Bondage – Page 48 – Femdom Resource

When a session goes bad (part 1)

My experience of playing with pro-dommes has been an overwhelmingly positive one. I’ve had many great sessions, and I’ve documented a few of them on this blog. In all the time I’ve been playing I’ve only had one really bad session. While that session was clearly an aberration, it struck me that it’s probably worth writing about. After all it’s easy to find lots of posts eulogizing great dommes and amazing sessions. It’s much harder to find discussion on the effect of play that turns sour. Looking back at the session the physical interaction itself doesn’t seem particularly significant, but what was interesting was the way it left me feeling for days afterwards.

I should start by saying that this session wasn’t with anyone I’ve named here in the past. Dommes like Lydia and Yuki have been unfailingly enjoyable to play with and I’d never hesitate to recommend them. The domme in question here will remain unnamed, as she’s still active and I don’t particularly want to get into a back and forth with her or any of her fans.

We’d played together a couple of times previously and I’d enjoyed those sessions, but I had been a little surprised at her reactions when things hadn’t gone as planned. In my experience a good domme is always able to adapt and modify the flow of a scene based on the feedback she gets. She’s always in control, but that doesn’t mean everything has to happen exactly as she originally envisioned. This particular domme seemed to become frustrated and react with a touch of anger when things didn’t work out. That struck me as a bad sign. Being in control of the scene means being in control of yourself as well as the submissive.

The unpleasantness started about an hour or so into our third session. She had me spread on an X-frame and had spent 20 or so minutes working me over with various floggers and paddles. At a natural break, while she switched implements, she asked how I was doing. My fingers were going numb thanks to the overhead position and tight leather wrist cuffs, and I mentioned this fact. This was apparently a mistake. I’m not sure what feedback she was looking for, but this clearly wasn’t it, as she got rather vexed. I actually hadn’t asked to stop, but she did stop and unhooked my hands in an angry fashion.

What followed was a quite surreal conversation/argument. I was naked and still shackled to the X-frame by my feet, but with my hands free so I could work the feeling into them. She was sulking in a chair across the room complaining how I was wasting her time. Apparently I shouldn’t be doing such long sessions (we were scheduled for 3 hours) if I couldn’t take it. This struck me as ludicrous. The length of overall session was irrelevant to this particular issue, and if anyone was missing out on active play time it was me. She also tried to make some bizarre point that if this was lifestyle play I wouldn’t be getting the option to stop. That didn’t seem a particularly convincing line of reasoning.

I’m normally not someone to let a stupid statement slide without comment. When my friends describe me the expression “Doesn’t tolerate fools gladly” is often in there somewhere. The problem was that just seconds before we’d been in a D/s mode, which made for a very confusing dynamic. I wanted to talk through the situation, but still had a submissive mindset. The intellectual bit of my brain was saying “Fuck this. She’s out of line.” where the emotional part was saying “She’s in charge. Don’t argue.” Suddenly all the tools of dominance that I enjoyed seemed to conspire against me. Being naked, bound and vulnerable is normally wonderful, but when the energy turned bad it made it hard to be assertive and take back my submission.

In hindsight I should have simply stopped the session at this point. I never want to play in an angry negative context. However, at the time it never occurred to me to try and stop. I was too busy trying to deal with my conflicting instincts of arguing versus submitting. The end result was a confused discussion that only made her more stroppy.

…To be continued in part 2…

Picking a picture for this post wasn’t easy. People typically don’t post pictures of bad sessions. Instead I’ve gone with a shot of some play from Men are Slaves that features both corporal and a cuffed X-position. I’m sure the participants below are having a lot more fun than I ended up having.

Happy BDSM

I’ve posted in the past how much I appreciate seeing happy smiling participants enjoying kinky play. For example – here, here and here. Very intense serious sessions can be great, but that kind of interaction is horribly over-represented in porn. I’d guess the majority of kinky play comes from a place of positive energy and joy, but you’d never guess that browsing the average BDSM tumblr or porn site.

I was therefore very pleased to discover (via this Spanking Blog post) a new-ish tumblr called Happy BDSM. It contains exactly what the name implies, all sorts of happy people doing BDSM in all sorts of gender and D/s configurations. I found browsing it actually cheered me up and put a smile on my own face, which isn’t something that can be said for a lot of porn shots.

Image found on the Happy BDSM tumblr, which has now also been added to my Femdom Image page. Originally it’s from the Devious Domination site, from the clip “Dominatrix Delight.”

Femdom image updates

I’ve done some work on the Femdom Image page. Specifically I’ve removed a few dead or dormant sites, and added the following ones:

Hopefully there should be a little bit of something for everyone on those tumblr’s.

The image below comes via the newly added Femdomcore tumblr. There’s no attribution but I believe that’s Mistress Shae, a pro-domme based in Southern California. I’ve never sessioned with her, but she has an excellent reputation as a very skilled domme.

See no evil, speak no evil

Today is sadly the last day of my vacation before returning to Seattle. Fortunately I’ve had a very pleasant trip, enjoyed some kinky fun, and met some interesting new people. I played with two different dommes, and got some nice piercing photographs from a session yesterday that I’ll share in a later post. In the meantime, while I pack, I’ll leave you with a picture I liked from the Thou Shall Love Thy Mistress tumblr.

From a masochist’s point of view this shot is pretty weak sauce. Those clothe pegs don’t look like they’d hurt much at all. Despite that, I like it for the fact she’s clearly getting enjoying his restrained and sensory deprived position. I always love the idea of a sadist getting off on what she’s doing. Pain that comes from anger and other negative emotions never does anything for me.

Darkly dreaming

Here’s a disturbing and ambiguous image. Which makes it my favorite sort of image.

It reminds me of the show Dexter, although in this case with a female lead. There’s a plastic wrapped room, a bound figure, a trickle of blood and a slightly distant and emotionally neutral figure capturing a trophy of the moment. I found it on the Selina Minx’s Musings tumblr, but I can’t find an original source for it. I’d love to know the initial context for the shot. There’s a real beauty in the symmetry of the figures, spatially and otherwise.

CMNF

At first I thought this was a gentle teasing shot. She’s naked and beautiful, but he can’t see a thing, and only feels what she allows him to. Then I saw that big knife on the windowsill. Now I’m not really sure what to make of it. I still like it a lot, but there’s an interesting ambiguity to it.

I found this on Homer’s blog. Which, at the time I’m typing, has this truly fabulous title image.

There is no ‘I’ in domme

I find subtext and subconscious communication fascinating. Picking apart what people say to expose what they really mean has an intellectual and an emotional satisfaction to it. I was therefore particularly interested in this article on the linguistic analysis of function words, the tiny building blocks (I, the, there, this, etc.) that tie sentences together. We don’t pay them much attention, but it turns out they have interesting predictive properties. For example, when two people are attracted to each other they alter their style of speech to harmonize their usage of these words. What was particular interesting in the context of this blog was the following discovery.

…some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status.
“It’s amazingly simple,” Pennebaker says, “Listen to the relative use of the word “I.”
What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word “I” less.

This is one of those findings that at first seems counter-intuitive, but actually makes a lot of sense in hindsight. In my own experience at work I see that dynamic all the time. Somebody in my organization reporting a problem to me is likely to say “I investigated X. I think it’s broken.” The both claims credit for work done (I made the effort) while simultaneously softening the message (I think this, but you may think differently). My response is likely to be “We need to fix this”, which actually means “You need to fix it.” What I’m unlikely to say is “I think it needs fixing.” That implies a personal opinion, and that potentially some other opinion out there matters and a decision can’t yet be taken. The impersonal or the plural form is actually a far stronger phrasing. Religions have of course known this for years. Jesus didn’t say “I think the meek are blessed. In my opinion they should inherit the earth. Although they may have trouble hanging onto it.” *

I’d be interested to hear from my readers if these observations match the experience of those in ongoing D/s relationships. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an image (courtesy of Geek Domme) featuring a happy domme and a submissive who doesn’t look to be in a position to make use of any pronouns or function words. Unless ‘Owww!’ or ‘Eeek!’ counts as a function word.

* That last part of the phrasing might be a touch inaccurate. I’m not too up on my biblical quotes.

Danger comes in many forms

We spend a lot of time discussing the complexities and risks of BDSM. By ‘we’ in this case I mean BDSM blogs and forums. There’s a lot of good discussion around safeword usage, aftercare, consent and the psychological risks of play. But with all the discussion around the dynamics of BDSM play, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the physical stuff can also be pretty dangerous as well.

This was brought home to me reading this article by Midori on a recent suspension accident. You can read the bottom’s version of what happened here. I don’t know either of the players and wasn’t there, so I’m not going to comment on what actually happened (although I do think this post makes an excellent point). Regardless of the specific circumstances, it’s unarguable that the people involved were experts and yet someone still got seriously hurt.

I’ve done suspension scenes several times and enjoyed them a great deal. They can be very beautiful, as in the last two images here. But there is undoubtedly risk involved. I wonder how many tops train not just for the scene itself, but for the potential scene when everything has gone wrong. Knowing what to do with a shaky submissive coming out of subspace and needing some aftercare is one thing. How many have rehearsed a set of steps to follow when they’ve just dropped somebody on a concrete floor? It often seems that the only time we get to practice an emergency is in the middle of one. Which is pretty much the worst time to do so.

This suspension shot is completely unconnected to the scene in question. I found in on this image board. I like it both for the bondage and for the contrast between the dark background and light bodies.

When I was a lad…

In yesterday’s post I wrote about a heavy bondage and hooding session I’d just done. I was happy that I’d managed to conquer what was for me a difficult style of play. However, the real surprise of the session wasn’t dealing with the hoods, but a strange memory of childhood that was triggered. That was a new experience. I know a lot of people can trace their kinky roots back to particular childhood events or relationships. That has never been the case for me, and I’ve never really thought much about childhood when playing.

What made it particularly odd was the heavy and intense nature of the experience. Some session can be kinky while still have a recognizably playful sexual element. Stuff like light rope bondage, nipple pinching, teasing, spanking, etc. These aren’t sex, but they are sex adjacent. You start in Sensation Avenue, and rather than a left into Sex Drive, it’s a right turn into Kinky Fun Terrace. In yesterday’s session I was wearing leather chaps and gauntlets, wrapped in a leather sleep sack, fastened with leather straps to a wheeled hospital trolley and isolated under a thick leather hood. The only exposed bit of me was the cock, and that was only there so Lydia could slap it around. To the casual observer that’s not sex adjacent. That’s down Bizzaro Highway, along the You Need Help Freeway and straight into the heart of Freakytown. And I’m happy to say that my childhood didn’t overlap with any of that geography.

The moment in question occurred when I was left unmolested for a period, free to relax and float in the bondage. It was dark, only faint noises could be heard, and the smell of leather was all around. As I lay there I flashed back to being a young boy in the back of my parents car. After visiting relatives we’d drive back late at night, and I’d often stretch out to sleep on the back seat. It would be dark and peaceful, with just the light of the instruments and the quiet murmur of my parents voices from the front. It felt safe and comforting, which is kind of ironic given the lack of safety features compared to the cars of today.

There are some obvious physical parallels between the two situations. Darkness. Limited background noise. The leather smell from the car seats. But I think the main trigger was the sense of security and lack of responsibility. As a child I trusted my parents to get me home safely. I didn’t have to worry. I could just relax and drift away. The bondage and sensory isolation created a similar emotion. I couldn’t do anything. I was safe. Wrapped up. Nothing to worry about. At least not until Lydia decided it was time for a little cock torture. That gave me something to worry about.

For an accompanying image a shot of the young paltego would be kind of appropriate. But since I’m not into humilation or emotional masochism, I’ll give that a pass. Instead I turned to the Serious Bondage site and an article they did on Darla Kincaid (sadly now retired). Not quite the same setup as my scene, but it does look very intense.

Hoods

A short post tonight. I just finished an intense session with Lydia and I’m still feeling pretty buzzed and floaty. All I want to do right now is pour a glass of wine and relax on the couch.

We were playing with hoods, an item I’ve had problems with in the past. I’m typically not claustrophobic, but there’s something about sensory deprivation, bondage and pressure around my face that stresses me. We’ve worked on it over time, and tonight we had a great session with a lot of layered bondage and some really heavy hoods (like this one). As usual Lydia threw in some interesting twists, using a leather body bag to wrap me in, and having me on a wheeled trolley bed that she could twirl around. That kind of spinning motion coupled with heavy sensory deprivation (she even used earplugs under the hood) and the layers of immobilizing leather bondage created a very intense head space.

In celebration of me making it through the session with no panicky moments, here’s a nice hood shot I came across on Mina’s Kinks tumblr.