See no evil, speak no evil

Today is sadly the last day of my vacation before returning to Seattle. Fortunately I’ve had a very pleasant trip, enjoyed some kinky fun, and met some interesting new people. I played with two different dommes, and got some nice piercing photographs from a session yesterday that I’ll share in a later post. In the meantime, while I pack, I’ll leave you with a picture I liked from the Thou Shall Love Thy Mistress tumblr.

From a masochist’s point of view this shot is pretty weak sauce. Those clothe pegs don’t look like they’d hurt much at all. Despite that, I like it for the fact she’s clearly getting enjoying his restrained and sensory deprived position. I always love the idea of a sadist getting off on what she’s doing. Pain that comes from anger and other negative emotions never does anything for me.

Mistress enjoying a blindfolded and gagged male slave

Darkly dreaming

Here’s a disturbing and ambiguous image. Which makes it my favorite sort of image.

It reminds me of the show Dexter, although in this case with a female lead. There’s a plastic wrapped room, a bound figure, a trickle of blood and a slightly distant and emotionally neutral figure capturing a trophy of the moment. I found it on the Selina Minx’s Musings tumblr, but I can’t find an original source for it. I’d love to know the initial context for the shot. There’s a real beauty in the symmetry of the figures, spatially and otherwise.

Bound inverted male submissive and female dominant

Travelling

I’m taking a few days vacation, so posting may be a little more erratic than usual. I’m planning to enjoy some really good food, excellent cocktails and hopefully a decent amount of kinky play. Between all that, I might manage to bash out the odd post or two.

In the meantime I’ll leave you with this shot I found on the Strawberry Mistress tumblr. It features a rather well muscled gentleman and an elegantly poised lady. As the British expression would go, she has a fine set of pins on her. It also taught me that July 24th is International Femdom Day, something I was previously unaware of. I’m looking forward to it already.

Mistress resting legs on slaves back

Spanking the monarch

Here’s a nice piece of femdom fan art by SpankingFemFatale. For those of you who don’t recognize the characters (shame on you!) it’s the evil mastermind known as The Monarch and his partner Dr Girlfriend (later known as Dr. Mrs The Monarch). They’re from the show the Venture Brothers, a post-modern cartoon series which packs a huge number of pop cultures references and allusions into every episode. I always found the smart and competent Dr. Girlfriend very sexy despite, or maybe because of, her deep gravelly voice. For those who have never seen the show, here’s a short clip of her in action.

Spanking The Monarch

CMNF

At first I thought this was a gentle teasing shot. She’s naked and beautiful, but he can’t see a thing, and only feels what she allows him to. Then I saw that big knife on the windowsill. Now I’m not really sure what to make of it. I still like it a lot, but there’s an interesting ambiguity to it.

Clothed and bound male submissive with naked dominant femaleI found this on Homer’s blog. Which, at the time I’m typing, has this truly fabulous title image.

There is no ‘I’ in domme

I find subtext and subconscious communication fascinating. Picking apart what people say to expose what they really mean has an intellectual and an emotional satisfaction to it. I was therefore particularly interested in this article on the linguistic analysis of function words, the tiny building blocks (I, the, there, this, etc.) that tie sentences together. We don’t pay them much attention, but it turns out they have interesting predictive properties. For example, when two people are attracted to each other they alter their style of speech to harmonize their usage of these words. What was particular interesting in the context of this blog was the following discovery.

…some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status.
“It’s amazingly simple,” Pennebaker says, “Listen to the relative use of the word “I.”
What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word “I” less.

This is one of those findings that at first seems counter-intuitive, but actually makes a lot of sense in hindsight. In my own experience at work I see that dynamic all the time. Somebody in my organization reporting a problem to me is likely to say “I investigated X. I think it’s broken.” The both claims credit for work done (I made the effort) while simultaneously softening the message (I think this, but you may think differently). My response is likely to be “We need to fix this”, which actually means “You need to fix it.” What I’m unlikely to say is “I think it needs fixing.” That implies a personal opinion, and that potentially some other opinion out there matters and a decision can’t yet be taken. The impersonal or the plural form is actually a far stronger phrasing. Religions have of course known this for years. Jesus didn’t say “I think the meek are blessed. In my opinion they should inherit the earth. Although they may have trouble hanging onto it.” *

I’d be interested to hear from my readers if these observations match the experience of those in ongoing D/s relationships. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an image (courtesy of Geek Domme)  featuring a happy domme and a submissive who doesn’t look to be in a position to make use of any pronouns or function words. Unless ‘Owww!’ or ‘Eeek!’ counts as a function word.

Happy domme with bound submissive

* That last part of the phrasing might be a touch inaccurate. I’m not too up on my biblical quotes.

Can’t get no respect

I’m not quite sure how I found my way to this article on the you beauty site. God knows I need all the beauty tips I can get, but it’s not exactly my regular web browsing fodder. I suspect it was something to do with the 50 shades of grey (or of bleauh) spillover into the mainstream media. However I got there, I ended up being both amused and annoyed by the articles take on BDSM.

The amusing bit was this…

In a study Hawley presented this March, the results indicated another interesting conclusion about submissive fantasies. Handing over the reins to your partner isn’t just a sexual desire exclusive to women. Men like when women take control in the bedroom.

There’s a penetrating insight if ever I saw one. Elements of the BDSM community might get annoyed by professional dominatrices being the common face of femdom, but you have to admit they are at least a very public face. It’s hard to imagine anyone not being aware of their existence. And if you know they exist, who do you think is paying them all the money?

The annoying bit was this…

The research found no evidence that wanting to be dominated is synonymous with masochism, for either gender. In other words, submission and self-respect can easily go hand-in-hand.

So apparently masochism is associated with a lack of self-respect. Did I miss the memo on this? I’ve always thought it was related to the way pain can be processed, but then again what’s my opinion worth? I’m just a useless masochist.

I’ll leave you with a shot of a man letting his partner take control in the bedroom. I’m not sure if he’s nobly submitting or masochistically denigrating himself. Either way, I like the image.

StrappingI found this on the Mina’s Kinks tumblr.

Danger comes in many forms

We spend a lot of time discussing the complexities and risks of BDSM. By ‘we’ in this case I mean BDSM blogs and forums. There’s a lot of good discussion around safeword usage, aftercare, consent and the psychological risks of play. But with all the discussion around the dynamics of BDSM play, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the physical stuff can also be pretty dangerous as well.

This was brought home to me reading this article by Midori on a recent suspension accident. You can read the bottom’s version of what happened here. I don’t know either of the players and wasn’t there, so I’m not going to comment on what actually happened (although I do think this post makes an excellent point). Regardless of the specific circumstances, it’s unarguable that the people involved were experts and yet someone still got seriously hurt.

I’ve done suspension scenes several times and enjoyed them a great deal. They can be very beautiful, as in the last two images here. But there is undoubtedly risk involved. I wonder how many tops train not just for the scene itself, but for the potential scene when everything has gone wrong. Knowing what to do with a shaky submissive coming out of subspace and needing some aftercare is one thing. How many have rehearsed a set of steps to follow when they’ve just dropped somebody on a concrete floor? It often seems that the only time we get to practice an emergency is in the middle of one. Which is pretty much the worst time to do so.

This suspension shot is completely unconnected to the scene in question. I found in on this image board. I like it both for the bondage and for the contrast between the dark background and light bodies.

Suspension

Perched on her pet

A cute shot this one. He has a gentle puppy look about him, where she looks a lot more carnal. Sometimes in a cage shot like this one there’s a sense of a firm but caring and playful owner/pet relationship. A bit like owning a dog. Not so much here. She looks like someone with delightfully evil plans, and the look in his eyes says that he knows his role in them.

Pet In Cage I found this on the Fuck Yeah Male Submission tumblr. It’s originally from the Divine Bitches site.

When I was a lad…

In yesterday’s post I wrote about a heavy bondage and hooding session I’d just done. I was happy that I’d managed to conquer what was for me a difficult style of play. However, the real surprise of the session wasn’t dealing with the hoods, but a strange memory of childhood that was triggered. That was a new experience. I know a lot of people can trace their kinky roots back to particular childhood events or relationships. That has never been the case for me, and I’ve never really thought much about childhood when playing.

What made it particularly odd was the heavy and intense nature of the experience. Some session can be kinky while still have a recognizably playful sexual element. Stuff like light rope bondage, nipple pinching, teasing, spanking, etc. These aren’t sex, but they are sex adjacent. You start in Sensation Avenue, and rather than a left into Sex Drive, it’s a right turn into Kinky Fun Terrace. In yesterday’s session I was wearing leather chaps and gauntlets, wrapped in a leather sleep sack, fastened with leather straps to a wheeled hospital trolley and isolated under a thick leather hood. The only exposed bit of me was the cock, and that was only there so Lydia could slap it around. To the casual observer that’s not sex adjacent. That’s down Bizzaro Highway, along the You Need Help Freeway and straight into the heart of Freakytown. And I’m happy to say that my childhood didn’t overlap with any of that geography.

The moment in question occurred when I was left unmolested for a period, free to relax and float in the bondage. It was dark, only faint noises could be heard, and the smell of leather was all around. As I lay there I flashed back to being a young boy in the back of my parents car. After visiting relatives we’d drive back late at night, and I’d often stretch out to sleep on the back seat. It would be dark and peaceful, with just the light of the instruments and the quiet murmur of my parents voices from the front. It felt safe and comforting, which is kind of ironic given the lack of safety features compared to the cars of today.

There are some obvious physical parallels between the two situations. Darkness. Limited background noise. The leather smell from the car seats. But I think the main trigger was the sense of security and lack of responsibility. As a child I trusted my parents to get me home safely. I didn’t have to worry. I could just relax and drift away. The bondage and sensory isolation created a similar emotion. I couldn’t do anything. I was safe. Wrapped up. Nothing to worry about. At least not until Lydia decided it was time for a little cock torture. That gave me something to worry about.

For an accompanying image a shot of the young paltego would be kind of appropriate. But since I’m not into humilation or emotional masochism, I’ll give that a pass. Instead I turned to the Serious Bondage site and an article they did on Darla Kincaid (sadly now retired). Not quite the same setup as my scene, but it does look very intense.

Bondage shot with Darla Kincaid
Bondage shot with Darla Kincaid
Bondage shot with Darla Kincaid