Manners Maketh Man

A tweet by Mistress Tess recently caught my eye.

I was helping him into a dress. He put his hand near my shoulder and said “May I?” instead of just automatically putting his hand on my shoulder to balance. This is called having RESPECT AND MANNERS! It’s not okay to freely touch your Goddess. Remember that guys.

I liked this for a number of reasons. Firstly, politeness is all sorts of hot. I’m not big on high kink protocol,  but love the more gentle dance of manners and courtesy in daily life. Secondly, it reminded me of my yoga teacher, who is a stickler for checking before touching any part of me. Initially it made me smile. I’m not used to women checking before grabbing me. Over time I’ve come to appreciate it and her attention to that kind of detail.

Finally, I liked it because denial leads to desire. To be close to someone as amazing as Mistress Tess, to have her do terrible but wonderful things to you, and yet to not touch her is a gift in itself. To be so near, and yet so far. As a masochist I deal with pain by drawing on my feelings and submission to the domme. The deeper those feelings, the greater the reverence I hold for her, the harder and further I can push into intense play. Respect and restraint really helps build that kind of dynamic.

This image is from the website of Mistress Tess. The post title comes from this rather well done fight scene.

Tripping

On the face of it, this article about a poker player experiencing sensory deprivation to win a bet has nothing to do with femdom. However, I’m linking to it because sensory deprivation is definitely a kink and the hallucinations he experienced actually reminded me of some of my own experiences with that particular kink.

I’ve always been limited to a couple of hours of reduced senses, rather the days he went through. On the other hand, I mix in heavy bondage, pain and breath control, which certainly ups the intensity of the experience. A couple of times in the state I had a sense of space opening up around me, my consciousness drifting in a large dark void, with spinning yellow stars moving around me and away from me. In hindsight I’m surprised I didn’t freak out, particularly given that sensory deprivation is a pretty tough scene for me to handle at the best of times. I think I intuitively knew, much like the poker player in the article, that embracing the vision and relaxing into it was the key to handling it. If memory serves me correctly, it only lasted a short period before I was quickly snapped back to reality by the domme electrocuting my testicles. That’s always guaranteed to capture a man’s attention.

This image is from Lady Hinako. From her blog and twitter feed she’s clearly an expert at heavy bondage and sensory deprivation scenes. I particularly like the contrast in this image between the cute doll like figure and the obvious immobilization and sensory restriction the man inside is experiencing.

Vulnerability

Mistress Lola Ruin has published a lovely blog post on her experiences of sharing her own vulnerability with slaves and letting the facade of being a perfect dominant Goddess slip. I like the post a lot because I’ve always thought the idea of needing to present a perfect invulnerable facade to be a great domme was badly flawed. Deep down we know that we’re all human, so to pretend otherwise lacks authenticity. A domme shouldn’t have to fit herself into a submissive’s fantasy in order to be respected and exalted. Those things should come even with knowledge of the dommes humanity and vulnerabilities. That’s what makes them meaningful.

Mistress Lola Ruin is  a pro-domme based in Manchester, UK. You find her twitter feed here and information on arranging a session with her here.

Memories of Warmer Days

It’s pretty wet, cold and gloomy across a lot of the US at this time of year. I’m pretty certain there are no visual cures for Seasonal Affective Disorder, but if there were, this would surely come close. It’s a lovely Spring picnic scene with an elegant lady and her helpful pet. Hopefully the inevitable ants will focus on picnic basket and not any dangling lower parts.

I’m not sure who the artist is. Reverse image search suggests the name ‘hisano’, but I couldn’t track down any sensible links to other work.

Anticipation

Some eye candy to start the week. For me, there’s a nice sense of anticipation contained in this image. It’s possible that this is during or at the end of a scene, but I think his pure unmarked flesh suggests it’s a starting point. A moment of focus and adoration before the toys in the background get deployed.

Given the setting, I’d guess this is a pro-domme scene. Unfortunately, I don’t have an attribution. If you can help out with that then please leave a comment.

A Trio of Asian-American Dominatrixes

Allure magazine has an interesting article on three Asian-American dommes. It features Mistress Lucy Sweetkill, Domina Dia Dynasty and Yin Q, and describes some of their experiences dealing with the stereotypes that come with the job and their ethnicity.

Even at her former job in fashion, Lucy’s employees would refer to her as a “dragon lady,” in both an endearing and negative way. She likes the association. “Yes, that’s definitely me. I’m a boss ass bitch,” Lucy says proudly. The association certainly helps in her positionality as a dominatrix and sex worker: She says her clients fear her.

I think the article does a pretty good job of describing BDSM and kink to its non-kinky readers, while also still giving some interesting perspectives to those of us who frequent sites like this one.

Although the online version is in Allure magazine, the article was originally published in Banana Magazine, issue 4.

Meet the New Boss

There was a new US Congress sworn in today. I think the political system here is too dysfunctional to hope for any significant change, but there was one statistic that caught my eye. In 1989 there were 16 Democratic women in the US House of Representatives. This year there are 89. Admittedly that’s still only 37% of the 235 Democratic seats they currently hold, but it’s still progress to be welcomed. Of course over the same period the Republicans have gone from a total of 13 women to – wait for it – 13 women. So not so much progress on that front. I think whatever your politics, if you regularly read this blog, you should welcome more women to positions of power and influence.

The image below is Kyrsten Sinema being sworn in to the Senate by Mike Pence. She’s the first openly bisexual woman to serve in the Senate and was sworn in on a law book, rather than a religious book.  I think those facts are both great. That fact Mike Pence would undoubtedly hate them makes the moment even better. And, I don’t to be shallow about this important moment, but she has also looks fantastic.

Save All The Things!

I have a hoarding problem. Not, I hasten to add, in the physical world. There,  with the exception of kitchen equipment, I tend to the minimal. My hoarding problem is in the virtual world of information. I hate the idea of losing content. It’s so easy to copy around – it happens for every visit on every page for every image – yet we do such a terrible job of preserving old digital sources.

When tumblr announced it was banning all adult content I was therefore particularly perturbed, and set about locally archiving what I could. The initial idea was to just save sites I liked to use as image sources for this blog. I figured I could sort and catalog it all later. That seemed like a fun way to spend the holiday period. However, once I had the pipeline setup and ticking along, things got maybe a little out of hand.

When I finally pulled it all together and de-duplicated, I discovered I’d got  5.1 million images from about 400 sites occupying over 3TB of space. Oops. The cataloging process might therefore be a touch more time consuming than I first thought. Let’s say I want to run through all images just once and spend just 4 seconds per image. With a lot of animated gifs involved, that seems like a pretty fast average pace. If I devote 2 hours every day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, I should be done in a little over 7 years and 9 months. Alternatively, I could quit my job entirely, put in a solid 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and be done in a bit over 2 years and 8 months. Piece of cake.

I guess the good news is that there’s no danger of me running out of images to post. The bad news is that I’m not sure how I’ll be able to sort through them all to find the good stuff.

Talking of archiving content, here’s an old image from the Leda / NuWest company. I’d guess its from the mid to late 80’s. I found it via the now unavailable ‘x ray blue eyes’ tumblr. That was the single largest tumblr site I archived, with 355,247 images. That’s a lot of femdom.

Happy New Year!

New Year’s Eve is upon us once more. That brings to a close a pretty good year in kink for me. I got to meet some amazing new dommes (Mistress Tess, Mistress Damiana, Ms. Savannah Sly) as well as renewing my acquaintance with some great dommes I’d played with in past years (Domina Yuki,  Troy Orleans, Mistress Mara, Mistress Iris, Mistress Lucy). My scheduling was a bit erratic, with big gaps with no play at all, and then bursts where I crammed in a lot of sessions. So that’s something I need to work on for next year. I’m also hoping to fit in a trip back to the UK in 2019, which’ll give me an opportunity to meet some new dommes and get beaten for the first time in the old country.

I wish all my readers the best for 2019. I hope it brings you a lot of kinky fun. And thanks to everybody who contributed comments to this blog over the past year or interacted with me via email or twitter. I always appreciate your input and feedback.

It’s traditional to get dressed up and go out and party on the last night of the year. That’s certainly my plan, although I doubt I’ll look quite as stylish as Lady Mephista’s slave does in this image.

This is from a tweet on Lady Mephista’s twitter feed.