Mistress Talia: a sadistic domme

Lightweight floggers like deerskin and elkskin have have a lot of uses in scene: they are good for a newbie dominant to learn on before moving on to heavier toys, they provide for sensuous flogging for non-masochistic subs, and they make a nice warm-up toy for scenes where you want to get the skin prepared for a more intense flogging later.

Generally, a deerskin flogger is recommended for newbie doms. There's two reasons it's a good first flogger. It really doesn't matter where you hit with it as short of whacking an eyeball you're not going to do inadvertently do any damage, so you don't have to worry about hitting the kidneys, spine or any small bones or about wrapping the tails inadvertently. Secondly, the tails are so lightweight that learning to aim and keep them together is actually more difficult than with more dangerous floggers, so by the time you have a deerskin mastered, your skill-set is ready to upgrade to a more intense whip.

Lightweight floggers are also good for non-masochistic subs who like the idea of being flogged more than the pain; deerskin makes for a very sensuous flogging.

Lightweight floggers are also good for warm-up. You can always warm-up a bottom's bottom with a spanking, but that can hurt your hands after a while. And spanking doesn't work so well if you're flogging the chest or back, a lightweight flogger makes for a very convenient warm-up tool.

The two typical materials used for lightweight floggers are deerskin and elkskin. Deerskin is very lightweight, very soft and sensuous. Elkskin is just a step up. As Heartwood describes on her web site: An elk is a larger animal than a deer. Its hide is thicker and a little heavier but still has much of the soft quality of deerskin. We usually use black or the golden elk from which we make our flame whips. We employ a sponge application technique called stippling. Black and red dye is applied over the gold hide to give the illusion of flames as the tails are flying. We weave the handle either in all black or red/gold flame to match the tails.

The Heartwood Elk Flame was my first lightweight flogger. I chose it because I liked that if I used it lightly, it was nearly as sensuous as deerskin, but if I used it heavily, I could inflict a bit of pain. I also found it just utterly gorgeous. As I've said previously, one can only have so many black toys, and this is a beautiful alternative to black.

The Valentine from Adam and Gillian is made with a particularly lightweight leather, softer and more buttery than typical deerskin. I would characterize this as a sweetheart whip, though I may be biased a tad since it was a gift from my sweetheart.

I acquired the Valentine as an actual valentine's gift from Talia a few years back.

It is a wonderfully sweet whip, though I often found it ironic that A&G makes such a delicate whip since they also make most of the nastiest whips I own.

It is hard to characterize the feel of these on the thuddy/stingy/cutting scale; there's a bit more thud with the elkskin than the deerskin, but overall the typical vocabulary for pain doesn't apply as these whips are simply sweetly sensuous.