Fixing Things

After my previous post on what not to do in a session, I thought I’d follow it with a more positive one. Namely, if things do go wrong, what are some good approaches to fix the situation.

Before doing that, I’ll add two important qualifiers. Firstly, these aren’t my brilliant ideas. These are what I’ve observed creative and talented dommes do in my sessions with them. Secondly, I’m purely talking about mechanical issues here. When the battery dies, the body won’t bend or the rope just won’t cooperate. Not issues in the scene dynamic or emotions. Those are a far trickier set of problems that are above my paygrade.

Those qualifiers out the way, here’s three tricks I’ve seen successfully employed when a domme’s plan A has failed…

  1. Playfully blame the submissive and use that to pivot the activity. A tongue in cheek – “Well look what you’ve done now!” – remark when the clip leaps off for the third time can a great excuse to set-up a new activity. After all, if I can’t keep those clamps on my nipples, it’s only fair she kicks me in the balls a few times. Most people don’t like being blamed unfairly, but a playful funishment for something that’s obviously not the submissives fault can be a nice way to shift gears and get away from the problem.
  2. Shift into problem solving mode, making the submissive simply part of the puzzle to be cracked. The objectification part of this can be very hot. Suddenly there’s not a one-on-one dynamic. It’s just a domme figuring out how to make some recalcitrant equipment do the right thing. I’m no more or less important than the hard points, ropes or carabiners.
  3. Ditch the problematic activity, shift gears to something totally different and loudly announce that fact. Most submissives will be so excited at the prospect of the new thing, they’ll totally forget whatever wasn’t working. If a domme announces she’s going to stop trying to get her humbler to fit me and instead is going to sit on my face, I’m not going to be lying there, struggling for breath and thinking to myself – “I wish we were still fiddling around the wingnuts on that humber. That was so much more fun than this.”

Speaking of face sitting, here’s some courtesy of the Mistress Land site. I don’t know what activity they were doing 10 minutes prior to this, but I think it’s a safe bet that he’s no longer thinking about it.

Blogroll Updated

I’ve done some long overdue blogroll housekeeping. Dead links have been purged and I’ve added a few new sites. Additions to the front page’s dynamic blogroll and my links page include:

Hopefully there’s something of interest in there for all my readers. Thanks to social media there are a lot less kinky bloggers around than there used to be, so I always appreciate those that do write and post. If anyone knows of established femdom or kinky blogs that are regularly updated then feel free to point me in there direction via comment or  email.

This playful image is from one of the new links – Bastienne Cross. She’s a Toronto based pro-domme. I like the fact that her galleries include a mixture of styles, including a lot of her laughing. It’s not all latex, leather and snarls.

Animal Crossing

One winner from worldwide quarantine seems to have been the Nintendo game Animal Crossing. It’s not only been a big mainstream hit, but also a hit in the kinky community. I’ve seen an amazing number of dommes in my social media feed talking about playing it and involving their subs in helping them. I thought that was just my particular slice of the kinky world, but then I came across this Vice article and this Wired article. People are even figuring out ways to connect sex toys up to it.

I find it amusing that it’s a Nintendo game that has triggered this kind of response. They’re the ultimately kid friendly gaming company. Sega and Sony were always more edgy, and PCs  the Wild West frontier. I guess it’s a sign that people will always be attracted to a high quality well designed product and then, once you’ve attracted them, people will always try and pervert it.

Personally, I’m an old school PC RPG fan. The kind of games where you start off killing rats in a grumpy villagers cellar, spend many hours in what’s basically a fancy spreadsheet in a nice frock, and finish by taking on the local God to stop the world being sucked into hell. There is probably an interesting post to write on the contrast between dommes liking fun collaborative social games and submissives like myself wanting to micromanage the hell out of wizards and clerics in a single player fantasy game. Unfortunately, this isn’t that post.

I believe this is from the artist Mosbles7.

Ch Ch Ch Changes

Regular readers may notice a different look for the blog from today. As step one in my overhaul process I’ve updated to a new more modern theme. It’s still pretty simple and clean, but it should work a lot better on tablets and phones. Google tends to punish sites that don’t support mobile devices with ranking demotion, and my old theme wasn’t set-up for mobile at all.

If you notice anything broken or not working then please let me know via a comment. I’m also hoping this’ll help with the speed and comment issues I’ve seen in the past, although that would be a happy side-effect rather than primary goal. At the very least it should make life easier for everyone who spends their life attached to their phone, even when they’re say sitting on someones face, like Meana Wolf is here.

Meana Wolf

Shit or get off my face

This paper mag article on the NYC BDSM scene is pretty short and light on detail. However, I have to salute the writer for its opening line – ‘Shit or get off my face’. That’s memorable. It’s a phrase that provokes an initial ‘huh?’, until you realize the writer is a dominatrix. Then it generates more of an ‘Ewww!’.

rodzoThis artwork is by Rodzo. Fortunately for those of a delicate disposition he’s an artist big on the face sitting part, but not so much on the poop.

International Fetish Day

Apparently International Fetish Day is a thing and I just missed it. It’s the third Friday of the year, which seems a rather silly scheduling decision, as there’s no memorable date. Are they trying to overlap it was workplace casual Friday’s? Maybe forget the jeans and t-shirt and turn up in your gimpsuit?

Fashion and horological issues aside, there’s a good article on it at The Debrief. It talks about kink, fetish and queerness in a very open and approachable manner. It’s the kind of mainstream article that can help demystify kink and encourage discussion.

Personally, I’m more of a masochist and power exchange kinkster than a fetishist. That said, if I was going to pick out a few specific things that push my fetish buttons, this image would be a good starting point. There are boots, leather gloves, facesitting, a happy lady and red wine. Those last two may not typically be listed as a fetish, but all five of them make me smile.

Facesitting

Used panties for sale

Men buying women’s used underwear online is a thing. Not really my kind of thing, but I do like the free market ethos behind it. The women involved get an extra source of income and the men get their particular kinky itch scratched. Of all the many sexual financial transactions that happen, this seems like one of the easiest and safest.

If this is your particular kink, and you’re also into powerful women, then let me direct your attention to this sale of Queen Victoria’s Underpants. Admittedly they’ll be a bit pricier than the average pair from a Craigslist ad. At around 120 years old they’re also probably mustier and sturdier than most guys would like. But just consider who the original owner was. She ruled the largest empire in history, at almost one quarter of the earth’s landmass and one fifth of the population. Forget minor celebrities with products named after them, this is a woman with an entire historical era named after her. That backpage ad for used underwear may feature an attractive young lady in tight leather, but is she related to most of the royal families of Europe? I think not.

While I’m on the subject of attractive ladies in tight leather, here’s one offering someone a close-up view of her particular garments. Queen Victoria would not have been amused.

Lady in tight leather skirt

Face-sitting explained

The recent British face-sitting protests (covered in my previous post) gave Salon a chance to publish an article explaining exactly what face-sitting is. Hopefully for most of my readers that’s a fairly superfluous explanation. What caught my eye was the comments. The article described face-sitting as being typically about domination and a lot of the comments were along the lines of ‘I never realized I was being dominant/submissive doing this’.

As I’ve argued before, there’s no such thing as an inherently dominant or submissive act. Intent and context is key. The act of sitting on someone’s face can be dominant, submissive or just squishy moist sexy fun times. The same holds true of pretty much any sexual act, yet this kind of simplistic labeling often crops up. People will claim a domme can’t give a blowjob, or have PIV sex with a submissive, or that anal sex is inherently homosexual.

It’s weird because that kind of simple labeling doesn’t crop up elsewhere. A hug can be a greeting, a sign of affection, a consolation or a celebration of success. An arm around the shoulders can be aggressive when trying to convince someone of something or a protective shielding act. Everyone understands these actions in terms of their context and intent. Yet that’s not the case with sexual acts. I wonder if it’s down to inherent insecurity about sex. When people are unsure of themselves they like to simplify and follow simple rules. They don’t want to be caught out by hidden social conventions and therefore reduce everything to context free labels.

Woman On TopImage is from the Brutal Face-Sitting site.

Face sitting protest

Regular readers will know that I like to seek out and post mainstream articles with a link (occasionally of a tenuous nature) to femdom. Typically I’ll spend time explaining why I think it’s femdom related, and then even more time hunting through tumblrs looking for a suitable sexy image to accompany the posts.

I was therefore very happy to spot a Guardian article titled ‘Face-sitting protest outside parliament against new porn rules’. Even better was the fact that it came with some great face sitting photographs. This kind of thing makes a bloggers life very easy. I particularly liked the protestor chanting described in the article…

“What do we want? Face-sitting! When do we want it? Now!”

That’s the kind of civil disobedience I could really get behind. Or under.

Face sitting protest outside parliamentI’ve covered the new UK laws in previous posts here and here. You can read more articles on the protest (along with more photographs) here, here and here.