Suspension – Page 6 – Femdom Resource

Lessons in control

In the last few months there have been countless mainstream articles using the 50 Shades of Grey phenomena as a jumping off point to write about BDSM. I’ve commented on some of the poorer examples in the past. Today I’m happy to bring you one of the better ones. It’s by Vanessa Pinto and describes her experiences in a class on female domination run by Midori.

It’s a 3 day course and features lectures, a field trip and a lab session with a trainer bottom to practice on.

Something very primal came over me, and as I circled him like a bird of prey, I could see that he wasn’t as complacent as he once was. When I wound up to slap him in the face and saw the reaction that I yearned to see, one of peace mixed with excitement. I knew that he was mine to do with as I pleased.

It struck me that I’d absolutely love to be one of those trainer bottoms. And that’s not because I particularly like the idea of the play itself. I’m sure that an hour or two with a strange and novice domme is not going to compare to the regular sessions I enjoy with experts who have done it for years. I also don’t kink on semi-public play or exhibitionism. What makes the role so appealing is the chance to watch someone else discover the joy of BDSM. There’s a lot of discussion on femdom blogs about how the culture of kink puts potentially dominant women off. Just for once it’d be nice to see the other side, where a talented educator can help some women explore a repressed and potentially important part of their sexuality and personality. I think it’d be immensely fulfilling to be part of that process.

The image below features Midori and Mayan and is most definitely not taken from her introduction to female domination class. I’m fairly certain suspension scenes would be in the advanced school. This is from the movie Silken Sleeves by Maria Beatty.

The reality of the fantasy

I used to worry that getting involved in real BDSM – the physical, sweaty, dear God don’t put that in my….oooohhh! – kind, would spoil the fantasy. I enjoyed my rich and somewhat warped fantasy life, and didn’t want to discover that everything my fevered imagination created was really about as much fun as getting hit by a flying brick, and then discovering there’s a courts summons wrapped around it.

Fortunately the reality turned out to be a lot better than the fantasy and actually gave my internal porn producer a whole new set of scripts to work with. However, just now and again I find myself over analyzing an image that catches my eye. For example, I like this shot from the TopGrl site a lot. It’s got elements of bondage, objectification and worship all rolled in together. But now I’ve done suspension scenes I can’t help thinking about how comfortable (or not) the rope harness might be. How long it took to set-up the shot and get all the knots right. How much the submissives neck might ache. It doesn’t spoil the shots for me, but occasionally it does make me second guess them.

All that said, my imagination still keeps itself pretty busy. In this case it’s picturing a second domme at the other end with a cane. Cunnilingus mixed with screams of pain sounds like a wonderful combination.

I found this on the blouxsterville tumblr.

Danger comes in many forms

We spend a lot of time discussing the complexities and risks of BDSM. By ‘we’ in this case I mean BDSM blogs and forums. There’s a lot of good discussion around safeword usage, aftercare, consent and the psychological risks of play. But with all the discussion around the dynamics of BDSM play, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the physical stuff can also be pretty dangerous as well.

This was brought home to me reading this article by Midori on a recent suspension accident. You can read the bottom’s version of what happened here. I don’t know either of the players and wasn’t there, so I’m not going to comment on what actually happened (although I do think this post makes an excellent point). Regardless of the specific circumstances, it’s unarguable that the people involved were experts and yet someone still got seriously hurt.

I’ve done suspension scenes several times and enjoyed them a great deal. They can be very beautiful, as in the last two images here. But there is undoubtedly risk involved. I wonder how many tops train not just for the scene itself, but for the potential scene when everything has gone wrong. Knowing what to do with a shaky submissive coming out of subspace and needing some aftercare is one thing. How many have rehearsed a set of steps to follow when they’ve just dropped somebody on a concrete floor? It often seems that the only time we get to practice an emergency is in the middle of one. Which is pretty much the worst time to do so.

This suspension shot is completely unconnected to the scene in question. I found in on this image board. I like it both for the bondage and for the contrast between the dark background and light bodies.

Surrender v’s Submission

Troy Orleans has a new blog post up where she talks a little about her blogging history and what motivates her to write. It also includes an ask for interesting questions for her to answer via the blog. I’m kind of surprised that some readers see her blog as a source of wank material, and simply ask to have scenes described. Given the vast flood of porn available online, with an almost infinite supply of images and fiction, a pro-domme blog seems an odd place to try and elicit material to bash the bishop to. Clearly I have too high a respect for my fellow man. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

I didn’t realize she had had a formspring account for questions, and I enjoyed browsing back through it. One particular comment caught my eye.

I sorta think that most of my play partners are fairly submissive to me, but their submission is something that I’ve earned over time and not “submission” in a fetishistic sense. I’m rarely asking my play partners to do things they don’t want to do or “forcing” them to “submit” to anything. Rather, it’s that they give themselves over to me out of trust and respect and a passion for the journey that comes with good, intense, highly skilled play. Throughout my practice, I’ve always maintained that what I seek is not submission, but surrender.
Troy Orleans

If you look up the dictionary definitions of ‘surrender’ and ‘submission’ they’re almost identical, and yet surrender resonates with me and the way I play much more than the idea of submission. To surrender feels like a voluntary act. When I’m in a session the mistress doesn’t need to be overtly dominant. I cooperate. Encourage even. I enjoy being a partial instrument in my own demise. In contrast the concept of submission seems to suggest a response to a forceful act of domination. The other term often used in this context is ‘bottom’, but that never quite aligns with me either. That loses too much of the power exchange component. After all you can be a dominant bottom. Perhaps I need to coin a new word. Surrenderist? Surrendission? Surrmission?

My ugly neologistic musings aside, if you’ve got an interesting question for one of the top NYC dommes, then I suggest firing it in Troy Orlean’s direction. Just don’t try and use it to pad your wank bank. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an impressive image of heavy bondage from her Salon d’Orleans.

Giggity

Here’s a cuckold or tease and denial shot with a bit of a twist. It’s an all female couple enjoying themselves for a change, and rather than simply tie the slave to a chair, he has been both mummified and suspended.

In theory this has all the right elements to be a really hot shot. There’s no individually aspect I don’t like. Yet, it somehow it puts me in mind of Glen Quagmire from the show Family Guy. Weird, I know. I think it’s because it looks like the guy has been slowly lowered in over the otherwise occupied women. My internal mental movie has them blissfully making out, entirely unaware of anything out of the ordinary, while the naked mummified man slowly drops into frame. He’s happily swinging back and forth, enjoying the scene, until one of the women catches a faint ‘Giggity, Giggity‘ floating down from above. Screaming and beatings ensue.

I always figured Seth MacFarlane must either be a little kinky or have hired some kinky writers. BDSM seems to crop up fairly often in his cartoons. There’s the sheep that likes shearing a little too much, the aurally masochistic dog and the cow that has its own ballgag. Not to mention the time Stewie decides he’s a masochist and wants to be tortured by Lois, or when Lois and Peter try a little roleplaying and BDSM (maybe a short ad before those last three clips).

The image is courtesy of Mistress T. You can find a lot more of her on her commercial site, and read her thoughts in her blog (also available from my blogroll).

Flying high

Here’s an unusual suspension shot. Often rope work like this is all about restraining and exposing the submissive. This looks a lot more fun and lighthearted. He almost looks like he’s flying, Superman style. From his rather tumescent silhouette he’s certainly enjoying the experience, and from her happy expression it looks like his mistress feels the same way.

I found this on the Treats for the Strange blog. It hosts a wide variety of interesting images. I particularly liked this one, which almost made me run my finger down my screen to feel the rope.

Y: The Last Man

I’m part way through reading a really excellent graphic novel entitled “Y: The Last Man.” I’ve never been a fan of the more traditional style comic books, but this steers clear of superhero cliches and the traditional clunky expository style speeches. Instead it reads more like a clever hip TV show, with funny snappy dialog and sly cultural references.

The premise is that every man (and male animal) drops dead at exactly the same time, leaving only those people without a Y chromosome alive. The only exception is a single young man named Yorick and his pet male monkey. What follows is the story of his quest to find his girlfriend (he’s in the US, she’s in Australia), while the 3B remaining women in the world try and deal with the aftermath of this cataclysmic event.

The author has obviously had a lot of fun thinking about some of the less obvious effects of such a societal shift. The obvious male dominated fields like engineering and law enforcement are clearly going to be a problem. But what about politics? There are comparatively few female politicians, and most of those are from the Democratic party (in the US). So by default the Democrats end up in charge, which doesn’t sit well with the surviving wives of the Republican politicians. The military is another male dominated area, with the exception of Israel, which conscripts and trains women and men. Israel is therefore vaulted into the forefront as a military power, something they’re not slow to take advantage of. There series is full of such intriguing ideas, most of which are great illustrations of just how unequally divided the world still is.

For the most part the books do a good job of subverting the obvious sexual expectations of being the only man on a planet full of women. Yorick spends most of his time hiding and trying not to be killed or kidnapped, rather than trying to repopulate the planet. But there’s one interesting sub-plot where he has an encounter with an aggressive and apparently dominant woman. Things don’t play out exactly as you might expect from these two front page shots, but it adds an entertaining erotic twist into a plot that’s already fairly unusual from a gender and sexual point of view.

Poking the piñata

Here’s a pretty cool suspension rigging. He’s hanging in a nicely tied bundle, available to be swung back and forth as needed, with a perfectly positioned posterior. Unfortunately he’s not looking too happy about it. In contrast she’s obviously enjoying herself, smiling with just a touch of lip curling sneer mixed in. Her boots aren’t in the more traditional/cliched (strike whichever you prefer) domme style, but they fit this prison like setting nicely. I’m guessing no matter how much she beats on this piñata no candy is going to be falling out, but that’s not going to stop her trying.

I found this on the snail meilk site, but it’s obviously originally from the men in pain site.

Just hanging around

I had a comment on my ‘about’ page recently asking for some electrical play or inverted suspension shots. Now as the saying goes, I don’t normally do requests, but then I stumbled across this image yesterday and thought it was worth sharing. The suspension is via cuffs and a bar rather than a proper rope harness (as shown more clearly in this shot), but it looks like it’d be both interesting and intense to try. I’m also now looking at it and wondering if it’d help out with some of my screwy back issues. It’d certainly help stretch the spine out, although the marks might be tough to explain to a physical therapist.

That’s Lady Natalie Black and you can see more of her at her members site.

I heart you

This is a sketch by the artist known as Vernice61. He’s featured here in the past, and you can see a whole collection of his drawings over at the Mistress Fantasy blog.

I like his work a lot. The women always looks very calm and in control, and he’s never shy about stuffing all sorts of tortuous ideas into a single drawing. In this case we have inverted suspension bondage, some nipple torture, a hood plus gag and what looks like a large needle about to inserted into the scrotum. However, what really caught my eye about this image was the little hearts emanating from the slaves head. Weird, but kind of cute.