Playing With Fear with vahavta!

Join vahavta for in-depth exploration of Fearplay!

When: Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Pacific Time

Where: Online, Zoom

Ticket Link: https://forbiddentickets.com/events/black-thorn/2025-09-20-playing-with-fear

Fetlife RSVP: https://fetlife.com/events/1838261

Are you drawn to the thrills of Fearplay, but unsure how to fully embrace the experience without causing harm?

This two-hour workshop puts both bottoms and tops in the proverbial unmarked white van's driver's seat, offering an in-depth exploration of the unique needs, desires, and responses surrounding this kind of intense edgeplay.

This class will delve into the diverse range of fear that can be created, from visceral phobic desperation to survival-based panic, awful dread, adrenaline-rush terror, and more!

Some topics that will be addressed are the following:

1. Explore how various fear responses can complicate communication and consent.
2. Consider worst-case scenarios and how to recover.
3. Discuss how to best handle possible responses and reactions from all sides
4. Assess risk for tops and bottoms,
5. Examine how to address real trauma responses that may come up (sometimes on purpose)!

Drawing from case studies, research, and the expertise gained from vahavta's ten years of bottoming to intense fearplay and involvement/connections in the worlds of extreme haunts and immersive horror, this class aims to teach bottoms to better empower their tops with all the necessary information to create heart-pounding experiences, while helping tops learn to read subtle (and not-so-subtle) cues and craft or adjust scenes to provide the level of fear desired by all.

By thoroughly examining potential risks and providing comprehensive mitigation tactics, bottoms and tops alike will leave better prepared to create a thrilling yet controlled fearplay environment based on mutual experiencing, risk awareness, and care.

Bring your enthusiasm and your curiosity to this exciting class! All experience levels and orientations are welcome.

About vahavta

vahavta is a kink writer and educator with a particular passion for risk-aware practices, personal agency, and the validity of all consensual desires. With over a decade of lived experience in 24/7 CNC-based Total Power Exchange—and even longer bottoming for emotional S/m and edge play—vahavta is the creator of the "Submission Beyond Limits" workbook for s-types as well as the Risk Evaluation Database (RED), and she is proud to have taught her classes for international communities both online and off.

vahavta is disabled, Jewish, and femme, and believes in approaching kink with a firm understanding of intersectional context. As an educator, she aims to give honest and risk-aware information that applies to the realities of human behavior, focusing largely on the "how" and asking people to consider their personal capabilities, interests, and readiness. She contributes regularly to kink blogs and her own Fetlife writing index—much of which can also be found on her website at loves putting words together, watching her most romantic nightmares come true, and doing whatever her 50-lb lapdog wants. In all aspects of her life, she strives to be a work in progress.