Hood – Page 8 – Femdom Resource

Keep it complicated

There’s a class of people who see every activity as a competitive event. There’s a right way and a wrong way, and they’ll be very happy to loudly tell everyone which is which. These people are annoying. There’s a further sub-class of them who insist that only the simplest most straightforward things can be right. Dinner should be steak, drinks should be beer or unadulterated spirits and sex should be good old PIV fucking. Anyone making life more complicated than this is pretentious, weird and fussy. I find these people incredibly annoying.

Variety in life is a wonderful thing. Both simple and fancy have their place. I personally hate discovering that I don’t like something. I feel like I’m missing out on a pleasure others get to enjoy. Anytime I see some incredibly elaborate kinky set-up I don’t think ‘Wow, that’s so unnecessary.’ I think ‘Fuck yeah! Go for it.’ I’m always happy to see someone doing something above and beyond, even when it’s not my personal kink.

Take for example this article in Serious Bondage and the scene in the image below. This has Mumman trapped in a small cell set into a deck, wearing a leather armbinder, a chastity device and a tight gasmask. Mme Suzanne is blowing smoke into the breathing tube and pulling the string attached to the chastity device. That’s not a set-up that I’d personally enjoy or want to try, but I love the fact there are people passionate enough to set these kind of scenes up. Sex is a hugely important part of life, yet as a culture we often seem to frown on people who invest major effort and time into their fantasies. We should be celebrating their effort and inventiveness.

Two smiles (probably)

Here’s an image to complete a trio of posts featuring smiles. Admittedly in this case I can only see her smile. His expression is a more than a little obscured. However, I’m going to guess he might be smiling. I certainly would be if presented with that particular view of Lady Natalie Black.

This rather well color coordinated image features the aforementioned Lady Natalie Black and was shot for the Kinky Mistresses site. I found it on the Mask tumblr.

Joining the medical establishment

Just hours after writing yesterday’s post on piercing I was intrigued to stumble across this article from Japan on a domme getting arrested for needle play. She’d posted images of it on her blog (link anyone?), and obviously the Osaka police have such low crime rates that they’ve time to waste hassling adults having consensual fun. Apparently it’s illegal in Japan to do anything that might draw blood without a medical license. That would seem to make a lot of BDSM play potentially risky, as even canes or single tails can draw blood if applied with sufficient force.

Obtaining a medical license seems like a tough requirement just for getting your kink on. I’m guessing it’s not the kind of thing you can obtain with a few evening classes at your local adult education establishment. In fact according to this article, even medical students in Japan can’t do minor procedures like give an injection. They have to graduate, which takes around 6 years. Yet despite that rule, the US somehow still manages to spend 2.5x times what Japan does on healthcare. Getting arrested for play piercing images clearly isn’t the only screwed up thing here.

I really wanted to find a sensual and visually attractive piercing shot to feature with this post (something like this). Unfortunately, despite a lot of hunting around, I’ve come up short. Ironically needles tends to feature in a lot of Japanese femdom movies, but there’s little good imagery out there. Most of what there is tends to be extreme and lack any D/s vibe to it.

Instead I’ll go with the medical theme and something from the pen of the great Sardax. I’m not sure what ailment this course of treatment is for, but I’m sure it’s a highly effective approach.

You can find more of Sardax’s fine work at his site. You can also pick up his illustrated and translated version of Venus in Furs at Amazon UK.

Nipple torment and good hair

I’m safely back in Seattle after an interesting few days in Vancouver. While I was there I was lucky enough to meet up with Mistress Eleise de Lacy. We had a few scheduling issues that cut into our time together, but the session time we did have was highly enjoyable. In a painful ass beating, cocking piercing, type of way. You know – all the good ways.

A close-up photograph of the piercing part of the session did feature on Mistress Eleise’s twitter feed. However, I’d rather not drive all my readers away with a cock piercing shot right on the front page, so I’ll reach back into her twitter archive and pull out an older and slightly less explicit image. Here’s something she entitled ‘Heavy nipple torment meets good hair day. Happy all round’. That seems to capture the moment pretty well.

Mistress Eleise has feature on this blog in previous posts (here, here and here). Her site Femme Fatale Films is a most excellent source of femdom erotica. Her professional site for arranging personal sessions is here.

Beware of guys with cameras

I often turn up for a session with a camera in my pocket. I like to document some of the more interesting activities I get to experience, even if the end results aren’t exactly studio quality. However, it turns out there’s another type of guy with a camera, and as Rain DeGrey entertainingly describes in this blog post, he’s someone to be avoided at all costs. It sounds like a horrible situation, but she turns it into a great anecdote.

I wrote about the cost of hiring a professional fetish model sometime ago. At the time I commented favorable on the comparison to hiring a pro-domme (for example), while at the same time making it clear these were not in anyway comparable activities. Obviously some other guys can do the same maths, but arrive at very different conclusions.

Of course the sign of a really talented photographer is when somebody will actually pay you to shoot them. One of the best in the BDSM world is Natasha Gornik. She’s the photographer of choice for a lot of the top pro-dommes. So after Rain’s tale of terrible photography, let’s finish with a couple of great shot’s from Natasha’s portfolio.

Ring toss

This looks like a fun game. I hope that there’s some sort of penalty associated with each thrown ring that fails to find its target. These kind of things are always better when they operate under a ‘she wins or he loses’ set of rules.

I’m afraid I don’t know the original source for the image. I found it on the Lashkisser tumblr.

Communicating with smile and a stare

I got to enjoy some electrical play with Lydia tonight, so I’m in a particularly happy frame of mind. We didn’t snap any photographs to share but, given the nature of the play, the shot below caught my eye as a suitable one to commemorate it with.

There’s not a lot to see from an equipment perspective, but their exchange of looks really makes the image a memorable one. His is one that I’m sure most submissives will recognize. It’s the look of “I know you’re going to twist that knob, and at some level I kind of want you to do it, but I’m still going to try my forlorn puppy dog look in the hope you’ll only turn it to 9 rather than 10.” Her look suggests amusement but also inevitability. It’s the “I love it when you make those faces, but you really should know by now it’s not going to help.”

I found this on the BDSM++ tumblr (which has some fairly extreme pictures, so browse with caution).

The only thing we have to fear…

When I was catching up on my blog reading over the weekend I came across an interesting sequence of posts by Lady Anna List. They described a heavy imprisonment scenario, featuring bondage, isolation and sensory deprivation. You can read them in part 1, part 2 and part 3 of a series entitled Incarceration. What particularly caught my eye was the comment about a panic attack during the scene.

He’d fallen asleep and woken up before feeling the entire world closing in around him. Experience has helped him before to talk himself out of his impending attack…
…I’m not sure I would rescue him because this is something he has to get through so he knows he can get through it again in future extreme bondage situations.

That got me thinking about the nature of panic and how we experience it, which in turn led me to this fascinating paper on the subject. It’s fairly readable for a scientific paper and it contends that panic is an evolutionary response to dangerous situations. There’s first a tendency to freeze (so a predator won’t spot us), and then a physical response to divert blood, suck in more oxygen, release cooling sweat and tension muscles before fleeing for home and safety. The paper also talks about agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder where panic attacks can strike out of the blue in everyday life. These panic attacks typical occur in certain locations (wide open or enclosed spaces), or in certain situations (being in crowds of strange people or being far from home). These are scenarios which from an evolutionary perspective represented specific threats, such as being exposed with nowhere to hide, or encountering a number of strangers from outside your tribe.

I found it fascinating because there’s a tendency to think about panic as being purely a mental process, as something you can think your way around. And it’s true that you can condition yourself against it by repeated exposure and positive reinforcement. But the basic response itself is a very deeply embedded one, with real physical manifestations. Nobody would think of telling an agoraphobic to simply snap out of it and think themselves better. And yet I find there’s sometimes a tendency to see panic as a weakness or mental failure in a submissive. In fact it’s really just a million years of evolution doing it’s thing. Like the primitive drives for sex or food, it’s all about maximizing the chances of passing the genes on.

The other interesting takeaway from the paper was in the final section, where the author talks about the difficulty of studying panic in the laboratory. He should get out the lab and into his local BDSM playspaces. I can guarantee his local dommes will have a wide collection of experimental subjects they can push into carefully controlled panic situations!

I’ll leave you with a shot of an item that is great for pushing my panic buttons – a hood. That tight enclosed feeling gets me every time.

I found this via the clitlickslut tumblr.

Sanity in the juryroom

I was heartened to read today about an “extreme pornography” case in England resulting in a not guilty verdict. Although it’s depressing that the case was even brought to trial, at least the jury saw sense.

I’ve written about this issue before. Back in 2008 the British government introduced legislation to outlaw what they defined as extreme pornography. The part of the act that concerned all BDSM lovers read as follow…

An image falls within this subsection if it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, any of the following—
(a) an act which threatens a person’s life,
(b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,

When the law was introduced it was accompanied by lots of scare stories about snuff films and non-consensual torture. Inevitably, as anyone with a brain might have guessed, it ended up getting applied much more broadly to anything the police thought they could get away with. I’d probably be in trouble because wrapping a plastic bag around someones head is life threatening. And burning someones genitals clearly could result in serious injury.

In this particular case it was fisting and urethral sounding that got the unfortunate victim into trouble. Neither of those things had resulted in serious injury, but obviously the facts weren’t about to get in the way of the prosecution. They also tried the usual tricks of exaggerating the evidence and smearing the defendant. As the defense lawyer describes, they originally suggested it was thousands of images, some involving children. In the end it was down to 5 images, all of consenting adults taken at a private party. It took the jury less than 90 minutes to acquit on all charges.

I’ll leave you with an image that will hopefully now not get my British readers into trouble. It features January Seraph and a nice long shiny sound.

This image is originally from the CBT and Ballbusting site. I found it on the Women with Whips tumblr.

When the going gets weird…

Weirdness often seems to occur at the intersection between the ordinary and the extraordinary. For example, while BDSM dungeons are unusual places, I don’t find them weird at all. Everything is in a common context. However, discovering one of my distinguished elderly aunts sipping a cup of tea while browsing a collection of nipple clamps in a dungeon, now that’d be weird. And possibly therapy inducing.

Pornography is a similar story. I can look at a picture of a bound man sucking a half naked transsexual and just think it’s a hot visual. Yet, occasionally there will be some weird juxtaposition of elements in a scene that turn it into WTF moment. Take the shot below for example. It’s not the dog hood alone that makes it weird. It’s the nonchalant way he’s wearing it, relaxing on the living room couch in his weekend casuals. Exactly what’s the role play here? I think if he was naked and leashed on the floor, in a bizarre way, it’d be a lot more normal a scene.

I found this on the All About Me (aka dominant damp knickers) tumblr. It’s originally from the Sharing My Wife site.