Great evening. Great artwork.

Tonight was a happy resumption of a long running tradition – my sessions with Lydia. Thanks to adjacent travel schedules it has been a month or so since we last got together. It was a very pleasurable (in a painful way) evening. Many clamps, clips and canes were deployed, resulting in much moaning and growling.

The image below isn’t really related to the session, other than both feature beautiful red heads. But right now I just want to relax and enjoy my endorphins rather than write posts. So if you’ll excuse me I have a date with my couch and a fine cocktail originally invented for a Mr. Ernest Hemingway.

Red headed mistress with her submissive

This great image was created by the artist i-have-a-hunger. I found it via Yumine Guo’s Storyland tumblr.

Real Sex

The Vulture site is carrying an interesting article on the old HBO show Real Sex. I was amazed to discover it first aired back in 1990 and ran for almost 20 years. I didn’t encounter it until I moved to the States in 2001 and, based on the frank manner it addressed sex, had always assumed it was of a fairly recent vintage.

It was by no means a great show. Although the article claims they aimed to be sincere and to laugh ‘with’ and not ‘at’ the people involved, I always detected an undercurrent of cynicism. Beneath the veneer of education and illumination there were clearly elements of titillation (ok with me) and mockery (not so good). However, all that said, I think it still was a net positive in helping people talk more frankly about their sexual interests. For example, this post from D. Hubby directly references the effect an episode on spanking had on his life.

One particular part of the interview that caught me eye was this quote…

It was always a challenge for us to find good-looking people. It’s certainly true of nudists, but a lot of people doing weird sex stuff are not necessarily young and attractive.
Katie Smalheer, associate/coordinating/supervising producer, 1996–2005

I think that’s a very telling comment. It could be taken to mean that people doing ‘weird sex stuff’ are unusually unattractive.The reality is that this media filtered view of the world is incredibly biased. Visual attractiveness is a valued commodity, particularly when nakedness is involved. Almost all commercial visual media picks from a tiny pool of conventionally attractive people. People into ‘weird sex stuff’ are simply a normal cross-section of the populace, and that clashes with the narrow selection criteria we normally expect for naked people on film. Our perception of what is acceptable or normal is horribly skewed.

I don’t have a particularly great image to use for this post, so I’ll finish with the kind of scene that I’m sure Real Sex would have loved to feature. That Miss Eve from the Young Dommes site.

Miss Eve

Signs of getting older

I’m not talking about signs of getting old you understand. Just older. While I’m still in still in the prime of my life (stop sniggering at the back), there is the occasional indication that I’m not as young as I used to be. Hangovers that still haven’t dissipated by 11am. A tendency to think that athletes look much younger than they used to. And media kerfuffles over artists and art that I’ve never heard of.

The latest example of that final category is somebody called Robin Thicke. He apparently has a hit song called Blurred Lines (warning very non femdom content), that has been attracting criticism for its rape-y lyrics. It’s a point of view that’s hard to argue with once you listen to it.

The reason I mention it here at all is this pastiche by the Seattle troupe Mod Carousel. I ran across this a couple of days ago, at a time when I’d never heard of the original. The funny thing was, even though I had no idea what it was based on, I instantly recognized this as a parody and knew exactly what the original version would look like. The cultural markers and gender stereotypes are so strong that the parody works with or without the original. And while I like the alternative version a lot, that’s a pretty sad indictment of both the original and the culture around it.

The CFNM style of the parody gives me a good excuse to finish with a CFNM image. I’m really not sure what’s going on here, but like the video, this image made me smile. The two expressions couldn’t be more different.

CFNM

I found the image on the CFNM classic tumblr. I’m afraid I couldn’t track down an original source.

QOTD

Given the length of the last few posts, I’ll keep this one short and pithy. The quote of the day is:

Anyone who thinks a woman who’s being paid to cane and sodomize people is vulnerable and exploited? Has never caned and sodomized anyone.

That’s from the twitter feed of Mistress Matisse. Feel free to discuss that amongst yourselves.

I was hoping to finish with an image featuring both a cane and a strap-on. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything I liked, so I’ll double down with an image for each. In both cases the ladies in question seem to be tending less to the exploited and more to the happy.

A smile and a cane
A smile and sodomy

The first image has had the watermark annoyingly chopped, but I believe it’s from Young Dommes. I found it on the Who’s Sorry Now tumblr. The second image is from the Strapon Dreamer site. I found it on the Pegging with a Smile tumblr.

Annoyingly complicated humans

One of the problems when writing about the origin of kinky preferences is the tendency to treat the personal as the universal. It’s human nature to assume individual experiences are widely shared, or even that they are the default experience. That’s particularly problematic with something as complex and multifaceted as kink is.

An interesting comment from Budman reminded me that not everyone traces their preferences back to early childhood. He feels that his triggers came from early adolescence. That’s something I’ve seen reported by others. I’ve also seen posts from people who came to kink even later, years into their adulthood. It was something that they grew into, not an itch that was always lurking under the surface of their sexuality. Humans are annoyingly complicated.

For me however, my kinky nature was in place long before adolescence. How else can I explain me and Penelope Pitstop? As I’ve posted in the past, I loved watching this show as a child. There was something especially tingly about watching Penelope be tied up and placed in peril. Like the magic act I talked about yesterday, it wasn’t a formative experience. There was no traumatic or exciting event that got associated with cartoon bondage. I just loved the idea of control and how it could be taken away. Reaching adolescence just slotted the next piece of the jigsaw in place for me.

I think the fact that people come to different kinks, in so many different ways, and at so many different times, emphasizes the problem in trying to associate particular interests with only single formative events. After all, how many people experienced similar events, and didn’t become kinky? We never hear from the guy who was dressed up as a girl by his sisters, and didn’t become a cross-dresser. Perhaps there’s an underlying predisposition in just a fraction of the population to having a flexible sexuality. One that casts a wider net for stimulus. Some people are always aware of it, some access it via childhood events, some as their sexuality emerges in adolescence, and some discover it via experimentation in later life.

Having mentioned Penelope Pitstop, it seems fitting to close with this image. It has similar feel, with an extravagantly costumed villain, and a helpless well bound victim. Fortunately for the purposes of this blog, it’s a rare reversal of the damsel in distress trope. It’s entitled Fred Stolen by a Villainess and is by the artist Barry960.

'Fred stolen by a villainess' by Barry960

And that’s magic!

Can you trace the origin of your kinks or fetishes? Assuming that you have any. Although if you don’t, you’ve chosen a really odd site to browse.

The NY Magazine article discussed in yesterday’s post on the origins of people’s kinks, talked a lot about triggers and formative events. Things from childhood that could be directly linked to a later sexual preference. It would seem that some fraction of kinky people have very clear triggers, some can point to a range of influences but no single thing, and others have absolutely nothing in childhood to point at. In the comments to the post Miss Margo mentioned that a lot of her clients can identify triggers, while Vista represented the kinky person without that genesis moment.

Personally I’m in the same camp as Vista. I don’t have anything I can point to that twisted me kinky. However, I can very clearly identify the moment when I first showed interest in a kinky thing. Cue a wibbly wobbly screen and swirly special effects as I take you back thirty (ahem) or so years to a much younger paltego…

I grew up in a tiny village. It was basically two streets, one shop, a village hall and (since this is England we’re talking about) two pubs. This was a time when the internet was still the arpanet and British television consisted of 3 channels. Any kind of organized live entertainment was therefore a big deal. There was the occasional village fête, a Christmas carol concert, an agricultural show, etc.  Then one year, when I was around 5 or 6 years old, somebody organized a variety show in the village hall. I can’t remember most of it. It was probably the usual amateur song and dance acts with a bad comedian thrown in for good measure. But there was also a magic act. And that act has stayed with me to this day. It was very traditional. Card tricks. Linking rings. Endless streams of colorful handkerchiefs. And a woman in a sparkly costume getting sawn in half (actually the Zig Zag Girl trick). It was this final trick that particularly transfixed me. I can still remember my excitement as she climbed into the box and the magician tied things around her wrists and ankles. She was constrained, in peril, sacrificial and yet willing. He took away her control, yet she seemed to enjoy it.

From that moment on I always kept an eye out for magic acts and escapologists on television. There was something I found very enticing about the ropes, chains, padlocks and perilous situations that featured in their acts. But it wasn’t till I hit puberty, and discovered the idea of bondage (via my parents copy of The Joy Of Sex), that I had my ‘Aha!’ moment. I certainly don’t think the magic act I saw as a child was formative. The wiring was already in place, because it excited me in a strange way the instant I saw it. The discovery of kink just helped me to understand why I’d found that particular act in an otherwise long forgotten village show so compelling.

Femdom Magic Trick captioned by Servitor

It was surprisingly hard to find a magic themed femdom shot. A lot of the equipment for elaborate magic tricks looks awfully similar to the contents of most dungeons, yet there seems to be very little direct cross-over. In the end I turned to the prolific Servitor and this amusingly captioned picture. The ‘magician’ in question here is the lovely Lexi Sindel.

Nature / Nurture / Whatever

The New York Magazine has an article on the well worn subject of nature versus nurture in the context of fetish and kink. It’s a discursive piece, heavy on anecdotes and light on hard data. It comes down firmly on the side of nurture, although it also admits there’s no simple way to divide up such a complex set of influences and interests.

Personally I wonder if, outside of scientific curiosity, the debate is even one worth having. Unless they identify a very clear genetic cause, which seems unlikely given the current research, the discussion isn’t going to result in anything actionable. Nobody is going to be able to come up with a set of guidelines for bringing up a child with “normal” sexual interests. The cause and effect is far too complex and unique for each individual.

It also seems odd that people are so interested in tracking down the basis for kinky sexual preferences, but seem happy to accept all the other preferences people exhibit without question. If somebody says they don’t like carrots, nobody starts wondering if they had a traumatic experience as a child while watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Wine lovers don’t feel the need to tie their interest back to early experiences with a sippy cup and purple grape drink. Even in the sexual and relationship realm we let vanilla preferences slide without comment. A serial dater of blonde women just has a ‘type’. Nobody wonders if it’s because he watched one too many Marilyn Monroe movies while sitting on his mother’s knee. Yet say he likes dominant blonde women, and suddenly there’s an urge to wheel out old Sigmund to try and figure out why the hell he’s so damn weird.

Given this posts focus on the development of sexual preferences, it seems appropriate to finish with this image – ‘School of Bondage’ by zblabla. The classroom can certainly be a powerful influence on sexual development, but it’s not typically this overt.

'School of Bondage' by zblabla

Nipple torment and good hair

I’m safely back in Seattle after an interesting few days in Vancouver. While I was there I was lucky enough to meet up with Mistress Eleise de Lacy. We had a few scheduling issues that cut into our time together, but the session time we did have was highly enjoyable. In a painful ass beating, cocking piercing, type of way. You know – all the good ways.

A close-up photograph of the piercing part of the session did feature on Mistress Eleise’s twitter feed. However, I’d rather not drive all my readers away with a cock piercing shot right on the front page, so I’ll reach back into her twitter archive and pull out an older and slightly less explicit image. Here’s something she entitled ‘Heavy nipple torment meets good hair day. Happy all round’. That seems to capture the moment pretty well.

Mistress Eleise de Lacy

Mistress Eleise has feature on this blog in previous posts (here, here and here). Her site Femme Fatale Films is a most excellent source of femdom erotica. Her professional site for arranging personal sessions is here.

I hate balls!

Not me personally. I quite like my balls. They get in the way now and again, but I’ve no personal desire to be neutered. The hatred in this case comes from Katherine Heigl. As she explains in this very amusing video, they’re dangly and disgusting and males are better off without them. I suspect the little sad look she gives at around the 50 second mark, when discussing the difficulty of neutering men, will be fantasy fodder for a decent fraction of my male readers.

Of course neutering does have its downsides. For one thing it removes a bunch of densely packed and sensitive nerves that are ideal for torture. For another, the fiendish humbler device, as shown in the image below, becomes sadly redundant.

Ball Punishment with a Humbler

This image has been manipulated (in the usual tumblr fashion) but I believe it’s originally from Amber’s Dungeon. I found it on the Under My Heel tumblr.