Photograph – Page 152 – Femdom Resource

Are you verified?

The Sliax site recently rolled out a verification scheme for professional BDSM and Tantra providers. I was at first hopefully that this meant that they were hiring submissives be professional BDSM reviewers. Sort of like the Michelin inspectors, but with one to three whips rather than stars. I’m not saying I would have instantly quit my job to tour the world having crazy kinky fun with fabulously skilled women for money, but if I thought it’d be a positive contribution to the community, I could have been talked into it. What can I say? I’m just the kind of guy who wants to help others.

Unfortunately the scheme turned out to be based more on community involvement and history rather than scratching my kinky itches. Once I’d gotten over my disappointment, it struck me that the idea of ‘BDSM verification’ was problematic in itself. After all how do you verify someone’s BDSM skills? It’s not like checking that your accountant has passed their CPA exam. There’s no single set of skills, or common training courses, or guild of professional dominants. Who defines the standards? Would verified mean someone was safe? Or skilled? Or simply that they owned a whip and hadn’t stolen their photographs from Vogue?

Fortunately, while I was puzzling over this, someone with real experience and knowledge got involved in the discussion – Mistress Matisse. You can follow her progress via tweets here, here, here and here. The end result is that they’re going to change it to simply a ‘BDSM professional’ badge rather than one that says ‘Verified’, which sounds a better idea. From my perspective, I doubt it’ll make any difference to who I session with. I’ll still prefer to do my own research. But I can imagine it being useful for people who don’t spend quite as much time on kinky web sites as I do (i.e. the other 99% of pro-domme clients).

The image below is of Mistress Shae, taken during her class entitled “The Hard Fuck- Embracing and mastering the art of the mind fuck.” Perhaps she should issue a scout style merit badge for it – “Verified Mind Fucker.” That’d certainly be an eye catching thing to sew to the side of a domme’s peaked leather cap.

Wetting the tip

Continuing the pegging theme from the previous post with an image that made me smile. There’s a lot going on in those two expressions. I also like her relaxed confident pose in comparison to his nervous and slightly tentative stance. It’s got a real predator/prey vibe to it.

This is obvious from the Strapon Dreamer site.

Labels and perception

I’m always interested to read mainstream descriptions of kinky behavior. When you spend a lot of time reading sex blogs it’s easy to get blasé about all sorts of activities. Seeing it filtered through a vanilla perspective can help illuminate how other perceptions might differ.

Take for example the article from yesterday’s post featuring the unfortunate domme who was arrested for needle play. It’s not particularly judgmental (compared to some of these articles), but it still talks about drawing blood, sticking needles into genitals and suturing. I can imagine most vanilla people, and quite a few kinky ones, reading that and going “Ewww! That’s crazy. What kind of insane masochist would do that?” Yet I’ve done all those things, and they don’t really hurt that much *. I’d say an old fashioned caning is way more painful. Hell, smashing my toe in the dark into the corner of the kitchen table is more painful. Familiarity normalizes them.

It’s also a good example of the importance of language. Call it play piercing and it sounds relatively innocuous. Play isn’t exactly a scary word and lots of people get decorative piercings these days. Describe it as needle play and the intensity ramps up a little. Describe it as needles stuck into genitals and it sounds nuts. I touched on a similar theme with respect to the idea of sadism a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a concept that applies pretty broadly in BDSM. Spanking sounds fun and lighthearted. Corporal punishment not so much. Breath play is innocuous next to asphyxiation or smothering. Would you rather say you were pegged or that you were anally penetrated with a dildo? And talking of which…

I found this on the Pegging with a Smile tumblr. I’m afraid I’ve no original source for it.

* One possible exception to the “don’t hurt that much” comment is suturing. It’s OK if you use hypodermic needles to pass the thread through the skin (as I experienced here), but using a genuine suturing needle hurts like hell (as described here).

Gulliver’s Travels

Last week I mentioned a piercing session I’d done with Lydia featuring a fair number of needles. This week I bring you a few photographs from the session. If you’re at all squeamish about piercings or naked gentleman bits, then I’d suggest not clicking on the image links. Both elements feature heavily. On the plus side, there is a sexy picture to finish.

The original plan A for the session was to do a butterfly boarding. We’d done this before, back in 2011, in one of the first sessions I documented. Unfortunately, Lydia couldn’t track down any foam board at short notice. Ever creative, she moved onto a plan B of using my body as the board. Specifically my thighs and stomach. The idea was to pierce through the genitals and then through the torso skin, stitching everything into place with needles. That sounded good in theory, but several painful minutes demonstrated it didn’t work well in practice. The needles tended to pull out too easily. Fortunately, it was a case of third time lucky, as plan C was a striking success. This stuck to using my body as the board, but combined pairs of needles acting as anchor points with cords to stretch everything into place.

This top shot and this side shot show the arrangement pretty clearly. It led to a fascinating headspace, as every small movement pulled at different needles and communicated sensation across my body. Piercing always makes me floaty and the bondage elements of this approach pushed me deeper into that subspace. It also created an interesting feedback loop. Arousal pulled at the needles and, masochist that I am, that made me more aroused, which pulled the needles even more painfully. Lydia always likes to layer sensation, so the nipples also got involved, with cord running from them down via a belly piercing to the top of the cock. You can see the nipple piercing here and a torso view here. That connection across the body brought my breathing into the picture, each breath pulling at the taut cord and signalling down to the needles in their sensitive homes. Very intense but equally stimulating.

I’m always happy and laughing at the end of a scene, but in this case I was particularly amused when it came time to take everything out and I could examine the arrangement more closely. It put me in mind of the famous scene in Gulliver’s travels when he visits Lilliput and gets tied down on the beach. Except instead of Gulliver and ropes there’s my cock and a lot of frayed cords. It’s not really how Swift first imagined it, but possibly my genitals might pull off the role better than Jack Black did.

Given all the naked me in the image links, it feels only fair to finish with someone who’s not only far more photogenic but also responsible for conceiving and executing the scene. This is the wonderful Lydia, taken from her new and excitingly revamped website.

Just for me

I try and pick images for posts that will be generally interesting for a broad range of people, provided that people = kinky and interested in femdom. I didn’t start this blog for it simply to become my online porn collection. There are plenty of tumblrs out there if that’s all your after. However, now and again I feel the urge to post something that’s just for me. Something that pushes all my buttons and makes me silently sigh with a sense of wistful happiness. This is one of those times.

The two shots below are of Mistress Natsukiss. She’s featured in several of my posts in the past (for example here and here). I’ll be the first to admit that a tight leather outfit, black boots and a whip is a look that has featured in countless generic femdom images. But there’s something about Mistress Natsukiss that makes them work afresh for me.

I found these shots via the Phobos tumblr.

Goddam roleplaying bullshit

I first came across this image via the Selina Minx tumblr. I can’t say I was a huge fan of the bondage. It’s very sloppy, and I’m not sure how it’ll progress into anything that’ll actually restrain. However, I did like the smiles, the casual attitude and the lack of fetish clothing. Encouraging kinky play that’s focused on fun and pleasure seems like a good thing. Unfortunately I then did the reverse image search and stumbled across several very annoying articles. I suspect this is a stock photograph and it has been used for a number of Cosmo ‘spice up your sex life’ articles. For example, this and this. These are almost always terrible. For example, here’s a quote from one of them on bondage…

Although in reality it’s wrong, in fantasies and role play, its significance is completely different. In the real world, restraining someone is assault or rape, even. In role play, in contrast, it signifies: “you’re so desirable that I can’t resist you. You have such power over me that I want you at all costs”. And for a woman, it can be very liberating.

It’s hard to know where to start with this. Yes, bondage can liberating, but for men as well as women, and on both sides of the knots. As for the rest? Words fail me. I don’t play in some fantasy world of magic and unicorns. I play in a reality of bondage, masochism and negotiated consent. The idea of someone being so desirable and irresistible that you want to tie them up whatever the cost is deeply troubling.

Roleplay can be a lot of fun. I’ve nothing against it. But it’s just one narrow slice of kink. Instead it often seems to be treated as all encompassing. That’s particularly true for the mainstream press, who treat BDSM as a subset of roleplay. Can’t we just tie people up and beat them for the sheer hell of it? I want to get fucked up by someone being themselves, not someone pretending to be someone or something else.

60 needles = a happy man

I’m not sure about the precise maths on this. It’s possible that 59 needles make for an equally happy man. The science isn’t entirely clear. However, thanks to my session tonight with Lydia, I can confirm that 60 needles through various bits of his body makes this man happy. And floaty. Possibly even slightly giddy.

I shall endeavor to gather more datapoints on the needle/happiness curve in future investigations. In the meantime I’ll leave you with this shot of another happy man. No needles involved, but there is a judicially placed foot. I’m sure the owner of it appreciates the smile.

I found the image on the Freya’s Fancy tumblr. Annoyingly it’s another one that I can’t track down the source of. Feel free to leave a comment if you can help me attribute it properly.

Continuing negotiations

I find it amusing that I happened to start writing posts on negotiation just when our glorious political leaders in Washington DC decided to give such a fine example of how badly it can be done. I can only imagine somebody up there must have forgotten the safeword. It’s certainly doesn’t seem to be Safe, Safe or Consensual from this perspective.

I had a couple of follow-up thoughts from yesterday’s post. One came from a comment by Pat, who suggested that ‘Keep it honest’ should have been on my list. I very much agree. There’s nothing to be gained from exaggerating experience or being overly optimistic about limits and abilities. I’d rather start at 70% and enjoy pushing towards 100% than start at 110% and have to stop the action and ask to scale back.

My other thought was on the topic of negotiating with a familiar domme. Yesterday’s post was mostly about dealing with a new relationship, but what happens when you’ve got a few scenes under your (leather) belt? What’s the best way to handle a scene negotiation? Well, this might seem like crazy talk, but I’ve found asking the domme how she prefers to structure it works pretty well. I know it’s odd to give the domme control, but somehow it seems to work for me.

Just as there’s a wide variety of play styles in scenes, I’ve also found there’s a wide variety of negotiation styles. Some dommes, once they know you, are happy to structure the session with minimal input. My last few sessions with Cynthia Stone in LA were that type. I was comfortable letting her do that and she certainly had no shortage of ideas to try out on me. With others I might give a single area or idea for them to riff on. That’s the approach Lydia and I use for our sessions. Typically it’s just a single theme per session and she elaborates on it, blending in other ideas and activities as she likes. Other dommes prefer a more detailed negotiation, with a more specific list of activities they can pick from. That works fine for me as well.

Ultimately this ties back to one of my original points about playing as much as possible with the same domme(s). How to negotiate a scene is in itself something that can be discussed and negotiated between the participants. But before doing that we need to already have a good understanding on the basic stuff (limits, interests, triggers, etc.), and that only comes with familiarity.

I wasn’t really sure what image would be appropriate for this post, so I thought I’d return to the subject of my opening paragraph for inspiration. In both cases somebody is getting fucked. It’s just that for the couple below, it’s the fun kind of fucked.

I found the image on the Pegging with a Smile tumblr. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to track down an original source.

Negotiation

A few weeks ago I wrote about scene negotiation and one particular way it could go wrong. I originally planned to follow that up with a post on the right way to do it, before realizing how incredibly egotistical that would be. I’m no expert to be telling others what to do. Instead let me simply describe what has worked for me in the context of negotiating professional sessions. That has been a learning experience for me over the years, and maybe there will be something relevant to others.

One of the primary things I’ve discovered is that familiarity breeds understanding. My best sessions have always featured people I’ve played with multiple times in the past. That’s not to say I haven’t had great first sessions, but it’s hard to have a really intense and moving scene when I’m still getting to know someone. I therefore play exclusively with Lydia in Seattle and I try to revisit dommes I already know when traveling. It’s so much easier to do scene negotiation when I’ve got past history to draw on and a shared understanding to work with.

That said, there are definitely learning opportunities that come with playing with new people, and all relationships have to start somewhere. So here’s my approach when I’m getting to know someone…

Keep it simple.
There’s a lot of figure out when playing with someone new – chemistry, communication, physical response, etc. I therefore like to keep the activities list short to try and minimize the variables. Picking just a couple of general areas, for example bondage and CBT, gives enough scope to play while keeping the negotiation easy.
Focus on areas of expertise.
A lot of pro-dommes will list particular activities they enjoy or areas they specialize in. I always like to suggest these in our initial negotiations. Seeing someone at their best is highly informative. If there’s not good chemistry doing something they profess to particularly enjoy, then that’s a red flag.
Trust my instincts.
I’ve had very few bad experiences. Any domme that I’ve played with and named on this site has been someone I’ve had a great experience with. For the unnamed dommes I’ve had problems with, there were almost always signs early in our communication that I ignored. This has included things like obviously not fully reading my (short) emails, introducing D/s dynamics at the negotiation stage, chopping/changing session times frequently, and introducing activities I’d clearly identified as problematic in initial sessions. I’ve learned that any early problems in negotiating (and sticking to it) is a sign of more problems to come down the road.
Do paired sessions.
I think it’s really hard to negotiate or give non-trivial feedback in the middle of a session. I’m typically in a submissive mindset and it takes time to switch gears, step back and get perspective on a session. With someone new I therefore always try and do two sessions a couple of days apart. That gives us both time to evaluate and re-negotiate when there’s not rope, whips and sweaty bodies involved.
Review before clothes come off.
I do most of my negotiation in email, and normally a week or so before a session. I’ve no doubt all good dommes will reread that communication before playing, but I always find it useful just to review it verbally, even if there’s nothing to add. There’s often detail and emphasis that can get lost when emailing someone, particularly when you’ve not met before.
Distinguish suggestions from asks.
This is a minor thing, but it’s something that’s bitten in the past. I’ll say something like “Doing A and B might be fun, I particularly like C”. To me that means “Definitely do C, pick as you like from A,B”. To someone else that can simply mean “Pick as you like from A,B,C”. I then spend a session expecting C at some point, and I’m slightly surprised and disappointed when it doesn’t happen. I’ve therefore learned to be very clear to distinguish between when I’m asking for something specific and when I’m merely suggesting some possible options.

Hopefully that short list might be useful for a few readers. I’ll save some follow-up thoughts for another post. Picking an image for this post was kind of tricky. Nobody photographs pre-scene negotiation. So going in completely the opposite direction, here’s an image of the kind of session you’d really want to negotiate carefully upfront. Guns don’t do much for me, but I do appreciate their iconic nature. It’s just not the kind of activity I’d want to be surprised with!

The image features Mistress Eve, a pro-domme based out of London. She has a very extensive list of interests, so if you’re in the area I’m sure you’ll be able to negotiate something interesting.

The San Francisco sessions

On my recent visit to the Bay Area I was lucky enough to do a couple of different sessions. One with Mistress Ai-Li and one with Mistress Yuki. They were kind enough to snap a few pictures during the sessions, and I thought I’d share the result here. The usual warning applies – these images are of my scrawny ass. Just for a change, the attractive women in lingerie are the ones behind the camera.

The first session was with Mistress Ai-Li and across the bridge in Oakland. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I planned badly and got a touch too drunk the night before. That meant a session that was slightly scaled back in intensity. Fortunately BDSM isn’t a competitive sport and success isn’t measured by who can go further or faster. We had a very enjoyable couple of hours featuring bondage, mild corporal, and CBT, finishing it all off with some nipple piercing. Mistress Ai-Li came up with a fun arrangement of needles and string that gave her a handy handle to yank. You can see what I mean in this side shot and this downward shot. For a small gauge the needles were pretty painful going in, but pleasantly erotic when gently tugged via the cord.

The second session with Mistress Yuki followed two days after. My scratch marks had faded, but my nipples were still tender to the touch. I’ve discovered over the years that mentioning this kind of fact to a domme acts more of an incentive than a reason for caution, and Mistress Yuki didn’t buck that trend! The session featured some heavier bondage and corporal, along with a lot of clips attached to very delicate places. The ones Mistress Yuki had the most fun with were small butterfly hairclips that looked better suited to a young girl’s bedroom than a BDSM playspace. You can see them in place on my nipples here and around the cock and balls here. They hurt going on. They really hurt coming off. But they were absolute agony when Mistress Yuki say on my lap and slowly moved them with her body. The combination of the pain of the clips, the closeness of her and the over-the-shoulder glance that she gave me as she pushed downwards will be a memory that stays with me for a long time.

The image below is Mistress Yuki in a photoshoot from a few years back. Although that’s not my hand with her, it seemed an appropriate image to pick to finish this post. I love blending intimacy and sensuality with intense sensations in a session. I always want to play with a positive energy and both Mistress Yuki and Mistress Ai-Li are great at doing that. This shot captures an aspect of that kind of play that is often missing in kinky imagery.