Saying ‘No’ to men

LA’s Natalie West has a written an interesting article entitled ‘I tell men “no” for a living: What a dominatrix knows about #MeToo‘. As the title suggests, it touches on issues of consent, boundaries and the men who potentially violate them, from her perspective as a domme. I normally like to pull out a representative post quote from these kind of articles, but this is a dense piece that doesn’t lend itself to excerpting. If you’ve come to this blog for hot sexy stuff, then stick to this picture from her professional site, but for anyone looking for a more thought provoking read, it’s worth checking out.

This is from her gallery page. If you’re in the LA area and want to a session, then booking info is here.

Bad Connections

I normally like being able to make new connections between old posts. This is sadly not one of those times.

Earlier this month I featured a surprisingly solid article from Cosmopolitan on nipple clamps. A few days before that I wrote a post entitled Beware Hijackers, warning of the dangers of the #MeToo movement being subverted by the anti-sex crowd. Today brings an unwelcome connection between these two things, with the news that Walmart has pulled Cosmopolitan from its checkout lines.  This was apparently driven by a bunch of fuckheads called the ‘National Center on Sexual Exploitation’ who claimed that the sex articles in the magazine contributed to the #MeToo culture and the sexual harassment of women.

I don’t actually care too much about Cosmopolitan magazine per se, but I do care about the anti-sex crowd twisting #MeToo for their own ends. And I hate the puritanical attitude that seems to be rising in the US. I fear that this is just the start of it.

This is Edie Sedgwick, a model and actress, sitting on her manager Chuck Wein. She was one of Warhol’s superstars in the late 60’s.  I don’t think she was ever in Cosmo, but she was covered in Vogue, and looked stunning. Sadly she died in 1971  from alcohol and drugs. Note that the link in the image doesn’t go anywhere useful.

Excessively Excitable

I know this is erotic artwork featuring an entirely fictional scene. Unfortunately, I have a stupid brain that picks up on strange things. All I can think is that it must have taken her forever to tighten up all the laces on that ridiculous outfit, and now he’s ejaculated as soon as she entered the room. What a waste of time. I can only hope this fictional woman is going to inflict some post orgasm torture on our fictional male. Or, if she’s a professional, that she charges him some fictional money for the time spent dressing.

This is generally attributed to Bernard Montorgueil.  I’m personally skeptical of that attribution. It doesn’t fit the style of the work known to be his. Sadly I don’t have a better suggestion for the artist. I found if via Trained Tool twitter feed.

Funny Mummy

After some seriously depressing politics, I felt a touch of humor might be required. And I can’t think of anyone who can combine humor, playfulness and some seriously intense bondage quite like Lady Hinako. The mummification image below is from her twitter feed. It makes me smile each time I look at it. The second image, of Mistress Hinako herself, is from a different scene and taken from her blog post entitled Hinako Hospital. Even in medical play, she manages to inject (ahem) some fun decoration of her submissive.

Voters should have a safeword

So the grade A bullshit that is the FOSTA-SESTA bill (as covered previously here) was passed by the Senate this week. It’s a good indication of the level of dysfunction in American politics that while this dangerous bill was sailing through with no significant opposition, Senator Risch was holding up a one trillion dollar budget bill over the naming of a nature park after a political rival. Words fail me.

The effect was immediate. Craiglist dropped its entire personals section, reddit dropped sex related forums, CityVibe went dark, sex worker advertising forums vanished, etc. And that’s on day 1, before before the bill even becomes law.

It’s possible that you’re reading this and thinking ‘Why do I care? I don’t use any of those things.’ To you I’d firstly say ‘Don’t be such an asshole. Don’t you care about anyone other than yourself?’ This is a bill that’s going to cause active harm to many thousands of sex workers. Secondly, I’d say ‘Just wait. Stuff you do care about is going to follow closely behind.’

My prediction is that in the near future a grandstanding prosecutor is going to pick on some sex workers and claim (incorrectly) that they’ve been trafficked. Then he’ll use this law to go after whatever social media or online sites these workers have used or posted on. The facts won’t matter – just some juicy headlines about his crackdown on online filth and human misery. At which point all sorts of online platforms – twitter, tumblr, instagram, reddit, Google, etc. – will start to aggressively purge anything vaguely related to sex and kink. Or I guess I should say, ramp up their already aggressive efforts in that area. The effect on sex related speech will be chilling and widespread,

In theory the law shouldn’t affect sites like this one. In reality I rely hugely on those kind of platforms to provide interesting content and links. The majority of the images here feature sex workers of some form or another. This site literally wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for my experiences playing with Lady Lydia – a professional dominatrix I found online.

Hopefully the constitutionality of the bill will be challenged in the courts. In the meantime, I’d suggest doing whatever you can to support any sex workers you interact with, make yourself aware of their perspective on the issue  and donate to organizations like SWOP and EFF.

It’s a shame this lady wasn’t on the floor of the Senate to knock some sense into people.

Kinky Knees

Mistress Ayn has wise words to share for anyone who wants to avoid passing out while playing.

I can’t comment on the effect of erectile dysfunction drugs or eating erratically. I’ve not tried the former and my eating schedule is weird at the best of times. However, this part definitely resonates…

When placed in standing positions. like on the St. Andrews cross, don’t lock your knees.

I’ve come close to fainting a few times, and on every occasion I was in a vertical position, I was tense, my knees were locked and our play was intense. The end result was a classic Vasovagal Syncope response and a concerned domme, keen to get her suddenly ghost white submissive into a non-vertical position. It’s interesting to note that the causes listed for a vasovagal syncope response include standing for long periods, heat, fear of bodily injury, seeing blood and straining. Which clearly align with some types of BDSM play and the points Mistress Ayn makes.

My advice would be to avoid vertical positions for any new types of intense play. For example, always lie down for a first piercing. When standing is required, ensure knees can bend and are regularly flexed, focus on breathing deeply, try and relax into the pain and wiggle the torso and hands whenever you get the chance. From the domme side, a smooth escalation and deescalation of pain can help the submissive adapt to the rhythm, and regular physical contact can keep them grounded in the moment.

This gentleman clear has the right idea. He has a good knee bend going and it looks like he’s wiggling his torso. She should really be able to ratchet up the intensity.

This is from Djeki spanking artwork site and specifically this gallery. If you like their artwork, it appears they have originals available for sale.

Better Know a Lamp: Part 4

Welcome to another entry in my intermittent series of posts on submissives as lamps. The series has only had 4 entries in almost 7 years, but that is 3 more than I was expecting. Past examples are here, here and here.

It’s not a fetish I personally get, but it does make me smile. It’s both kinky and surreal. Clearly not widely popular (given that I don’t see many lampshades featured as equipment in play spaces) but it does seem to persistently pop up in kinky imagery. For those that do like it, standby for  another entry in the series sometime in 2019-2021.

This is from the instagram of latex.Jacqueline The-ripper.

Pie

Apparently it was Pi day last week. I’m slightly baffled as to why a mathematical constant gets its own day, but there we are. Can we look forward to the Euler number festival and the feast of the Lapace limit? Meanwhile, in Indiana, they presumably celebrate it on an entirely different day.

It’s tough to find a suitable image to connect femdom with π. Stern yet attractive ‘teachers’ brandishing a pointer in front of a bunch of blackboard equations don’t count. However, it’s a lot easier to connect pie with femdom. That’s a particular specialty of the artist Bakerman.

Bubbles of Intimacy

This Business Insider article describes a photographic project capturing couples in intimate moments. The twist in the tale is that they all feature the photographer Marie Hyld,  and a stranger she’s met for the first time just minutes before (as recorded in the corner of the photographs). Most of the shots are fairly conventional sweet/casual/romantic moments, but there’s one fun fetishistic one I’ve featured below.

Mistress Matisse made an insightful comment on the series via a tweet…

So, this photographer is basically tapping into the dynamic that many sex workers create, only she’s doing it in a performative way, instead of it being for the person she’s with.

I have to admit that when I started playing with pro-dommes I was puzzled by the nature of the dynamic. It felt genuine but was also in a sense artificial. Intimacy between relative strangers. Nobody was pretending, but we were also suspending disbelief. Was it real? Or fake?

In the end I decided that these were the wrong questions to ask. It was what it was. A little bubble in time and space. It was genuine of itself, and incomparable to anything else. I didn’t have to try and sort it into my existing categorizations. I could carve out an entirely new space for it.

The series of photographs is called lifeconstructions and can be seen on the photographers web site.