Thanks John

Melissa Todd has a column in Metro where she describes how she got started as a dominatrix. She followed a path I know others have taken – stripping to spanking model to pro-domme. The part of the column I particularly enjoyed was about her first client and her description of that first session. Up until ‘John’ showed up, she’d only had a cushion to practice caning on.

In his seventies, just recovering from some scary operation with the whole of his torso tattooed with a jagged purple scar, he spent most of his hour giving me a tutorial on what tools and implements I desperately needed, the positions most often requested, the idiots best avoided – and he paid me for the privilege!

John let me practise my few pathetic implements on his backside, coaching throughout. ‘Bit to the left. Avoid the whip round. Accuracy before intensity. That’s it! Now try again, but harder…’ I couldn’t have been more thankful.

There’s a notorious kind of client that looks out for young and inexperienced dommes to session with. They seek them out as they know they can push boundaries and take liberties a seasoned pro would never permit. Most pro-dommes will have stories about them. It’s therefore nice to read a positive story about a client helping out a newbie domme and steering her in the right direction. Thanks John.

This is Melissa with a much larger collection of canes then she started out with. Sourced via her Bluesky feed.

Getting the Kinks Out

This has been a good week. I got to enjoy something that has become a relatively rare event for me – in person kinky fun. Savannah Sly is in town for a visit and she was kind of enough to take time out of her busy schedule to beat me up.

Top of the list of activities was what Savannah accurately describes as mean massage. Lots of pummeling, squeezing, pressuring and pounding. It’s a bit like being the chew toy of a giant sexy cat who happens to have a degree in human anatomy. There might also have been some staples in my dick towards the end, which isn’t an officially accredited procedure from any of the schools of mean massage, but is fun all the same.

The end result was a body like a limp noodle, a lot of lovely scratch marks and a blissed out brain. Like I said, a good week.

This shot of Savannah is from her Free Speech Coalition page, demonstrating she can look amazing in almost any setting. If you want to help support Sex Workers Rights then I’d encourage you to visit and support her New Moon Network. They do tons of fabulous things in the sex work community.

The Submissive’s Handbook

Fans of online classes might want to check out The Submissive’s Handbook by Rain DeGrey coming to a Zoom near you on July 14th. Rain has been involved in kink (of many kinds) and teaching for years – I first linked to her back in 2013 – making her an excellent resource to learn from.

This shot of Rain is source from her Bluesky account. You can support her work via he Patreon here.

Kinky Career Arc

Delphine (of the Bay Area) has shared an interesting overview of her career in kink and sex work via this blog post. She started as a bondage model with Insex, which I’d imagine was a real trial by fire. From there she transitioned to the domme role and ultimately added full service work into the mix. Her latest evolution, and what seems to be the trigger for the post, is exploring bondage as a submissive again. Not as a replacement for her domme work, but as an adjunct to it.

It’s pretty rare to see people who domme professionally also talk about switching. I suspect there’s a fear it might impact their primary line of work. Or that they’ll have to deal with clients wanting to top them. One exception to this who comes to mind is another Bay Area domme – Elise Graves. She creates a lot of material as both top and bottom for her Bondage Liberation site. Bondage does seem to have a special appeal that brings out the switch in people. I’ve zero desire to ever be a top,  but I could imagine getting into rigging and rope if I had a partner who desired it.

This is a shot of Delphine from her website. If you’re in the Bay Area and would like her to tie you up, check out her site here.

Met ’25

It was the Meta Gala bash last week. Normally the outfits there are incredible but not particularly aligned with this blogs typical content. However, the theme this year was “Tailored For You”.  That meant it leant into a lot more sleek tailoring that I think I can justify posting.

My absolute favorite was Zendaya’s Louis Vuitton outfit, shown below. There’s something special about a woman in a beautifully tailored suit. Anna Sawai had a strikingly similar Dior outfit and looked equally amazing. Kim Kardashian went for a leather corset and skirt combo that would have been at home in any kink event. She would need a retinue of slaves to carry the train around, but I’m sure she’d have had plenty of volunteers.

Oddly enough, the last time I featured the Meta Gala – back in 2018 – that also involved Zendaya. Her outfit that time was very different to this look, but equally impressive.

Plura

I’ve heard of a lot of unusual activities taking place in a dungeon space but never a ‘sound bath’. Apparently this is a ‘a meditative practice where participants are exposed to resonant sounds, like those from singing bowls, gongs, or other instruments, to create a sense of relaxation and deep relaxation.’ It’s a regular thing at LAs Dungeon East.

I gained this new information via this mashable article on Plura. That’s a new dating/meet-up/event app for people into polyamorous, kinky and generally non-traditional relationships. I’ve covered similar apps before – I think the last was FeelId – but they’ve never quite broken through to the mainstream. Hopefully, Plura will have better luck.

Mentioning Dungeon East does give me an excuse to feature it’s fabulous owner – Justine Cross. This is from her Bluesky account and is obviously shot in the aforementioned Dungeon.

Financial Mismanagement

Reddit recently had an ‘Ask Me Anything’ thread featuring a woman whose husband secretly spent $200K on financial domination. I’ve no idea how they validate the authenticity of these kind of posts – Reddit is full of creative writing these days – but it is kind of interesting to pick through.

What struck me from the comments was how often the old cliche of kinks being tied to previous trauma came up. I thought we’d all moved past that a longtime ago. There may or may not be correlation in this case, but there are plenty of people making stupid decisions without kinks, and plenty of kinky people lacking any kind of traumatic background. Hopefully, there is a good therapist involved here to unpack the mess and help them figure it out.

It’s a lot of money to spend, but the financial domination part of it seems like a bit of a red herring. Any kind of regular engagement with professional sex workers is going to get expensive, whatever your kinky proclivities. An average in person session with a pro-domme these days is $800 or more. Do it once a month for 10 years and you’ll be closing in on $100K. I’ve never done the math on my outgoings, but it has got to easily be into 6 figures. Fortunately, I’m an overpaid tech type with no dependents to worry about. In the case of the couple in the AMA, it’s the cheating and dishonesty here that the real issue, not the type of kink.

This captioned image has been floating around on various femdom tumblrs. Not sure of the original source. It seemed appropriate here.

Categorization Complexity

Is it rude to turn art into porn? To take a shot originally intended as art and present it in a sexual context? To change the artists intentions? Assuming we can judge their intentions of course.

The most obvious cases of this are image captioning  – literally putting words into peoples mouths. A good number of these take regular non-pornographic imagery and re-cast them into a pornographic context. However, even posting an image to a themed tumblr or a blog like this changes the interpretation. I sometimes wonder about the rights and wrongs of that.

This image is of Anna Monroy di Giampilieri, shot by Slim Aarons in 1984. He was an American photographer, famous for his images of celebrities and what in those days was known as the jet set. It clearly was intended to capture the wealth, power and beauty of his subject. I think that also makes it work for the Femdom inclined, but wonder how the artist and subject would feel about that.

Hooks

Writing about Fakir Musafar reminded me of one of the activities he helped bring into kinky culture – flesh hooks combined with suspension. His promotion of it was controversial, bringing charges of cultural appropriation. It’s a ritual used in multiple cultures – including some of the Native American tribes – and a bunch of white people adopting it into kinky culture was understandably not a welcome development for some.

I’ve never done it, but I have had several dommes say they’d love to do a flesh hook scene with me. Not sure what it is about me that creates the desire to suspend me from big metal hooks, but there clearly must be something. I doubt I’ll ever have the combination of nerve and opportunity.

While I might lack the right stuff, I do remember Mistress Matisse writing of her experience of a flesh hook scene. Oddly enough she was a participant rather than a coordinator. You can read about it over three of her old Control Tower articles – part 1, part 2 and part 3.  An intense scene.

This is Mistress Matisse from a recent photograph on her Bluesky feed.