The beauty of dominant women
No rambling thoughts or verbiage from me on this post. Just a beautiful image to end the week. This is from photographer Rene de Sans and features Bishop as the model and Kitty Mooschief as the rigger. I’ve featured that same trio before, with an equally striking image.
I thought I’d seen all of the ways it was possible to monetize BDSM, but apparently not. Goddess Justine of Oakland is using Airbnb to offer tours of dungeon spaces. For $69 (hem hem) you can get a tour of a playspace and I guess an explanation of how some of the more unusual equipment is used.
Given the high cost of maintaining a playspace in the Bay Area, I’m all for anything that brings them some extra money. However, I can’t help feeling there’s a trick being missed here. Some pro-dommes offer the option of a ‘vanilla’ girlfriend to join the session and watch. It’s not really my kink, but I assume it’s either for exhibitionists or submissives who get off on the humiliation aspect of being watched and judged by a non-kinky person. So how about combining the tours with a session? What could be more humiliating than being naked and spanked whilst Mr and Mrs Blenkinstop, a retired couple from Ohio, wander around the space laughing at the buttplugs, posing for pictures in the cage and trying to sit on the Sybian?The submissive gets humiliated, the Blenkinstop’s get a great story to tell and the domme gets paid twice. Win, win, win.
While there are some nice playspaces in the Bay Area, I think Germany is the location where these kind of tours could really take off. As I’ve covered before, they have some amazing spaces. The image below is from Studio Black Fun in Leipzig. Just looking at it slightly unnerves me.
I had a couple of different emails recently. One was sadly all too common, the other sadly all too rare.
The first was someone asking me to set them up with the Goddess of their dreams. Apparently they thought I had hot and cold running Goddesses on tap and I’d be willing to divert a few of them to a random internet person on the basis of a one line email. As emails go, it’s about as effective as emailing Bill Gates with the line ‘Give me the job of my dreams!” and then signing it with a smiley face. On second thoughts, it’s actually less effective than that because, unlike me and the Goddesses, Bill at least has the theoretical ability to actually deliver.
The second email was someone thanking me for running this site and saying that reading it had played a part in them reaching out to a domme to set up their first ever play session. That gave me the warm fuzzies. Even better was the fact that they’d had a great time and they were planning to play more in the future. If there’s one single thing I’d want this site to achieve, it’d be to encourage people to get physically involved in kink. It doesn’t matter if it’s going to a munch, visiting a pro-domme or exploring something new with a partner. Just venture out there and try it. The only lasting regret I’ve ever had about my kinky experiences is not starting them years earlier. If I can encourage others to avoid that same mistake, I’ll be a happy bunny. Just don’t expect this particular bunny to fix you up with a Goddess. That parts on you.
As for which email is the common one and which the rare one, I’ll leave that for you to guess. Absolutely no prizes for guessing right.
Here’s an example of the kind of kinky fun that’s out there to be explored. I believe this is Lady Hinako and Mistress Kawa with human thing from this tweet. Even better than one happy domme, is two happy dommes.
I’m continuing my thoughts from yesterday’s post – Opt In or Opt Out. If you haven’t read that already, then I’d start there, otherwise this won’t make much sense.
When it comes to scene negotiation, I think there’s a fundamental tension that’s challenging to resolve. On one hand everyone wants scope for creativity and spontaneity. Working out a strict plan of action beforehand or stopping every 5 minutes to discuss the next activity is no fun. On the other hand, people can have very different views on what activities need discussion and what don’t. It’s not so much a question of failing to negotiate, but failing to spot the need to negotiate. If I think hoods are an opt in item then I will not mention them, as I don’t think I need to explicitly bar them. If the domme thinks they’re an opt out item, then me saying nothing leaves them on the table as a viable option to stick over my head mid-scene.
I don’t have any great suggestions to resolving this tension, other than trial and error and playing with the same people repeatedly. A few things I try to do from the submissive perspective are assume that…
I’ll leave you with a vintage image of an activity that is opt in for most dommes I know. However, there was one domme who, mid-scene and totally out of the blue, tossed me a pair of fishnet stockings, a garter belt and a pair of frilly panties to put on. It turned out to be fun, but I was certainly a bit surprised at the time. I think she was equally surprised by just how long it took me to figure out how to get them all on properly.
This show is from mrunderheel’s twitter feed.
A couple of comments to my previous post got me thinking about the dynamics of session negotiation. Specifically, what gets treated as opt in and what as opt out. In theory, if you listen to most kinksters, all play has to be consensual and explicitly negotiated ahead of time, so everything should be opt in. The reality can be murkier.
The comments in question – from Servitor and Al about my pet peeve of ‘gotcha questions’ – were slightly different but both raised the same basic point. I might not like questions designed to trip a submissive up, but that’s a valid thing to do for some scenes. Your kink is not my kink and all that. I absolutely agree with that. It can be a fine style of play if you’re into that dynamic or the roleplay requires it. But it’s also not quite the point I was trying (and probably failing) to make. Gotcha questions are a specific activity or style, and yet often get used without discussion. Which brings me to this posts title. My pet peeve isn’t so much with the approach itself, but that it is something I have to actively opt out of. Shouldn’t the default be opt in? Not so much YKINMKBYKIOK, but that YKINMK – and it’s in my session damn it! – BYKIOK.
I can think of other examples where the default is the reverse of what you might expect. Bondage for example. That’s part of almost every scene I do, yet I don’t think it ever gets negotiated. It’s treated as an intrinsic part of kink that you’d have to explicitly request not to do. Impact play is another. I’ve lost track of the number of times I didn’t mention impact play in session negotiation, yet 10 minutes later somebody was whaling on my ass. I suspect that’s probably because almost all domme’s like it so much! Neither of those activities count as a pet peeve for me, because I also enjoy them, but it might be an issue for someone else.
What exactly gets treated as opt in versus opt out clearly varies from domme to domme. At one extreme, every domme I know treats edge play activities like piercing, cutting or breathplay as opt in. They always get discusssed first. On the other side, along with bondage and impact play, I’ve typically found blindfolds and hoods are opt out. If I don’t call them out as an issue then there’s a good chance they’ll be pulled out at some point and I’ll have to start negotiating mid-scene, which is never my favorite time to do it. In between those two groups there’s a lot of fuzziness. For example, face slapping for some people is a very specific activity to be discussed ahead of time, for others its just an intrinsic part of kink that it’s up to the submissive to opt out of.
I’ve more to add here, but I’ll save that for the next post. In the meantime, I’ll continue my photographic theme of impact play. If this gentleman has a desire to opt out of caning, he probably needs to speak up asap.
This is from the High heels & Fetish tumblr.
I think I’m due another PPPP – a Paltego Pet Peeve Post. Excuse me while I unburden myself on this one.
Today’s pet peeve is domme’s who ask questions with the deliberate goal of tripping the submissive up or drawing out a ‘wrong’ answer. There are a lot of ways to do this, but perhaps the canonical example would be posing a question and then, however the submissive responds, following up with “No. The right answer is whatever Mistress wants.” That really bugs me.
Let me first qualify that there is a specific style of play that this kind of gotcha questioning is appropriate for. If you’re doing a punishment or humiliation dynamic, where the whole point is that the submissive should always be wrong and kept mentally off balance, then its a valid technique. It’s certainly a mindfuck to be forced to answer knowing that there is no good response. But those kind of scenes are a specific and narrow style of play. I actually never do them, yet still encounter the gotcha question approach from time to time.
The reason I dislike it so much is that it runs directly counter to the goal of being open and honest in communication. I always want to be transparent and truthful with my thoughts and emotions in a scene. That’s the only way I know to build two way trust and a sense of connection. If I start having to second guess my answers, or spot the gotcha questions from the real ones, then it runs counter to that goal. Being told an honest answer is a wrong answer sets up bad incentives for my future answers, and forces my brain into social-interaction and negotiation mode, which is not at all conducive to subspace.
I’ve seen plenty of dommes complain over the years about submissives expecting them to be mind readers. They get told that the submissive will do anything to make them happy, and then get upset when it turns out that they were operating with different definitions of ‘anything’. I think that’s a very reasonable response but, on the flip side, asking submissives ‘no win’ questions conditions them to give exactly these kind of responses. You can’t have it both ways.
Of course, just because a domme doesn’t deliberately trip up a submissive, doesn’t mean she can’t beat him. It’s always fair to say – “It’s interesting that you think that. Now bend over so I can cane that ass.”
I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image. Please leave a comment if you can help me with that.
Updated: Thanks to a helpful comment I can attribute this to Princess Toni. Based on similar images, I think this might be a Cruella shot.
These shots by Mistress An Li made me happy. Not because it’s a great bondage set-up, although it is that. Not because it looks like something I’d want to try, although it’s also that. Not even because Mistress An Li looks so pleased with her creation, although a smiling domme is one of my favorite scenes. No. It’s because I saw the first shot and went “Oooh, that looks like reclined bound angle pose.” And then I felt all unjustifiably smug and pleased with myself that – after 18 months of regular yoga – I’d finally been able to remember and recognize one pose. Admittedly, that might be because it’s got a kinky sounding name, but I don’t care. I’m officially upgrading myself from yoga idiot to yoga novice.
Mistress An Li is a LA based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here and here twitter feed here. She also has a short video shot from this scene tweeted here, with the full video available at her onlyfans site.
This isn’t actually femdom, but it made me laugh, so it gets a pass. Plus, I figure there must be at least some overlap between readers of this blog and people who like muscular men doing cross-dressing Magical Girl cosplay. The background to the shot, along with more photos, is in this crunchyroll article. Feel free to imagine a stern domme waving a whip at them from behind the camera if it’ll help.
The news these days is generally not good. One might even go as far as saying it’s seriously fucked up. Even this blog, designed as a kinky oasis, has featured a fair number of depressing posts about laws and politics. I’m therefore very happy to report a minor but cheering feelgood story. New Zealand’s Catherine Healy, who helped decriminalize prostitution, has been recognized in the Queen’s honors list. Specifically, she has been made a a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the rights of sex workers.
When I first spotted the headline, I assumed it’d be a situation where she’d done several good things, and she just happened to be someone who’d also worked for decriminalization. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. She’s being recognized primarily for her work towards decriminalization. In a world where regressive and punitive legislation seems the new norm, have a sex worker recognized by the ultimate establishment figure of the Queen is a happy twist. Congratulations to Catherine and whoever nominated her.
A lot of pro-dommes own thrones and cherry pick some of the trappings of royalty. However, it’s tough to beat a thousand years of inbreeding and faith in a divine right. The shot below shows Mistress Ezada Sinn on her throne. It’s a pretty impressive one, but not quite up to Sovereign’s Throne in the House of Lords. Now that’d be a great location to play out a worship scene.
Five bonus points for anyone who knows where the post title came from.
I typically don’t like to link to articles that are surfacing via my blogroll. It seems lazy on my part, since they’re already available to anyone who is interested. However, a new post by Ms. Renee Trevi, entitled ‘A Session With No Map‘ is too good not to feature. It describes the kind of intensity I strive for but only occasionally touch.
He is quietly breathing and I read in his eyes that he gave it up entirely. I feel him fully dissolved, like there is nothing left of him, completely disintegrated. There is a sense of deep surrender in his eyes, he is neither scared of pain nor desiring of pleasure. And that’s when we slow down.
There’s sometimes a moment for me, deep in a session, where everything inverts. The pain has been driving me inward, focusing me on my sensations, my emotions. Then I reach a point, not of giving up, but of letting go. The energy turns outwards and it becomes about Her. It’s a sense of acceptance. The pain is still there, but it’s just information, something that I can release to her. I might be experiencing it, but she owns it. We’re in a bubble and everything else is noise.
As I said, I don’t often get there, but when I do, it’s way better than anything as straightforward as an orgasm. I think Ms Renee Trevi’s post captures the intensity of that kind of moment beautifully, and I love how she tackled the open ended nature of the session she describes.
Ms Renee Trevi is a NYC based pro-domme. If you’re interested in experiencing her skills for yourself, her session page is here.
