Tag: Pro-domme

Floating and Floaty

I couldn’t finish a trio of posts on bondage and its related equipment without featuring two renowned experts of both the tools and the art – Elise Graves and Troy Orleans. These two shots feature some beautiful leather bondage and a very cool suspended table. I also like the very simple clean space that they’re playing in. For me it always feels a lot more intense and serious to play in a ‘normal’ looking studio space than it does to play in all black dungeon with chains and whips hanging off the walls.

I know from experience that heavy bondage can create a floaty headspace. In this case it also looks like he’s floating in space.

I found this via a tweet on Elise Graves’ twitter feed. It’s obviously from her Bondage Liberation site, which contains all sorts of interesting intense bondage shots.

Triple Bondage Trouble With Mistress Tess

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was lucky enough to get not one but two sessions on my current trip with the amazing Mistress Tess. We split them as 2 hours and then 4 hours, with my original thinking being that we’d start with a gentle warm-up and then get into the heavier stuff in the longer second session. In the event we started with intense and awesome, followed by even more intense and even more awesome, which turned out to be just fine with me! There was a lot of bondage in both, but we only snapped photographs in the second one.

That second session started with a leather body bag, and straps, and rope, and more straps, and some locks, and then more straps. This abundance of leather and bondage was complemented by some electrics attached to the only skin showing – the cock and balls. You can see all this in these images – torso, angle, side and close-up. I should add that throughout this Mistress Tess was spinning an imaginative medical experimentation fantasy, with me as the object at the focus of it. Apparently amputation and castration might have been in my future – but luckily, this time at least, I escaped with all parts intact.

We then moved on to some metal bondage on her pegboard bed, as shown in this overhead shot. I’m sporting some particularly sexy boots, and the metal spheres just in frame at the bottom are actually enclosing my hands. The metal creates an interesting head space, as there’s a little more initial wiggle than ropes or leather, but at the end of the wiggle it’s hard and immovable metal. Everything’s bolted down, so you feel very much part of the apparatus, rather than simply held by it. While I was bolted into place, Mistress Tess took the chance to do some piercing and continue to zap my delicate bits.

Finally, we did something entirely new to me  – a wet pack. This consisted of multiple cold wet sheets being wrapped around me to swaddle the body.  As a newbie to the process I got the lightweight version, which didn’t feature sheets that had been kept wet in the fridge for hours, but it was a still a major shock to the system. Apparently a wet pack is a genuine medical ‘treatment’ that used to be used in asylums to restrain/cure/punish patients.  Tess being the bondage aficionado that she is, didn’t just stop at sheets, as leather straps and then plastic wrap were added to finish the encasement off. You can see the final result in this image and this image. Luckily, body heat eventually warms the sheets, so it becomes almost relaxing. I say ‘almost relaxing’ because of course, with Doctor Tess in the clinic, the restraints are only the start of the procedure…

It was a genuinely awesome experience, and I was giddy and burbly for many hours afterwards. The technical elements of the play were exceptional and, as I mentioned the last time I played with her, Mistress Tess  is also brilliant at spinning a verbal fantasy. There was a lot of tease, denial and creative sadistic storytelling to go along with it all.  It’s unfortunate that I live a 6 hour flight away, otherwise I could see myself spending a lot of time as a specimen in her laboratory of kink.

This shot is a close-up from the first scenario. You can see the white rope pulling the body bag tight, with the padlocks locking the straps into place.

If you’re in the NYC area and interested in seeing Mistress Tess, then her professional site is here and her twitter here. If you can’t make it to NYC then her OnlyFans account has a lot of great content and is here.

Doctors Orders

Today was a good day. The kind where God pats you on the head and says”Good boy, have a reward.” The kind of day that makes you feel slightly guilty for enjoying yourself when there’s so much shitty stuff happening in the world.

I got to enjoy some awesome modern Korean food for dinner (here) and got to be tortured, teased and objectified as a medical test subject by Mistress Tess. At this point I’m not sure if I’m all human or part lab rat. I do have a craving for cheese, but that’s pretty much normal. Being tightly trussed up in leather, fed strange yellow liquids and having various body parts painfully clamped may seem like kinky fun. However,  I was assured by the very stern yet attractive lady Doctor that (a) my opinions weren’t relevant and (b) it was valid medical research. I guess I should contact my insurance company and see if they cover this kind of treatment? Or should they even by paying me for the research underway here?

I believe based (based on this collection at Femdom Artists) that this work is by an artist working under the handle Adams.

Ice with Mistress Mara

My trip East got off to an excellent start, meeting up with Mistress Mara Mayhem in Chicago. We’ve played together several times in the past, so it was nice to catch up and get back into the rhythm of playing again.

She’d just purchased a lovely red vinyl ‘straitjacket’ that wrapped my arms and shoulders up but left the delicate body parts available for torturing and for binding. All manner of squeezing, slapping, pinching, scratching and tickling featured, along with a fair amount of growling and snarling from yours truly. If Mistress Mara’s spirit animal is cat then, judging by my mid-scene noises, mine is definitely a dog.

Probably the strongest reaction I had was to something as simple as a strategically placed ice cube. For some reason that made me laugh a lot, although I’m not totally sure why. It was a very instinctual response, almost like being tickled, but triggered by a very different skin sensation.

My thanks to Mistress Mara for a great start to my trip. I’m now in NYC, where hopefully more kinky shenanigans await.

Mistress Mara is a Chicago based pro-domme, although if you keep up with her twitter you’ll see she also tours as well.

Working from Different Baselines

This article – The female price of male pleasure – isn’t femdom and isn’t even recent (Jan ’18). However, I found it thought provoking and it’s my blog, so here it is.

The basic thrust of the article is that men and women operate on very different scales when it comes to sex and pleasure. For men the range is boring to awesome, for women the range is painful/scary/coercive to awesome. That leads to very different baselines and different normal expectations. On top of that, society has conditioned us to make the male expectation the default one, to the point where people don’t even realize other expectations exist, which in turn distorts any discussion about it.

Although it’s  not about kink and femdom, I think the articles basic point is actually equally applicable to them. If you look around at the online representation of femdom, it would be hard to argue that male pleasure isn’t the primary focus of 95% of it. The dicks might be getting squashed, smacked, beaten, locked up, teased or laughed at, but the dick is still the primary focus. It’s ironic that in a realm where the purported focus is female pleasure and male pain, it’s typically still the women clambering around in the uncomfortable outfits while the men get to sit back and soak in the sensations they crave.

I don’t really have any wise words on how to address this. Hell, this blog is just as guilty of perpetuating the status quo. But if a discussion is going to be productive, all parties have to at least be operating with a shared understanding and a common context. So perhaps just acknowledging the different contexts and baselines that are operating here is a useful first step.

It was tricky to pick and image for this particular topic. I figured a dominant woman enjoying both a candle lit bubble bath and a bound silenced slave to drip hot wax onto was a pretty good representation of what should be pleasure for all concerned. This is Goddess Viper,  a pro-domme based in Manila, with the image taken from her twitter feed. My thanks to Lucy Sweetkill for the original article link.

Chemistry over Cash

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post on the topic of pro-domination and the amount taken as tribute. In that post I argued that the number one factor that drove tribute was the local cost of living and property prices. However, that’s not the whole story. If you look just at a single city and take an average across tribute values, you’ll still find a non-trivial variance. I’ve occasionally seen as much as a two times variance in hourly rate within the same metropolitan area. So what gives with that? Is the experience offered by some pro-dommes that much better?

…There’s a slight pause at this point while I strap my flameproof pants on…

In my entirely personal and anecdotal experience, the answer to that question is no. Among the various well established and independent dommes I’ve played with, I’ve never observed a correlation between session quality and tribute rates. I’ve had lots of amazing sessions and I’ve had a few very average sessions, and which was which always came down to personal chemistry and all the other intangibles that  go along with great kinky play. The amount of cash I had to show up with never made any difference. It’s the same story with equipment and general professionalism. I know dommes with mad scientist levels of equipment stuffed into their play space who charge less than dommes who play out of hotel rooms.  I had one domme who was charging 50% over the average San Francisco rate show up two hours late to our session, where Lydia, who charged around the average for Seattle, was never once late in 100+ sessions.

Of course you should never ever haggle over tribute rates. A pro-domme, or a sex worker of any type, can set her rates at whatever she wants and absolutely have that rate respected. If you don’t want to pay it, then don’t contact her. However, don’t be tempted to think that higher necessarily means a better experience. If you’re budget limited, you’ll almost certainly be able to find an amazing domme who doesn’t charge more than the average for her part of the world.

Of course, everything I just wrote applies only to regular professional kinky play. If you’re into findom of the kind depicted by Sardax here, then all bets are off.

Money, money, money

When it comes to paying a professional dominant – the ‘tribute’ in the industry parlance – it’s said that you get what you pay for. My social media feeds frequently features this sentiment expressed in various different ways, both by pro-dommes and their clients. In other words the quality of the dominant and the experience she offers correlates strongly to the size of the tribute she demands. But is this true?

I can obviously only comment from my limited personal experience, which is entirely with independent and well established pro-dommes.  However, within that limited set, I’d say the number one correlation with the tribute amount isn’t the skill of the domme, but the cost of real estate in her location. High cost cities make it expensive to maintain both a playspace and a personal residence. They also tend to have a highly paid client base who can afford higher fees. So Manhattan has always had very high hourly tribute rates. San Francisco wasn’t too bad a decade or so ago, but has become a lot more expensive in recent years.  Seattle isn’t in San Francisco’s league yet, but is beginning to trend in that direction.

Keeping all this in mind, if there are any American submissives out there with cash on the hip, vacation time in the bank, and a kinky itch to scratch, my top recommendation would be to visit Los Angeles. It’s got a huge and talented pro-domme community, but its sprawling layout leads to a cheaper cost of living and significantly lower tribute rates. For example, Isabella Sinclaire is undoubtedly an outstanding domme, with the skills to match anyone in the world. Yet, her rate for 2 hours is (at the time of writing) $500, which is significantly below the SF average and way below the NYC average. She also has an amazing and well equipped play space.

I hated LA when I first visited it back in the 90’s, but it’s probably the one place in America I’d now consider living outside Seattle. If you’ve not been then I definitely recommend it. Just steer clear of the Hollywood tourist traps.

This shot is from Isabella’s instagram feed. Her contact information for scheduling professional sessions is here.

Memorial Parade

The New Orleans Dominatrix Convention is coming up in October. Specifically it runs from the 4th to the 8th. I’m sadly not going to be there, but if you can attend, you might want to look out for a Second Line Parade that’s being organized. It has been put together by Simone Justice to remember and celebrate the lives of people the BDSM community has lost in recent years. As their press release says…

More than 100 dominatrixes will strut The French Quarter dressed in full fetish regalia comprised of leather, latex and thigh high boots while dancing to a brass jazz band, waving parasols and handkerchiefs.

The second line parade is a uniquely New Orleans tradition, held for many kinds of occasions, and anyone on the street is welcome to join in the revelry.

You can read more about this New Orleans tradition here. It sounds like this one should be quite the event. If you know of anyone you think should be specifically called out for this memorial, then Simone Justice has been collecting suggestions.

I’ve no idea what fetish outfit Simone Justice plans to wear for the parade, but based on this image, I’m sure any attendees will be in for a visual treat. If you’re interested in seeing her in her professional capacity, her main site is here.

Top Dog

Here’s a final post (for the moment) on a pet theme. Just after I published yesterday’s post on pro-dommes and animals, I noticed this tweet from Mistress Baton. For those not wishing to click through it features an image with the text “You don’t get to tell me what to do, you’re not my dog.” Her accompanying comment is that “The only creatures who can boss Dominatrice around are our pets.”

So I guess the lesson here is that if you’re going to top from the bottom, make sure you’re as cute as a puppy. Otherwise best do what you’re told.

This image is Mistress Adreena Angela with her personal puppy.

For the Love of Dog

Over the last decade or so I’ve been lucky enough to meet and interact with a lot of fabulous pro-dommes. They’ve all had their own unique style and approach, but there is one unusual commonality that I’ve observed. It’s not that they were intelligent, empathetic, well-organized and excellent communicators. I mean all those things were true, but being a successful professional dominant  tends to naturally select for them. Pointing those out is like pointing out that most basketball players are tall and most politicians can lie convincingly. It comes with the territory.

The unusual commonality I’ve observed is a love of animals. That’s obviously not a characteristic unique to pro-dommes, but it seems to be significantly skewed compared to the general population and to manifest itself in many different ways. Pro-dommes are frequently enthusiastic and proud pet owners, adopters of abandoned animals, volunteers at pet rescue centers, vegetarians or vegans and supporters of animal related charities. I’m obviously generalizing a lot here about a big group of people, and it won’t be true for everyone, but it is true for most of the dommes I’ve played with and true for a lot of the pro-dommes I see posting on social media.

I actually made this observation to a pro-domme last year. Although in fact, I only got as far as saying that there was one common theme I’d noticed before she beat me to the punch. I hadn’t even managed to finish my sentence before she came out with exactly the same observation.

An optimist might suggest that this trait derives from dommes possessing a nurturing and empathetic personality type that fits well with caring for animals. A cynic might suggest its because the average pet is a lot more obedient, dependable and trainable that 95% of male submissives.

This shot is from Mistress An Li and features, in her words, her two bitches playing. The one on top is her puppy and the one apparently losing the fight is her submissive in a pet crawler outfit.

Mistress An Li is an LA based pro-domme, and her professional site is located here.