Legal Matters

I had to employ the services of a lawyer recently. It wasn’t a major legal entanglement. Just papers I wanted reviewed before I filed them. Her fee for the work was $250 per hour. Oddly enough, that’s around the average fee per hour for a pro-domme in Seattle. That fact got me thinking about the contrast between the work. Actually, if I’m honest, the fact she was attractive, forceful and wearing knee high brown leather boots got my mind initially moving in a certain direction. The hourly rate just sealed the deal.

My legal session was conducted in a standard office. No fancy equipment, sound proofing or leather wrapped furniture required. After I left, I’m pretty certain she didn’t have to spend time rubbing everything with alcohol wipes and autoclaving the pen I used. Nor did she have to invest a highly specialized wardrobe that she can only wear to work or to secret lawyer parties. Touching was limited to a couple of handshakes and, despite a very warm office, I kept all my clothes on.  At no point did she have to deal with a naked me in her personal space. Her only risk was paper cuts and possibly boredom from answering my dumb questions. Safewords weren’t required, and there was no chance of me asking her to undertake a dangerous legal maneuver that could have landed me in hospital and her in jail. I don’t know what her inbox looks like but I doubt it’s full of dick pics, badly written kinky fantasies or guys suggesting if she was a real lifestyle lawyer she’d work for free. Scheduling didn’t involve intricate planning to avoid clients bumping into each other and her firms web site didn’t require dozens of up to date professional photographs of her brandishing a pen and looking stern. Oh, and I could pay with a credit card, because banks don’t mind taking money from lawyers.

I could keep going, but I think my point is made. I’m not going to claim that visiting a professional domme is cheap, but it is good value. You get a hell of a lot for your money. Rates may be charged by the hour, but there’s an awful lot that happens both before and after to make those great moments in a session possible.

This is the actress Julianna Margulies who plays a lawyer in the series Canterbury Law.

Auntie

In my last post I was ragging on the New Jersey police for stopping a former domme from becoming a cop. I thought it only fair to balance that up with an organization that is a little less puritanical – the BBC. The journalist Nichi Hodgson spent some time working as a professional domme and is now employed as a journalist by the world’s biggest and oldest broadcasting organization. According to this recent article she actually made more money working as a domme than as a journalist, but I guess that’s what you get for working for a public service company.

In years gone by the BBC was famously straitlaced. Its nickname of ‘Auntie’ or ‘Auntie Beeb’ was derived from the idea of a prudish maiden Aunt who always knew what was best. Of course, for some people, a strict maiden Aunt who thinks she knows best, is a source of joy and pleasure. This is Juliana Granger in a shoot for Auntie’s House.

Miss Granger is a professional disciplinarian based in Sheffield UK.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

For those who have been following the Kristen Hyman saga I have bad news – she lost her fight to become a cop.

For those of you who have no idea who I’m talking about, let me provide some context. Kristen Hyman briefly worked as a pro-domme and produced some femdom movies under the title Domina Nyx. I even featured an image of hers back in 2012. After quitting that career, she went on to train as a police officer. She was just days away from graduating when somebody blabbed about her past life and she was suspended. There was the standard sensationalist coverage in the press, with their usual hypocrisy of stigmatizing sex workers while using their stories to make money. Now, after spending significant time and money to qualify as a policewoman, she is out of a job.

I hadn’t covered the story up to this point because I was hoping she get re-instated and I didn’t want to add to the publicity on her past life. Now, with her name plastered across hundreds of tabloid articles and immortalized online, that seems kind of moot.

The reason I mention it at all, is to highlight the challenges sex workers face and the sacrifices they make. Society disparages their profession, criticizes their decisions and forces them to operate without the proper protection the law should provide. Then, even when they move onto jobs deemed more ‘worthy’ by society, the sex work they did can still be used as a cudgel against them. And why? Because they gave sexual pleasure to others while earning money for themselves and their families? How fucked up is that? They should be handing out medals, not blocking them from worthwhile careers.

The artwork is of course by the incomparable Eric Stanton.

Catsuits in NYC

Humiliation types scenes in public spaces are pretty common in Femdom imagery. I’m sure you know the type of scene I mean. There’s a domme in sensible clothes leading around a submissive in slightly less sensible clothes, while random bystanders look on with varying degrees of amusement, shock and puzzlement. Something like this one.

It’s not really my kind of scene, so I was therefore pleased to see an alternative variation on a public scene in this post from Miss Ava Zhang. It features Miss Zhang and Domina Dia Dynasty cruising around NYC in shiny rubber suits. No humiliated submissives in sight. Just two dommes having fun in great outfits. Amusingly the only place they weren’t welcome was a kinky whip cracking meetup in Central Park, where apparently whip cracking and hot dommes in latex was just too much fun to have all in one public place.

You can see more images from their NYC adventures in the post here.

My inner feline

What’s better than playing with an awesome domme in LA? That would be playing in LA and then playing with the same awesome domme a week later in Seattle. Yes, God was good to me this week. Although technically it was more Mistress Iris and her travel schedule than God. They are at least similar in their ability to bring grown men to their knees.

I got to enjoy some amazing tease and denial, along with sensation play and some sounding thrown in for good measure. Most of my play partners would liken the noises I make in a session to a dog or a bear. There’s a fair amount of growling, snarling and barking that goes on. I think today might have been the first time I purred in a session. Clearly Mistress Iris is bringing out my inner feline. I didn’t even know I had one.

This is Mistress Iris with not me. I can only wish I rocked a garter belt and pair of stockings like that. This is from Mistress Iris’s twitter feed.

Belated SOSS

Once again, I kind of missed the boat on the Share Our Shit Saturday. Better late than never I figure, so here are some links to interesting stuff that caught my eye recently.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image. If you can help with that, please leave me a comment.

Duality

The Crave Portrait Project has recently been popping up on my social media feeds and news alerts. Its basic idea, of presenting dual images of people in their kinky gear and their regular clothes, is not a new one. I featured a similar set of images in a post back in 2014. However, it is a well executed version of the concept, with some fine black and white photography. I particularly like how happy everyone seems. I think it succeeds in projecting a very positive picture of kinky people and play.

The above shot is of Janny and you can read some of her thoughts on the project via this Bustle article. You can see all the photographs from the project via their gallery.

Slutting Around

My algorithm for picking people to play with when I’m travelling has a problem. Admittedly, it’s a problem in the sense that spilling champagne on your Ferrari’s leather upholstery is a problem, but I’m going to share it anyway. I will not be expecting a great deal of sympathy.

The original algorithm for travelling was simple: Find someone I had chemistry with and play with them exclusively. Partly that was because I wanted to build a deeper rapport and invest in a richer D/s dynamic. Partly it was because I didn’t want to have to explain my weird kinks and perversions to more unfamiliar women than I absolutely had to.

Unfortunately, no matter how careful the planning, schedules didn’t always co-operate. With only a few days in a town, there was always a chance the domme I usually played with would be travelling or busy. So I inevitably ended up occasionally playing with someone new – and I came to realize that this was a good thing. Playing with someone new was an opportunity to learn. Sometimes I learnt what I didn’t like, but more often my experiences made me a better submissive and a more self-aware masochist. Plus, once I started writing about my kinks here, explaining them to the nice ladies in the exciting outfits became considerably less stressful.

My updated algorithm therefore became: Do two sessions. One with someone I knew and liked and one with someone new. Push limits with the former and learn new things with the latter. It was a win-win.

Unfortunately, once I played with a new domme, they automatically moved into the category of ‘dommes I know’. And since so many of them were amazing and awesome to play with (like Damiana Chi from yesterday’s post), they became ‘dommes I know, like and will travel thousands of miles to play with again’.

This gave my latest iteration of the algorithm: Do three session. One with someone I’ve know for years, one with someone I’ve played with a few times and one with someone new. You don’t have to be a genius to see the pattern here, or the long term problem. It’s possible I can keep adding more sessions per trip until my body or bank account gives out, but I’m not sure it’s entirely the smartest solution.

The amusing side to this ‘problem’ is that I get called a slut by some of the dommes I play with (in the nicest possible way). Given my monastic years through my teens and twenties, that makes me smile. I’m a reserved, quiet, introverted, middle-aged British male slut. I’ll take that.

I’ve no idea what an appropriate image for this post is, so here’s a random one I like.

The Final LA Shivers

I’m back in Seattle and quite literally shivering. It’s cold here, at least compared to the balmy SoCal weather. When I’m old and decrepit, or least more so than I am now, I may have to move permanently to LA to warm my bones. I quite fancy retirement as an old submissive who potters around cleaning up dungeons in between sessions and spends the rest of his time sitting outside in the sun sipping tea.

Anyway, setting aside the ghosts of paltego’s future, my last day in LA was as good as any of those that had gone before. I was lucky enough to be able to schedule time with Mistress Damiana Chi. She’s has a stellar reputation, and she certainly lived up to it. Heavy bondage, nipple torture, CBT and electrical play were on the menu, and she quickly got me spacey and shivering with adrenaline. I think it’s the mark of a skilled dominant to be able to quickly zero in on the appropriate level of intensity even with new play partners. Enough to get the endorphins flowing, but not so much that it causes stress and nerves to spike unpleasantly. She had me right in that zone for a very happy two hours, and I got to bask in the afterwash of it for the rest of the day. Even dealing with TSA and LAX couldn’t knock that out of me.

This image is from Mistress Damiana’s site. It’s a beautiful picture and I think she’s actually even more striking in person.