The beauty of dominant women
A lot of the cities in the US, including my home of Seattle, were celebrating Pride this weekend. To commemorate that, here is a lovely rainbow mummification courtesy of Damiana Chi. I don’t think it was originally done with Pride in mind, but it certainly makes for a striking representation of the rainbow.
I found this on Damiana Chi’s twitter feed.
Predicament bondage is often shown in very complex set ups – like those in my last two posts. The kind of thing that looks like you need to be a cross between a structural engineer and a mad scientist to pull off. But it need not be like that. I remember doing a scene with my hands bound behind me while I was trying to hold a coin against a wall with my nose. That was an interesting predicament to hold, particularly when the caning started.
The shot below shows another simple technique, using something sharp under the heels. In this case its a pair of spiked wallpaper strippers placed there by Miss Deelight. The rest of the set-up (as shown in this post) is more complex, but this element of the predicament would be easy set-up in the comfort of your own home.
Miss Deelight is a pro-domme based in South Whales and the South West of the UK.
I’m regularly surprised by the extent to which discussion on specialized BDSM play has spread to mainstream sites. For example, here’s a recent Refinery29 article on Cock and Ball Torture. OK, so Refinery29 isn’t exactly the New York Times, but I doubt a few years ago you’d have seen anything on CBT outside of specialized kink sites. I don’t think I knew what CBT was until I started physically exploring BDSM and actually arranging to play. Now anyone can read about it next to articles on health, entertainment and politics.
As articles go it’s not a bad one, given the obvious constraints on space and detail. However, it does suffer from a problem I see in a lot of these mainstream articles – treating the sensual and the sadistic separately. They often seem to treat kink as something you do by taking a break from regular sensual sex to try this sadistic and painful thing. In my experience very few masochists like cold, brutal and unmodulated pain. And those that do, probably aren’t taking tips from Refinery29 articles. For most of us it’s the blend of pleasure with pain, and the ratcheting up of sensation as the balance tip back and forth between them.
I think the best advice for a CBT curious couple would be to start with the pleasure. Get him hot and bothered with the tongue or the hand, and then mix in some squeezing, pinching or slapping. Someone horny and eager is going to be less self conscious about what they’re doing and more likely to relax into the moment. Wait till he’s panting, then put some clothespins on the shaft or sack and slowly masturbate him. That mixture of lovely friction and painful tugging gives a lot of scope for shifting the pain/pleasure balance. It also sets up the right dynamic of control – giving pleasure and then taking it away. There’s also an obvious visual feedback mechanism as arousal ebbs and flows.
A suitable image to follow-up yesterday’s post. This is another elaborate rope suspension with a high difficulty/risk factor. It looks very cool for a photograph, but I can’t imagine it being sustainable for any kind of extended play.
I’m afraid I’ve no idea of the original source for this. Happy to credit appropriately if someone can help with an attribution.
I’ll finish the statue themed posts with some lovely art from Yumine Guo. Admittedly this is more of a candelabra than a statue, but the plinth and pose gives it a somewhat sculptural feel. From her tumblr post you can actually see the original inspiration, which is kind of fun. Oddly enough, it’s yet another lamp themed scene. What is it with being a lamp?
I’ve a small triangular bruise on my cock. I’m not exactly sure who put it there. It showed up sometime during my weekend in San Francisco, and so was the work of either Domina Yuki or Domina Ai-Li. Whoever created it, the end result is the same, it makes me smile. Most people probably wouldn’t react that way to genital bruising, but I always like to see a temporary reminder of my recent activities.
It was fun to play again. Getting together with two familiar dommes was definitely the right move. My body seemed to mark up more than it usually does, and I had a few pre-session butterflies in my stomach that I don’t normally get, but emotionally I was in a good space. No lengthy negotiation necessary. No chemistry to figure out. Just a sense of a happy place to return to.
I also got to try something new – a suspended bed with a pendulum weight attached to the genitals. You can see the general set-up below and a close-up of the weight arrangement here. It might not be clear from the shots, but that frame that I’m lying down on is hanging on chains and can therefore easily swing. This meant that my entire body would move as Yuki hit me, and that would cause the pendulum below to swing. The two systems would then interact with each other as they moved, going in and out of phase and pulling me in painful but interesting ways. It felt like being part of a kinky science experiment, although I’m not strictly sure what hypothesis was being tested.
You can see another top down show here which shows some mild red marks from the beating. They would receive some significant additions a few days later from Domina Ai-Li’s whip. We also did some zipper play, which can be seen here. I’ve a video of this, which I may share, just as soon as I can overdub the embarrassing screaming and whimpering noises which somehow seem to have turned up on the audio track. Can’t imagine where they came from.
Continuing my clothing themed post sequence with this striking shot. It’s posted all over the web under the title ‘conceptual photograph’ but the attribution isn’t particularly clear. I think it’s by Polish photographer Michal Pedziwiatr, but I’m not 100% sure.
When it comes to clothes and female dominants there are millions of images I could feature. Not so much on the male submission side. The options there seem to be nudity, odd leather gimp attire or frilly cross-dressing. Personally I don’t have an issue with any of those, but they don’t fit into a stylish clothing themed post. I’d guess that the original photographer had a different concept in mind than femdom and male submission, but I’m happy to repurpose the shot.
This has been a depressing week for me for a number of reasons. Some of those I can’t share here, but the one I can share is a big one: Lydia is retiring. Regular readers will be aware that Lydia is the domme I’ve played with for years and has been a big part of my development both as a person and as a submissive. I’ve documented a small fraction of our play on this blog (for example here, here, here and many more). Amazingly she was actually the first pro-domme I ever played with, almost 6 years ago now, and we’ve got together for 2-3 hours every couple of weeks ever since then. Hearing that she planned to retire, and possibly leave Seattle, wasn’t entirely surprising but it really shook me up.
From a purely selfish and practical perspective I’m going to miss the joy of playing with her. She’s without doubt the most talented domme I’ve ever interacted with. In what is literally hundreds of sessions that we’ve done together, I can’t think of one time where it felt like we were repeating something or simply going through the motions. Every time I stepped out of my clothes, and went to meet her naked and smiling, it was the beginning of something magical. Certain activities formed common starting points – piercing, corporal, bondage, breathplay – but each time she’d take our play in some new exciting direction.
Emotionally it has hit me pretty hard. Partly because I’m not sure how to process it. I’m not someone who ever had a problem with the professional boundary. I’m not saying I’d have turned down the chance to make it a non-professional relationship, but that was never anything I expected or particularly hoped for. I just enjoyed the relationship for what it was. Now its ending I don’t have a natural way to move through the change. I end other professional relationships all the time, but my realtor or doctor hasn’t spent hundreds of hours with me in very intimate and intense sexual situations. The closest analogy I can draw is to losing a very close friend. Someone important to you and who knew you in a way nobody else did, is suddenly no longer going to be in your life.
Fortunately there a few weeks left before she hangs up her whip (as a professional at least), and I have the chance to play with her a couple more times. It’ll be kind of strange. I almost didn’t want to play again at all. But given all the fun we’ve had together, it seemed like it’d be silly not to enjoy our last opportunity. I’ve never yet cried in a session, no matter how hard the beating. I’ll be kind of ironic if I end up crying when the beating stops.
Strawberries and cream is a classic English summertime dessert. It’s most famously served at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, where they get through about 23 tons of the berries. However, even at their most hedonistic, I doubt that the All England Club has ever served its signature fruit quite like this.
I’m normally a fan of interesting predicament bondage combined with service scenarios. Yet somehow the idea of a butt plug based tray for serving fruit seems a little off. I’m sure it’s perfectly hygienic, and it’s not like providing food to people requires servers to leave their assholes at home. I just think the butt plugs and finger food are two things that could probably live happily apart. Call me old fashioned like that.
I’m afraid that despite my best research efforts, I’ve no idea where this shot is from.
I should start this post with a warning: It features images from a piecing session I did with Lydia a few weeks ago. So if you wish to avoid image of naked needled me, then I’d suggestion not clicking any of the links below.
The negotiation for our play was – as usual – very short. I think I said “How about doing some piercing?” and she said “Sure.” That was job done. We’re not big on complicated scripts. I like being surprised and giving Lydia scope for her devilish imagination. A piercing session gives her that ample scope, as she has shown in the past (e.g. here, here and here). In this case she created a decorative piercing all across and down my back. She said the layout and design was inspired by the idea of a walk in a spring garden.
You can see the top part of the design in this shot here and from another angle here. Not content with decorating the top of my back she also planted some needles in my butt, seen in this long torso shot and this close-up. The round design on my butt cheeks is known as a button and is particularly painful. The shafts of the needles cross each other and trap flesh in between. This means any kind of movement pinches and squeezes nerves between needles and creates very intense sensations. Moving around wasn’t really on my agenda, but apparently it was on Lydia’s, as piercing was followed by hitting, and striking, and prodding. That tended to produce a few wiggles.
The marks left when everything had been removed were particularly impressive. I loved the patterns created in the skin. In total I think we used around 120 needles with a gauge varying between 25 down to 18. It wasn’t one of the most intense piercing sessions we’ve ever done from a pure pain perspective. However, it was one of the most meditative, focused and aesthetically pleasing.
Photograph of Lydia is by Mandy McGee photography.
