Context Matters

The Guardian has a new article on a subject dear to both masochists and sadists hearts – pain. Its basic premise is that the perception of pain is highly contextual and complex. Someone might have a serious injury but power through the situation. The same person on another day might stub their toe and spend 10 minutes hopping up and down and swearing about it. Pain is perceived in the brain and so our mental state is a big factor in how intense we think it is.

It’s an interesting article but I don’t think its conclusions will be surprising to kinky folk who play with pain. I know my tolerance varies significantly, depending on things like stress, arousal, uncertainty and past history with my play partner.

One thing I hadn’t thought about was the how the perception of risk can affect tolerance…

“If we think ‘this is terrible, this is awful, it’s going to do me serious damage’ – those types of people will have lower tolerance.” This includes people who tend to be anxious or who catastrophise pain.

The perception of the damage being done can have a substantial role. A violinist is more likely to report higher levels of pain when a pain stimulus is applied to their dominant playing hand than when their other hand is subjected to the same stimulus, Moseley says – because an injury to their dominant hand could end their career.

That makes sense to me and is a useful thing to keep in mind when planning sessions. If you want to play harder then being able to relax and not worry about the end result is important. If you’re stressing about marks or injuries it’ll hurt all the more.

I hope this gentleman is feeling relaxed and worry free, otherwise that’ll really sting. I’m not entirely sure of the source here, but it looks like something from the Cruel Punishments site.

Needles

I mentioned a few posts back a recent sessions I did with the fabulous Savannah Sly. I was lucky enough to sneak in a second playtime before she left town. Needles were on the agenda.

The fun thing about doing piercing play is how varied the dynamic can be. It can be meditative and contemplative. Moving progressively across the body, decorating as you go. It can be quite sadistic and intense. A needle in a delicate part of the body gets your attention fast. It can also be sensual and stimulating. Piercings in erogenous zones heighten sensation and make gentle touches light up your pleasure center.

This session was a bit of all of the above. A lovely mix of the mean and the mischievous. Savannah wasn’t using particularly large needles, but they were plenty big enough to get my endorphins surging.  You can see a photograph of my chest taken mid-scene here. It always surprises me the variety of sensation different piercings can trigger. One needle might slide in with barely a pinch, the same size an inch over might have me yelping in pain. You just never know till the pointy end meets the skin.

All this needle talk does give me an excuse to re-post one of my favorite piercing images. Indeed one of my favorite kink shots ever. While my position was similar, this isn’t me and Savannah – it’s Domina Yuki and her submissive (originally posted in 2011 here).

More Google Bullshit

Everyday, in everyway, the internet gets a little bit shittier.

I stumbled across the image below via tumblr and was trying to figure out an attribution. My starting point for that is always Google’s reverse image search. However, that came back with no results and a message I’d never seen before: “This search can’t be processed due to content guidelines. Please try a different image or keywords.” What fresh hell is this? I have safe search off and the image isn’t particularly explicit. Just a cute scene of a fully clothed woman and her pup.

Digging around it seems like I’m not the only one hitting this issue. Google – not for the first time – appears to be getting more puritanical and less useful (if that were possible). Trying  a few different images from my post queue had about a 50/50 block/pass rate. So much for organizing the world’s information and not doing evil. Over the last decade or so the leadership of Google has taken a company that was the pride of the tech world, a brilliant search engine that every developer wanted to work on, and turned it into a pile of AI and Ad infested crap.

Sadly, as the above post should make clear, I don’t have an attribution for this. Bing and Yandex did allow me to do a reverse image search, but couldn’t find the source. If you can help me out with that, then please leave a comment with the info.

Thanks John

Melissa Todd has a column in Metro where she describes how she got started as a dominatrix. She followed a path I know others have taken – stripping to spanking model to pro-domme. The part of the column I particularly enjoyed was about her first client and her description of that first session. Up until ‘John’ showed up, she’d only had a cushion to practice caning on.

In his seventies, just recovering from some scary operation with the whole of his torso tattooed with a jagged purple scar, he spent most of his hour giving me a tutorial on what tools and implements I desperately needed, the positions most often requested, the idiots best avoided – and he paid me for the privilege!

John let me practise my few pathetic implements on his backside, coaching throughout. ‘Bit to the left. Avoid the whip round. Accuracy before intensity. That’s it! Now try again, but harder…’ I couldn’t have been more thankful.

There’s a notorious kind of client that looks out for young and inexperienced dommes to session with. They seek them out as they know they can push boundaries and take liberties a seasoned pro would never permit. Most pro-dommes will have stories about them. It’s therefore nice to read a positive story about a client helping out a newbie domme and steering her in the right direction. Thanks John.

This is Melissa with a much larger collection of canes then she started out with. Sourced via her Bluesky feed.

Piss Boy Government

Bacchus over at Eros Blog shared an entertaining post on the lack of kink awareness at a punk bar. Apparently the indie musician Jessilyn was playing her song ‘Piss Boy Government’ and that confused a couple of the attendees. They needed to go lookup what a Piss Boy might be.

Now, in fairness, I’m not sure I’ve ever hear the term Piss Boy to describe a male submissive into golden showers. And I say that as a male submissive who loves a golden shower. It’s just not a common kinky term. However, I suspect if this blogs audience heard the term at a punk club, they could probably take a pretty good guess at the meaning.

Bacchus illustrated his post with some fine artwork by Namio Harukawa. That’s an excellent choice as he was a great illustrator of watersports scenes. I’m going to go with a slightly more modern option. This is  a ‘coffee time’ sketch by Sardax he shared to social media under the title ‘Oubliette’.

Getting the Kinks Out

This has been a good week. I got to enjoy something that has become a relatively rare event for me – in person kinky fun. Savannah Sly is in town for a visit and she was kind of enough to take time out of her busy schedule to beat me up.

Top of the list of activities was what Savannah accurately describes as mean massage. Lots of pummeling, squeezing, pressuring and pounding. It’s a bit like being the chew toy of a giant sexy cat who happens to have a degree in human anatomy. There might also have been some staples in my dick towards the end, which isn’t an officially accredited procedure from any of the schools of mean massage, but is fun all the same.

The end result was a body like a limp noodle, a lot of lovely scratch marks and a blissed out brain. Like I said, a good week.

This shot of Savannah is from her Free Speech Coalition page, demonstrating she can look amazing in almost any setting. If you want to help support Sex Workers Rights then I’d encourage you to visit and support her New Moon Network. They do tons of fabulous things in the sex work community.

Mitia C.

This is by the artist Mitia C, one of the more interesting and unusual kinky artists I’ve come across recently. An Osaka based illustrator, his work blends humor and very modern kinks with a contemporary Shunga artistic style. You can find a number of femdom works on his website under the ‘Strong Women‘ section. I think they’re great – hot and fun. It’s not often you that see a Shibu Ina blended with watersports and kink.

This piece by Mitia C is entitled 柴犬 / Shiba Inu (a dog’s dinner).

Text Based Playfulness

Most pro-dommes invest a bunch of time in brand management and marketing. It’s no good being a wizards with whips or looking lovely in leather if nobody know that. To that end they build websites, curate their social media, film clips, write articles, model fetishwear and generally put their dominant diva selves out there.

I thought I’d seen most ideas for domme brand building over the years – until I stumbled on this article on a domme’s bespoke typeface. London’s Jane Grey worked with WMH&I to create a custom typeface for her brand.

The brand’s distinctive asset is “binds”, strips of their bespoke typeface distorted to appear like ropes or leather, adding a subtly erotic edge to the campaign without nudity. The ability to suggest and entice is key in WMH&I’s arsenal of text based playfulness. “The ‘binds’ are a visual representation of Jane Grey’s psychological control,” says Mark. “Always taut, the binds emanate directly from Jane when present in the scene or act as her omnipresent control when she’s just off camera.” Aiming to disarm an audience of willing “subs”, this text-based experimentation dabbles in the dark arts of mind tricks and manipulation.

You can see the typeface in action via Jane’s website. I’m not sure how much it’ll help attractive submissives, but it is interesting to see the effort that can go into brand building.

This beautiful shot was sourced from one of Jane’s social media feeds.

The All Knowing Algorithms

It can be spooky when the social media algorithms figure you out. Particularly if you’re trying to maintain separate worlds.

For example, I have a Reddit account, but I keep it clean. I use a totally different username and follow things related to my non-kinky interests – restaurants, cooking, programming, games, books, etc. I’m not even logged into it on machines I use for this blog and other kinky activities.

I was therefore a little surprised when my reddit feed featured an item from what looked like a martial arts shitposting forum. I’ve zero interest in either of those things. Yet this did catch my eye, as it featured a woman’s kickboxing champion throwing around a male UFC fighter. Maybe it was just a coincidence and a popular post? Then today, my feed featured another item from that same forum, with a woman repeatedly kicking a male ‘sparring partner’ in the nuts. I checked the rest of the forum and those are the only posts it selected to put on my feed. That can’t be a coincidence. I think it’s on to me.

These are images from the first item I mentioned. That’s Katarina Kavaleva (kick boxing world champion) having some fun with Merab Dvalishvili (UFC Bantamweight champion).