The silver lining

If there’s one upside to the recent clusterfuck of the battle for bathrooms (see my previous post) it’s the response it has provoked in mainstream America. Ten years ago it would have been a fringe issue. Not anymore.

When artists like Pearl Jam, Boston and Bruce Springsteen cancel concerts then it’s easy for conservatives to dismiss them as part of the liberal elite. When Deutsche Bank and PayPal start cancelling investments then it’s harder to make that claim. And when major employers in the area like Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Target start speaking out in favor of transgender rights, then it’s pretty clear where the mood of the mainstream is. Of course that doesn’t help individuals caught in the current crossfire of discrimination, but it at least suggests that the world is trending in the right direction. One can only hope the trend is an accelerating one.

In the meantime let’s support people using the bathroom in whatever manner is most appropriate. If that means peeing on a naked consenting man, then so much the better.

PeeI’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image.

Celebrating scoring

I stumbled across this image yesterday while looking for something to feature with the pegging article. Given that post was all about a sweet first pegging experience, this image was far too porn-y to use. It did make me smile though, so I figured I’d save it for a post of its own. The outfits and set-up doesn’t do much for me, but the two expressions are great. Sometimes sex is a tender expression of love between two people. Sometimes it’s about celebrating sticking your strapon right in his pooper.

CelebrationThis is from the Club Dom site.

Eskimo Kiss

My mother taught me that rubbing noses together was how Eskimo’s kissed. Of course, as you might have guessed, that turns out to be a Western distortion of a specific type of Inuit greeting known as the kunik. Whatever the name and derivation of the act, I’ve always found it a particularly cute and expressive one. It’s hard to be serious when squashing noses together. I therefore particularly enjoyed this image. They look like a couple having fun.

RubbingNosesThis is from the Club Pedestal site. I found it via the Alternative Female Domination tumblr.

Fings I ave learnt

I believe it’s customary to reflect back on lessons learned when reaching a significant milestone. Given this blog just reached its 5 year birthday, it seems fitting to reflect on a few learning points I’ve taken away in that time.

  1. If you use your phone to take session photographs, don’t give it to friends when they want to browse your holiday snaps. It’s possible they’ll side swipe right past that charming little restaurant you found and right onto a close-up of a cock with needles in it.
  2. Never schedule a dermatology appointment the day after a scene. Cane and clamp marks take longer than 24 hours to fade.
  3. It’s unwise to tell a domme to ‘avoid X and Y, but anything else is fair game’. The set of things that are not X or Y is really big and contains much that is painful.
  4. Ninety five percent of dommes will immediately reach for a cane when they discover you have a long flight coming up in a few hours. They’ll also giggle about how painful it’ll be to sit down afterwards.
  5. It’s possible to become blasé about discussing the exact type of anal play you enjoy with a unfamiliar lady you met just 10 minutes earlier. This remains true even if you’re a generally shy person who can get embarrassed while watching TV on your own.
  6. Hot wax gets everywhere. You could be pressure washed down by a team of expert nurses just minutes after hot wax play, and still be finding wax in odd crevices days later.
  7. When a domme asks ‘Have you tried activity X?’ do not take that opportunity to brag about what an intense and crazy amount of X you did in a previous session. That will be seen as a challenge that you can only lose.

Hopefully that’ll aid you all on your kinky journeys. In the meantime, like this young lady, I’m off to raise a glass to mine.

RaisedGlassI believe this is by the NZ artist Archia!, and is fan art from the TV show Hannibal.

The alpha female submissive?

More ruminations follow on the often espoused theory that submissives are frequently thrusting, successful alpha types in daily life. I hadn’t intended to write quite so much about this, but the more I ponder it, the more flaws I see in it.

In my original post I used the expression ‘submissive people’, but that’s not really accurate. I almost never hear of female submissives described in this way. The powerful controlling person who needs to let go in the bedroom is always a man in a ‘stressful’ job. He needs to take a timeout and not be himself for a while. When it comes to female submissives the more common descriptions center around secret yearnings, a desire to be controlled and tapping into fantasies. It’s about giving in to her deep desire, rather than stepping outside of the self.

In other words male submission is being positioned as taking a break from the normal state of affairs, where female submission is about a desire to return to a more natural order. To me that says much more about the way society perceives gender and power dynamics than it does about the nature of submission. It’s fundamentally an inconsistent view motivated by the need to fit it into conventional structures.

Cute Collared SlaveThe cute slave in this image is doubtless getting in touch with her inner desire for submission. Of course if she was a man then this would have been shot in between power lunches and organizing leveraged buy-outs on Wall Street.

The original source for this is the Everyday Slave site. I found it via the Alternative Femdom tumblr.

Teen Wolf Fan Art

The artwork below is fan art for the MTV show Teen Wolf. The two characters are Derek Hale and Braeden. I remember seeing the original Michael J Fox movie when I was a kid, but until I started researching this image I’d no idea they’d turned it into a TV show. According to Wikipedia the creators of it were influenced by Joss Whedon’s Buffy, which can never be a bad thing. Sadly I doubt that explicit kinky bondage sex features in the show, but luckily we have creative fans to put that right.

Teen Wolf Fan Art
Despite a lot of hunting around I’ve failed to track down the original artist. It’s unsigned and Google reverse image search just gives me a lot of tumblr reposts. As far as I can tell it first surfaced on this tumblr. If anyone can help me with attribution then please leave a comment.

A visual connection

I was lucky enough to get to play with Domina Yuki today. She’s a very talented domme and as usual it was a great session with lots of groans, screams and whimpers. I can only hope the soundproofing in our playspace was good.

One thing I found particularly interesting was my emotional reaction to a whipping. I was lying face down on padded bench to receive it, looking to one side as she hit me with a heavy leather whip. To start with I was looking directly at her and the whipping felt incredibly intimate. Our only contact was the strands of the whip, and yet it felt like a caress. As others might feel about an intimate hug or a kiss, I felt about watching her swing this whip against me. It was almost a sexual experience.

After a number of strokes she moved around to my other side, where I couldn’t see her, and that changed the dynamic dramatically. Suddenly it was a challenge. I had to focus inside of myself and push through. The endorphins continued to flow but rather than being in an intimate situation I felt objectified. I could no longer project my feelings towards her and had to turn inward instead. I’m sure the strength of the blows were no different, yet they felt harder.

In hindsight the experience was a fascinating insight into the role of the brain in modifying pain and the way we can contextualize powerful sensations. It was almost a childlike reaction – sadistic peak-a-boo. Intellectually I always knew I was being hit by Mistress Yuki, but only when I could see her did it take on a different meaning.

Blindfold