Travels

It’s wet in Seattle and it’s cold in Seattle. The holiday season is over and the year stretches before me. This can mean only one thing – time for paltego to take a vacation. Ideally somewhere warm, with a multitude of food and kinky possibilities. So watch out Los Angeles, here I come.

As usual I’ll try and keep blogging while I’m away. I have some kinky play lined up, so hopefully I’ll have some interesting experiences to share.

I’ll leave you with an image of someone having an interesting kinky experience of their own. It’s not often you see suspension bondage, face sitting and selfie taking all combined.

This is from natsumi @723StudioK.

How to Deal with Men

This NYTimes article is pretty much perfect link fodder for this blog. It features an ex-dominatrix teaching a class for women on how to tackle power imbalance when dealing with men in conversation and negotiation. I particularly like the fact that the course apparently draws on BDSM, Taoist martial arts and Cesar Millan’s book on dog training. I love the idea of a woman in a business meeting sternly telling a loud man to sit down and be quiet, and then tossing him a biscuit from her handbag.

One quote that I did find slightly surprising was this…

“If I’m in control of you, my attention is outward, so precisely fixed on the other person that I almost forget I exist,” Ms. Urbaniak told the audience. If you’re submissive, “your attention is focused inward, on yourself and your feelings.”

I found that curious, because that’s pretty much the opposite of how I function. When I’m deep in a submissive mind set my focus is intensely on the domme. Everything else floats away, my body is no longer mine and she’s the center of my universe. Conversely, when I’m being forceful in a work situation, my focus originates from a sense of self and confidence in my knowledge and expertise.

If you’re interested in the classes, they’re run by Kasia Urbaniak from something she calls The Academy. I’ve obviously no idea of their efficacy, but I do appreciate the goals and sentiment behind them.

I found this image via some random tumblr, but I believe that’s London based Mistress Evilyne with one of the ‘Boss’ mugs.

Show some link love

One unfortunate trend I spotted when refreshing my blogroll was the number of sites that don’t have a blogroll at all. I’m not sure if that’s a new trend, or an ongoing thing that I’ve just not noticed before. Either way, I’m not a fan.

A blogroll (or a links page) is the original version of Share Our Shit. In many ways, it’s a human version (in a very hand wavy way) of the classic Google PageRank alogrithm. If I like the writing of this blogger, there’s a good chance I’ll also like the stuff they read. Ironically, search engines themselves tend to suck at queries like “Femdom Blog”. I’d say 80% of the blogs I find come via links on other people’s blogs, with the other 20% from social media, comments or email.

So if you’ve got a blog, please put up links to other blogs you like and read. It can be a traditional blogroll or a separate page or whatever. Just show a little love to your fellow bloggers and gives your readers some interesting people to explore.

I’ve no idea what image goes with this kind of post, so here’s a sexy as hell shot of Sophia Loren, taken at her home in Rome in 1955. You’re welcome.

Blogroll Updates and #SOSS

I’ve been doing a very bad job of supporting the #SOSS movement. Some might even go as far as to say the job has been non-existent to date, and those people would not be wrong. Hopefully joining in late will not prevent my hanging with all the cool kids who have been doing it for months now.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, SOSS is Share Our Shit Saturday – designed to encourage sharing of sex related writing online.  It started from Girl on the Net and Bacchus at ErosBlog. The underlying issue is the dominance of closed platforms on the internet and their hostility to sex related content. So lets share our shit on the open web and actively encourage people to discover interesting adult content on other sites. Arguably that is what this site has always been about, mostly because I’m lazy and it’s easier to link to talent than to possess it always a leader in social trends.

I decided the first thing I needed to do was update my blogroll and blog page, neither of which had been touched for months. Dead links are gone and I’ve added the following new (to me) blogs…

As far as sharing writing that I’ve enjoyed…

As is my custom, I like to finish a post with some visual loveliness. One of the new blogs – Pain as Pleasure – is written by a kinky man who goes by the handle BibulousOne. He’s written at length about his relationship with Mistress Elita, which gives me a very tenuous excuse for featuring these great images from her professional site.

Mistress Elita is a London based pro-domme. If you’re interested in arranging a session, her site contains all the necessary contact information.

Parallel Universe

Photographer Eli Rezkallah has created an amusing twist on sexist vintage advertising in a series called Parallel Universe. I’m sure a lot of my readers will have encountered his inspiration material in articles like this one. It’s classic clickbait, guaranteed to both amuse, appall and make you marvel how far the world has moved on. He’s taken specific original ads and reshot them with a gender reverse.

I like the idea, but can’t help feeling that there’s a missed opportunity for the companies here. A lot of them are still around. For example, you can still buy Chase & Sanborn coffee, creators of the original ad below. They should reshoot their ad themselves with the gender reverse (or use just Eli’s version) and issue it as a new ad. They could claim it was a both a joke and an implicit acknowledgement of their past mistakes. It’d get loads of publicity  and generate social media controversy – both of which appear to be the primary goals of modern advertising.

Lovely Leather

After the quintessential 1970’s leather domme outfit I posted yesterday, I thought I’d follow it up with an alternative modern take on leather and bondage. This is neither femdom nor my personal kink, but I think it’s a gorgeous costume all the same. The craftmanship and material are beautiful. It almost looks like an abstract sculpture.

This is from the twitter feed of Reflective Desire. More shorts from this scene are available on their website.

The Safeword is ‘Thief!’

This article title really captures the whole story – ‘Woman disguised as dominatrix ties man to his bed and robs him‘. Apparently a German man managed to get both financial domination and bondage packed into a single session. The bondage was consensual, but the 1800 Euro theft less so.

I can’t say I’ve ever been worried about theft, given I always play with well established professionals. However, I do sometimes wonder what would happen if something went wrong after I’ve been wrapped in rope. Often that thought strikes me as the domme is trying to balance in high heels while clambering around the bondage table several feet off the ground. I doubt I’d be much of a Houdini is there was a fall and I had to try and escape to get help for her.  Fortunately, another benefit of playing with experienced dommes is that they’re experts in maneuvering in impractical footwear.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and predict that the thief in the original article is not an expert rigger. I picture the scene unfolding a little like this vintage bondage shot. She came equipped with rope and it was probably more clothesline than the specialized hemp based stuff.

I’m afraid I don’t know the creator of this image. For anyone who complains about the bondage in porn today, keep in mind that back in 70’s it was hard to find and looked like this when it did show up (so I’m told).

Intense Pegging

I’ve no idea how to embed a tumblr video into a blog post, so I’ll just have to provide this lame link to a hot pegging video and rely on you, my treasured reader, to follow it. There are all sorts of ‘intense’ pegging videos online – with dommes sporting enormous dildos and dominating the hell out of their hapless submissives. This isn’t one of those. For me intensity in pegging comes from the sensuality and the connection formed. Two people deep in an intimate moment. This video might be from a porn shot, but it has a lot more of that sensuality and intimacy than I normally see.

Given my lack of embedding mojo, I needed some other eye candy for this post, so here’s a sexy pegging artwork. It’s not the same vibe as the video, but I like it all the same.

I’m afraid I’ve no idea who the artist for this is.

Update: Thanks to a helpful comment I can now attribute this to the artist Tang. You can find more of their work at this tumblr and their personal site.

Thirst for Knowledge

Much as I appreciate the attractive ladies in the tight dresses, what really makes this image for me is his enthusiastic expression. There is a man with a powerful hunger for some forbidden fruit. If he’d be in the Garden of Eden, that tree would have been stripped bare of apples before God knew what was going on. The serpent wouldn’t even have had time to get his famous sales pitch out. He’d have been less an evil tempter, and more that poor unfortunate creature who got trampled to death as man rushed to grab the fruit of the tree.

According to Wikipedia it’s only in Western Europe that the forbidden fruit is commonly identified as an apple. Other possibilities include grapes, figs and pomegranates. Those actually make more sense to me. I always thought that forbidden fruit should suggest sensuality, temptation and decadence. Apples are perfectly fine as fruit, but they’re also very sensible and boring.  They’re the missionary position with the lights low. Nobody should get kicked out of paradise for that.

This is Ms Renee Trevi with USAFETISH taken from this tweet on her twitter feed.

Should have used more lube

I had all sorts of serious posts to write today. Yet here I am, featuring this image from CNN. I just couldn’t resist it. Great headline? Or the greatest headline?

I can only assume that Senator Collins was wielding something like the weapon below and was sparing on the lube. Poor Donald. It does of course beg the question – what would his safeword be? Typically you’d pick something you’d never say accidentally. So I guess “Sorry” would work pretty well.