The beauty of dominant women
To finish my little trio of posts on claws, here’s Goddess Kyaa having fun with them and a delicate part of the male anatomy. They certainly seem to be putting a big smile on her face.
Alternatively, if you like combining fashion and art with your kink, then these claws from Danielle Nicole Hills might be worth looking for. At $200 each ($900 for the set) they’re not exactly cheap, but they do look quite striking.
I’m safely back in Seattle. A couple of games of Civ Revolution and many glasses of red wine kept me entertained while traversing the continent. Often on these kind of flights I’m nursing some bruises or tender spots from a session. Dommes seem to take an inordinate delight in making the hell of air travel even more uncomfortable for me. It’s almost as if they’re some kind of sadists. Fortunately, despite a couple of very enjoyable sessions with Miss Troy Orleans on the prior days, I didn’t have to contend with that particular issue this time.
I haven’t yet had time to track down some good post topics, so I’ll take the easy route and point at some interesting content elsewhere. D has a nice post up on using a dermaroller that caught my eye. I always enjoy discovering a new pervertible and this one looks like a lot of fun. Blending sensation play and pain is always a favorite of mine. The old school approach to this is the Wartenberg wheel, which might not be as intense or as versatile as a dermaroller, but does look beautiful. This is Mistress Varla using one in a K is for Kink shoot. I found it on Dishevelled Domina’s tumblr.
Today is my last full day in NYC. I’ve got one more lunch lined up at a great restaurant, and then it’ll be 6 hours of reading books and starting at the back of an airplane seat. On the plus side, going home will hopefully allow me to get back to proper blogging rather than simply throwing up a few quick sentences and an entertaining image. And talking of which, here’s today’s dose of whatever caught my eye on tumblr. It shows a nice moment of tenderness together with an interesting alternative use for nipple clamps. I’m sure that right hand of hers is a guarantee of absolute attention from him.
I found this on the My Inner Domme tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution.
I’m having too much fun in NYC to blog properly. I’ll therefore stick to simply posting images I like. This one has a nice trio of facial expressions. It features Lexi Sindel and Lea Lexis and is from Femdom Empire. Personally while I like the C part of CBT, I’m not big on the B. That long drawn out ache is tough to deal with. I’d guess this guy is going to be living with the results of that squeeze for a while.
I found this on the Alternative Femdom tumblr.
I have to admit that I’m not always the best organized blogger. Some people have multiple posts and drafts lined up in their queue ready to go at the push of a button. I typically have a bunch of thoughts, a few random images, and a glass of wine to work with. Sometimes they come together. Often they don’t. When I’m stuck and it’s late at night, I turn to some of my favorite tumblrs for inspiration. I figure if I can find a good image I’m 80% done already.
One of those ‘go to’ tumblrs is the Happy BDSM one. A feel-good photograph of a grin and some kink is always an easy one to blog about. I was therefore perturbed to browse it tonight and discover a whole bunch of my old posts popping up on it (all with the correct attribution). Did nobody tell these people that they’re where I go for images? It doesn’t work if it’s the other way around. It’ll end up as an infinite loop of reposting with zero added value, much like the Huffington Post. Somebody has to do some actual work here, and I’ll be damned if it’s going to be me.
Anyway, while the Happy BDSM folks sort themselves, out, I’ll leave you with the kind of image I was hoping to find and steal from them. This was actually from the Kaisub blog.
I feel that I should be able to track an original source for this image. It looks like something from a professional shoot, but nothing pops up on a Google reverse image search. The Japanese style genital blurring is also kind of odd for what looks like a Western image. Anyway, if anyone can help me attribute it, then please leave a comment.
I thought I’d seen most forms of CBT, but this is a new one to me. I’m not sure if the silver foil is designed to spread the heat, concentrate the heat or simply ensure he bastes evenly in his own juices. Either way it looks like a particularly intense form of torture. On the plus side he might end up with some stylishly coiffured pubic hair.
This is originally from the OWK site. I found it on the Dominalova tumblr.
I feel the need to return to the topic of sadism and sadists. Some of the comments left on my post from a few days ago were thought provoking. In particular I was struck by how overloaded the term ‘sadist’ is.
Most labels we apply to people also carry a judgement about their behavior. Consent (or the lack of it) is seen as so important it’s often baked right into the label itself. For example, if I have consensual sex with a partner them I’m a lover, but non-consensual sex with anyone makes me a rapist. I can be a consensual flirt, but never a non-consensual one. That’s sexual harassment. I can be an employer of consenting workers, but only a slaver or trafficker of non-consensual ones. Actions themselves can be neutral, but the labels we use on people rarely are. A punch is neutral, but a boxer is not the same as a mugger.
Sadism is fairly unusual in that respect. It carries no information on consent. It’s accurate to describe a domme who enjoys S&M as a sadist. It’s also accurate to describe a horror movie psychopath in the same way. This strikes me as problematic when talking about kink in a mainstream context. As hmp accurately pointed out, non-kinky people really don’t get the idea of consensual sadism at a gut level. Having the same label used for very different behaviors is therefore particularly confusing. People are used to labels implying judgement about behavior, and given their gut feel about the infliction of pain, their default view of sadism will always be a bad one.
Masochism doesn’t have this problem. It’s a more passive label and consent is naturally implied. We really need another word for sadist that pairs more tightly with masochist. That way we could leave sadism as the general label for non-consent and save the new word for only when masochists are consensually on the receiving end. I’ve no idea what that word should be however. Any suggestions? Maybe I should get Dan Savage on the case. He’s done a pretty good job so far coining pegging, GGG and Santorum.
Given the subject matter it seems only fitting to finish with an image of a sadist in action. This is from the Divine Bitches site.
This post was supposed to be a thoughtful follow-up to yesterdays one on the topic of negotiation. Unfortunately I got sucked into watching an old Columbo movie and ran out of time. If there’s one thing I like more than blogging, it’s well, many things actually. Sex. Bondage. Pain. Wine. Food. Books. Art. Fast cars. So really, among the many things I like more than blogging, one is classic Columbo movies. And that’s where my time went tonight.
I’ll therefore settle for a simple post with an interesting image. I love their expressions. I love the slapping action. But what’s with his blue shirt and her pink boots? It’s good that they’re not in stereotypical fetishwear, but is this the best alternative they could come up with?
The image is originally from the Men in Pain site. I found it on the Femdom Times site.
Peroxide has been having some anal fun with a new toy he’s named Dita. While I’m a fan of anal play, I’ve never got into naming things. Doesn’t matter if it’s a car, boat, body part or half a foot of silicon cock. Somehow it always felt odd for me to assign it a name.
Men giving their penis a name seems fairly common. I’ve been asked what mine is enough times to suggest women must encounter the phenomena fairly often. I kind of get it, as cocks do sometimes seem to lead independent lives of their own, but I’ve never smashed a bottle of champagne over mine and done an official naming ceremony. I’m always tempted to answer the question with “Edith”, and then when I get a confused look, follow it up with “You know, named after Edith Bolling, the second wife of Woodrow Wilson.”
I’ve absolutely no reason to pick that name, other than I think it’d get a laugh. And laughter is always a good thing to mix with sex. Unless it happens when you pull your trousers down. That’s less of a good sign.
Here’s a nice shot of someone having a laugh while playing with male genitals. The name of the cock in question is sadly not recorded, but I’m willing to bet it’s not Edith. The image is from the FemaleDom site and I found it on the In a Humbler tumblr.
I’m currently reading Staci Newmahr’s Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy. It captures some interesting data but it’s a frustrating book. I’ll dig into why that is in a future post. For the moment I want to tackle one very specific phrasing that caught my eye. It’s on the subject of power in BDSM scenes and how it’s described.
Power and control are obviously significant parts of BDSM play and the author is careful to qualify them with terms such as ‘apparent’ and ‘illusion’. In describing the various phases of a scene (negotiation/play/aftercare) she wants to make it clear that what’s being constructed is an elaborate facade. A type of theater where the actors themselves have to suspend their disbelief. I should add that this isn’t unique to this book. A lot of academic BDSM books adopt similar descriptions, presenting it as an insight into the underlying reality that the players themselves don’t acknowledge.
I always find this approach a very facile one. It ignores the complexity of power in other situations and reduces the value of the descriptive term. Outside of kink we’re happy to use descriptions of power in a nuanced way, without the need for heavy qualifiers. For example, we would be comfortable describing the CEO of a company as having power. He has a degree of control and a corresponding freedom that his employees don’t have. That doesn’t mean he can do anything. It also doesn’t mean that his employees have no options. They can always quit and walk away from their job. But we don’t feel the need to describe his power as illusory just because he requires a degree of cooperation from those who wish to work for him.
To pick another example, when describing the dynamics of a conventional relationship, people will often use terms related to power and control. Those dynamics can play a role in all sorts of relationships, not just D/s ones. Yet nobody feels the need to say something like – “His wife is really in charge of vacation planning, she makes all the decisions. Although of course it’s only an illusion of control because he could always leave her if he wanted.” The second part is implicitly understood, but it doesn’t make the first part any less true.
When I’m stripped, bound and gagged in a BDSM scene, I’m giving up control and relinquishing power. There’s no illusion or suspension of disbelief necessary. I don’t get to control where she puts that needle, where the cane lands, where she puts the but plug (although I can probably guess in that case). The fact the dominant doesn’t have absolute power doesn’t make it an illusion of power. Yes, I can stop the scene at any time and walk away. I can also quit my job at any time and walk away. Neither fact means I’m the one with the power.
It seemed appropriate to finish with a shot featuring a classic demonstration of power – the hand to the throat. This is from the Divine Bitches site. I originally found in on Thy Queendome Come tumblr.
