Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

The ratio of dominant women to submissive men is a topic of conversation that pops up fairly regularly across femdom blogs and forums. Most submissive men will maintain their are lots more of them than dominant women. In contrast, I’ve observed some dominant women claim that lots of the play events they attend have a ratio close to parity or even skewed to a majority of dominants.

I’ve done my own highly unscientific research in the past, and now OKCupid  have done something a bit more scientific, sampling their userbase. They have a chart showing ‘Turn-ons by gender’, which has good news in general for kinky people, but bad news for people searching for a Femdom relationship.

The good news part is a lot of people seemed to be into general kinkiness. Over 60% of both genders liked of the idea of ‘rough sex’ and over 50% ‘being bitten’. Even enjoying ‘some pain’ was over 30% of both genders. Those numbers are higher than I’d have guessed, although I’m sure the general populace would skew lower than OKCupid users.

The bad news is that the survey terms that tend to be high for both genders don’t differentiate top from bottom. Once you start doing that, then a more stereotypical view of kink emerges. Over 40% of men in this survey like tying people up but less than 20% enjoy being tied up. A majority of them like taking control (~60%) but only around 20% are happy for their partner to take control. Women are pretty much the reverse of that Less than 10% of survey women like taking control or doing the tying. In contrast over 40% like being tied up and over 60% like their partner taking control.

That means, purely from a population size perspective, anyone hunting on OKCupid for an M/f relationship is likely to have a much easier time of it than an F/m one. In terms of the ratios, then it looks roughly like a 2:1 between dominant women to submissive guys. Almost 20% of guys like being tied or giving up control, where a little less than 10% of women enjoy being in charge of the ropes.

This is by the photographer Martin Duerr from a series called The Hotel.

Something for the grandchildren

This shot is apparently by Amauary Grisel (featured here in the past). I say apparently because I haven’t managed to track down the original posting, despite lots of other sites listing this as by Amauray Grisel. It makes me smile and I’d love to know the background story. It looks like a shot from a quirky indie horror movie featuring ravenous kinky grandmothers who like to tie up their man meat before devouring it. And also, maybe snap a few selfies for the family while they’re doing it.

Needle Smart

Melissa Febos is back in the news to annoy my over my morning cup of tea. For those that haven’t heard of her, she’s the author of a book called Whip Smart about her time working as a pro-domme in a dungeon in NYC. Her story is a familiar one. Full of the confidence and immortality of youth, our author-to-be does a bunch of drugs and develops a heroin addiction. She then spends several years trying to combine a normal life, a drug habit and a secret job that can sustain said habit. Eventually she kicks the drugs, ditches the job and writes a book about how crazy it all was. It’s a time honored tale, and one practiced by many authors.

I’m happy she got clean, got published and got a different job that she’s clearly better suited for. What annoys me is that in the countless interviews she does, she never provides broader context for domination or shows any self-awareness of herself in the bigger kinky picture. You get the impression she thinks she’s a truly representative example of a dominatrix and is providing a valuable insight into that world. Where in reality she was hired as a pretty face, working with zero training in a McDungeon. It’s a bit like a 3rd string quarterback, who never made it beyond the practice squad, writing a book on being a professional NFL player. He might have a great personal story, but he’s not exactly Tom Brady. In that case I’m sure he and his interviewers would understand that. In the case of Febos and her coverage, I’m not sure that distinction gets drawn.

I also find it odd that the dangers of what she did never get addressed. For example, she did risky kinky activities like breathplay while high on drugs. I wonder how the interviews would have gone is her side gig had been say a carer at an old peoples home? I’m guessing all the funny stories about the stupid shit she did with the crazy patients while on heroin wouldn’t have gone down so well.

The other thing that bugs me – while I’m ranting here – is how she trades on her time as a dominatrix while also complaining about people bringing it up. Several times in this recent Guardian article she writes disapprovingly about people mentioning it, and is mad that a colleague makes a joke about it. You don’t get to write a book, and do countless interviews on a subject to flog said book, and the declare it off limits for comments. If you’re making money off it, you should probably learn not to be embarrassed by it.

Mistress Mattisse wrote a review of the book and also chatted to Febos. I think she covers the issues pretty well.

Melissa FebosPhotograph is of Melissa Febos. Post title and ‘McDungeon’ stolen shamelessly from Mistress Matisse.

Comments Finally Fixed (I think)

Long term readers may be aware that there have been ongoing and persistent issues with people trying to comment here. Ironically, given the nature of the site, comments featuring words like ‘dominatrix’ or ‘BDSM’ were the ones causing problems. It was just my luck to get stuck with a prudish comment system on a sex blog.

The good news is that after devoting some serious effort to it, and at one point yesterday breaking the site entirely, I think I’ve finally fixed it. For anyone interested, or with similar issues, I’ll put some technical details after the obligatory pretty femdom picture.  For everyone else, the upshot is…

  1. If you’ve tried to comment before and been driven away in frustration, please try again in the future. No more weird errors of ‘page not found’.
  2. On the tiny tiny chance – crosses fingers – that anyone still sees problems then please email me with the comment. Now I’ve identified the root cause I can quickly fix any odd remaining errors if I have the comment text. I’ve tested with all manner of naughty words, and it seems to be fine, but it’s possible there’s some particularly deviant combination I’ve missed.

And now for a pretty picture as promised…

The dirty stuff for the technically depraved: It was nothing to do with a WordPress at all. It was a module called ModSecurity buried inside Apache that I knew nothing about and certainly didn’t install. It scans the incoming http requests and blocks ‘bad ones’ based on a big set of rules. This makes total sense for protocol level attacks like SQL injection or buffer overruns. Unfortunately it also has a set of spam rules which perform checks against a blacklist of adult words (like bdsm, latex, plug, dominatrix, etc.) In my opinions that’s a really dumb layer in the stack to do spam filtering, so I didn’t really think to look there. The end result was that incoming comments would be blocked before ever making it to WordPress and its comment management system.

If you ever have this issue, then fixing it can be a pain. My cpanel only lets me turn ModSecurity on/off, not configure it. WHM gives a lot more detail in its security section, but the UI kept giving errors when I tried to tweak rules. In the end I had to use shell access and edit the mod_sec .conf files. There’s a whitelist file you can use to kill rules you don’t want.

Roleplay with an edge

Some people use BDSM to temporarily escape reality, while for others it’s a way of working through and exploring real world issues. I’m definitely in the escapist camp. I like to take a vacation from my overactive and constantly nagging brain by giving it a big wash of adrenaline and hormones. Being reminded of stuff that depresses me on a day to day basis is the last thing I want sneaking into my kink.

The people in this Broadly article clearly feel differently. The title sums it up pretty well – ‘Inside a BDSM Dungeon with a Hillary Dom and a Guilty, Diaper-Clad Trump Voter’. So on top of wall to wall political coverage in the media, you can now also politics in your local playspace. Assuming your local playspace is La Domaine Esemar that is.

The Domme in question is Mistress Couple (featured here in the past), who started offering a Hillary/Trump roleplay as joke before the election. When Trump won, and the joke became decidedly less funny, she continued with the twist that wannabe Trump submissives had to prove a donation to the ACLU or Planned Parenthood before a session.

I like the idea of generating money for a good cause and giving Mistress Couple the satisfaction of hitting a Trump voter in the nuts with a golf club. I just wish our politics wasn’t so fucked up that it’s ripe for being turned into BDSM role play material.

This street artwork, featuring Catwoman and Trump, is entitled ‘The revenge of women’ and is by Herr Nilsson.

It’s unlikely the ‘Mike’ featured in the Broadly article is a reader of this blog, but on the off chance he is, I’d just like to say: ‘Mike, you’re a goddamn idiot’.

CBT for the curious

I’m  regularly surprised by the extent to which discussion on specialized BDSM play has spread to mainstream sites. For example, here’s a recent Refinery29 article on Cock and Ball Torture. OK, so Refinery29 isn’t exactly the New York Times, but I doubt a few years ago you’d have seen anything on CBT outside of specialized kink sites. I don’t think I knew what CBT was until I started physically exploring BDSM and actually arranging to play. Now anyone can read about it next to articles on health, entertainment and politics.

As articles go it’s not a bad one, given the obvious constraints on space and detail. However, it does suffer from a problem I see in a lot of these mainstream articles – treating the sensual and the sadistic separately. They often seem to treat kink as something you do by taking a break from regular sensual sex to try this sadistic and painful thing. In my experience very few masochists like cold, brutal and unmodulated pain. And those that do, probably aren’t taking tips from Refinery29 articles. For most of us it’s the blend of pleasure with pain, and the ratcheting up of sensation as the balance tip back and forth between them.

I think the best advice for a CBT curious couple would be to start with the pleasure. Get him hot and bothered with the tongue or the hand, and then mix in some squeezing, pinching or slapping. Someone horny and eager is going to be less self conscious about what they’re doing and more likely to relax into the moment. Wait till he’s panting, then put some clothespins on the shaft or sack and slowly masturbate him. That mixture of lovely friction and painful tugging gives a lot of scope for shifting the pain/pleasure balance. It also sets up the right dynamic of control – giving pleasure and then taking it away. There’s also an obvious visual feedback mechanism as arousal ebbs and flows.

Bruises on bruises

I’m safely back in Seattle, recovering from my LA hijinks. Doing 8 intense hours of sessions over 6 days definitely wasn’t wise, but it was a lot of fun.

I finished by playing with Mistress Lucy again, whilst sporting fresh and vivid whip marks from Mistress Isabella Sinclaire. You can probably guess what happened next. Do you think that on being shown the day old marks…
a/ Mistress Lucy observed how tender they looked and was careful to avoid them for the rest of the sessions, or
b/ Gleefully raked her fingernails across them and then pulled our her slappy leather whip to add her own layer of marks on top?

The vivid bruises on my back will testify to answer (b). There’s something about showing a tender spot to a sadistic top – they just can’t help poking at it to get a reaction. Or, in this case, beating it with a big leather thing to get a scream.

This isn’t me in the picture with Isabella below, but my marks were (and are) remarkably similar in pattern. Or at least were until the next layer got added!

I found this on Mistress Isabella’s Instagram.

Living the dream

I was lucky enough to realize a long held dream of mine this weekend. I got to play with Isabella Sinclaire.

For those that don’t know of her work (shame on you), she’s a famous and very talented domme, who I’ve mentioned here in previous posts. I first became aware of her thanks to the Ivy Manor films she did with Jewell Marceau back around 2000. At the time my kinky life lived in fantasy only, and the films and her presence completely grabbed me. It’s hard to believe I’d one day be lucky enough to end up tied to her table.

Her approach to playing reminded my a lot of Lydia. They both possess the confidence, skills and experience to riff on a theme, reading body language and organically building layers of sensation. Rather than working through a specific pre-determined plan, there’s a sense of working towards a know goal but improvising a lot of the steps along the way. In my case some of those steps involved a tens unit, a beautifully thrown single tail and suturing around the nipples, cock and balls. It was a fantastic experience.

Please note that my comparison shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of the other dommes I play with. There are a lot of different but equally great ways to construct a scene and top someone. I’ve always tried to play with different dommes and enjoyed their unique slants on domination, even when Lydia was still around. I’ve just never before encountered anyone who reminded me so much of her general approach as Isabella did, even while their styles were still very much their own.

If you’re in the LA region and interesting sessioning with Mistress Isabella, her professional site is here. She also organizes a Domme Collective, featuring many talented professionals.

Cock Cage Fantasy

Recently I’ve been fantasizing about cock cages. That might not seem like hot news. Submissive guy has chastity fantasy – hold the front page. But I’ve actually been fantasizing about other guys in steel cock cages. And I’m still straight, or at least I was the last time I checked.

What prompted this was hanging out in Los Angeles restaurants and observing groups dining together. Many of them seemed to consist of very average but loud men dining with very attractive but quiet women. There’s nothing unique to LA about that combination, but it seems more prevalent here. There’s something particularly annoying about watching overweight guys in badly fitted suits holding forth at great length about their latest business deal while their female companions sit back and nurse their drinks.

The male ego is particularly unattractive when displayed so blatantly. What cheered me up was to imagine them all wearing expensive steel chastity devices, shifting around uncomfortably beneath their Zegna suits. They might have been boasting to their buddies over the steak course, but in my fantasy the ladies held the key to their devices, and then fucked them brutally when they got home. Who knows, it might even have been true in some cases.

Talking of cock cage fantasies – here’s a great one from Steelwerks. This is the steampunk cage.

Does this hurt? How about now?

I think all good sadists have a touch of the mad scientist in them. They’re not content with making it hurt. They also have questions. How much does it hurt? What about here compared with here? What if I squeeze? Was that a yes or a no? What if I do it again? What if I turn it up and squeeze?

I had a great session with Mistress Lucy yesterday, which featured many of these questions. She particularly enjoyed testing where her Tazapper hurt the most. Oddly enough, despite testing it on the more obvious delicate and protruding areas, I think the final answer was in the armpit. I guess that’s what a good mad scientist does. Don’t waste time guessing or making assumptions. Just jam that probe in and see what jumps.

This is a shot of Mistress Lucy I found on her twitter feed. Not exactly sure what’s going on with that pole, but it definitely got a bit of a (sexy) mad scientist vibe to it.