Crush training

A BDSM trainee in a ‘Crush’ drysuit w/o inflator hose

In the photo above: A BDSM trainee is wearing a shoulder entry heavy rubber drysuit with no low pressure hose connected to the inflator port, for ‘crush’ training. You can see details of her suits neck seal and the hood she wears to keep her long hair from getting tangled in her dive gear. She is on the preparation shelf and from her suits inflated chest area it’s obvious she hasn’t completely vented her suit to get as much of the ambient air out as possible before beginning her descent. She has been coached to leave as much air in her suit as she can and still have negative buoyancy as the more air remaining in her suit the slower she will descend to aid in equalization. In a suit like this with a weight belt and no BCD her descent will be uncontrolled down to a net stretched across the diameter of the well. She will have to work on equalizing as best she can and will pick up speed as she descends because the remaining air will be compressed inside her suit. Her goal, once she reaches the net at the 100 foot (30 meters) level will be to masturbate against the rubber crotch of her suit while holding her air consumption to 1.75 cuft per minute or less. She is wearing a nylon/lycra bodyskin to minimize the effect of being pinched by the rubber folds of the suit as it compresses around her. As she gains more experience in crush diving she will wear only a bikini under the crush suit or be completely nude except for nylon booties.

Crush diving is one aspect of BDSM training that I’ve intentionally avoided. I have inadvertently been squeezed in one of my fully functioning drysuits when I accidentally vented air and it collapsed around me. But since I’m lactating it is not a good idea to compress even empty breasts after I’ve pumped much less when they are filled with milk. Not only can the folds of rubber pinch and hurt like blazes, but breast compression can cause clogged milk ducts, something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.


‘Crush training’ in a collapsed drysuit: Adolph uses several old heavy rubber drysuits with no low pressure hose connected to the suits inflator fitting for crush training. He uses old suits because the deflated suits ‘squeeze’ causes an even greater need to urinate than the dive itself and the trainee is not allowed to wear a diaper to absorb her urine. Without an inflator hose and valve connected the wearer is unable to control her buoyancy with the suit and needs to wear a buoyancy control device, BCD, or have a lift bag available to be able to return to the surface on her own or needs a handler to assure her safety. No crush training student is allowed to wear a BCD and her instructor, Adolph, is her handler and he will leave her at depth to reach the surface as best she can as, among other things, her ingenuity is being tested. She is not allowed to remove her weight belt so that any positive buoyancy of the empty tank (There is none, an empty the tank is -2 lbs), the air in her mask and hood would float her to the surface. The crush diver wears a single HP steel Nitrox-Ready Worthington X8-130. The specs for that 130 cuft tank are:

*Volume: 130 cubic feet (16.0L)
* Service Pressure: 3,442 psi
* Outside Diameter: 8.0"
* Weight: 43.0 lbs (empty)
* Height: 25.5 inches* Width: 8.00 inches
* Buoyancy Empty: -2.0 lbs
* Buoyancy Full: -11.7 lbs

The trainee breathes Nitrox II (36 % oxygen) to reduce her nitrogen loading on the dive and he gives her a lift bag, but no Spare Air bottle to fill it with so she needs to watch her gas and inflate the bag with the bubble stream from the exhalations of her last few breaths of gas from her tank rather that removing her mouthpiece and pushing the purge button and she must be sure to put a foot in the ascend loop before the bag gets away from her. Her performance score is heavily dependent on how long she is able to remain at depth not how little air remains in her tank when she reaches the surface because she could intentionally purge gas w/o using it. So crush training teaches tolerance to pain and breath control under adverse conditions and requires steady nerves, all important attributes for young divers (either Domme or Sub) entering the BDSM lifestyle.

Dive-sex bottom time calculations: Typically an experienced diver/escort’s surface air consumption (SAC) rate can vary between .5 and 1.1 cu ft and during orgasm it can rise to 2.5 cuft/min or more. For dive-sex training we assume an average of 2.25 cuft/min. If we assume a surface air consumption rate (SAC) for penetrative dive-sex of 2.25 cuft/min x 5 min = 11.25 cuft on the surface.

Crush training bottom time: For Crush training (with masturbation to orgasm) we are estimating an average of 1.75 cuft/min X 5 min = 8.75 cuft on the surface. At 100 fsw (4 ATA) 8.75 cuft x 4 ATA = 35 cuft divided into the tank capacity 130 cuft = 3.7. To get bottom time in minutes: 3.7x5 = 18.5 minutes and that is w/o any rock bottom time air for ascent and deco so the tank will be empty in about 18 minutes +/- depending on how good the divers breath control is. Breathing regular (21% O2) air if the trainee’s bottom time is no more than 20 minutes she needs no deco stop. Breathing Nitrox II (36% O2) her max bottom time is about 25 minutes bottom time before deco is required. So with good breath control she can get her minutes of bottom time into the low 20s if she can stand the pain of her suits squeeze.

Conception in a drysuit: It’s impossible to have penetrative sex with a man when the woman is in a sealed drysuit. However it’s not impossible for her to become pregnant if the woman had sex a few hours prior to diving and she is wearing the wrong style gas-guard. I’ve written about this before and it’s frustrating to me because this is an area that hasn’t been covered in women’s contraceptive training. We are seeing gas-guard problems more frequently now since the weather is warming up and The Lorelei guests are taking drysuit dive excursions to Lake Mead and Adolph has begun crush training in the well. I’ve tried talking with Adolph about alerting the guests at The Lorelei and his BDSM students who use diaphragms as gas-guards and I’ve talked to both guests at The Lorelei and his students when I meet them, but they don’t seem to understand, until it’s too late.

After Adolph tampers with a woman’s hormonal birth control all she has as backup is her gas-guard and if she remembers what it was like to be fertile before she went on hormones she may use a diaphragm for contraception and feel she is well protected. But the diaphragms that European women are most often fitted with are Milex, which is popular in the EC and will protect them in typical residential swimming pools but neither rim style, arcing or coil spring, will protect them on a dive below 30 feet. As I’ve written so often before they need a Reflexions flat spring rim diaphragm that won’t distort due to pressure during a deep dive and it’s frustrating to try and help and get rebuffed and then I’m sought out when they are in trouble from something that could have been easily avoided by using the proper protective equipment.

So there they are typically having sex in their suites or in ballet class the morning of a deep dive and with fresh semen still in their vaginas are sealed into a drysuit and descend deeper than 30 feet either on an excursion to Lake Mead or in The Well during crush training. The women use no spermicide since they are protected by the pill - so they think – and therefore are in the habit of wearing their gas-guards dry (w/o spermicide) and rim of the diaphragm they are wearing distorts, leaks and semen is suckled into the dome and sperm swim into the diver’s cervix. By examining the fluid collected in the dome when a woman removes her gas-guard she can get an idea if it leaked and she is in trouble or not. But, most of the women haven’t been taught to examine the fluid in their diaphragms immediately upon remove. The fluid can be a mixture of liquefied spermicide, fertile cervical mucus (FCM), natural lube from the anterior vaginal wall, or semen that leaked past the rim. If they were familiar with the differences and something looked suspicious they could take ella right away, but even with the ones who suspect many are reluctant to take EC hoping that they are safe and that none of the fluid was semen leakage and two weeks later they miss their periods and test positive for hCG.

1950s Cosplay pregnancies

A Reflexions flat spring diaphragm & its introducer

Ballet Cosplay and pregnancy: There have been some unintended pregnancies among the UNLV cosplay women. In my entry for October 18th 2010 entitled ‘Ballet Cosplay & Horizontal Academics’ I discussed helping Taryn’s friend in a UNLV Cosplay club train for some 1950s ballet role playing involving pointe shoes and sex using female barrier birth control devices available in the 1950s.

The girls I coached have now debuted in femme fatale and ingénue ballet roles and been very successful in their portrayals of 1950s ballet dancers (Moira Shearer, Zizi Jeanmaire, Cyd Charisse and Leslie Caron) and well protected by their latex Reflexions flat spring diaphragms. However, two of the more senior members of the sorority’s cosplay club who had been the most verbally abusive weren’t as well protected and found themselves pregnant just after my October 18th entry. Male UNLV cosplay partners are not required to use condoms – in keeping with the dislike of them by men and the more subservient social position of women 60 years ago. And that’s come back to bite some of the most fanatically detail oriented and verbally abusive women in the group. Curiously, the ones insisting men ride bareback are the ones who found themselves with a bun in the oven and (were) very vocal about being against abortion, believing that life begins when an egg is fertilized, not after implantation in the lining of the uterus which is the medical definition of pregnancy.

An emergency call: Suddenly I’m getting an emergency call from Taryn’s friend wanting to know if I can smooth the way for discreet menstrual extractions at our clinic for the two fourth year girls who were then about six weeks preggers, because they didn’t want to go through Student Health at UNLV where their condition might become known. Getting them on the schedule wasn’t a problem and they paid for the procedures with their own credit cards. I went over to see if there was anything I could do and talked to both of them. I asked them how they felt about the right-to-choose now that they needed the option and both where in tears when admitting they had not understood what it meant to find yourself pregnant with medical or law school on the horizon, tens of thousands in student loans and no male partner for support and now, in their need, had found themselves with a total reversal of opinion and very much pro-choice. I was saddened that it had taken a personal crisis, but very pleased that two more women understood the need to have abortion available as an option.

Barrier blues: While they were waiting to be prepped for their procedures I asked what barriers they were using and both had been using three year old latex Ortho coil spring rim diaphragms. Neither of them had had a fit check since the initial fitting and both had been frequently sexually active in the intervening months and both had started an intensive training regimen for track and had lost weight and toned their bodies. So I thought that both women’s diaphragms were probably too small because of the stretching of the vagina from an active sex life and from the fact that they had both lost about fifteen pounds.

The women said they had enquired about getting new barriers since early 2009, shortly after Ortho stopped making latex diaphragms, and whoever they consulted told them, incorrectly, that latex diaphragms were no longer being made. By that time they were so involved in the cosplay community that they kept using their old barriers, since the rubber domes appeared to be in good condition with no pin-holes, thin spots or cracks in the rubber, though the latex was beginning to lose its elasticity. Continuing a very active sex life using a two to three year old latex diaphragm that hadn’t been fit checked was just asking for trouble. They lucked out for about eighteen months before testing positive for hCG when they both lost stamina and began having nausea in the mornings.

Reflexions fitting: Both extraction procedures went well and while shaken and glad the ordeal was over neither women seemed remorseful. But remorse, while in my experience not common, can occur at any time, especially when the woman has had time to think about it and been staunchly pro-life, so one or both may need therapy later on, or not. They were so newly pregnant that the size cannula used didn’t require cervical dilation which sped their recovery time. I told them both that I would personally fit them with latex diaphragms when they felt that they had recovered enough to withstand the fitting process and two weeks later they called to set up a fitting visit and asked for me as their fitter. I volunteer at the clinic on most Saturdays and do nothing but cervical barrier fittings, about ten or twelve a day on a busy day. When they came in they both looked good and accompanied each other during their fittings and asked lots of questions so I could tell whoever fitted them the first time wasn’t really into teaching their patients about how to use the barrier they were being fitted with. Both women took a Reflexions two sizes larger (a 75 mm and a 80 mm) than the ones they had originally been fitted with and with the soft coil spring rim a D two sizes too small is easy to under-thrust which completely compromises the effectiveness of the diaphragm and that is probably how they were impregnated.

Under-thrust training: I had had them bring in their old Ortho coil spring diaphragms and while each was on the exam table I asked if they would like to have a brief under-thrust lesson which we teach in the AST class at St Lucy’s. They both said yes so I had them insert their old diaphragms and then feel the gap between the anterior rim and their pubic bone. When not aroused they could get a finger between the rim and the bone with room to spare which was an obvious sign that the device was too small. Then I took a warmed silicone dildo, lubed it with Dive-Gel and while the woman was on her back with her feet in the stirrups I inserted it and then at an acute angle gently but firmly thrust it into the anterior wall of her vagina and she gasped as the chisel-head tip of the dildo pushed between her pubic bone and the rim and slid under the rim compromising her protection. I withdrew the dildo had her reseat her D and while still on the table helped her get on her hands and knees as though she was preparing to be penetrated doggie style. Then when she was ready I spread her labia and inserted the dildo, thrusting it downward this time, but not at such an acute angle because the gap between the pubic bone and the rim was wider in that position since gravity pulls the uterus and cervix deeper into her body. I immediately had the tip of the dildo under the rim again, but this time it was far less noticeable because there was a much larger gap and the thrust angle wasn’t anywhere near as acute. Then I had the second girl remount the exam table and repeated the demonstration under-thrusting with her old D inserted. All they could say was, “I had no idea!”

Then I had them both insert their new Reflections flat spring diaphragms and went through the procedure with the dildo again in both missionary and rear entry positions showing them that with a properly sized D and with the flat spring rim it was very difficult to do and it hurt when a flat spring rim was under-thrust, so now they know if they feel anything like that during an encounter they should use their safe word and stop the scenario that is being acted out while they check their protection.

The Sorority and latex fetish: While they were in the exam room the women, who are also sorority officers in addition to running the cosplay group asked what I thought about the sorority becoming involved with a local latex fetish group. That sort of thing wouldn’t be approved by the UNLV administration (if they knew about it) so I recommended they do nothing to raise the school’s or public’s awareness of their interest in latex as a fetish.

I advised them to start small with a sorority based latex fixation group. That way they can control the rules, membership and male guests. If they try to affiliate with a local Vegas fetish group they will find themselves relegated to being prey for local Alpha males. Not that that might not be fun if you are a Sub, but being at the bottom of the food chain is a very bad place for a group of young inexperienced women to start.

I passed on to Taryn’s friend and her circle that the sorority officers are considering starting a latex fetish group and was told that there were already signs of a serious interest in latex especially in the “rotten rubber” stench aspect of latex diaphragms left inserted for more that twenty-four hours. So the sorority’s member’s interests are beginning to expand into more kinky areas and she asked if they started a latex fetish group would I be willing to be an advisor. I agreed as that would give me a renewable source of candidates in their twenties for some fetish projects I have in mind.