Bad Assumptions

This Frisky article on the bad assumptions people make about kink and kinky dating made my smile, albeit in a rueful way. The anecdote that really hits home features a roommate who interprets her friends preference as a ‘dom’ to mean being a professional dominatrix, and then thinks clients are getting invited over for their games night. I guess that’s what happens when people get all their information about kink from shitty memoirs.

I struggle with the perception of kink with the friends that I’m out to. On one hand I don’t want to get into too much detail about my sessions and personal sexual practices. Describing what an awesome play piercing session I just had doesn’t really make for a comfortable dinner conversation. At the same time, I see the common representations of femdom in popular culture, and wonder how it colors their view of me. I assume they think I get off on crawling around on the floor at the end of a leash and being called a miserable maggot by a lady in head to toe leather.  Which is all perfectly fine if you’re into it, but doesn’t really look anything like how I actually play. I don’t know how to communicate the complexity and richness of D/s and kink without an uncomfortable amount of oversharing.

I’m fairly certain this vintage shot is how my non-kinky friends picture my sex life when the subject of dommes or BDSM comes up. And it’s not like I’d object to doing a scene like this, it’s just not representative.

Replacing Max

One of the oldest discussion forums for femdom, and particularly professional femdom, has been The Hang at Max Fisch. Sadly, these days it seems somewhat neglected and forlorn. Whoever owns it has pretty much left it to rot, and while it still kind of works on a good day, the load times are long, the moderation AWOL and the support pretty much non-existent.

Anyone looking for a working alternative that doesn’t actually look all that different might want to check out The Buzz at domina.ms. They’re using what looks like exactly the same forum software with many of the same forums, but running on decent hardware and with proper moderation and support. It’s not as busy as Max used to be, but as The Hang continues to decline, I’d expect and hope it’d pick up more participants. I just created my account there.

If anyone has any other suggestions for active and well managed femdom forums, then feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll take a look and potentially link to them. Running this site takes up most of my kinky writing energy, so I don’t tend to do a lot of forum participation, but I do enjoy browsing them and linking to interesting posts I find.

One of the more frequent domme posters on The Buzz is Mistress Ayn (594 posts according to her profile). She’s shown here in a beautiful recent portrait by the inimitable Sardax. If you’d like to see her in person, she’s based in Atlanta.

Incompetent or Evil?

Some rare good news for my old country – the UK has indefinitely suspended introducing their porn blocking system. I’d like to say this was because they realized the danger to free speech and had a sudden burst of sanity, but it was really just down to incompetence. I guess if someone comes up with a stupid idea, the best you can hope for is that they’re too stupid to carry it out properly.

In less good news over this side of the pond, US politicians are once again having a go a free speech online and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. As always, sex workers are the canary in the coalmine. Having used bogus sex trafficking fears to weaken the law with SESTA/FOSTA, they’re now trying to expand the wedge and jam more free speech constraints in place. The online tech companies originally lobbied against SESTA/FOSTA, but eventually caved to the politicians. Presumably they thought it was a safe compromise on a topic they didn’t want to defend. Maybe now they’ll learn their lesson. Politicians have an endless appetite for limiting what people can discuss and share, and compromising in one area will only increase that appetite in other areas.

Here’s an image that seems suitable for a politician trying to limit free expression. Although if all the members of the Soviet’s security forces had looked like this, America might actually have lost the cold war.

This is Mistress Nikita. She no longer takes professional sessions but you can access images and video from her main site here.

Newton’s Laws

The idea of trampling is hot. The visuals can be fantastic. It works both masochistically and psychologically. Yet somehow, whenever I try it, I struggle with it. I think that’s mostly because I’m afraid a rib is going to crack. I’ve got no natural intuition for the force they can take. It’s tough to relax into the moment when I’m picturing a trip to the ER and explaining why I’ve got heel marks all over my chest.

I suspect my fears are unwarranted when trampling is done properly. This article claims that a force of 3,300 Newtons gives a 25% chance of cracking a rib. That kind of force can be generated by a hard fast punch, but it’s a long way off the force exerted by the resting weight of a human. A 140lb domme would exert just 622 Newtons of force from standing on someone. Of course that’s only true when she’s stationary or when moving carefully. If she jumps then she’ll exert a very large force when she lands and rapidly decelerates. So if your domme wants to try that, I’d suggest telling her that Mr. Newton strongly recommends against it.

This fantastic trampling shot is from the twitter feed of Michelle Lacy. I love both the space she’s in and the bondage/trampling combo. If you’re interested in playing with her, she’s based in South Florida but does travel.

Pride Knights

Here’s another Pride themed post to finish the weekend off. This is from a tweet by A. Archer, an artist, model, cosplayer and adventurer.  Not strictly femdom, but I’m sure there’ll be many readers out there who appreciate a lady in armor with a big sword. I think it’s a very fun shot, particularly with the six different colors represented across the back row of people.

It seems odd to see brightly colored outfits for combat, but for hundreds of years that was actually common. Not sure anybody ever went in for a rainbow outfit, but before the days of accurate long distance rifles and rapid firing machine guns, camouflage was a low priority.  It was better to look good and create cohesive units that could be easily identified. It wasn’t until the wars of the late 19th and early 20th century that being hard to see suddenly became a big advantage. As an interesting aside, the creator of the Pride Flag, a man called Gilbert Baker, was actually an army veteran who served between 1970 and 72.

If you’d like to support future work of Archer Inventive, there’s a Patreon here.

Friendly

There has been a bunch of debate on social media recently about how open to kink Pride events should be. One side maintains that kink should be kept indoors and making Pride family friendly is important. The other side says that kink has always been an important part of Pride, and we shouldn’t be embracing corporate sponsors and mainstream coverage at the expense of slicing up the community.

You can probably guess where I stand on the issue. It seems pretty messed up to have huge corporations like AT&T sponsoring events while at the same time telling some segments of the LBGTQ community they’re not welcome. Young children will think all the costumes are fun and older children will be more aware of and switched onto the issues than their parents. The only people who’ll be offended are the same people who say “I don’t mind what people do, as long as they keep it private.” In other words, their standards should be the community standards and everyone else should fit into their world view. Fuck those people.

Of course, the irony here is that I hate crowds, marching and doing anything before midday. So while I’ll make it to the latter parts of Seattle pride to applaud and cheer, I’ll not be in the parade and certainly not be dressed in anything outrageous. If I was going to take a kinky outfit public, this cartoon definitely represents my preferred option. After all, everyone likes a friendly dog.

This is from The Perry Bible Fellowship (original is here).

Intensity (or not)

My random thought of the day: Intensity of play is entirely situational. It depends on the chemistry you feel in the moment, your emotional state beforehand, the stress in your daily life and countless other factors. It’s fine to ask for a lighter scene or to bail out of an intense scene. It’s fine to play hard with one person but lightly with another. It’s fine to change limits from scene to scene.

I used to think of kink as a one way street. If I achieved a certain level of intensity with a domme, I couldn’t pull back from there. And if I did some activity with one domme, then obviously I should be able to do that with all dommes. It was a bit like a videogame where I was unlocking achievements. Once you’ve got the heavy whipping badge, then obviously heavy whipping should always be a possibility in all future scenes.

These days I’m older and wiser. There is no grand council of dommes collecting scene reports and making sure nobody ever backslides on their level of play. I’d much rather evolve my play slowly and organically with a new domme than immediately race towards my limits as fast as possible. And if I’m feeling stressed or not in a good masochistic headspace, I’m also now fine asking for a lighter scene that I can relax into. It turns out that you don’t get into trouble for not always playing on the edge of what’s possible.

Talking of intensity – here’s a pretty heavy caning scene. Not sure where this originates from sadly.

Shut Up

Here’s a young man who clearly didn’t pay attention when he was told to hush up. Hopefully he’s getting the message now.

It strikes me there’s actually a product marketing niche here. Writing on bodies is a kinky thing. Bondage tape is a kinky thing. Why hasn’t anybody combined the two? Tape with phrases on might be quite fun. Just simple things like ‘My Property’ or ‘Pain Toy’ or the ever popular ‘Slut’ might work pretty well. Customization options would be even more entertaining. What domme wouldn’t want personalized bondage tape with ‘Property of Mistress …..’ on it for wrapping up submissives?

This photograph is by Fuck-Me-Mon-Amour from deviant art. It’s titled ‘shut up baby 3’.

Sunday Fantasy

Readers in the London area might want to consider checking out the exhibition entitled Sunday Fantasy by Zoe Williams. It’s not really femdom, but it is about women taking control of and exploring their sexual fantasies. I particularly liked this description of one part of the exhibit…

two women exert themselves energetically to remove the fantasist’s clothes while she does all she can to keep them on. The result is often more pillowfight than catfight, with the women wrestling hard only to collapse periodically in exhausted giggles.

That seems a particularly fun fantasy. I like the contrast in types of desire – clothed and in control versus naked and sexual powerful. Apparently the exhibit also features pee as a linking element and references to 70’s Gothic lesbian horror movies, both of which are very fine things. The exhibition is at Mimosa House and you can read an interview with the artist here.

This image isn’t connected in any way with the exhibit in question. But it does at least feature a woman happy about taking someone’s clothes off. In this case, he doesn’t appear to be resisting all that much.