Thoughts – Page 20 – Femdom Resource

Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist

I recently watched Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. It’s a documentary detailing Bob’s life as a writer, performance artist and sexual submissive masochist. What made him particularly extraordinary was that he suffered from cystic fibrosis, a disease that normally kills people before they reach their mid 20’s. He died age 43, making him one of the worlds longest lived suffers from it.

If you’ve never seen it I’d urge you to rush out and get a copy. I thought it was an extraordinarily moving film. I’m not ashamed to say I cried a little at the end. I also think it captures some aspects of masochism, submission and D/s better than any other film I’ve seen. Using a fairly standard documentary format, cutting interviews of friends and family into home movie footage, it paints a very frank and honest picture of his life with his partner and mistress Sheree Rose.

This is actually the second time I’ve seen the film. I first saw it over 10 years ago, before I’d gotten physically involved in BDSM, and I remember being fairly horrified at some of the SM activities they did. Now I look at the footage and think “Yes, done that. Loved that. Oh play piercing, that’s fun. Drinking piss, done that…..” I’ve never actually nailed my cock to a board as Bob does at one point in the film, but my sense of ‘normal’ has clearly shifted.

There’s some attempt in the film, particularly by his parents, to tie his early childhood experiences with his illness to his kinkiness. I understand that desire to look for a cause and effect, but it seems to be misplaced. The vast majority of kinky guys don’t have major childhood trauma and medical procedures. I think he was someone with cystic fibrosis who happened to be kinky. The one clearly influences the other, but it seems misplaced to think of it as a cause.

Two quotes really stuck with me. The first from Bob was near the start of the movie. The second is from Sheree and was towards the end when he was getting very sick.

People don’t think of the masochist as being a strong person. The stereotype that the masochist is sniveling and weak is actually not true. The masochist has to know his or her own body perfectly well and be in full control of their body, in order to give control to somebody else or to give control to pain. So the masochist is actually a very strong person.
Bob Flanagan

I don’t even think he’s a masochist anymore. I think life has beaten him down too much. The pain he lives with every day is so intense that there isn’t any other kind of pain that he can even think about right now.
Sheree Rose

I certainly agree with the first quote, and I think the second helps emphasize the same point. Being a masochist (or submissive) doesn’t mean being a needy person or someone who has no control over their life. You need control and a strong sense of self in order to successfully gift that to another. By the end he’d lost that, the disease was taking over and he could no longer give away power. His body and its sickness had already stolen it.

The movie is available on DVD from amazon. You can read Roger Ebert’s review of it here.

Update: Scott of Mrs Kelly’s Playhouse was actually friends with Bob in the early 90’s. He’s left a lengthy comment on this post describing some of his memories of Bob. My thanks to Scott for that additional information.

It was a dark and stormy night…

Thumper made a comment in a recent post that struck a chord with me.

It’s interesting to me that I can post pictures of my junk online but writing down my fantasies like this makes me feel more vulnerable and nervous. I guess that’s because it’s a peek into my head while all the HNT in the world doesn’t give you much more than a surface view.
Thumper

I’ve posted a fair number of onlink junks shots (purely as an educational resource of course), along with shots of naked me in sessions, but publishing my erotic fiction always creates a far greater feeling of vulnerability. Even commenting on my fantasies in blog posts, or saying what I like about certain images, seems far safer then crafting fictional porn. Of course there’s the natural fear of failure and ridicule that comes with any public creative endeavour. But on top of this I think erotic writing has its own particular issues.

For one thing, I give up any plausible deniability. A reposted image or a blog comment can easily be written off. I can just claim it was interesting rather than personally exciting, or I posted it because it was weird and made me laugh, or it raised important questions. There’s no chance of that with a carefully crafted ten thousand word short story. Everyone knows I spent hours writing, editing and proof-reading it. Every paragraph is there because I want it there. It’s impossible to distance myself from the ideas it contains.

Writing also gives immense power. Photographs of me in a session are constrained by physical, legal and moral laws. I know I’m publishing something that thousands of people have described and attested to before me. There’s safety in those numbers. As a writer I stand alone. I don’t have to limit myself to any particular physical or moral constraints. I can create something uniquely depraved if I wish, and I’ll have no one to share the stage or the blame with.

Finally, I think there’s often an implicit chain of reasoning that runs as follows. An erotic story is designed to excite and arouse people. The author based their ideas on what excited him or her. People like to do what excites them. Therefore the author wants to do whatever is written in the story. Nobody thinks Stephen King wants to dress up as a clown and lurk in sewers threatening children. Or that he’d really enjoy going insane in a deserted hotel. But throw a sex scene into a book and it’s impossible not to start wondering what it reflects about the author and their particular sexual quirks. Where do they draw the lines between their achievable, unachievable and undesirable fantasys?

Some of the things I’ve written or enjoyed reading would be truly horrendous in real life. In some cases I wouldn’t even want to see them filmed or photographed Hollywood (i.e. fake) style. They work in the abstract. They distill out the nasty underlying emotions into sexual heroin for my reptilian id. They’re like a sexual horror movie, drawing on primitive responses to short circuit the intellectual bit of my brain.

There’s really no blog post or picture I’ve published that I look back on and regret. I can’t say all of them were successful, but there’s none I sometimes wish I could take back. I’m not sure I could honestly say the same thing for the very limited amount of fiction I’ve written.

I’m afraid I can’t think of any particularly appropriate image that would go along with this post, so here’s a very attractive lady in latex. You’re welcome.

$Woman in latex catsuit$ I found this on the Stuff I Like tumblr site.

I like power exchange, not link exchange

This is going to be a fairly dry post about blog etiquette and site management. By way of compensation I do have a link to an amusing video clip at the end.

I get regular emails and comments pointing me to the senders blog or tumblr site. I’m always happy to receive these and discover new material. In some cases, when I think it’s worth sharing, I’ll add the links to an appropriate part of this site. Sometimes I’ll just keep an eye on the link and keep it as an option to add publicly after I’ve had chance to read it over a few weeks. The key criteria is do I think the link will be interesting and useful for any of my readers.

However, please don’t email me and offer to do a link exchange. I think it shows a poor attitude towards your sites readership. If you think my site would be interesting and useful to your readers, then link to it. If you’re right then you’ll be enhancing the value of your own site. If you don’t like it, then don’t link. It’s as easy as that. My criteria for linking always adopts that approach. I think if you concentrate on building the best most useful site you can, the rest will sort itself out.

OK. Minor blog rant over, here’s the video link I promised. It’s a sketch by the comedy group The Whitest Kids U Know, featuring a dominatrix’s first day on the job. It’s not hysterically funny, but it did made me smile. Although I’m pretty certain they’re wrong about the key to being a good dominatrix.

Happy childhood memories

I love the strange covers of the trashy erotic novels and fiction magazines that appeared from the 1950’s through to the 1970’s. They’re often very lurid and melodramatic, with weird sexual ideas. This one is a particularly good example of their what-the-fuck strangeness, with its newly minted lesbian castratrix. I found this on the femdom artists site, and Her Majestys Plaything also featured some similar covers in a recent post.

The reason for the post title is not because I was almost emasculated by a strangely large lesbian archer as a child. Although that might explain a few things if it were true. In fact, oddly enough, the title is due to my Uncle. He was an ordained Methodist minister by profession, politically active in the local community and highly literate. As you’d expect with that kind of resume, his study was crammed with dense complex books relating to religion, philosophy, sociology and politics. But one enormous bookcase, almost covering an entire wall, was packed with erotic novels. He had all the classics (Delta of Venus, The story of O, Fanny Hill, etc.) but the majority were kinky and explicit works of a more recent vintage. They featured everything from vicious female Nazi doctors through naughty British schoolgirls to seductive French countesses. Sometimes all in the same book.

As you might expect for a horny teenager with kinky tendencies, that bookcase was my holy grail. I planned my visits to his house like an Oceans 11 style heist caper. How could I sneak into the study, dodge the various family members, acquire a book and escape for some private time, before replacing it undetected? Unfortunately I was less George Clooney and more Groucho Marx when it came to the smooth execution of complex plans, and usually ended up being forced to ‘borrow’ one of his conventional books as cover. It’s hard pretty hard to jerk off to the life and works of Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas unless you’re a real sicko. Finally, one happy summer, we traded houses with his family for a few days, and I spent every night sneaking his sleaziest nastiest books back to my room. I think I probably slept five or six hours in total over 4 very onanistic nights.

Fire! Fire! Fire!

(Post title to be read in your best Beavis voice).

I’m feeling a little on edge today as a result of a session I did last Friday with Lady Lydia. The session itself was a fantastic one, which is no surprise when Lydia is involved. However, it did leave me with a rather interesting and/or frustrating (depending on your point of view) short term side effect.

We were playing with heat and burning, with a bunch of surgical staples thrown into the mix just for added fun. For the heat Lydia used several different approaches, including wax candles and sparklers (very pretty), but the bulk of burning was done with an electric soldering iron. By applying the tip to the skin she could pop skin cells, resulting in an audible zap as the cell fluid boiled, and delivering a sharp jolt of pain to me. It created an interesting headspace, as the pain was sharp, but very localized and of short duration. It was quite difficult to zone out to, as it was almost a drip like effect, delivering small blasts of sensation with an irregular periodic timing as she worked across the skin. At the same time being decorated and creatively modified (as I’ve posted about before) is a very intense and emotive experience.

While the session itself was wonderful, the side effect was to leave small scabbing burns all across my chest and genitals. The chest marks are fine, but lines of burns on my cock means that rubbing it vigorously is probably a bad idea. I don’t fancy a scarred dick, so I’m going to have to leave it to heal and remains hands off for a week or two. I realize that for some guys (e.g. Thumper or Tom Allen) a couple of weeks of enforced chastity is fairly trivial, but I’m really not used to it. And the fact I physically could jerk off, but know that I really shouldn’t, makes it additionally frustrating. Don’t be surprised if I start posting pictures of baseball players in an effort to avoid stimulating material.

I do have some shots of the after effects, but I really should emphasize caution before clicking. The chest one is fairly innocuous, but the other two are very explicit and not for the squeamish. If you are the kind of crazy person that for some weird reason doesn’t want to see close-ups of burns on the male genitalia, then please don’t click. I’m very proud of the marks, but I’m sharing them here only for educational value. Those of you that choose to put your genitals into the hands of a creative sadist with a soldering iron will at least now know what’s liable to happen. Here’s the chest shot. This is the cute design Lydia put on my balls. And here’s a shot of the burns to the cock. There are actually 4 distinct lines up the shaft and and a ring around the edge of the glans.

A hint of vanilla revisited

This is a follow-up post to this earlier one. I received several lengthy comments, including a response from Mistress Rex which she re-posted to her blog. I started to write a detailed comment as a reply, but decided it’d be easier to simply create a new post. Apologies to those people who weren’t particularly interested in the original discussion to start with. I promise to include an attractive picture at the end by way of compensation.

I want to start with the ‘my way or the highway’ aspect.

Pro Dommes who state from the get-go what is expected in communication – whether it’s as simple as how she is addressed to the more complicated issues of capitalization – it is entirely in her right and reason to do so…
…if it bothers you, find someone else.
Mistress Rex

I think that’s simultaneously true and also irrelevant to the discussion. It’s an argument that taken to its logical extreme would mean never writing about negotiation and interaction with pro-dommes, because the answer can always be “If you don’t like it go elsewhere.” Obviously what I’m writing about here are my personal feelings and expectations. The kind of interaction that I find meaningful and reasonable. I’ve certainly voted with my feet in the past and no doubt will do so again in future. This discussion is about some of the things that might cause me (and other submissives) to do that.

I should also add that I’m not talking about the kind of rules that are necessary for the smooth running of a business. Only calling between certain hours, requiring a reference or deposit, meeting in a neutral space for the first time, etc. These all are sensible operating parameters, and don’t imply anything about the D/s dynamic.

The issue for me is related to the sentiment that coined the expression “I may be a submissive, but I’m not your submissive.” This expression often crops up in the context of social gatherings, where it’s important to emphasize that submission to one dominant does not imply submission to all. For me that same idea can also be applied temporally. Just because I will submit in a session doesn’t automatically imply I should be submissive and deferential outside it.

It is unclear to me if the comments here are in objection to inequality wholesale, or if the men here feel more simply that the demands from these ProDommes were displaced via the lack of personalized attention toward the defining of a unequal power exchange.
Mistress Rex

I’d say my objection is to an assumption of inequality without negotiation or agreement. Refinement and evolution of roles is always going to happen as a relationship (professional or otherwise) develops. But I start from a position of equality. I think it’d be presumptuous of either party to assume otherwise. I might be a submissive, but I’m not her submissive until we agree that. Anyone insisting on lower casing my name and pronouns before they’ve even met me, simply strikes me as insecure. And insisting slaves email multiple times to get a response doesn’t put me into a suitably submissive mindset. It just makes me think that the mistress is crap at running her business.

I’ll also add that there was one comment I saw which, in contrast to Mistress Rex’s thoughtful words, struck me as fairly daft.

When men pay, they feel like they have license to top from the bottom.

Firstly, that’s a ridiculously sweeping generalization. And secondly, it misses the point of this discussion, which is about what goes on outside of negotiated play.

That’s probably enough of my random ramblings. As promised here’s an attractive and entirely unrelated picture to finish the post. It’s not really femdom material, but I saw it on Erotic Haecceities and thought she was adorably cute.

A hint of vanilla

The post title sounds like it’d be more suitable to Martha Stewart’s blog, but instead I’m going to talk about a (relatively) recent post from Mistress Rex. Specifically there are two sections in her post I wanted to pick up on, one negatively and one positively.

The negative is more of a quibble than anything, triggered by a certain phrasing in the post.

There are endless complaints by Dommes on various social media platforms regarding contact from clients who don’t “get it” – men who don’t know their place and compose emails that in no way defer to the addressee;
Mistress Rex

It often strikes me that some pro-dommes want to have it both ways. They’re understandably insistent that session play doesn’t carry across to the real world. The D/s dynamic is very much a timed and negotiated agreement, lasting just while the session does. They don’t want to have to deal with guys acting submissively and trying to force them into a mistress role when communicating outside of a session. Yet at the same time, some of them often seem happy to carry across D/s elements when it turns out to be useful to them.

I should emphasize at this point that I’m not referring to Mistress Rex herself (who I’ve sadly never interacted with professionally), or any of the dommes I’ve named and written about on this blog in the past (who all behaved entirely professionally). But the word ‘defer’ in that quote, along with the bit about ‘know their place’, sat uncomfortably with me and put me in mind of some on-line behavior I’ve seen and experienced. For example, a domme claiming she can’t be bothered to check email to often, so slaves should be prepared to email her several times and not get impatient if she doesn’t respond with a week. Or domme’s using stupid capitalization rules to put me into a specific role when we’re only just making initial email contact. Or domme’s expecting some sort of different or special allowances when sessions have to be cancelled or re-arranged.

Outside a session a domme will get respect, politeness and consideration from me, but not deference. And I’ll expect exactly the same thing back from her in return. Bleeding the D/s dynamics across that divide is only OK if that’s part of an ongoing and agreed relationship, and not if it’s simply a double standard at work.

That minor quibble aside, the positive part of the post that really spoke to me is quoted below.

…I like inviting vanilla into sessions rather than leaving it at the door, because I like there to be a perceivable exchange of power right there between the two of us. I don’t want to keep vanilla at a safe distance, outside the walls of the dungeon where it can be preserved and slipped back into unaltered; I want it right there in the room where it can be mutilated, transformed.
…
This is what I reckon is the problem with many commercial sessions: you can’t make it real until it gets real. You can’t force it; the organic exchange does not occur by walking through a door.
Mistress Rex

One of the things that put me off going to see a pro-domme for the longest time was the idea of the transition. On one hand I had this mental picture of a cliched pro-domme session (naked guy, on all fours, leashed, getting whipped) and on the other hand I had me. Normal, boring me, standing in a room with a woman I’d never met before. Somehow it seemed impossible to see how one vision could transition to the other. I didn’t want to fake it or act out a role that wasn’t me. This was supposed to be BDSM, not the local amateur dramatics society .

Fortunately, when I did finally arrange a session, I was lucky enough to find a pro-domme in Lady Lydia who really understood what Mistress Rex is talking about here. When we play there isn’t a hard transition point. We don’t suddenly go from friendly chatting into full D/s mode. There are jokes. A little two way teasing and perhaps some prodding of old fading marks. Then slowly, a little edge slips in. She’s still has a smile, but now there’s a sadistic glint in it. The pain levels go up and my options go down. Over the next fifteen or twenty minutes the balance and interaction between us may shift back and forth, but there’s only one general direction, and that’s into our respective top/bottom headspaces that lie at the heart of the session. Without any force or artificiality she takes the sensible plain vanilla me that walked in the door and mutates him into a far more interesting flavor.

I wasn’t exactly sure what image was best fitted to illustrate this post, so I just went into my folder of general images I like. This one is from the Femdom Proper tumblr site and caught my eye for her quirky smile.

The big O

Emily Nagoski has an interesting post up in relation to this Jezebel article on female pleasure and the emphasis put on the orgasm. The writing is in the context of vanilla sexual relationships rather than kinky ones, but it got me thinking about how the ideas related to more unconventional sexual interactions.

For men, orgasm and pleasure are closely linked. They’re practically the same thing. They can enjoy arousal without orgasm, sure, but basically they can tell if they had a good sexual experience by whether or not they’ve had an orgasm.

And they apply that standard – THEIR standard, the male/masculine standard – to their women partners. As though women are men, and as though to be anything else is to be broken.

So even if a guy wants his female partner to have orgasms because he wants to make her feel good, which is lovely and very nice, why can’t he just MAKE HER FEEL GOOD because he wants to make her feel good, without the performance demands of orgasm?

Orgasm is often slower and more effortful for women than for men; it’s more variable from woman to women, more variable from day to day in an individual woman. Sometimes orgasm just isn’t there for her; she can still experience truckloads of pleasure, though.
Emily Nagoski

It’s tempting at this point to start getting pedantic about the definition of sexual experience. I’ve had some amazingly enjoyable experiences being bound, beaten and burnt that I’d consider as very sexual but that didn’t feature orgasms. However, for the sake of argument lets just consider sexual experiences as they’re more commonly defined, where genitals and stimulation of some sort is involved. In that scenario I think it’s still incorrect to say that an orgasm is necessary for a kinky man to have a good sexual experience. But I do think that the idea of an orgasm is a key part of the experience. Chastity play and tease and denial all concentrate on the removal of the orgasm. Edging is all about repeatedly approaching the point of orgasm without tipping over it. Ruining an orgasm is about spoiling the moment itself. These different type of orgasm control may or may not feature an actual physical orgasm, but they do put the idea of it right at their heart.

In contrast some women (and it’s impossible to avoid stereotyping here as Emily acknowledges) are not wired in that way. Lack of orgasm isn’t necessarily a sign of total failure in bed, in the same way that your partner achieving orgasm doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a fantastic lover. To quote Emily once again – “pleasure is a destination, not a journey; if you feel good, you have already arrived.”

Where I think this gets particularly interesting in the kinky domain is how it relates to lifestyle male chastity arrangements. I have to tread a little carefully here, as I’m not speaking from first hand knowledge of that specific type of play. However, I’ve never let lack of knowledge get in the way of my opinions before, and I don’t see any reason to start now.

I browse and read a variety of kinky blogs (not all of them linked to from here) and one of the subtexts I observe in a lot of male chastity blogs is a type of transference of sexual expectation. It often seems that simple denial or control over the male orgasm isn’t enough. To be truly satisfying their has to be frequent orgasmic sexual experiences for their female keyholder. There are no doubt a lot of complex reasons behind that, but a key factor seems to be avoiding turning a deliberate denial of sexual pleasure into a total absence of sex. From the male perspective sex involves orgasms, and if he’s not having them, then it’s necessary (or at least highly desirable) that she is.

That of course then runs directly into the issues Emily is addressing above. Male expectations around sex and orgasms can’t automatically be projected onto women. And yet long term chastity play seems to encourage that very projection, with the resulting conflicts you’d expect from that.

I’m afraid I have zero answers for how to resolve this issue. Other than perhaps being aware of its existence and using that knowledge to think creatively around the conflict. In the meantime, while I brace myself for a flood of comments from men in chastity telling me I’m full of crap, here’s a nice shot of a steelwerks chastity device. It’s from their blog and was supplied by one of their clients.

Dine and Domme Tour 2011

Just a quick note to mention that, for the first time in years, I’m take a vacation. Specifically I’m heading down the West coast and eating at a bunch of really good restaurants and seeing a couple of dommes I don’t normally get chance to see. I will be posting, but it may be a little more erratic than usual. A day of getting beaten and whipped followed by a multi-course meal with paired wines doesn’t do much for my blogging/typing/coherent thinking ability. It does however do wonders for my soul and general well-being, so hopefully I’ll be back to blogging at full-speed post-vacation.

Avast, ye mateys!

In the last couple of days an old post of mine on the recently popular subject of the devaluation of male submissives sparked to life. Maymay added some thoughts, as did Alisa. That triggered some blog browsing on my part, and led me to a post by Alisa which made me laugh out loud. I’ll quote the relevant part…

If we’re playing pirates and wenches, you’ve captured me off a British vessel and have had your way with me, perhaps you’ve tied me up and left me in a corner while you await ransom, but eventually we tire and we go out and we get dinner. And when we put on our clothes and walk out the front door you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you are not a 15th century pirate* because if you don’t, we’ve got problems. There is no confusion, I will not be mistaken for a captured wench at the corner diner, neither of us will have period dialects or accents, there is no risk of scurvy.

I think that’s a very visual and illustrative way to highlight an important point – submission is a negotiated state with very defined boundaries. A dominant who can’t handle those kind of transitions and state changes is not someone to play with. But the importance of the underlying point aside, it was the mental picture that made me laugh. I can just imagine a nonplussed wait staff staring at each other while a big macho dom in a white shirt and leather pants curses them as spineless landlubbers. He’d be ordering grog while his erstwhile play partner holds her head in her hands and regrets the day she decided to fool around with Captain Rum (who doesn’t even know the way to France).

Given this is a femdom blog, I thought I’d pick some suitable female pirates to illustrate the post. These two come courtesy of the Femdom Artists site and pulpy 1960’s magazines.

You can see the original two posts here and here.

* The anally retentive history nerd in me feels the need to point out that pirates and the British Navy was mainly an 18th Century phenomena, not 15th Century. The Royal Navy wasn’t actually founded until the 16th Century. OK. End of annoying nerd moment.