The beauty of dominant women
I really hope the next words out of her mouth are something like – “What the hell are these? Do you think this is amateur hour? Go find my toy chest and bring back the heavy manacles, the ball gag and the largest of my strap-ons”. That should really give him something to grin about.
I typically shy away from Western articles on the less mainstream parts of Japanese culture. They’re often thinly concealed racism expressed as a veneer of humor around cultural differences. However, this article by Kotaku manages to avoid that trap while presenting some brilliant animated gifs. They’re all about assuming the supplicant or grovelling position, but in increasingly elaborate and acrobat ways. Fortunately, for readers of this blog, the grovelling is all happening before attractive and haughty women. I particularly like the final pyramid apology style, although it does suggest that if they’d spent less time practicing it and more time actually doing the original task, they might not have needed to grovel in the first place.
The image below is from the livedoor page the Kotaku article was derived from. I’m not sure that standing on your head counts as an apology, but it’s certainly eye catching.
It’s important that a masochist learns to scream correctly. Not to mention moan, whimper, flinch and wince. Volume or pitch isn’t important, but consistency and honesty is. Anytime I play I’m trying to give good feedback about the intensity of the experience and what headspace I’m in. It’s not like I get hit and then think “Hmmm, that feels like a level 7 moan. And maybe a level 5 flinch.” Instead I aim for a natural transparent reaction, and to resist the urge to occasionally exaggerate my response in order to control the scene. When the intensity is ratcheting up it can sometimes be tempting to do that and get ahead of what I know might be coming.
Of course, an expert domme can normally accurately assess just how painful her actions are and how genuine the reaction to them is. For the less experienced then help maybe at hand. It turns out that computers can be amazingly good at judging how genuine a reaction to pain is. According to this article, when shown video of people experiencing or faking pain, humans were essentially hopeless at guessing which was which, while computer software got it right 85% of the time. I find that an astonishing number. It would be interesting to put a selection of dominants through the same test and see if they were any better at spotting the fakers. I also wonder if adding sound to the test would have significantly improved the score for the humans.
Apparently one of the best indicators is the dynamics of the mouth opening. I’d guess this scene would provide some useful training data for the software. I don’t think he’s faking it.
This is from the Men in Pain site. I found it on the Alternative Femdom tumblr.
Batman and Catwoman often show up in D/s situations, but it’s more unusual to see Robin and Poison Ivy getting kinky. This is from Batman and Robin Adventures #8. Fortunately (or possibly unfortunately) for Robin, Harley Quinn eventually gets upset playing second fiddle to the boy wonder and feeds him the antidote to Ivy’s charms. Although that’s not before he’s spent some time shirtless and massaging her feet.
I originally found this on the Robin Wilde tumblr, which has a larger version of the image.
Here’s my BDSM tip of the day: If you’re looking for a particularly painful place to drip candle wax, then the taint is a great go to area. It’s even more painful than the balls or the cock. I acquired this information first hand courtesy of Lydia. I think I may be washing bits of wax out of odd crevices for days to come.
This image doesn’t feature that particular area of the body, but it does have rope, tender nipples and chest waxing, which also featured in my evenings entertainment. This is Bobbi Starr in a shoot for Divine Bitches.
As I mentioned in previous posts, I was in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, the day before I flew down, a nasty bug hit me. It wasn’t enough to knock me out entirely, but it did leave me feeling pretty rotten. That presented a conundrum. Normally if I’m sick I don’t play. Bottoming in a scene takes a lot of energy, which I don’t have if I’m unwell. I want to ensure that I’m warm, rested and hydrated, not naked, beaten and sweaty. However, in this case I had a limited window of opportunity. I’d set up sessions with Mistress Yuki and Mistress Ai-Li, and I was only in town for a handful of days. I didn’t want to miss out on getting together, and I didn’t want to mess them around by cancelling. They were happy to deal with the less than healthy me, but how would I cope?
In the end I came up with what I thought was a cunning plan: I’d try and make my reactions to the session work for me. Specifically, I’d try and use the endorphins generated to power through my vacation. I normally have a post session buzz than can last for hours or even days. So I figured I’d leave my body to fight the nasty virus, while I floated through the trip on a BDSM induced high. I’d still have the symptoms, but maybe I just wouldn’t care.
With my cunning plan in place, the next question was: What type of session should it be? Ideally it needed to be something calm, meditative and involve a lot of lying down on my part. I wanted the endorphins, but I also had a sore throat, so anything involving heavy pain and screaming was a non-starter. Given a fuzzy stuffy head, heavy breathplay was out, as was any kind of gag. Ultimately I decided piercing was the perfect solution. Painful and ritualistic enough to get me juiced with all the right brain chemicals, but not extreme enough to stress my body or drain my energy.
Unfortunately, I’m sad to say that while the theory might have sounded good, in practice my plan was slightly less cunning that I had originally thought. On the plus side, the immediate reaction was all I had hoped for. Mistress Yuki and Mistress Ai-Li did a brilliant job and I left appropriately floaty. That lasted for several hours and allowed me to do typical vacation stuff with my friends. At that point, I then crashed, and crashed hard. It wasn’t sub drop. I guess it was virus drop. Or getting-needles-through-the-genitals-while-sick drop. I basically ended up wiped out for 48 hours, and feeling worse than I had before the session. Just to double check my data, I ran the whole experiment again a few days later and got exactly the same results. Great for the few hours while the initial endorphin hit lasts, terrible after that.
In conclusion I’d suggest that if you’re sick and have a critical job interview or task to accomplish, then BDSM may help. Get yourself tied and tortured in your preferred fashion immediately beforehand, and you’ll float through feeling great. But if your goal is simply to get better as fast as possible, I’d avoid getting down with your kinky self. That is unless your kink involves warm drinks, restful naps and watching daytime TV on your couch.
This image is by the Australian photographer Peter Coulson. I do have some personal shots taken from my San Francisco sessions that I’ll put together for a later post.
I maintain a Google alert on the term ‘dominatrix’. I originally figured that if the term popped up in a news article it’d be a likely article for me to post about. In actuality what it means is that I get an endless stream of links to articles featuring celebrities wearing something that, if you squint and don’t concentrate too hard, could be vaguely considered to be fetish wear. It doesn’t seem to matter what it is, or what the context is, just so long as it’s slightly non-conventional.
Some of them I kind of understand (for example this) while others are completely ridiculous (for example this). The latest example, and one that falls firmly into the ridiculous camp, is Kylie Minogue, with this and then this. Kylie is undoubtedly a very attractive woman, but I’ve played with a lot of amazing dommes, and not one of them has worn anything like those outfits. If you’re going to call something a dominatrix outfit then may I suggest this outfit by Mistress Shae Flanigan as a reference point? Obviously you can be dominant in anything you damn well choose, including fuzzy slippers. But if you’re going to invoke cliches, at least make sure it’s an accurate one.
Here’s an image for fans of the CFNM kink. It’s by Ben Hill photography and taken from a series of images called ‘One Side Life, the Other Side Death‘. In the words of the photographer it “…is a collection of shots designed to illustrate our collective paths from conception to our final rest.”
I originally stumbled across this via a cropped version that’s floating around on the tumblers. Typically images get cropped to remove watermarks. In this case it appears to have been done to simply make the image a squarer and more tumblr friendly shape. I’m glad I tracked down the original, as this version seems a far superior composition.
Women shopping for shoes in Walmart should watch out. If a gentleman claims to be a podiatry student or a producer of America’s funniest home videos then it’s possible he’s not being entirely truthful. If he starts sucking your toes, he’s almost certainly not who he claims to be.
Scott Adams once wrote that he assumed all shoe salesmen are secret foot fetishists, because they’d obviously agree to do the job for less money than a non-fetishist. Presumably the two geniuses in the above articles couldn’t pass the interview for that job, and had to resort to more underhand methods.
I’m afraid I don’t know who photographed this happy lady and her foot admirer. I’m personally not particularly into feet, but I do like her smile. I found it on the Alternative Femdom tumblr.
Today’s link to ‘thing that’s not really femdom, but I liked it and wanted to share’ is to something called an implicit association test. This is a test which can supposedly uncover associations that you make unconsciously and may not be aware of. It takes about five minutes to do and you don’t need to register if you don’t want to, simply proceed as a guest. There are tests for (allegedly) revealing your instinctive biases on things like skin-tone, weight, religion, etc.
I found the idea fascinating and headed immediately for the sexuality and gender tests. On the sexuality test it reported I had “little to no automatic preference between Straight People and Gay People.” That put me in a neutral group of about 17% of people. Apparently 68% of people taking the test expressed a preference (from slight to strong) for straight people compared to gay people, and 16% for gay people over straight people. Normally being in the middle of any issue is boring, but I was kind of happy to be in that middle bucket.
The gender test result was slightly more surprising. It tested the association between men/women and career/family. For that the standard curve has 76% of people associating men->career and women->family, 17% neutral and only 6.3% associating women->career and men->family. I was in that latter group with a “moderate association of Female with Career and Male with Family”. Apparently (according to the site) our implicit assumptions come from our everyday experiences. Yet I’ve always worked in an environment of >90% men and as a child I was brought up by a stay at home mom and a working dad. That suggests I’m definitely an outlier here. Or that the test is broken.
I’ve no idea how solid the science is behind it, but I thought it was fun to try. Plus, all that talk of gender and careers gives me a chance to feature an everyday office scene. Perhaps she implicitly associates men with doormats?
This is from the Under Feet site.