Tag: F

Anthony Vaccarello

Whenever I see a fashion editor going on about a ‘dominatrix look’ I brace myself for disappointment. It normally means one of the models wore a pair of boots or – even worse – a leather choker. However, I have to admit that this papermag article on the 2020 Saint Laurent collection by designer Anthony Vaccarello doesn’t get it wrong. It’s a pretty hot and kinky collection, with some serious dominatrix vibes. I particularly like the combination of pussybow blouses with shiny latex pants as shown in this linked image. That’s fetish meets old fashioned schoolmistress, a particularly fab combo in my eyes. I also love the latex dress in the image below. Impractical no doubt, but beautiful and sensual.

Pet Peeve – Contact Form Feedback

Time for another PPPP – Paltego Pet Peeve Post. This time it’s pro-domme contact forms for scheduling sessions. Specifically, the type of contact forms that give little to no feedback to the user. From my experience, that’s 9 out of 10 of them.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, allow me to explain. Rather than having submissives send random and badly structured emails, many pro-dommes have a contact form that elicits the specific information they require. This is a good thing. The problem comes when, after many rounds of editing and proofreading, you say a silent prayer and hit the submit button. At that point almost anything can happen. Maybe it’ll clear all the text and give you no clue if it worked or not. Maybe you’ll get some obscure error code or connection error. Maybe you’ll get a blank page. It’s impossible to predict.  Even if it gives a ‘Thanks for your submission’ type response, you’ve still no idea if it really worked or not. Did it email the info to the domme? Did it delete everything? Or did it just email all my contacts with the fact that I’m interested in exploring watersports, puppy play and like being called a dirty little boy?

What prompted me to talk about this was actually the rare example of a contact form done well. Domina Esme Crane’s – built on Jot Forms – actually emailed me back with all the information I’d just submitted. That not only let me know it’d worked, but also allowed me to see it had got all the relevant information. Genius!

If you follow any pro-dommes on social media you’ll often hear complaints about submissives who are too demanding and expect rapid responses to any communication. I’d suggest one way to reduce that is to remove ambiguity from communication. It you’re not sure if something worked properly or not, it’s always going to be tempting to assuming not and to try it again.

This is the aforementioned Domina Crane in an image from her twitter feed. She’s a San Francisco based pro-domme. Sadly, despite her well executed contact form, it doesn’t look like we’ll manage to intersect on my next visit to the Bay area. Hopefully I’ll be better organized for future visits.

A New Twist

It’s always fun to discover a new twist on a favorite activity. After years of kinky indulgence it’s rare for me to discover something totally new, but I’m often happily surprised by how different an activity can feel when approached from a new angle.

The specific example I have in mind is seated mummification, courtesy of Mistress Damiana Chi during my recent LA trip. I’ve been wrapped up many times before, but never in the seated position. We started with me standing in front of the chair while Mistress Damiana swaddled me in plastic wrap. Then, once I hopped back and eased myself down, she bound my mummified torso  into place using rope. It was a great setup because I felt incredibly immobilized, but I could also interact with the domme and observe the sadistic things she was doing to my genitals and nipples. With the traditional horizontal position it can often feel disconnected, with me staring at the ceiling while nasty things happen down south. With this setup we could make eye contact and I could see what was happening, while still having no ability to stop it. That sense of a shared intimate connection and total helplessness is a wonderful button pusher for me.

Unfortunately we didn’t capture any photographs of the chair bondage. However, we did get some good snaps of the second setup, which featured a beautiful red latex bodybag. That was complemented by multiple ropes and leather straps. You can see the resulting arrangement from three different angles here, here and here. Of course, bondage is never quite enough on its own, so Mistress Damiana added some piercing to the nipples and scrotum and then fired up her Electrastim device. This is shown in the two shots here and here.

Looking back on the images now, what catches my eye are the little touches I missed first time around. For example, the color match between the posture collar and the bag, or the extra rope added to expose the nipples properly. It was an amazing session and, as always, my thanks go to Mistress Damiana for creating such an intense yet enjoyable experience.

You can find Mistress Damiana’s main site for sessions here,  her site for her Dominatrix Academy here and her site for kink-knowledgeable life coaching here.  She also has a twitter feed available here.

Stinky Socks

After mentioning scentplay in my previous post, this seems an appropriate image to post as a followup. It’s tough to communicate a smell via a jpg, but I think this does a pretty good job.

It’s interesting how many kinks are associated with feet. There’s obviously your basic foot fetish, but there’s also kinks around high heels, boots, sandals, nylons and sweaty socks like this. Some foot fetishists can trace their kinks back to formative experiences as youngsters crawling or sitting near the feet of adults. Given the number of foot related kinks, it seems likely a lot of fetishists pick up their interests in similar ways, even if they can’t all remember it.

I’m think artist goes by the handle of pii (taromura). The woman’s look is a fashion trend known as Ganguro.

The Sport Report

America had a concert and ads showcase today, occasionally interrupted by a sporting event.

The game itself made me sad, as I’ve been a 49ers fan since I was a teenager watching Joe Montana and Jerry Rice play. On the plus side, the halftime show was a lot of fun with a surprising kinky vibe. Shakira had a hint of bondage going with her rope dance and then Jennifer Lopez came out in a leather outfit that had an awful lot more than a hint of BDSM about it. Not to mention the backing dancers sporting classic leather caps and dommey snarls.

As an added bonus, the sight of two talented Latino women dancing and singing in Spanish appears to have pissed off a lot of right wing troglodytes. So while my team may have lost, I’m always happy to find a silver lining.

Looking Back

As part of my ten year kinkyversary I thought it’d be interesting to look back and try to figure out exactly who I’d played with over that time. I keep all my emails, so in theory I should be able to come up with a pretty accurate list. Actual sessions are way too numerous to count, but as far as people are concerned, I think the total is 37 different pro-dommes. On one hand that seems like a lot, but on the other hand, this is over a decade and spread across 9 different cities.

I wrote last year about my relative success rate in terms of identifying dommes I think I’ll have good session chemistry with. Looking at this list supports the rough estimates I made back then. There were 14 dommes who I played with once and didn’t feel that we had suitable chemistry. At the other extreme, there have been 11 dommes I loved playing with and always reached out to any time our paths crossed. The remaining 12 are dommes I’d like to play more with, but so far time, geography and circumstances have conspired against us.

Two other things also pop out from the list. Firstly, I’m surprised how many dommes on it are now retired from the profession. So if there’s someone you’ve always wanted to play with then I’d encourage you to reach out sooner rather than later. You never know when they’ll decide to hang up their whip (at least from a professional perspective).

The other thing that strikes me is the amazing diversity in styles, techniques and personalities. After all, this isn’t a random list. These are all pro-dommes I researched and decided would be a good fit for my kinks and preferred dynamic. When you browse pro-domme sites and see repeated common lists of activities and equipment you might be tempted to think the variance in play would be small. After all, when you think of other professional services – lawyer, doctor, masseuse  – you don’t expect massive variation between different providers. Yet that’s exactly what you find in the dynamics of a pro-domme session. Even the more creative professions, like a chef or an actor, don’t compare. The best analogy I can think of is a fine artist. An artist will have a distinctive personal style that is common to all their work, but every artist is unique in their own approach.

This is Mistress Eleise De Lacy, someone who definitely falls into the category of people I’d love to play more with, should time and space not conspire against us. We intersected once in Vancouver back in 2013, but since then she has been based in Europe and the opportunity for further play hasn’t presented itself. Should you be similarly constrained, she does have an OnlyFans site you can join for a virtual experience.

Jennifer Brooks

A final image in this vintage themed series of posts. Miss Brooks below is Jennifer Brooks who started out as a spanking model and gradually shifted into playing primarily dominant roles over time. I knew her from her work in the Leda videos from Ed Lee. I hadn’t realized until I start researching this post that she actually went on to start her own company for spanking films called Brooks Applications and also published the Femdom magazine Behind the Scene. You can see an example cover from Issue 4 (1993) of that here. 

I’m pretty certain I’ve browsed examples of her latter work, without actually realizing it wasn’t associated with Leda. My bad. She shut down her company just over 10 years ago in 2009. Whatever you’re doing now Miss Brooks, thanks for all the great magazines and videos you created over the years.

I feel I can’t complete this post without a callout to the text alongside the cane image above. It’s not often that kinky porn will include a phrase like “Guaranteed to break the will of the most wretched curmudgeon…” Kudos to whoever wrote that caption. As a man who sees curmudgeon in his future, I’d agree the cane is an excellent implement to break that particular affliction. 

A New Kind of Resolution

This is the time of year for making resolutions. Normally this means I pick some, fail to keep them, feel bad about that and finally forget them entirely. This year I’m going to try a new approach – giving everyone else in the world a resolution. Obviously this is unlikely to be entirely 100% successful, but the same is true for my usual resolutions and at least when this fails, it’ll be other peoples fault rather than mine. Genius.

The resolution I’m assigning is this: Resist the urge to share, re-tweet or forward stupid or ugly things on social media. Thinking that something is dumb and then simply moving on is a perfectly valid action. There’s no need to spread that shit around.

In theory this resolution should be an easy one, as it involves *not* doing something. It’ll actually save you time! Unfortunately, social media companies are very good at hacking our emotions and appealing to people’s innate sense of fairness. We want to punish wrongdoers and unite our tribe against them. Re-tweeting a slam on someone seems to achieve this. In reality it just triggers social media chain reactions, drives user clicks and makes the social media companies money.

I should qualify at this point that I’m not talking about situations where influential people or companies do or say something terrible. In that case social media actually helps balance the scales somewhat. Lots of quieter voices can unite to match a much louder one. I’m taking about the cases where some misogynistic / homophobic / anti-sexwork garbage shows up on my social feed from some random idiot with just a handful of followers. Inevitably in those cases it’s because someone I follow has shared it with comments explaining just how terrible and wrong it is. So an opinion which would normally have died quietly and alone in a dusty corner of the internet is now being broadcast to tens of thousands of people and generating all sorts of craziness.

If you’re re-tweeting a troll then you’re making them happy. If you’re arguing with an idiot then you’re wasting your time. If it’s just some random person who did a stupid thing, then leave them to their stupid thing and move on. There’s no need for to pile on and humiliate them over it. Jon Ronson has excellent book on the effects of social media on that last category of people, which I think is well worth reading.

I think we all like to imagine our social media selves as the lady below. Rather than a simple paddle we’ll deploy our cutting wit and re-tweet button to change the mind of the ignorant and punish the evil. In reality we’re more like someone who treads in dog shit on the way to a party and decides that rather than quietly scraping it off we should show all our friends just how nasty it is.

The caption is of course from Servitor over at Contemplating the Divine. Sadly, the School Mistress site that created the original image appears to have ceased to exist.

That’s Hedy!

Continuing the theme of vintage shots of women holding whips badly (it’s a very narrow fetish niche), here’s Hedy Lamarr in a shot from the 1946 movie ‘The Strange Woman‘.  I’ve blogged about the awesomeness of Hedy before, but even a fan like myself would have to admit, she doesn’t exactly look committed to the role of fearsome whip wielder in this shot. You get the impression she has no idea why she’s been given it in the first place.

The post title obviously derives from a certain well known comedy film. Amusingly, Hedy Lamarr actually sued for $10M over the use (or abuse) of her name and ended up accepting money (presumably a lot less) in an out of court settlement.

Mistress Adrienne

I was very sad to hear of the recent passing of Mistress Adrienne of NYC. While our paths never cross in real life, I always admired her obvious creativity and talent. She had an amazing reputation as a domme and fetishist, as shown by the numerous tributes being paid on social media – Mistress Blunt, Daddy An Li,  Mistress Morgan, Lady Sophia Larou, Mistress Iris, Michelle Lacy and too many more to list.

This site has featured her images in past posts (for example here, here and here). While dommes in fetishistic outfits aren’t exactly an unusual thing, for Mistress Adrienne fetish and fashion was clearly a hugely important part of her identity, creativity and aesthetic. She had an amazing sense of style and the dedication to make it work, as described in this anecdote by Amikoland.

I’ll finish with an image and tweet she shared back in November. It makes me tear up a little reading it now. Rest in Peace Mistress Adrienne.

Although I’m a woman of #blackleather & dark fantasy, I’m a soul of LIGHT 🕯 Days get darker in winter months, but The light never goes out for inspired & content people. How will you make the most of your current reality? #leathergoddess #inspiration