Discretion is the Better Part of Valor

You’ll find professional play spaces in all sorts of neighborhoods, in a wide variety of buildings and decorated in a lot of different styles. However, there’s one very consistent feature that applies to all of them – discretion in how you approach. When I’m playing with someone new, they’ll often spend a lot longer on the protocol for getting into the space than on the actual pre-scene discussion. Nobody wants a horny guy in a gimp suit wandering up and down the street knocking on doors and asking if anyone knows where Mistress Whiplash lives.

The perils of attracting the attention of the neighbors is highlighted by this recent story in the NY Times. While technically it might be totally legal to set-up a BDSM playspace, the reality is that the neighbors actually have a lot of leverage. Most people aren’t going to want to run the gamut of loud and disapproving locals when they’re trying to scratch a kinky itch. In this particular case it seemed one particular crazy religious neighbor (who suggested submissive guys would want to snatch kids off the street) was enough to torpedo a location.

Charlotte Taillor – the domme in question – did eventually manage to successfully relocate, but only after a lot of hassle and expense. It’s a tale worth keeping in mind for anyone visiting a professional space. You really don’t want to be the one to catch the eye of the local morality police and create a lot of problems for your domme.

This is Charlotte Taillor and the site for the Taillor Group is here. It’s billed as supporting ‘Female Empowerment & Education for the Kinkster or the Curious’.

Late Again

No idea where this is from, but it does have a sexy 1950’s feel. It’s best not to examine her proportions too closely however, lest you realize she’s 66% legs. At least if her tardy young man tries to escape, she’ll easily be able to run him down.

Cute Toilet

It’s not often I find myself using the word cute in connection with a toilet play scene, but I guess this post will have to be the exception. The image below is Bastienne Cross on her rather unique toilet, found via this tweet. You can see another angle of the table like toilet in this image (from this tweet), with the subby’s feet just sticking out at the top. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dungeon toilet design quite like this one.

Where most people take a book to the bathroom, Bastienne obviously prefers bubbles.

Bastienne Cross is a Toronto based pro-domme.

Role Models?

One slightly random follow-up thought from yesterday’s teacher related post: Why is it that parents thinks teachers need to be a role model for their pupils? Anytime there’s a minor scandal in a teacher’s private life, that’s the line that gets trotted out. I don’t get it. What pupils think their teachers are so amazing that they want to copy them? Frankly if there’s anything likely to make nude selfies seem uncool, it’s finding out your teacher is doing them.

I had many teachers, some good and some bad. I never saw any of them as a role model. My main thought was – why would any adult want to come back to school and deal with all these asshole teenagers? I can’t wait to get away from all this.

Of course I do have fond memories of some teachers. My English teacher – a Miss West – springs to mind. She had the right mix of intelligence, stern authority and care for her pupils that made an adolescent paltego quite smitten. A fact he demonstrated by walking into things, dropping books and tripping over his own feet anytime they crossed paths.

Sadly I think the site this image is originally from has ceased to be.

Beware the Nipple

Exhibit number 1,024,604 in the case of ‘sexually repressed crazy people vs sanity’ would be this story of a teacher fired for a topless selfie. The woman in question sent a topless shot to a colleague she’d previously dated, which got leaked to a student. In any sane world this would result in a collective shrug. If you were you going to punish anyone, it would obviously be the male teacher she sent it to. He was at best careless and at worst vindictive. However, because this is the worst possible timeline we’re all living in, she was the one fired.

I realize this story isn’t femdom related, but it is a great example of the fucked up way attitude society has to female sexuality. She wants to give her partner a little visual treat, and gets punished for it. The students and the man violate her privacy, and as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing happened to them.

The good news is that she’s sued the school for discrimination. The case is based on the fact that a male topless shot wouldn’t have been any big deal. I hope she wins, but I wish it was less about discrimination and based more on the idea of minding your own goddamn business. You’d think an internet awash in millions of naked people would have desensitized us to this kind of thing, but apparently not.

Here’s some male nippilage to finish the post. Hopefully he doesn’t have any students to scandalize.

Warning Signs

I thought I’d continue my previous post on the incompetent domme and the site she shoots for with a few follow-up thoughts.

Firstly, always be alert for warning signs in any kinky interaction – whether it’s playing in person or simply buying someone’s BDSM porn. I remember seeing the site in question advertise for film slaves with the condition that they’d only waive the usual session fee if the slave didn’t use their safeword. That’s obviously a horrible incentive structure. The submissive is liable to push beyond safe limits to avoid paying and the domme is encouraged to push hard in order to save the company money. I should have called them out when I saw that, but somehow it slid past me at the time.

Secondly, be smart about where you consume porn from. If you like a lot of low risk activities, then it probably doesn’t matter who the domme is. Femdom Empire features a lot of crossover models from the regular porn world,  but they tend to stick to activities like pegging, foot worship, facesitting, tease/denial. etc. I’ve never seen them do extreme scenes that create non-trivial risk. On the other hand, if you’re more into things like impact play, heavy bondage, CBT and medical play, then pick sites that feature a lot of well known pro-dommes. For example, The English Mansion site definitely features edgier activities, but it’s also run by a well known domme and features a lot of top professionals.

Finally, if you’re a submissive, don’t think you can delegate all safety concerns to the domme. Playing safely is a joint responsibility. If you’re concerned about raising issues mid-scene – which I’ll admit can be difficult – then build into more intense play slowly over time. That makes it much easier to adjust course or raise concerns between sessions when you’re in a clearer headspace. I’d rather look forward to playing again and pushing just a little further than leave a scene with an injury or a messed up mental state.

Talking of the English Mansion, heavier activities and professionals who know what they’re doing, here’s Domina Liza in a shoot for them. She’s certainly someone who knows how to correctly wield a single tail.

Managing Risk

Femdom twitter has been aflutter recently with threads on the dangers of impact play and how not to do it. This was all triggered by a particular ‘domme’ who didn’t seem to have much idea about wielding a single tail or where to apply it. You can see an example of the kind of thread I mean here. I’m not going to send clicks to the domme in question, or link to the site she shoots for. Let’s just say it’s based in America and staffed by young women who are the opposite of friendly.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that a lot of the women you see playing domme’s on femdom porn sites are adult actresses rather than professionally trained tops. I know this from talking to pro-dommes who have actually shot for a variety of these sites. They always report that the directors are very happy to shoot with them, as it makes a nice change for them to work with someone who knows what they’re doing and can use all the equipment properly.

Of course, the use of an actress rather than a technical expert isn’t necessarily a blocker to creating good scenes. I don’t think Gal Gadot could really take out a gang of hardened criminals, but I still enjoy watching her as Wonder Woman. The trick is to either stick to scenes that don’t require specialized technical skills or have experts to handle the tricky stuff. Not simply start whaling on a submissive like you’re a hyperactive toddler playing whack-a-mole.

In the meantime, if you’re indulging in impact play, then make sure you know what areas can be safely targeted. There are plenty of visual guides available online – for example this one.

The lady in this Jay Em scene may be applying some fierce blows, but they are in the proper area. There’s no danger here to our fictional characters.

A Problem in the Pant Department

If you hang out on kinky social media sites you’ll inevitably come across stories of people braving airport security with kinky toys. The best advice I’ve heard for when a TSA agent starts quizzing you on the contents of your toy bag is simply to say “It’s a sex thing”.  That pretty much guarantees they’ll want to quickly drop whatever it is and move on.

Of course that approach doesn’t really work if the toy in question is currently residing in your pants and locked onto your dick – as Thumper recently found out. While airports have strict rules about taking shoes and belts off, chastity devices occupy more of a grey area. Although they do have special TSA locks for luggage, so maybe that could be adopted for dicks? Just make the agent in charge of telling everyone how to put their laptop in a bin also responsible for unlocking  chastity devices and running them through the x-ray luggage scanner. Admittedly you might upset some people re-locking your chastity device on the other side of the security gate, but you could just tell them it’s for their own safety. The contents of your pants are now guaranteed to be safely non-explosive, both literally and metaphorically.

Thumper clearly handed the situation with great aplomb. He was at least fortunate to be in a simple plastic device. The conversation might have been different had he been in something like the steelweeks device below. I think this is very cool, but I wouldn’t want to try and explain it to an uncomprehending TSA agent. The only thing that’d make it more suspicious would be a couple of blue and red wires and a big countdown timer.

This is the Steelwerks Steampunk device.

Missing from Porn

This image by Hazel Mead isn’t femdom related, but I thought it was cute and wanted to share. I had a crazy experience in a Vegas hotel room years that actually managed to combine multiple things from this – banging heads, shyness, struggling to put on the condom and falling off the bed. Even for someone as clumsy as me, it was pretty spectacular. Maybe I’ll share that story in a future post.

If anyone out there with artist talent wants to try and do a similar drawing for kinky sex, I think there’s a lot of ideas to pick from. Some things I’ve never seen in kinky porn but that actually happen pretty regularly…

  • Numbness and pins and needles when in bondage.
  • Taking off the very sexy but uncomfortable and impractical shoes just a few minutes into a scene.
  • Shy bladder when it comes to a watersports moment.
  • Spending a bunch of time trying to get the right position and angle for the strap-on.
  • Deciding that the cool looking hood is just a bit to stressful to handle just minutes after putting it on.
  • Giggling like an idiot when being sprayed with cold antiseptic at the end of a scene.