A swing and a smile

Here’s a nice picture to finish off the weekend. Someone is clearly enjoying themselves. It’s probably not slave number 52, but who knows when it comes to masochists. Judging by the bright red color of his bottom she’s being very faithful to the instructions written on him. I hope she keeps that grin going all the way to strike fifty.

Swinging With A Smile

As the watermark makes clear, this is originally from the Young Dommes site. I found it on the The Heart’s Dark Desire tumblr.

Reality and physicality

I had a slightly unusual session yesterday. Not so much in the ‘how’ and the ‘what’, but in the ‘who’ and the ‘where’ (the ‘why’ is left as an exercise for my therapist). It featured Mistress Yuki playing in Lady Lydia’s space. I’ve played with Mistress Yuki in the past down in San Francisco (see here and here), and was happy to hear she’d be in Seattle for a few days this month. It was a lot of fun to get together, if a little disconcerting to play with someone new and different in a space I know so well.

It was a fairly intense session, with lots of corporal play, and we finished with some piercing. I was pretty zoned by that point. Time and space were askew, and my brain really didn’t care. As Mistress Yuki moved around the table I was suddenly struck by a tremendous sense of her physicality. Attractive women in exciting undergarments always have a pretty powerful presence, but this was more than that. Her body had a three dimensional solidity that felt more real than anything else in the room, including myself.

I’ve experienced this kind of reality distortion before in subspace and, as I pondered it afterwards, it reminded me of passage from one of my favorite books – Neuromancer. The quote features a mysterious man named Armitage telling the protagonist (Case) that his lost hacking abilities could be miraculously restored to him.

“What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage, Case?” Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that soon he’d wake. Armitage wouldn’t speak again. Case’s dreams always ended in these freeze frames, and now this one was over.

That description of a character and a moment in time has always stuck with me. I read it long before I did a BDSM scene, but that sense of sudden physicality coupled with unreality, fits beautifully with what I experienced last night in subspace. That’s perhaps appropriate for the book that popularized the term cyberspace.

Mistress Yuki
Mistress Yuki
Mistress Yuki
The above images were taken from Mistress Yuki’s tumblr. If you’re in the San Francisco area and would like to session with her, check out her main site.

As for Neuromancer, if you’ve never read it and aren’t violently opposed to the cyberpunk genre, I definitely recommend giving it a shot. It’s an incredibly influential novel, and an archetype in its genre. It’s amazing to read it now and realize it was written in the early 80’s on a 1927 Hermes model portable manual typewriter.

The latest dungeon toy: MRI scanner

I’ve written about the science of pain in a previous post. That discussed some interesting findings from studies in the 1940’s and highlighted the difficulty in measuring pain in an objective manner. According to this article on brain imaging, that last part may be about to change. Researchers have managed to train a computer model (via machine learning) to analyze MRI scans and predict the level of pain experienced.

The part I found particularly interesting was that the responses across different patients brains was very uniform. They didn’t have to sample a patients pain at say levels 1 and 2 to be able to predict what that patients brain would look like at level 5 or 6. The same predictive model could be used across all patients. Meaning that they could take an MRI scan in from any patient and accurately estimate the level of pain experienced.

That seems counter-intuitive because we have a concept we call pain tolerance. Some people are as tough as nails and others are delicate daisies. Yet the underlying brain mechanism seems to be fairly uniform. Everyone’s brain fires up in similar ways to similar degrees of stimulus. That suggests to me that people’s baseline tolerance to pain, before endorphins and adrenalin kicks in to modulate the signal, is a learned response. You’re not pre-programmed to have a specific tolerance and presumably it could be modified over time.

I’ll leave you with an image of somebody doing a pain experiment of her own. She seems to have neglected the MRI scanner to measure the exact effects but perhaps this is just a practice run. Judging by his expression she should have no problem getting a reading from him.

A Pained Expression

I found the image on the Some Husbands Need Discipline tumblr. The original commercial site is sadly now extinct.

Carrying the essentials

Tonight’s post brings you the last of my sequence of corporal themed images. It’s an old school dynamic captured in a modern shot.

Personally I’m not a big fan of the mother/governess/nanny roleplay. I like dominants to hit me because they think it’s fun and they enjoy doing so. Not because I’ve done something ‘wrong’ and it’s therefore their duty to punish me. However, I can appreciate a well done version of the old fashioned punishment theme, and I think this qualifies on that score. The 50’s style dress and handbag are a nice touch.

Mistress Morgana with hairbrush

The image is of Mistress Morgana, a pro-domme and kink teacher based in San Francisco. You can see more images from the same shoot in this gallery.

The joy of a red bottom

I’m spending a couple of days down in Portland to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Updates may therefore be slightly more erratic than usual. I normally manage to combine kink+food+drink into my trips, but in this case I’ll be missing the first and most enjoyable part.

In the meantime, here’s two more images on the corporal theme. I’m normally not a fan of shots featuring the domme staring into the camera. I prefer them to be engaged with their submissive. However, the “Hey! Look What I did” genre is a happy exception. It’s always a pleasure to see a dominant take pride in her work.


Red Bottom

I found both of these images on the Some Husbands Need Disciple tumblr.

Leaving their mark

Moving on from yesterday’s action shot, here’s one showing the after effects of some corporal punishment. At least I hope for his sake it’s the after effects. Stopping to pose for a photograph and then starting all over again would just be cruel.

That’s Cybill Troy and Mina Meow (aka Thorne) showing off their skill with what I assume is a single tail.

Cybill Troy and Mina Thorne with marked slave

I originally found this on Mina Thorne’s tumblr, although it started as a post on Cybill Troy’s. I think it’s originally from a scene shot for Femdom Empire.

Approaching at speed

Looking through old Leda images while preparing yesterday’s post put me in a bit of a corporal mood. So expect a few more images on that theme over the coming days.

Today’s shot features Cassie Canes approaching her target zone at speed. Personally I find a cane can hurt like hell when delivered with just a rapid flick of the arm. Heaven knows how much more it stings when the disciplinarian arrives at a gallop.

Before a fast bowler in the game of cricket delivers his first ball he will carefully pace off his run-up. The idea is to ensure his foot lands perfectly on the line (called the crease) as he releases the ball. I wonder if Miss Canes did the same thing? That’d certainly be a more ominous sight than the usual practice swishes.

Cassie Canes

I found this image on the Femdom Marriage tumblr. Obvious it’s originally from the Cassie Canes site.

Ed Lee

I was sad to read that Ed Lee, founder of Nu-West/Leda productions, had recently passed away. In an earlier era of really bad BDSM porn, he produced some of the most authentic and exciting corporal material around. As he describes in this interview, he was taking a big risk by doing so. The legal situation was very unclear and even if you won in court you could still end up bankrupt.

As a young femdom aficionado in the late 90’s I remember travelling down to London’s Soho specifically to hunt for Leda videos. I’d seen some of the still shots on-line and wanted to get my hands on some high quality VHS. There was only one shop that sold them (as they were illegal in England) and unfortunately they had a very loose approach to labeling their tapes. You’d buy 3 tapes and hope at least one of them was what it claimed to be. I suspect they were all pirate tapes, which no doubt would have infuriated Ed had he known. Being young and very nervous I never had the guts to go back and complain. After several trips and a dozen random tapes of all sorts of random porn (mostly rubbish), I’d managed to accumulate just 3 Leda ones. It was worth it though. The production values weren’t great, but the authenticity was never in doubt.

I’ll leave you with two shots from the short-lived Ma’am magazine he produced. Thanks for everything Ed.

Shot from Ma'am magazine
Shot from Ma'am magazine