Power Broker

Talking of Mistress Iris (as I just was) she has apparently been listed on NY Magazine’s list of The Most Powerful New Yorkers You’ve Never Heard Of (scroll to the end). I say ‘apparently’ because it doesn’t provide a photograph or a link and Mistress Iris isn’t traditionally associated with NYC. She was originally LA based and now seems to mainly be in Europe (with regular trips to Tokyo, London, NYC, LA, etc.). However, I can’t think of another Mistress Iris who’d have the profile to be in this article and also considered as an NYC local. Although based on the title on the list, I guess not having heard of her would be kind of the point.

Wonderful though Mistress Iris is, it seems a shame they didn’t pick an equally high profile domme who has a stronger claim to NYC residency. After all, there is no shortage of them. It’s one of the great cities for kink. Off the top of my head I can think of Troy Orleans, Mistress Tess, Lucy Sweetkill, Mistress Blunt, Lady Harper Chase, Mistrix Sade and many, many more.

Here’s an image courtesy of Mistress Tess who has an amazing NYC studio space. Curse Covid for ruining my chance to enjoy a lengthy session in it earlier this year.

Making Music

Here’s an unusual type of forniphilia I’ve never seen before – a submissive as a music stand. While most forniphilia looks less practical than the inanimate equivalent, this one actually seems like it might work better. They can both hold and turn the pages as needed.

The photograph comes courtesy of NYCs Lady Harper Chase. I’m sure she’s a very accomplished musician,  but it does strike me that for a devious and less musically talented dominant there’s a great opportunity for unexpected torture here. Get your human music stand all rigged up in place, then pull out an instrument you’ve never played before and try to learn it using the most basic beginner tunes. I’d imagine an hour of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ on a badly played violin would be enough to get most submissives reaching for their safeword.

Original source for the image is via this tweet, photographed by photopupnyc. Lady Harper Chase is a NYC based pro-domme and you can find her professional site here.

House Boss

According to a study from China, attractive women wield more power in their households. Basically as their perceived attractiveness increased, so did the likelihood that they were the major decision maker.

It’s not too surprising a result. Repeated studies have shown that attractive people are generally treated better. Beauty helps if you’re trying to get a job or trying to get away with crime. It’s therefore not unreasonable that it’d also help you gain power in a household.

What I found interesting was this line at the end of the article.

It is also possible that interviewers saw wealthier women and those with more self-esteem as more beautiful.

The attractiveness rating was assigned by interviewers, so was obviously subjective. It might be the case that attractive people get more freedom to make decisions. But it also might be true that more forceful and dominant women are seen as more beautiful. What’s cause and what’s effect? Are bossy women perceived as more beautiful or do beautiful women get more opportunity to be bossy?

I’m not sure who this is or where the shot is from, but she certainly seems like someone who might be in charge of things. Or if not yet, soon will be.

The Hits Keep on Coming

Last week Germany’s Studio Avalon announced it was closing after nearly 23 years. I’ve featured the space in past posts and visiting it was high on my kinky bucket list. Sadly for me and kinksters all over the world, it seems our opportunity has gone.

This week it’s the turn of NYC’s Parthenon. Queen Ariana Chevalier has announced that it’ll be closing at the end of the year. It has been a fixture of the BDSM scene in NYC for 17 years. I think the comments on the twitter thread and posts like this one from Vinyl Queen testify how widely used and appreciated the space was. I played their just once, visiting last year with Empress Wu, and would have loved to return.

I covered a fundraiser back in June for the Parthenon. Given its location in Manhattan, home to some of the richest people in the world, I find its closure particularly depressing. How many wealthy Wall St. types have had the balls crushed or backsides blistered inside that space? With the markets hitting record highs, could none of them step up to help out until the Covid vaccines come through next year? We’re going to return to ‘normal’ in 2021 and discover it’s going to take years to rebuild we lost in 2020.

This is Mistress Ariana Chevalier in an image sourced via this tweet.

On Her Way to Work

Just a regular morning start for your typical busy dominatrix. On her way to work clutching her trusty single tail. Those slaves aren’t going to whip themselves.

I suspect the identity of this leather clad lady has been lost to history. All the references I could find simply say generic things like ‘vintage dominatrix’.  If you can help me attribute it then please leave me a comment. I’d love to rescue her from anonymity.

Mood Killer

A week or so ago I wrote a couple of posts on happy memories of dialog and sound effects from past sessions. I thought it’d be interesting to follow those up with a verbal interaction that didn’t go so well. This example is from a few years back. It’s rare that I have a bad memory of a session but this particular moment has stuck in my mind, partly because it seems so trivial. Odd for a small thing to make such a big difference to a dynamic.

It was my first session with this particular domme and part of it involved a whipping scene. I’m generally not a fan of doing whipping with someone I don’t know well, as the intensity levels can vary dramatically and it requires a certain amount of trust to relax into the headspace. However, I am a fan of being flexible and open to how a domme wants to compose a session, and so as long as it’s not a hard limit, I tend to go with the flow.

She had me tied facing a wall and the warm up period was relatively short. That already meant we had two strikes working against us. Not being able to see a domme, particularly when I’m playing with someone I don’t know well, always makes a scene harder. The pain becomes disconnected from the dynamic and simply becomes something to tolerate, rather than being channeled through my desire.

It wasn’t the most intense whipping I ever received, but it certainly wasn’t light. By the time we’d finished I was feeling pretty proud of myself for taking it all. At which point the domme said “Hmmm. Not bad I suppose. For a first attempt.”

That comment totally drained the energy out of the scene for me. Maybe it was intended as a combination of compliment and encouragement, but it had the opposite result. I felt like the scene had been set-up for failure, I’d powered through to make it work, and yet couldn’t even get a ‘Good Boy’ out of her. We didn’t play together again.

As I said at the start, it was a trivial thing. I’m sure the domme didn’t think anything of it. Yet for me, with the endorphins churning in the heightened emotions of subspace, it was a mood killer that I remember years later.

This is very much not the domme in question. Both her whip and her smile are a lot bigger than in my scene. I believe this is Mistress Ama K from the Latin Beauties in High Heels site. I’m not aware of a personal site for her.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

More artwork for today’s post, this time it’s a fantastic Western themed watercolor by ALD, originally posted in this tweet. I’m a huge fan of the movie referenced in the tweet, and just love this piece. The cheroot she’s lighting is a nice call back to Eastwood’s character and his frequent use of one in those movies. I hope we’ll see more of this women with no name in future pieces from ALD.

 

Hanging on the Telephone

Here’s a final post in my short series on making connections with pro-dommes in the pre-internet era. This is a photograph of what I’m sure was the expectation/hope in every submissive’s mind when he plucked a card from a phonebox and got up the nerve to dial (quite literally) the number. A fabulous domme clad in full fetish gear, whip in hand, just waiting for his call. That’s very different to today of course, where the submissive assumes the domme will be checking her email, while clad in full fetish gear, whip in hand, just waiting for his message.

I’m afraid I don’t have any background on the image. I found it via this tweet by mrunderheel. I’d guess it’s from the late 70’s or early 80’s.

A Stroppy Server

Apologies if you tried and failed to access the site in the last day or so. All the tiny electronic wizards that carry my wise words down to your phones and computers went on strike. I did file a ticket with my hosting company, but I guess that one of their customers sites being totally offline doesn’t rate as an important issue. Presumably I’d need my server to actually explode and burn down their data center to get a timely response on a weekend. I finally managed to get the tiny wizards back into line by rebooting everything, so we’ll see how long that lasts.

Talking of frustrating and annoying situations – it’s tax season in the US. Even a masochist like myself struggles to eroticize that kind of pain. However, I was happy to see this article in the NY Times about Mistress Lori the Tax Domme. She specializes in tax preparation for anyone in the adult industry. While the US government might do everything it can to make life difficult for sex workers, that’s still not going to stop them demanding a share of their earnings. They really should change the motto on the dollar bill from ‘In God We Trust’ to ‘Fuck you. That’s why.’

Oddly enough, while I don’t use Mistress Lori for my tax returns, I do use an accountant recommended to me by a pro-domme. I figured if they could handle her complicated returns, they should have no problem with mine. So far that logic seems to have worked out pretty well. I just wish I could figure out a way to write off my session tributes. Medical expenses maybe? They do feature a lot of needles, sutures, electroshock and prostate exams.

I’ve never actually met my accountants, as everything is handled over email, but this is definitely how I picture them when I send in my paperwork. Given my horrible financial organization, this look of scorn, pity and disappointment would not be unwarranted.

This is from Femme Fatale Films, featuring Mistress Eleise and Mistress Miranda. It’s from a scene called ‘Not Good Enough.

Mechanophilia

I’ve heard plenty of dommes complain about slaves slobbering all over their feet or shiny boots. The human tongue is rarely an effective mechanism to polish leather or clean a leg. However, I’ve never heard of a domme complaining about a slave ignoring her and licking the grill of the car she arrived in. Are they expecting him to lick the whole thing clean? Or did he take one look at the attractive ladies in fetish gear and decide that a fly splattered BMW grill was more his cup of tea? Also, at least one of the people there in very confused about how handcuffs work.

The image is from the classic British femdom magazine Cruella. This is one of their odder examples, but their magazine and site in the 90’s was very formative for the young paltego.