More Manipulation

After a fun weekend in Vegas I’m heading for home. I once again visited the city of sin and didn’t do any sinning. Must be getting old. I did go and see the U2 show at the Sphere which was pretty amazing. I think it’s a space that’s going to set a new standard for concert venues.

For the image in today’s post I’m continuing  the theme of photoshop and image manipulation. I’m not sure of the original image source (it shows up in a bunch of equestrian themed pinterests) but I think the man has been added after the fact. I sourced this version via the Brutal Women tumblr.

 

Guido Crepax

This artwork is by the Italian artist Guido Crepax. Based on this tweet it’s circa 1980. Searching through past posts, I’m kind of surprised to discover I’ve not featured his art before. He was a significant creator of erotic art through the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, with the character Valentina being his most famous creation. While he wasn’t a femdom illustrator, kink is a common theme in his work. The Lambiek Comiclopedia has a good article on him if you’re interested to learn more.

Happy Holidays

If you celebrate Christmas then I hope you’re having (or had) a good one and Santa brought you something you wanted. If you don’t, then I hope all the festive nonsense going on (including this post) hasn’t been too annoying. Personally I shall be enjoying some quiet time cooking and reading with very limited social interaction.

The festive drawing below is by the most excellent femdom and fetish artist Ald. You can purchase art from them via their Etsy site. They also take commissions.

Bound and Bagged

I’m still fighting off the effects of the seasonal virus I managed to acquire as a special Christmas gift to myself. So I’ll stick to posting hot kinky eye candy to keep things ticking over here while I recover.

This is Mistress Inka with her bound and bagged slave. It’s a very sexy and sensual shot, with a lovely mix of textures. I sourced it via Twitter and you can see more shots from the same scene here and here.

Mistress Inka is an Edinburgh based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here and her Twitter feed here.

Power Broker

Talking of Mistress Iris (as I just was) she has apparently been listed on NY Magazine’s list of The Most Powerful New Yorkers You’ve Never Heard Of (scroll to the end). I say ‘apparently’ because it doesn’t provide a photograph or a link and Mistress Iris isn’t traditionally associated with NYC. She was originally LA based and now seems to mainly be in Europe (with regular trips to Tokyo, London, NYC, LA, etc.). However, I can’t think of another Mistress Iris who’d have the profile to be in this article and also considered as an NYC local. Although based on the title on the list, I guess not having heard of her would be kind of the point.

Wonderful though Mistress Iris is, it seems a shame they didn’t pick an equally high profile domme who has a stronger claim to NYC residency. After all, there is no shortage of them. It’s one of the great cities for kink. Off the top of my head I can think of Troy Orleans, Mistress Tess, Lucy Sweetkill, Mistress Blunt, Lady Harper Chase, Mistrix Sade and many, many more.

Here’s an image courtesy of Mistress Tess who has an amazing NYC studio space. Curse Covid for ruining my chance to enjoy a lengthy session in it earlier this year.

Making Music

Here’s an unusual type of forniphilia I’ve never seen before – a submissive as a music stand. While most forniphilia looks less practical than the inanimate equivalent, this one actually seems like it might work better. They can both hold and turn the pages as needed.

The photograph comes courtesy of NYCs Lady Harper Chase. I’m sure she’s a very accomplished musician,  but it does strike me that for a devious and less musically talented dominant there’s a great opportunity for unexpected torture here. Get your human music stand all rigged up in place, then pull out an instrument you’ve never played before and try to learn it using the most basic beginner tunes. I’d imagine an hour of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ on a badly played violin would be enough to get most submissives reaching for their safeword.

Original source for the image is via this tweet, photographed by photopupnyc. Lady Harper Chase is a NYC based pro-domme and you can find her professional site here.

House Boss

According to a study from China, attractive women wield more power in their households. Basically as their perceived attractiveness increased, so did the likelihood that they were the major decision maker.

It’s not too surprising a result. Repeated studies have shown that attractive people are generally treated better. Beauty helps if you’re trying to get a job or trying to get away with crime. It’s therefore not unreasonable that it’d also help you gain power in a household.

What I found interesting was this line at the end of the article.

It is also possible that interviewers saw wealthier women and those with more self-esteem as more beautiful.

The attractiveness rating was assigned by interviewers, so was obviously subjective. It might be the case that attractive people get more freedom to make decisions. But it also might be true that more forceful and dominant women are seen as more beautiful. What’s cause and what’s effect? Are bossy women perceived as more beautiful or do beautiful women get more opportunity to be bossy?

I’m not sure who this is or where the shot is from, but she certainly seems like someone who might be in charge of things. Or if not yet, soon will be.

The Hits Keep on Coming

Last week Germany’s Studio Avalon announced it was closing after nearly 23 years. I’ve featured the space in past posts and visiting it was high on my kinky bucket list. Sadly for me and kinksters all over the world, it seems our opportunity has gone.

This week it’s the turn of NYC’s Parthenon. Queen Ariana Chevalier has announced that it’ll be closing at the end of the year. It has been a fixture of the BDSM scene in NYC for 17 years. I think the comments on the twitter thread and posts like this one from Vinyl Queen testify how widely used and appreciated the space was. I played their just once, visiting last year with Empress Wu, and would have loved to return.

I covered a fundraiser back in June for the Parthenon. Given its location in Manhattan, home to some of the richest people in the world, I find its closure particularly depressing. How many wealthy Wall St. types have had the balls crushed or backsides blistered inside that space? With the markets hitting record highs, could none of them step up to help out until the Covid vaccines come through next year? We’re going to return to ‘normal’ in 2021 and discover it’s going to take years to rebuild we lost in 2020.

This is Mistress Ariana Chevalier in an image sourced via this tweet.

On Her Way to Work

Just a regular morning start for your typical busy dominatrix. On her way to work clutching her trusty single tail. Those slaves aren’t going to whip themselves.

I suspect the identity of this leather clad lady has been lost to history. All the references I could find simply say generic things like ‘vintage dominatrix’.  If you can help me attribute it then please leave me a comment. I’d love to rescue her from anonymity.

Mood Killer

A week or so ago I wrote a couple of posts on happy memories of dialog and sound effects from past sessions. I thought it’d be interesting to follow those up with a verbal interaction that didn’t go so well. This example is from a few years back. It’s rare that I have a bad memory of a session but this particular moment has stuck in my mind, partly because it seems so trivial. Odd for a small thing to make such a big difference to a dynamic.

It was my first session with this particular domme and part of it involved a whipping scene. I’m generally not a fan of doing whipping with someone I don’t know well, as the intensity levels can vary dramatically and it requires a certain amount of trust to relax into the headspace. However, I am a fan of being flexible and open to how a domme wants to compose a session, and so as long as it’s not a hard limit, I tend to go with the flow.

She had me tied facing a wall and the warm up period was relatively short. That already meant we had two strikes working against us. Not being able to see a domme, particularly when I’m playing with someone I don’t know well, always makes a scene harder. The pain becomes disconnected from the dynamic and simply becomes something to tolerate, rather than being channeled through my desire.

It wasn’t the most intense whipping I ever received, but it certainly wasn’t light. By the time we’d finished I was feeling pretty proud of myself for taking it all. At which point the domme said “Hmmm. Not bad I suppose. For a first attempt.”

That comment totally drained the energy out of the scene for me. Maybe it was intended as a combination of compliment and encouragement, but it had the opposite result. I felt like the scene had been set-up for failure, I’d powered through to make it work, and yet couldn’t even get a ‘Good Boy’ out of her. We didn’t play together again.

As I said at the start, it was a trivial thing. I’m sure the domme didn’t think anything of it. Yet for me, with the endorphins churning in the heightened emotions of subspace, it was a mood killer that I remember years later.

This is very much not the domme in question. Both her whip and her smile are a lot bigger than in my scene. I believe this is Mistress Ama K from the Latin Beauties in High Heels site. I’m not aware of a personal site for her.