• by changing the attachments on the wand. As with beating and flogging toys, all other things being equal, the smaller and more compact the area of contact, the more intense and concentrated the effect. A very narrow electrode may even feel like a blade slicing the skin.

As with all SM activities, unless the players know each other and the game well, it's always best to start at low levels and work up slowly. Begin with the wand itself at a low level on innocuous areas of the skin, and gradually up the output level, move on to more sensitive areas and experiment with the narrower attachments.

One special technique that some players find diverting is to effectively convert the top's body into a wand, sometimes known as magic fingers. To do this you need to turn the wand off, then set things up so that either the top's or the bottom's body is permanently in contact with it. Some wands have a special plate attachment for this purpose; otherwise use a metal spike attachment and stuff it down the side of one of the bottom's socks or boots, tape it to the body or simply grip the business end of the naked wand firmly. For the best contact some conductive gel (see the article in Leather Online #5) can help here. Then turn the wand on, and you will find that just holding your fingers close to the bottom causes the sparks to fly.

Of course you will also feel the sensation, but you may consider this a small price to pay for the spectacular effect of being able to inflict pain direct from your fingertips. Sharpened fingernails can create a really intense sensation. You can use a penis too if you have one, though of course this will be more intense for you than your fingertips. And any conductive object that you hold will also act as an extension of the wand: I once had the violet wand treatment from someone with a sort of flogger made from strings of metal beads, each one of which was made to crackle with power. With all these techniques it's important to keep good contact with the wand while the machine is on, and only break contact once it has been switched off.

Violet wands are remarkably safe playthings but there are a number of points to bear in mind:

• Use anywhere on the body except the eyes, mucous membranes such as the inside of the vagina, and directly into the urethra. It is probably best to keep away from the whole area of the eyes to avoid problems with ultra-violet.

• Avoid prolonged use in any particular spot since the wand can eventually burn, and the UV rays it produces can also cause sunburn. Be especially careful with metal attachments and with using the wand on metal piercing jewellery for longer periods: metal can heat up and burn the skin directly and a burn on the inside of a piercing is far from pleasant.

• The discharge of radiation from the wand will produce a small amount of potentially harmful ozone, probably not enough to worry about but it may be advisable to play only in well-ventilated spaces if you intend to use wands for lengthy periods.

• Many of the attachments supplied with wands are made of glass so exercise due care, and in particular do not insert any glass object into bodily orifices, down boots and so on (some wands were supplied with insertive attachements but they are not very satisfactory for play anyway as to spark effectively there should be a small gap between the wand and the body). If using a glass head it may be advisable to restrain the bottom so they can't hit out and break it.

Those starting out with electrical play should find TENS units and violet wands, as described in these articles, provide quite enough diversion for a while. Progressing beyond them really requires some specialist knowledge, both of electrical safety and of electronics, to enable you to build, convert and safely use your own devices. Here are a couple of common advanced ideas people often think of, and a few suggestions about how they might be approached.

When you first start playing with a TENS (for more details see Leather Online #5) you may find even half-power demanding, but people do adjust to them and one day you may find you have hit maximum power and still want more. Where do you turn next?

Given that electrical appliances intended to inflict pain, such as shock batons and electrical cattle prods, are almost impossible to obtain, you will probably have to resort to improvised or custom-built equipment. Popular sources here are the magnetos in old fashioned hand-cranked telephones, various kinds of electric motors, induction coils and adapted pieces of medical and massage equipment: all can be used with the same forms of electrodes discussed with TENS machines.

When using any of these higher-powered units, it is absolutely vital to follow the safety rules about not passing currents across the chest and head, and to bear in mind that the kinds of muscle spasms you can induce will be correspondingly more intense than with lower-powered units, so use only loose bondage if you intend to shock muscles. And while some people do experiment with mains powered units, relying on the integrity of their earthing (grounding) and other safety precautions, we would still say this practise is highly inadvisable.

Electricity at higher levels when applied to the body first causes burns and can even cause other forms of tissue and nerve damage. Some more powerful items used in SM play are quite capable of burning so be very careful: you should be able to inflict more than enough agony without causing burns.

Many people are fascinated by combining sound with electrical play. One fantasy is to use some form of feedback so that the bottom's own groans and screams trigger stimulation; another is to combine electrical play with an external source of music or other sound.

In fact, the frequency of most music and screams is probably too high to be that effective if converted to electricity and applied directly to the body: what the first fantasy really requires is some sort of trigger or gate circuit where sounds from the bottom trigger the current, perhaps with the amount of stimulation proportional to the loudness of the bottom's voice. Rigging such a system should be relatively easy for someone with a basic knowledge of electronics but it's beyond the scope of this article.

Similarly the complexity of the signals from most recorded music makes them less than ideal sources in sound-to-pain games: giving your bottom a new kind of feeling for Wagner or Oasis is probably impractical without the signals being heftily processed first. However, instruments designed for electronic music synthesis, such as dedicated synthesizers and computer packages, do have possibilities.

An article posted on the Erotic Electro-Stimulation Page (see links below) suggests using an ordinary stereo amplifier and applying the speaker outputs direct to the body through the usual system of electrodes, and driving it with a PC wave generator program and soundcard. As the writer points out, the power produced by a standard domestic hifi amp through its speaker outs should not do much harm and there appears to be no good reason it should harm the amplifier either: I would add, however, that in the admittedly unlikely event of anything going wrong you run the risk of a shock from the mains. An alternative may be to use the external outs of a high-powered ghetto blaster running on batteries. If you intend to experiment with anything like this, start with the volume on zero and increase it gradually, observing all the usual precautions detailed in previous articles.

• Two good sources of electricity information on the web are The Erotic Electro-Stimulation Page in the Netherlands and the Electricity section on Leonards online BDSM homepage.

• Some general articles on electrical play archived on the web include Gandalf on Electricity from alt.sex.bondage and a report from a GMSMA (New York) teaching session in Alt Sex's BDSM section. A.E.C.C. TENS Application Notes for Users is about using TENS therapeutically but has some useful information.

• PES Electrical is a perve supplier that tries to offer the ultimate in electrical play gear (at a price, unfortunately!)

• The Electic Chair.com is one of those non-sex weird on the web pages dedicated to this execution method, which might be appealing to some readers.

• Text resources include the classic Fledermaus piece The Shocking Art Of Electrical Torment in Dungeon Master #8, January 1981, and a QSM lecture by J Bruce on Electrical Applications, December 1990.

• I would like to thank a number of people that helped me with these articles, in particular Lolita in Philadelphia for the use of her notes from a teaching session she gave on violet wands to The Eulenspiegel Society in New York, Peter Boots in London for material on TENS machines and general help, Peter in Liverpool for much patient practical instruction and Ian in London and Mark in Birmingham for useful additional material. Best wishes and plentiful supplies of Duracell batteries to them all.

Des de Moor is the editor of one of the web's most exciting and ambitious BDSM sites, The Deviants' Dictionary, an attempt at a comprehensive "encyclopervia" of SM terms.

Based in London, he has another life as a polemical singer-songwriter , performance poet and host of Pirate Jenny's Musical Cabaret Club, details of which he also splashes liberally about the web.

He prefers rubber to leather, shaved to hairy, and Doctor Martens to biker boots and plots devious and twisted SM encounters while going on long country walks.