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.

Fatal Beatings

I thought it was time for another post featuring a collection of themed tumblr links. There aren’t any fatal beatings in here I hope, but I was inspired to do something on a spanking theme by stumbling across this old sketch by Rowan Atkinson. It’s one of his best, featuring an acerbic headmaster who is very concerned about the attitude of a problematic pupil.

For an accompanying post image, I liked the dynamic nature of the shot below. It has caught the moment of impact perfectly, with a nicely balanced mistress and very squashed and red ass.

Mistress paddling slave

Savoir-faire

Today’s post brings you news of an article from 2004. Don’t say that Femdom Resource doesn’t deliver the latest in BDSM culture!

I was reminded of it after reading some of the comments on my earlier post about approaching a dominant woman. Ferns linked to an excellent post she’d written on the subject, which emphasized that the person comes before the submissive. It’s a package deal, and nobody is going to spend time with someone who can scream delightfully when whipped but is an annoying jerk the rest of the time. Playing with gags can be fun, but they shouldn’t be a requirement for a relationship.

This philosophy put me in mind of an old article from Mistress Matisse on how she started dating her primary partner Max. He’s actually a male dominant, but I don’t think that fact alters the underlying point. She wasn’t attracted to some aspect of his sexuality, that actually counted against him initially. It was the fact he was capable, quietly confident and self-possessed that was a significant part of the initial attraction. I also can’t resist posting a link to an article that opens with the following line.

As Max and I approach the fifth anniversary of our first date, I’ve been thinking about the fact that if my submissive, Jae, didn’t have such a big clitoris, Max and I might never have gone on that date at all.
Mistress Matisse in ‘Me, Max and Jae’

That must be a great way to start a response to the old cliched question – ‘So how did you two meet?’

For images I can bring you shots of two out of the three people in question. The first shot below is Mistress Matisse giving Bobbi Starr a spanking in a scene for Everything Butt. The second image is Jae giving some lucky guy a good paddling, taken from this blog post.

Mistress Matisse and Bobbi Starr
Jae swinging a paddle

Spanking theory

When I look back over my posts it strikes me that I’ve featured a surprisingly small amount of traditional style spanking. I have to go all the way back to last year to find a posted image that even alludes to it. This isn’t a deliberate choice on my part, but clearly there must be a degree of subconscious selection going on here. I also don’t think I’ve ever directly asked for a spanking, although I have enjoyed them when a session has naturally evolved in that direction.

In some ways I find spanking an odd activity. I don’t mean that it’s weird or wrong, but just that it seems to possess unusual characteristics that other activities don’t share. It has a historical and a cultural meaning that doesn’t exist with other types of physical D/s interaction.

One thing that held me back for a long time from doing my first pro-domme session was the idea that it’d feel weird. I imagined that I’d be embarrassed by the scene or start laughing when someone tried to tie me up. In the event that didn’t happen. I’ve done scenes that most non-kinky people would think were very unusual, and found them entirely normal, at least for my strange measure of normality. In hindsight I think that this is down to the lack of context. I have no cultural conditioning around how two people should behave when doing play piercing, breathplay or heavy bondage. I just do it and enjoy it. And yet when I get pulled over someones lap for a spanking there is a passing moment of discombobulation. It has a meaning and wider context that come along with it, despite the fact I was never spanked in that fashion as a child.

I got to thinking about this while reading Red Rump’s entertaining tale of his early yearnings for a little babysitter spanking action. Like Red Rump, and a lot of kinky people, my desires started when I was young. However, I didn’t focus on a particular activity. Instead I fantasized about very general ideas of control and restraint. The idea of pain and punishment was always subservient to this broader sense of being dominated. For a lot of spanking fans it seems to be the other way around, where the specific activity is the focus and the elements of domination flow from that. I think it’s telling that the two activities with the most cultural context, spanking and bondage, also attracts the most dedicated and focused followings.

Personally, despite rarely having them, I have always enjoyed a traditional spanking. The sense of closeness to the dominant and the physical communication between the two bodies make for a very unique experience. But I think for me it’s in spite of the cultural background. That’s something I have to overcome in order to simply enjoy the raw activity for what it is. I suspect for a lot of spanko’s it’s the reverse situation, and a lot of the enjoyment comes from the broader context it has and the personal meaning they bring to the act.

Anyone managing to make it through all that random wurbling from me deserves at least a good spanking picture, so here you go. She certainly seems to be enjoying applying that hairbrush with some serious force.

Happy SpankerI found this on the lash kisser tumblr site.

The one where I channel a little maymay

For those of you that haven’t encountered his writing before, maymay writes the ‘Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed‘ blog. He’s an interesting guy and he writes about all sorts of stuff connected to kink, sexuality, gender and politics. Some of his stuff I find thought provoking, some of it strikes me as completely over-the-top and excessively dramatic. And don’t even get me started on some of his dumb comments about pro-dommes (for example here and here).

One thing he’s often commented on in the past is the prevalence of male dominant/female submission in scene spaces. So I couldn’t help thinking of him when I wandered past this page on the kink.com Upper Floor site. The alleged concept of the Upper Floor is:

The creation of a 24×7 BDSM lifestyle space as fantasized about in BDSM literature such as ‘Story of O’, Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty Series, and Laura Antoniou’s MarketPlace Series. Such literature often describes a castle like place in which the norms of society are replaced by the rules of dominance and submission. “The Upper Floor” is an exploration into the feasibility of such a place and lifestyle.

That sounds like fairly ludicrous and laughable concept to start with. However, lets run with the concept of a luxurious decadent space to explore a formalized D/s “lifestyle” (quotes definitely required), and look at the main characters they’ve assembled. There are five in total, four men and a woman. There’s the Master (male dom), the Major Domo (male dom), the Steward (male dom), the Butler (male dom) and the Governess (female switch). Yes, the only woman there is also the only one they put into both a dominant and submissive role. They couldn’t quite bring themselves to add a simple dominant female, despite the fact that ‘Mistress’ would actually be a very appropriate addition to that list of roles. Instead lets ignore the fact that ‘Governess’ sounds like a pretty strict top role, and go with:

Punished or punishing, she is an expert in all things protocol and corporal. Her experience as both top and bottom give her a unique outlook on the needs of both slaves and masters.

Admittedly there’s also a very brief mention about the Butler being punished if he screws up, but it’s kind of lost in all the mentions of him dominating and punishing slave girls.

To add insult to injury, the governess is also responsible for “the close training on the kitchen slave”. So the only woman there also gets put in charge of the kitchen staff. Personally I’d have thought that would be more a job for a cook rather than a governess, but then again what do I know about these kind of 24×7 lifestyle D/s communities?

As kink/gender injustices go, this one is probably a fair way down a pretty long list. But just for a moment or two it ticked me off.

GovernessFor an accompanying image I thought a governess style shot would be somewhat appropriate. I found this on the Superior Women tumblr site. I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution.

Guilt. Loathing. Anger. Shame. Sickness.

I enjoy getting annoyed at an article or book occasionally. Gesticulating in the direction of the screen and muttering “What the fuck is this guy thinking?” can be cathartic. Fortunately for me, thanks to the Internet, there’s an inexhaustible supply of such articles close at hand.

The latest one to trigger my WTF reaction was one in GQ on hard core pornography and the authors reaction to it. The post title gives a little hint as to what that reaction might be. Or maybe this little snippet, when he’s talking about Max Hardcore.

I needed to know we were different. I needed to know I wasn’t him. I needed to know that whatever the hell was wrong with me was not as bad as whatever the hell was wrong with him.

A couple of thousand miles, I decided, wasn’t too far to go to find someone I hated more than myself.

….[ then immediately after talking to Max ]….

It had been over two hours. I didn’t hate him nearly enough. And it made me hate myself even more.

As far as cathartic emotions goes, this article was pretty successful. I managed to get annoyed, bemused, puzzled and incredulous all in the space of four pages.

I read a wide variety of kink and sex blogs, with all sorts of wild behavior in them. There are people getting whipped, trampled, cuckolded, spanked, diapered, caged, stabbed, burnt and pissed on. Yet somehow they all seem more emotionally healthy than this ‘normal’ guy. Guilt and self-loathing must be horrible emotions to have to live with.

For an accompanying image I tried to find something that I felt guilty about liking. It wasn’t easy. There’s all sorts of freaky stuff I like, but I don’t feel guilty about any of it. Finally I settled on this image. It’s completely ridiculous. There’s a cliched classroom setting, a pastiche of a school mistress outfit in latex and a woman posing as a student in latex underwear. But for some reason I think it’s kind of cute.

School mistress spanking pupilImage is from the Captive Culture site.

A nice healthy pink colour

Just a quick post today. I’m heading off for a few days R&R in Las Vegas, and still need to pack my case. I aim to keep posting, but it might be a little more erratic than usual.

In the meantime here’s a well tied and well bruised slave. There are some interesting patches of pink and red on his body, and he looks to be in the perfect position for the mistress to decorate him a little more. That position pulls the skin and muscles around the ass and thighs very tight, which’ll make any cane or strap she decides to employ exquisitely painful.

Bruised And BoundI found this on the Mina Kinks tumblr site. It’s originally from the Divine Bitches site.

Paging Marcel Marceau

I don’t really do role playing. Most of my fantasy involve me being helpless while a sadistic woman enjoys tormenting me in creative ways. That pretty much fits with standard kinky play, no extra layer of acting or creativity required. I also dislike having to think too much when I’m playing. I spend most of my life having to think creatively and solve problems. It’s therefore great to simply let go in a session and slip into subspace, where my opinions don’t count for anything.

That said, I do appreciate the idea of role playing, and I like reading about what other creative fantasy’s people manage to come up with. I was therefore very entertained by this post on The Hang, where regular contributor loucabrazzi listed some of his favorite sessions. All the sessions he describes are a little outside the usual cliches of school mistresses, nurses or prison guards. And his number one session is definitely not one you’ll see in the average kinky porn shot.

1) A Mime session with Mistress Tess in which she plays a mannequin and I’m the “Poor Soul” who wishes her to come to life, but it turns out that once she did come to life, she was a sadistic woman. I did a funny dance routine, with my pants falling down, to Frank Sinatra singing, “All I Need Is The Girl” while she was standing completely still. The whole role play was done in mime with neither of us saying a word or making a sound (even when I was thrashed) and the music was fantastic.

Every time I read that it makes me laugh out loud. I think it’s brilliant. Whenever I happen to drive past a known dungeon location I have a secret smile to myself about what exciting hijinks may be taking place inside. I’d never considered that they might include mimed dance routine to Frank Sinatra in front of a domme pretending to be a mannequin. Followed by a silent thrashing. Now I’ve got a great new mental image to carry with me.

Unsurprisingly, it’s pretty hard to come up with any images of femdom mimes or mannequins to go with this post. I did find this weirdly amusing pornographic shot featuring a mime, but it’s pretty much the opposite of femdom. So instead, given loucabrazzi is a corporal punishment fan, I thought I’d go with something a little more old school and traditional. This is Julia Jameson in an Leda shot that I think was published originally in Ma’am magazine.

Julia Jameson spanking from Ma'am magazine

A few bum notes

Looks like this music mistress has got a little fed up with her pupil’s playing. There’s no instrument more painful to listen to than a badly played violin, and clearly she’s decided she shouldn’t be the only one to have to suffer. Although I can’t help thinking that the quality of the sound will not be improved after administering a spanking with the bow. Maybe the pupil should explain that she’s playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.

I’d love to know the original provenance of this image. I found it on the ‘Stuff I like‘ tumblr site, but with no hint where it was from. It obviously appears to be a period photograph, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be more modern than it looks at first glance.

Music mistress spanking pupil with violin bow

The showing of the implements

I did a session last week where, once I’d been initially shackled to a St. Andrews cross, the domme started pulling out various implements from her bag of tricks. She described each of them as she did so, and laid them out on the bench in front of her. It made for a interesting opening few minutes, setting the scene for what was to come.

I was reminded of that when I saw this image. Judging by his pained expression and hand position, this is obviously not right at the start of the activity. But I like to think it’s capturing a moment mid-way through. She’s giving him a moment to collect himself, offer him a little bit of manual encouragement, and to show him what implements she still needs to use on him. It’s the arm around his shoulder and her focused but caring expression that really makes this image work for me.

Leonardo Femdom ArtworkI was sent this by a reader who thought I might appreciate it. He’d enjoyed one of my earlier posts, and wanted to share some art that he felt had a similar sense of emotion and intimacy. So my thanks to him for pointing me at this particular piece.