The beauty of dominant women
This is a continuation of the pet play theme. Arguably this image is simple D/s or CFNM, but something about their respective body language puts me in mind of dog and owner. I think it’s the way she seems engaged in an event or discussion off frame left, where he’s got that oddly fixated focus on some random thing that dogs do so well. Perhaps he just saw a squirrel?
I’m afraid I don’t know where this is originally from. I found it on the Male Pet tumblr.
You’ll be glad to know that the title doesn’t refer to a continuation of the enema theme from yesterday’s post. Instead it references a post by Stabbity which poses the question: Why is the pet in a pet play scene always the bottom?
That strikes me as an excellent question. I don’t think it would work to top as a dog. They’ve got a natural follow the leader obedience built in. But what about cats? As Stabbity points out they’re adorable furry little assholes, and clearly sadists. It’s always important to remember that a domestic cat would eat you if it could. Although it’d probably play with you for a while first. They’re only tolerating humans until someone invents a tin opener that can be operated by a paw *.
I’m not big on serious roleplaying, but I can imagine having a lot of fun with a top acting in a cat like manner. Plenty of scratching, nuzzling, trampling and swatting. As a bottom getting to be the scratch post, fuzzy ball and the comfy bed would all be fun experiences.
I’m afraid I don’t have any pictures of that style of play, but the subject does give me a chance to share these adorable photographs. Isn’t that one of the cutest pet play couple you’ve ever seen?
These images are from the Pet Play and Pony Girls site. I found them on the Rope Pup tumblr.
I have mixed feelings about enema play. I find the fantasy really hot, but the reality somehow doesn’t click in the same way.
I love the idea of something so invasive, intimate and controlling. There are exciting tubes, clinical looking apparatus and thick probes to be inserted. It hints at mad medical experiments by sadistic doctors, as well as a ‘it’s for your own good’ nurse dynamic. I like artwork featuring them (Augustine is always a reliable source) and fiction that describes them (for example Tyjord).
Unfortunately the reality involves stomach cramps, bowel movements and lots of sphincter clenching. None of these are in my list of top 1000 sexy things. They put me more in mind of food poisoning and nights out that go horribly wrong. There’s nothing worse than being packed shoulder to shoulder in a crowded dive bar when your curry from earlier that evening decides it needs to make a break for it. The effects of an enema remind me all to vividly of painful minutes spent desperately clenching while queuing for a scummy single stall toilet that wasn’t clean at the start of the evening, and certainly hasn’t improved since then.
Now that I’ve disgusted everyone with that particular mental picture, let me try and redeem myself with a hot enema related image. This has all the good stuff and not a clenched sphincter in sight.
I found this on the Wet Beehive tumbr. I’m afraid I couldn’t track down an original attribution, so if anyone knows who this striking looking lady is, feel free to leave a suitable comment.
There have been a number of thoughtful and interesting blog posts popping up recently. Obviously that doesn’t include anything from this particular location, but several posts from my blogroll have caught me eye.
Firstly, Miss Pearl came up with 33 things every submissive man should know. This is territory that a lot of bloggers have covered in the past, but rarely as succinctly and effectively as Miss Pearl has done here. In a similar advisory vein Ferns tackled the tricky issue of ‘How does a sub say no‘. There’s not easy answer to that, but Ferns does a nice job of exploring the complexities of it. HMP and Dymion delivered a rare double header on the subject of ‘Longevity in D/s relationships’. The original post started over HMP’s blog and Dymion followed it up with his thoughts. Both provided some thoughtful commentary. Finally, Kaya wrote about a very emotional and complex scene from her past. It’s not femdom, and her relationship to BDSM is quite different to my own, yet I found the post fascinating.
In other blog news I was happy to see that Constanze Borgia has started updating her site again. She’s been busy helping out an animal charity, and I’m sure she’d be grateful to anyone who contributed.
I’ve also added the ‘Girl on the Net‘ blog to the ‘Sex & Kink Blogs’ section of my blogroll on the right. It’s more sexy fun times rather than BDSM, but I’ve enjoyed reading it. Plus, the eponymous girl is British and some of her phrases and cultural references points make me smile and think of home.
I’ve no idea what picture is suitable for such a wide range of material, so here’s a naked lady with a whip. You can never go too far wrong there.
This image is appropriately entitled Whip, is by the artist RedPandaDee.
This is a continuation of my previous post. If you haven’t read that then I’d suggest doing so if the rest of this is to make any sense at all.
Before I go on, I should make it clear that none of this post should be taken to suggest any blame or fault is directed towards the submissive in the original scene. I can well imagine I’d have done the same things in her situation. The fault lies with the dominant. The priority should be for the community to blacklist him and warn others about his behavior. However, I’m an engineer, and when fallible humans are concerned my instinct is to look for processes that can help. I’m not part of ‘the scene’ and I’m not experienced when it comes to play parties, but I thought I’d throw a few ideas out. Perhaps people with more relevant knowledge can critique them and improve them.
In the last post I drew an analogy between a scene and a computer system. Both can go badly wrong, and when that happens the badness is compounded by the unusual nature of the situation. Continuing that analogy, one approach frequently used to mitigate emergencies is to make the emergency process part of the normal process. For example, you don’t want to have a primary system and a backup system that’s used only when the first fails. The middle of an emergency isn’t the time to try and fire up a rarely used backup system. A better approach is to designate both systems as primary, and flip between them on a regular basis. That makes the standard process the same as the emergency process, which means when your data center catches fire you’re not exploring an entirely new situation.
Applying this approach to a BDSM scene would mean that safewords wouldn’t be the exception, they’d be the rule. I’m not sure how often safewords are used in play parties, but I’m guessing it’s rare. That potentially sets up a situation where using one feels unusual or even ‘wrong’. It makes the critical case the exception case. If instead every single scene had to end with a magic word, said loudly by either the dominant or the submissive, then perhaps that barrier would be significantly lowered. If you’ve heard ‘Red’ shouted a dozen times already in an evening, maybe it feels easier to say when it’s really necessary, even when dealing with a submissive headspace and a fucked up scene.
Another computing idea that seems applicable here is the idea of the heartbeat. This is one of the ways you make an unreliable system reliable. Components send out a regular heartbeat signal to let everyone know they’re OK. If the monitoring systems don’t detect a heartbeat signal they notify someone about the problem and kick off repair procedures. Applying this to a BDSM scene would mean that an external observer would have to get a periodic ‘Green’ from a submissive or the scene would be stopped. That’s obviously not a system to use in every situation, but perhaps could be a default for scenes where the players are unfamiliar with each other. It would be helpful if a submissive suffers a panic attack or is in such a bad place that they’re not able to safeword.
The final computing analogy I want to use is the idea of watchdogs. These are systems that are specifically designed to watch other systems. They’re constantly checking that the right processing is happening and are primed to shutdown anything that appears to be misbehaving. In the BDSM space the equivalent of watchdogs would be dungeon monitors. They key question is what they actually monitor for. Simply looking out for safewords being ignored or legal violations leaves a lot of scope for abuse. Perhaps the default should be that any kind of ‘no’ or negative response from a submissive stops the scene. If you want to do an explicit safeword based scene then that needs to be agreed and confirmed beforehand. Otherwise the assumption should be that anything other than a visibly willing and keen submissive is cause for stepping in and at least temporarily halting things.
It’s kind of depressing that these kind of protocols would be necessary. Abusive assholes will never go away, but you’d hope a community that talks about consent so much would do a better job of identifying them and isolating them. Clearly that’s not currently the case.
I wasn’t sure what image would be suitable for this post. I didn’t want to trivialize the issue by featuring something pseudo-non-consensual. So instead I’ll go in the opposite direction, and feature something cute and life affirming.
I found this on the Fucking Cuddle tumblr.
I just had a really wonderful scene with Lydia. Many needles and much moaning on my part was involved. However, I don’t want to talk about that tonight. Instead I want to talk about a bad scene. A scene with an abusive asshole of a dominant. Specifically, this scene described by Little Dorky Cyclops. I’m not going to try and summarize it, so feel free to go read it if you want the rest of this post to make sense.
I have to admit that a few years ago, when I was not particularly young and still stupid, I would have been sympathetic but bemused by that scene description. I would have been the idiot saying “Why not just safeword? That’s what it’s for.” Now that I’m definitely older and possibly wiser, I get it. I don’t play in public and I’ve been lucky enough to encounter very few bad dominants. I’ve only really had one session go seriously sour on me (described here and here), but I still completely understand LDC’s reaction in the scene. It’s tough to switch gears and take control back from a dominant. You’re fighting the natural dynamic of the scene and a desire to do your bit to make it work. It’s always tempting to think it’ll get better, that that you just need to hang on till the endorphins kick in. It’s easy to safeword on cramping or going numb, but this scene was a far more complex dynamic, with social pressure added into the mix as well.
Obviously the dominant here – Jefferson is his fetlife handle (aged 50, in NYC) – behaved abusively and there are serious questions the people who attended the event should be asking themselves. Hopefully making this public reduces his chances of going to other events and repeating the process, although given he’s done it before I’m not optimistic. From a submissive (and possibly selfish) perspective it makes me wonder what I can do to avoid getting caught in a similar situation. Even assuming the BDSM community can do a better job of policing itself (big assumption), bad dominants will continue to be a fact of life. So what are good self-defense techniques for a submissive to practice?
In a weird way this problem puts me in mind of a common problem in computer systems, namely handling backup and recovery when disaster strikes. I know that sounds like a bizarre connection, but stick with me on this. The problem computer users often have isn’t defining the recovery process or setting up the emergency systems, it’s making sure they work when needed. They’re hard to test properly and are rarely used. Unfortunately when you need them, you need them to work flawlessly, the first time of asking and in the most difficult circumstances. That’s a really bad combination. Typically people find out their recovery system isn’t working the first time they try and use it.
I wonder if submissives face a similar problem? They have a theoretical mechanism for safety, but the only time they use it is when they’re already in a bad situation. That’s exactly when you want to fall back to a frequently used and easily deployed mechanism, not step further into the unknown.
I’ll continue this post tomorrow with a few more thoughts. Feel free to leave comments until then. I’ll finish with what seems like an appropriate image. Thanks to Little Dorky Cyclops we’ve found out about some of that lurking evil in one particular man.
This image is by the artist Ybar. I found it on the Velvet Underground tumblr.
I was planning to write a serious and substantive post today. But the lateness of the hour and earliness of my meetings tomorrow has caught up with me. So instead, he’s a picture of a couple wrestling. That’s normally a euphemism for having sex, but in this case I think they really are grappling. My money’s on the lady. She might be fighting above her weight division, but she seems to have a good grip on the situation. If I were him I’d be thinking of crying uncle before her smile gets any wider and her grip any tighter.
For all you fight fans out there, I believe this is originally from the Dirty Wrestling Pit site. I found it on the Girls Rule, Subs Drool tumblr.
I found these images via this Eros Blog post, which led me to this article and finally to the gallery page of the artist Emily Rangel. These kind of parodies always work best when they have a natural fit with the characters conventional personalities, and I think the artist chose wisely here. It’s easy to picture Miss Piggy as a top, and they’d make for a well matched D/s couple. Or should that be P/f couple?
The article claims these sculptures will ‘haunt your dreams’. That doesn’t worry me at all. I have weirder dreams than this all the time. My problem is that since I first saw these, several hours ago now, I’ve had that damn Mahna Mahna muppets song stuck in my head (original version here). All together now: Do doo be-do-do, Mahna Mahna, Do do-do do, Mahna Mahna, Do doo de-do-do de-do-do de-do-do de-do-do-doodle do do do-doo do!
I always find it strange the way unusual talents, interests and kinks are treated so differently. An odd talent, say the ability to play the bagpipes or cultivate bonsai, make someone quirky and interesting. People might consider you eccentric if you spend hours restoring antique typewriters or learning to bind books, but only in a friendly and harmless way. Yet admit to rare fetishes, perhaps sploshing with custard pies, or pretending to be a dog, and suddenly we’re into weird and strange territory. We’ve redrawn the lines of sexual acceptability over the years. Things like bondage or anal sex have become conventional if not common, yet we’ve not yet got away from that judgmental attitude for less common sexual interests.
Personally I think that’s a great pity. I love learning about new kinks, even if they do nothing for me sexually. For example, I find balloon fetishes fascinating. Apparently, according to this very informative site, they’re known as looners and come in two varieties, the self-explanatory poppers and non-poppers. There are even semi-poppers, who I guess would be the switches of the balloon fetish world. I think it’s great that something so fun and cheerful as a balloon can also be sexual exciting to people.
The image below could be catering to a number of kinky interests – S&M, CFNM, humiliation, etc. In my heart I’m really hoping she’s a popper and he’s a non-popper. Then they’d be simultaneously combining two different type of balloon fetish into a tortuous D/s and S&M scene. That’d be some advanced grade, Ph.D level kinkyness right there.
This image was originally from the Young Dommes UK site. Unfortunately, as this tweet makes clear, the site closed when the owner didn’t want to deal with UK regulation. Nice to see my home country heading backwards towards the 1950’s.
On the face of it this image follows the standard format for foot fetish porn. There are high heels, a naked slave and feet being shoved in his face. Yet, it’s so much more interesting than that overworked fetish shot. There’s a really sense of danger and vulnerability about it. I love his bared throat and the dimple she’s creating in it with that sharp spiked heel. He doesn’t look like he’s lost in his own fetish fantasy, he looks like he’s submitting himself to hers.
This is Thrash and Mistress Trish as photographed by Aeric Meredith-Goujon photography. She’s a pro-domme and sexuality educator based in NYC. I’ve featured this same pair in a previous post. Mistress Trish has some of the most interesting and creative images that I’ve seen from any pro-domme, and her site is well worth exploring.
