The reality of the fantasy

I used to worry that getting involved in real BDSM – the physical, sweaty, dear God don’t put that in my….oooohhh! – kind, would spoil the fantasy. I enjoyed my rich and somewhat warped fantasy life, and didn’t want to discover that everything my fevered imagination created was really about as much fun as getting hit by a flying brick, and then discovering there’s a courts summons wrapped around it.

Fortunately the reality turned out to be a lot better than the fantasy and actually gave my internal porn producer a whole new set of scripts to work with. However, just now and again I find myself over analyzing an image that catches my eye. For example, I like this shot from the TopGrl site a lot. It’s got elements of bondage, objectification and worship all rolled in together. But now I’ve done suspension scenes I can’t help thinking about how comfortable (or not) the rope harness might be. How long it took to set-up the shot and get all the knots right. How much the submissives neck might ache. It doesn’t spoil the shots for me, but occasionally it does make me second guess them.

All that said, my imagination still keeps itself pretty busy. In this case it’s picturing a second domme at the other end with a cane. Cunnilingus mixed with screams of pain sounds like a wonderful combination.

Suspension I found this on the blouxsterville tumblr.

Music to float by

I love the moments as I drive back from a session. I almost always play late, so it’s often near midnight when I’m returning home. The city is lit-up with the neon of bars and the strings of streetlights. I’m floating along in my little cocoon of endorphins and adrenalin, wrapped in leather and metal, enjoying each blip of power as I navigate the corridor of signals and lights. I’ll often drive further than I have to, extending my route to sustain the moment. There’s a thrill to looking out at other people, silently enjoying themselves behind the windows of bars and restaurants. A sense of shared pleasure and also my secret pleasure.

I always play something on the stereo during these drives, and it’s always something very approachable. I don’t want difficult, complex or challenging. Emotional, simple and perhaps a touch cliched works just fine. My current favorite is U2’s With or Without You. It’s got a very hooky bass line, great guitar parts and lyrics which are actually pretty appropriate in places.

My hands are tied, my body bruised
She got me with nothing to win
And nothing else to lose

It works wonderfully when I’m drifting along feeling emotional and buzzed after a session.

Picking an image for this post was a little tricky. I considered going with this, which is appropriate in the use of the car, but a crash doesn’t exactly capture the mood I’m tying to portray. So instead I’ll take my cue from the U2 lyric. His hands are tied, and if he’s not bruised yet, it may well be in his future.

Women sitting on man handcuffed to bedI found both images on the excellent Femdom Style Counsel tumblr.

Guess the fetish

I’m intrigued by this shot, mainly because I’ve absolutely no idea what’s going on. He’s acting like a towel rail, yet staring up as if he’s just spotted a large insect scuttling across the ceiling in his direction. She looks like she wants to give him more laundry to hold, yet I can’t see the impromptu towel rail taking that extra load and he’s making no effort to reach out. Is it forniphilia? CFNM? Domestic service? Art? A reverse image search led me to this blog post, which left me none the wiser (partly because the utterly retarded Google translation service can’t deal with Google’s own adult warning page on blogspot). I kind of like the image just for its strangeness alone.

Guess the fetishI originally came across it on the Femdom Core tumblr.

Fashion, Sardax style

I don’t normally post Sardax artwork. Not because I don’t love it, he’s without doubt my favorite femdom artist, but because he earns a living via his paysite. It’s one thing to share a single photograph from a commercial site. They typically make money from videos and any one scene will have dozens of photographs clicked off. It’s quite another to freely share a single piece of artwork that the artist spent hours slaving over.

The Sardax images below are a little different. They were done in collaboration with Afira, a British based contemporary women’s clothing brand. As the designer herself explains in an interview…

I have known and admired Sardax’s work for a long time. Then one evening I found myself sitting next to him at a dinner party! We hit it off immediately, became friends and creative collaboration soon followed.
….
I hope my customers will see images of women experimenting with, enjoying and flaunting their sexual power. I can only imagine Sardax’s fans will see the same, but perhaps from the very particular perspective of men who adore that power in women.

My first thought was: Why don’t I get invited to those kind of dinner parties? My typical dinner party experience is someone explaining how new types of switch routers will change the design of data center network fabrics. I need less geeks and more femdom illustrators to split a bottle of Cabernet with. My second thought was around how brilliant it was to see this kind of crossover. It’s not a freakshow collaboration. The kind where a mainstream brand gets some free publicity by doing some ‘shocking’ S&M images and briefly flirting with controversy. Instead it seems to be the case where artists in two different but related fields saw a chance to work together. The end result is some great art and a message of normality* and acceptance for femdom. That can only be a good thing.

The Dripping Heel by Sardax
Blue Dress by Sardax
You can see the rest of the images at the Afira site under the Dark Daze collection.

* OK, so the images don’t depict anything close to normal. But neither does a lot of advertising. I mean that it’s normal in the same sense that a brand might choose a sports star or a music start to cast a positive light on their products. It’s halo style advertising, which is very unusual in a BDSM context.

Blogpocalypse

I’m beginning to wonder if my blogroll is going to need some major revisions come July 20th this year. That’s the release date for the new Batman movie – The Dark Knight Rises. This film features a powerful double whammy, in the form of catwoman as played by Anne Hathaway. I know from past posts that there a lot of catwoman fans out there (HMP and lovetosubmit, I’m looking at you) and Anne Hathaway fans aren’t exactly thin on the ground (calling Servitor). I therefore fear that this deadly combination will just be too much for some of my submissive fellow travelers, a peak of perfection that will leave them drained, apathetic and with no reason to keep blogging. We’ll just be left with a lot of puzzled female bloggers wondering what the hell happened and where everyone went.

In an effort to lessen the shock and acclimatize everyone ahead of time, here’s an intriguing new poster from the movie (full resolution version here). I kind of like it. And by ‘kind of like’ I mean ‘Dear God, would you look at that.’ I only hope the movie itself is a little tauter than the previous one. I enjoyed it, but I think it would have benefited from more aggressive editing and a shorter running time.

Dark Knight Rises - Catwoman Poster

Popping my cherry

A recent post by Underling posed what I thought was an interesting question for submissives. He was writing about spanking, and in particular that first experience…

…do you remember your first time? What prompted that initial collision of palm and derriere? Was it spontaneous, planned, paid for? Was it all you’d dreamed of and more, or were you left wondering what all the fuss was about?

He follows the question with a nice story describing his own first time, featuring a slightly surreal but ultimately satisfying session with a nice professional dominant lady.

My first adult spanking was also in a professional session, but it was oddly late in my kinky career. During my first few months of BDSM ‘for real’ (as opposed to in my fevered imagination), I did a pretty good impression of a kid in a candy store (apologies for the clashing mental image). I wanted to try everything. Ropes, whips, canes, needles, nipple clamps, gags, cuffs, pegs. You name it, I wanted it attached, inserted or applied at speed. Yet oddly I never got around to a traditional over the knee spanking. Somehow it seemed a little old fashioned.

I ended up having my first spanking almost accidentally. We’d been trying to do a suspension scene, and it just hadn’t worked out. I was having some joint issues, we couldn’t get the balance right, the rope harness was too tight, Libra was on the cusp of Capricorn, the BDSM gods were grumpy, etc. Normally a suspension will take a full session, so when it didn’t pan out we suddenly had extra playtime, and Lydia decided that a spanking was the right way to fill it. So like Underling my first time had a touch of the surreal, but in my case it was because it caught me so unawares. My thought process ran along the lines of “This is weird. Why am I getting over her knee? How is this going to work? It’s almost like…ohhh…we’re spanking! That’s kind of fun!”

Since then I’ve done it a number of times and always enjoyed it. I don’t get the rush from it that I think true spanking aficionados experience, but I like the close physical contact and the intimacy of it. Whipping and caning can be quite isolating. The pain makes me turn inwards and focus on my body. But a spanking is definitely a shared experience.

After The Spanking by UnderlingImage is by Underling from his site Underling’s Humblings.

Site Updates

I’ve done a little site maintenance work. Hopefully there will be at least a few links of interest here for people.

To the Femdom Image page I’ve added:

To the BDSM Equipment page I’ve added:

Finally, to blogroll on the right and to the Blogs page I’ve added:

The image below is of Mistress Eleise de Lacy, whose blog has been added to the pro-domme section of my blogroll. It’s by the artist Ariel Belle and was featured in Sinical magazine. I’m a sucker for vintage re-creations that play with time, fashion and cultural eras as this shot does. Alternatively, if you prefer a more modern look, I was also tempted to feature this image and this image. I can’t imagine there are too many submissive guys who wouldn’t appreciate that pair of images. Feel free to browse in the direction of the Femme Fatale Films site if you’d like to see more.

Mistress Eleise de Lacy - Femme Fatale

When a session goes bad (part 2)

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post where I described my one, and so far only, really bad pro-domme session. I left off at the point where I was naked, fastened to an X-frame and trying to reason with an angry and somewhat irrational pro-domme. For emotional masochists this might represent an interesting predicament, but for me it had all the appeal of violent stomach cramps. While stuck in an elevator. With a deranged hobo.

She had continued to complain and moan while I shook some life back into my tingling fingers. When I was done she cuffed my hands back above my head, and asked what I thought was the scariest corporal punishment implement. That struck me as an odd question. All of them can be pretty fearsome if applied with enough force, but scary isn’t a word I associate with inanimate objects. In the end I picked the cane as having the greatest potential for mayhem. She proceeded to give me a heavy beating with one while angrily criticizing my attitude and its effect on ‘her’ session. It wasn’t by any means the severest caning I’ve had, but it was the most unpleasant. I associate negative emotions like anger or frustration with a lack of self-control, a weakness that has nothing to do with dominance. It felt like she was using the beating to deal with her temper and irrational response, not because she’d made a conscious decision that it was the right thing for our session dynamic.

I realize that some of you are probably reading this and wondering what the big deal is. After all, aren’t I there to be dominated? Isn’t being beaten to satisfy her part of the package? For some submissives this may be true, but personally I only enjoy playing in a mutually positive way. I get off on the domme’s pleasure in hurting and controlling me. Insults or humiliation push me straight out of submissive mode and straight into ‘Who the hell do you think you are?” mode. I want to feel that the domme and I are working as partners to create something together. My submission is a gift within that context.

After the caning the session shifted back into a more normal, if slightly strained, atmosphere. I didn’t bring the issue up when we’d finished and were making smalltalk, because I still hadn’t processed it properly. I had a lot of adrenalin and endorphins swirling around, and emotionally I wasn’t really sure where I was. It took me some days to get my head around it, and during that time I felt horrible. Normally a session leaves me on a big high, and I then have a mild sense of well-being that lasts for days. I never get the post-session crash that some people experience. In this case all those usual positive feelings soured on me, and I had a low grade depression for over a week. I’d even get a little tearful when I’d think about the scene. It was a really strong and quite strange reaction.

On a more positive note, it was at least a learning experience. For anyone out there who might themselves in a similar situation, here’s what I ended up taking away from it:

  1. When the dynamic goes bad in a session, stop and step away from it. It’s easy to say but hard to do, particularly if you’ve been eagerly anticipating the play. At the time I didn’t really consider it as an option. Next time (which is hopefully never) I will make that alternative available.
  2. If you need to step back, then make a very conscious effort to switch headspaces.  It’s tough to go from D/s back to a more normal power balance. Typically this is a gradual process at the end of a session, so it takes a real effort to change gears quickly mid-session. I suspect getting a glass of water and sitting down away from the play space would help this process.
  3. When playing with someone new pay attention to how they deal with setbacks and plans not unfolding perfectly. Reacting emotionally and irrationally is rarely a positive sign. A good domme treats these issues as interesting problems to be solved. A great domme can anticipate them and adjust before they even become an issue.
  4. If the worst happens and a session does go bad, expect and plan for a significant emotional reaction that can last for days or even weeks. All those powerful emotion amplifying effects can turn and bite you when the wrong dynamic enter the mix.

I’ll also re-emphasize what I said in my previous post – this session was an aberration. I’ve sessioned a lot over the last few years with several different dommes, and only once had this kind of problem. If you’re thinking of moving from the fantasy to the reality of BDSM, please don’t let this post stop you.  Alternatively, for those already playing, then I found this post and this followup by Clarisse Thorn had interesting suggestions for dealing with S&M play gone wrong. Her comments are more focused around non-professional relationships, where the option to simply stop seeing someone (as I did) isn’t the default.

For an illustrative image I though I’d go with something that looked like an aftercare situation. This beautiful shot is by the photographer Jan Durina.

Woman hugging man with red striped back

 

When a session goes bad (part 1)

My experience of playing with pro-dommes has been an overwhelmingly positive one. I’ve had many great sessions, and I’ve documented a few of them on this blog. In all the time I’ve been playing I’ve only had one really bad session. While that session was clearly an aberration, it struck me that it’s probably worth writing about. After all it’s easy to find lots of posts eulogizing great dommes and amazing sessions. It’s much harder to find discussion on the effect of play that turns sour. Looking back at the session the physical interaction itself doesn’t seem particularly significant, but what was interesting was the way it left me feeling for days afterwards.

I should start by saying that this session wasn’t with anyone I’ve named here in the past. Dommes like Lydia and Yuki have been unfailingly enjoyable to play with and I’d never hesitate to recommend them. The domme in question here will remain unnamed, as she’s still active and I don’t particularly want to get into a back and forth with her or any of her fans.

We’d played together a couple of times previously and I’d enjoyed those sessions, but I had been a little surprised at her reactions when things hadn’t gone as planned. In my experience a good domme is always able to adapt and modify the flow of a scene based on the feedback she gets. She’s always in control, but that doesn’t mean everything has to happen exactly as she originally envisioned. This particular domme seemed to become frustrated and react with a touch of anger when things didn’t work out. That struck me as a bad sign. Being in control of the scene means being in control of yourself as well as the submissive.

The unpleasantness started about an hour or so into our third session. She had me spread on an X-frame and had spent 20 or so minutes working me over with various floggers and paddles. At a natural break, while she switched implements, she asked how I was doing. My fingers were going numb thanks to the overhead position and tight leather wrist cuffs, and I mentioned this fact. This was apparently a mistake. I’m not sure what feedback she was looking for, but this clearly wasn’t it, as she got rather vexed. I actually hadn’t asked to stop, but she did stop and unhooked my hands in an angry fashion.

What followed was a quite surreal conversation/argument. I was naked and still shackled to the X-frame by my feet, but with my hands free so I could work the feeling into them. She was sulking in a chair across the room complaining how I was wasting her time. Apparently I shouldn’t be doing such long sessions (we were scheduled for 3 hours) if I couldn’t take it. This struck me as ludicrous. The length of overall session was irrelevant to this particular issue, and if anyone was missing out on active play time it was me. She also tried to make some bizarre point that if this was lifestyle play I wouldn’t be getting the option to stop. That didn’t seem a particularly convincing line of reasoning.

I’m normally not someone to let a stupid statement slide without comment. When my friends describe me the expression “Doesn’t tolerate fools gladly” is often in there somewhere. The problem was that just seconds before we’d been in a D/s mode, which made for a very confusing dynamic. I wanted to talk through the situation, but still had a submissive mindset. The intellectual bit of my brain was saying “Fuck this. She’s out of line.” where the emotional part was saying “She’s in charge. Don’t argue.” Suddenly all the tools of dominance that I enjoyed seemed to conspire against me. Being naked, bound and vulnerable is normally wonderful, but when the energy turned bad it made it hard to be assertive and take back my submission.

In hindsight I should have simply stopped the session at this point. I never want to play in an angry negative context. However, at the time it never occurred to me to try and stop. I was too busy trying to deal with my conflicting instincts of arguing versus submitting. The end result was a confused discussion that only made her more stroppy.

…To be continued in part 2…

Picking a picture for this post wasn’t easy. People typically don’t post pictures of bad sessions. Instead I’ve gone with a shot of some play from Men are Slaves that features both corporal and a cuffed X-position. I’m sure the participants below are having a lot more fun than I ended up having.

Whipping from Men are Slaves
Whipping from Men are Slaves
Whipping from Men are Slaves