BED

Gloria Brame has put together a new directory site for listing BDSM educators and groups – BED (Brame’s Educators Directory). It provides not only contact details but also things like professional qualifications, past presentations, community memberships, etc. This strikes me as a fine idea, not only for people within the community, but also for people outside it looking for useful contact points.

The site also has some fascinating historical illustrations and photographs. I particularly liked the advertisement below from the section of circa 70’s and 80’s pro-dommes. The text on the left captures – in just a few lines – how much the world has changed. These days submissives starts complaining if a domme doesn’t answer their email in a day or two. In this case Domina Verushka required you to send her a letter, together with stamped and self addressed envelope for any reply. A tape of her voice is available for $12 – which is around $28 in today’s money. Allow 8 weeks for delivery. Makes spending a few bucks for the instant delivery of a video from a modern clip site seem like something of bargain.

Based on this website I believe that Mistress Verushka is actually still offering professional domination sessions. Which I think is awesome. These days she’s in NYC (Queens) and contactable via email. No eight week wait required.

Updated: My apologies to Mistress Verushka Mandrake. As she makes clear in this comment, she’s not the same as the San Francisco based Mistress Verushka from this ad. Should you be in the NYC area and wish to session with her, then I did at least get the link to her contact information correct.

Sweet Smooshing

I hadn’t intended to do another Valentine Day themed post, but somehow these romantic fireside photographs of a ‘Happy Valentines’ cake getting smooshed were too fun not to feature. I’m not really a fan of food play or feet, but this made me smile. Possibly I need more frosting in my life. The lady doing the smooshing is Madame Ingrid, a Pittsburgh based pro-domme.  You can see other shots from the sequence in this tweet.

If the cake play isn’t doing it for you, then check out this Vice article on Valentines Day for Doms and Subs.  It interviews a variety of kinky people about what expressions of love and romance means to them. Oddly enough, licking dessert from your Doms feet doesn’t feature in it anywhere.

Cherub Season

Valentine’s day is upon us once more. An occasion that creates stress for couples and depression for single people. I think it’s second only to New Year’s Eve in my list of events that are far less enjoyably than their advertising would lead you to believe. If I ever spot a winged cherub with a bow and arrow, it better hope I don’t have a bottle of insecticide handy.

Of course, one can always find a silver lining to any cloud. In this case Dr Kate Lister has shared a great article on how Valentine’s day is really about whipping. I think that’s a fine idea to build on. Every restaurant that jams in extra tables and doubles their prices for Valentines should also include a flogger with the menu. A restaurant full of couples smooching, drinking champagne and beating each other would be an instant hit.

This beautiful wax rose is from a series called Roses by Brooke Didonato.

Domina Colette

My short sojourn in San Francisco has come to an end. Happily it finished on a high, thanks to a wonderful session with Domina Colette.

This was the first time we’d played together and initial meetings always have a touch of extra stress about them. Fortunately, any nerves quickly dissipated once we started talking and then easing into the scene. Sometimes you just know a session is going to be a great one right from the start. I’d like to think that’s about chemistry and shared energy, but I suspect a big part of it is down to the skill of the dominant in carving out a safe virtual space for the scene to unfold into.

Compared to the two sessions from the start of my trip, this upped the masochistic side slightly, whilst still retaining a lot of tease and denial elements. I particularly enjoyed Domina Colette’s very hands on approach to nipple torture.  Often when doing CBT and NT, there’ll be  a lot of the C and the B, not some much of the N. Slap a pair of nipple clamps on and then immediately head south frequently seems to be the approach. Colette took a much more balanced approach, mixing pain and pleasure between the different areas, and using her touch to alternately ground me, tease me and hurt me. She promised me a lasting memento of our session, and the tenderness across my chest the next day was certainly that. Just the movement of my clothes against it would trigger a mild wave of pain and then a happy smile.

If you’re interested in the possibility of a session with Domina Colette, or just want to see more images like the one below, then her professional site is here and her twitter feed here. She also has a passion project called Pervette, which I think deserves a post in it’s own right. It’s kind of a choose your own adventure, transmedia labyrinth and storytelling guidebook. Check it out and I’ll return to it in a future post.

This image of Colette and her silent maids is from her twitter feed.

Everyone’s Against Me

My weekend adventures in San Francisco have left me feeling a little tense. Nothing too excessive. Just the kind of mild tension where you bite a chunk out of your laptop and then start mindlessly humping the leg of the desk it’s sitting on.

I wrote a couple of days ago about my initial SF session with Mistress Iris. That left me, to phrase it delicately, somewhat on edge. My second session for the trip was with Domina Yuki. We’ve played together a lot in the past, and those sessions tended to skew towards traditional masochist play. This one did feature some CBT, electricity and a beautiful leather straitjacket, but was much heavier on tease and denial, with a particular emphasis on the denial. It’s one thing to be close to someone as desirable as Domina Yuki. It’s quite another to have her tease you about how frustrating that must be and yet deny any relief.

I don’t really cry in sessions. My standard response to pain is to yell or scream. Yet this session actually had me sobbing in frustration. Yuki even commented that I was pulling expressions she’d never seen from me before. I left the play space on a high of denial, with my whole body vibrating like a tuning fork.

Of course, the universe then chose to mess with me just a little more. Crossing Union square much later that night, a rather attractive young lady propositioned me with the idea that we might enjoy a mutually satisfying business arrangement back in my hotel room. That’s not normally my kind of scene, but just for a second or two some frustrated lizard brain cells were leaping up and down shouting “Do it! Do It!” Back at the hotel, having wrestled my id into submission and regretfully declined the ladies offer, the couple in the room next door then decided it was the perfect night for a marathon sex and spanking session. I was stuck there, horny beyond all measure, on a strict Scout’s honor of no touching, and all I can hear is endless slaps, grunts and cries of ecstasy.  I probably should have put headphones on to drown them out but, like a rubbernecker at a road accident, I couldn’t drag myself away. I might not have had any orgasms recently, but the couple in room 541 certainly made up the averages for me.

This was a shot from our scene, with me leaning over a spanking bench and Domina Yuki on top. There’s a similar shot from the same angle that better shows off Yuki’s beautiful boots here. There was also a very hot short movie, but sadly I don’t have the bandwidth to host it here. If  you can’t manage an in person session, but would like to see more of Domina Yuki and her scenes, then I’d suggest checking out her OnlyFans site. She posts a lot of great content to it.

5 bed, 2.5 bath, 1 dungeon

My social media has recently been full of the story of a real estate listing for a house just outside Philadelphia with a large and well equipped kinky basement space. Sadly Zillow and Redfin have both removed the interesting photographs from the listing, but this Vice article managed to capture them before they were pulled.

What I particularly liked was this interview with the Realtor – Melissa Leonard. I’m not sure I want to buy a house in this location, despite how amazingly cheap it seems compared to Seattle, but I’d love to use Melissa on any real estate deal I need to do. She definitely has the chutzpah you need in a negotiation.

The other thing that made me smile was all the mainstream non-kinky people commenting that it was a real faux-pas to have a white dungeon. As I’ve posted here in the past, for a lot of kinky people, white is the new black.

While I wouldn’t knock the color scheme, the placement of the whipping frame here seems kind of odd. It’s an interesting pentagram design, but there doesn’t seem run to swing a single tail properly. Hopefully the new owner will swap it with the spanking bench from the main room, which I think would be a far more logical use of the space.

A Brief Migration South

There’s a few inches of snow in Seattle. For many parts of America this would mean it was a mild winter day, but for Seattle it’s snowpocalypse. I’m really not kidding about that. People are stripping the local stores of produce, and emptying the hardware stores of snow clearing equipment. In terms of chaos, from my social media feed, it seems to rank somewhere above the Seahawks winning the Superbowl and just a touch below a zombie uprising.

Fortunately, I’m in San Francisco for a few days of fun, well away from the mess. Today I found the best possible way to keep warm and celebrate my well timed trip – playing with Mistress Iris. We had a wonderful session, with a lot of growling, snarling, whimpering, scratching and biting. There was no explicit animal role play, but if a nosy neighbor had sneaked up to  listen, I’m sure they would have thought otherwise. It’s odd, because I’m a fairly quiet person in normal life. Yet wrap some rope around me, and grab me by the balls, and suddenly I turn into an animal sound effects catalog.

This is Mistress Iris with some rather more attractive pets. Pedigree puppies versus me the mangy mutt. This is from a post on her instagram feed.

AOC

99% of my brain tells me I shouldn’t post this image. Firstly, posting anything vaguely political tends to turn people off. I’ve still got a long unfinished comment thread I need to get back to from the last time I ventured in that direction. Secondly, women in politics have to face all sorts of double standards about their looks and attitude that men never have to deal with. I’m not sure me posting this image in the context of this blog really helps with that problem.

However, apparently the remaining 1% of my brain happens to be the bit in charge of blogging right now, so here we have it. While I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does look great here, what really makes it are the expressions of the guys on the right. I think they’re having what I’d call ‘complicated’ thoughts.

This is actually a crop (found on social media) of this larger shot, featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arriving at the State of the Union with her guest  Ana Maria Archila.

Canary in a Coal Mine

The Slixa site launched an essay contest in December on the subject of the SESTA-FOSTA laws. They were offering $10,000 in prize money for both the authors and their charities of choice. The winners were recently announced, and I was very happy to see that Lucy Khan had taken the top spot with her essay: Against FOSTA/SESTA: One Canary’s Cry From Inside the Coal Mine.

I’ve been lucky enough to session with Lucy multiple times in the past. She has always impressed me as a highly intelligent and insightful person, so it’s great to see her pick up this award and money for SWOP-LA. In fact LA pro-domme’s managed to score two out of the three top spots, with Grace Marie picking up the second place prize. Meghan Peterson, a researcher and sex worker rights advocate, stopped an LA/pro-domme sweep by picking up the third spot. I think all three essays are really well written and well worth reading, so check them all out here.

Given it’s Chinese New Year, this seems an appropriate image of Mistress Lucy to feature. She’s in the center, flanked by Daddy An Li (left) and Mistress Damiana Chi (right). It was taken from a Chinese New Year Play Party hosted at The Chi Temple. The submissive is appropriately attired, given it’s the Chinese year of the brown pig.

Top of the Pops

The LA Weekly has published an interesting list of their top 10 fetish inspired bands. I have to admit that while I’d heard of the more obvious ones like NOFX, Genitorturers and Adam and the Ants, most of the list was new to me. I was particularly intrigued to learn that there used to be a Portland punk band called ‘The Submissives’ who wrote exclusively about femdom. Sadly they only released one album before their guitarist ‘Pig Champion’ passed away. You can listen to the album here. As a punk and thrash fan I kind of like it, but I will concede it’s definitely a niche taste. Fans of romantic ballads should steer clear.

This is an image of Gen, the lead singer from the Genitortures. They’re currently touring with another of the bands from the LA Weekly list – the Lords of Acid. You can catch them both via the Pretty in Kink tour.