Nobody Cares

My random thought of the day: Never stress about walking up to a BDSM playspace. As long as you’re dressed like conventionally – which you absolutely should be – then nobody knows or cares what you’re doing. Passersby will just assume you’re a regular person doing regular person things.

I’ve done a lot of sessions at a lot of different spaces in many different cities. I’ve never once had a random stranger shout “Hey everyone – look at that pervert! He’s off to do weird freaky stuff in that building.” From the outside playspaces look anonymous. 99.9% of people will walk past and have no idea they’re there. Over the years I’ve personally had exactly zero awkward moments getting into and out of playspaces.

It’s also important to keep in mind that the domme is highly incentivized to keep the entrance routine under the radar. After all, she is the one regularly in the space and dealing with a constant stream of clients. No domme is going to appear at the doorway in full fetish gear and loudly command her clients to get to their knees in full view of the street. Instead the traditional entrance routine is the sideways slide, slipping through a door held only slight ajar, concealing both the domme and the hallway decorations from any random passersby.

The discrepancy between the outside of playspaces and the inside is always something that brings a smile to my face. I love that the outside can be a regular townhouse on a regular street, and inside a scene like this one can be unfolding….

This is Domina Yuki and Lucy Sweetkill playing earlier this year in a lovely San Francisco space I know well.

A New Angle

This unusual shot from Mistress Chiaki is all kinds of fun. It takes a moment to orientate yourself to what’s going on. There’s a slave kneeling on the floor by the bed and then two toy bags either side of the bed. I think there’s also a mirror on the right wall, so there’s reflections of reflections.

I’ve played in hotel rooms many times, but I’ve never played in one with a mirrored ceiling. I feel I should add it to my ‘to do’ list, although they seem to be pretty rare in the US these days, even in spots like Las Vegas. Dungeons typically have a lot of mirrors, but I’ve never yet encountered one with a ceiling installation. It seems an odd omission.

You can see more photographs from this particular session at Mistress Chiaki’s blog.

Threesome

This is a lovely shot from the Dreams of Spanking site. There’s a lot of humor and fun in those sly smiles. The use of the mirror to capture both his and her expression while keeping a natural feel to the composition is cleverly done. From the look of that red bottom I’d guess this was taken in the middle of a scene.

You can see the larger version of the image, together with other shots from the same scene here. It’s actually a foursome in the full scene shots.

Stupid Tech

I’m generally a fan of combining fancy equipment with kinky sex. It’s certainly not necessary, but it can be a lot of fun. However, I do draw the line at the idea of this cockring combined with a camera. That’s the stupidest combination of technology and sex toy I’ve seen since the vibrator that reported your usage of it to the parent company. What are you possibly going to see on a cockring camera that’d be interesting or titillating? It’ll just be dark, shaky close-ups of random body parts. It’s tough enough to frame a decent shot with a proper camera, let alone trying to do it by waving your dick around.

Although perhaps there’s a opportunity for a creative modern artist here. It might be stupid as a sex toy, but how about as the basis for a cutting edge art installation piece? Maybe they could combine it with a chastity device for an added twist. Andy Warhol famously made an eight hour movie of the Empire State Building in slow motion. How about a 72 hour film from the point of view of a dick in a chastity device? It’d be a striking social commentary on the phenomena of the dick pic and a critique of a society that seeks to both exploit and constrain sexuality. Not to mention a handy visual guide on effective peeing whilst in chastity.

If you’re going to attach something to a dick, this leash seems like a lot more effective and fun to play with.

Managing Risk

Femdom twitter has been aflutter recently with threads on the dangers of impact play and how not to do it. This was all triggered by a particular ‘domme’ who didn’t seem to have much idea about wielding a single tail or where to apply it. You can see an example of the kind of thread I mean here. I’m not going to send clicks to the domme in question, or link to the site she shoots for. Let’s just say it’s based in America and staffed by young women who are the opposite of friendly.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that a lot of the women you see playing domme’s on femdom porn sites are adult actresses rather than professionally trained tops. I know this from talking to pro-dommes who have actually shot for a variety of these sites. They always report that the directors are very happy to shoot with them, as it makes a nice change for them to work with someone who knows what they’re doing and can use all the equipment properly.

Of course, the use of an actress rather than a technical expert isn’t necessarily a blocker to creating good scenes. I don’t think Gal Gadot could really take out a gang of hardened criminals, but I still enjoy watching her as Wonder Woman. The trick is to either stick to scenes that don’t require specialized technical skills or have experts to handle the tricky stuff. Not simply start whaling on a submissive like you’re a hyperactive toddler playing whack-a-mole.

In the meantime, if you’re indulging in impact play, then make sure you know what areas can be safely targeted. There are plenty of visual guides available online – for example this one.

The lady in this Jay Em scene may be applying some fierce blows, but they are in the proper area. There’s no danger here to our fictional characters.

Saucy Sketch

Random aside before I start the post proper: Hurrah for Olivia Colman. I typically have zero interest in the Oscars, but I was very happy to see she won tonight. If you’ve not seen her before, then I strongly recommend checking out Season 1 of Broadchurch and The Favourite (which is both excellent and spelled correctly).

Now, back to the part of the post I originally planned, which may actually be shorted than my random aside. The saucy sketch below comes courtesy of Yumine Guo. I personally find it pretty hot, despite not really being a fan of body writing or humiliation. Not sure exactly how that works, but I’ll take hotness wherever I can find it.

You can find Yumine’s Patreon here.

Plotting

This’d be a great image for a caption competition. It’s obviously a porn shot from the strap-on hell site, but what makes the image work isn’t the big fleshy fake dick, but the look being exchanged by the dommes. They seem to have a cunning plan in mind. If he’s lucky, it doesn’t involve the man at all. If it does, then God help him. I can’t think it’ll play out to his advantage.

Good Job Tumblr

The final banishment of adult content from Tumblr was an entirely predictable shit show. Huge swathes of carefully curated content vanished, including pretty much every link on my image page.  It was pretty depressing looking around it in the last few days, with a lot of people saying goodbye to their followers and goodbye to all the time they’d invested in the platform.

People who actually tried to follow the rules and clean up their site found that it was impossible to flip it back to a non-explicit status, rendering their site worthless. Meanwhile I found endless examples of very explicit images still being shown, often right next to images that were blocked. Either the blocked ones were so graphic they’d have made my eyes bleed or, more likely, tumblrs filtering algorithms are useless. So they destroyed a lot of online communities, pissed content creators off, lost a huge chunk of their users and still ended up showing people porn. All in all, a great week of work for them.

Luckily their incompetence does have a minor benefit. As I posted on twitter,  you can actually still use TumblThree to rip any tumblr back to your local hard drive. This includes tumblr’s that send you to the block screen or that have explicit images covered up. All the content is still there, and you can typically pull a tumblr with a few thousand images in just a few minutes. I’m sure they’ll close this hole pretty soon, but right now it’s still a good option for archiving any favorite sites you had.

In the meantime a lot of people  seem to be heading to bdsmlr as the tumblr clone of choice for kinky people. I get the logic of their name, but it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. I’ll post some follow-up thoughts on that site tomorrow. In the meantime he’s an image from a tumblr that I definitely archived for my personal future ‘reference’ purposes – Alternative Femdom.

I believe this was originally shot by Alvaro Hernandez

Technical Issues

Apologies if you had any trouble trying to reach the site in recent days. I’ve been dealing with some technical issues. I’m still not sure they’re entirely resolved, but hopefully it should at least remain reachable for anyone reading.

I always wonder what the the technical support people from my hosting company make of this site. From the names of those involved, the first line support staff appear to mostly be women based in India. It must be a tough job to suddenly be dropped into a chat function with a strange guy called paltego who is wondering where his site full of dominant ladies, tied up men and sexually explicit imagery has vanished to.

Speaking of which, here’s a fun photograph of a tied man and a couple of happy looking dommes.

I’m afraid I’ve no idea where this is from. The text is Spanish for ‘Tied Love’ (according to the online translators), but I haven’t tracked down a site or photography studio. As always feel free to comment if you can help me attribute it.

Floating and Floaty

I couldn’t finish a trio of posts on bondage and its related equipment without featuring two renowned experts of both the tools and the art – Elise Graves and Troy Orleans. These two shots feature some beautiful leather bondage and a very cool suspended table. I also like the very simple clean space that they’re playing in. For me it always feels a lot more intense and serious to play in a ‘normal’ looking studio space than it does to play in all black dungeon with chains and whips hanging off the walls.

I know from experience that heavy bondage can create a floaty headspace. In this case it also looks like he’s floating in space.

I found this via a tweet on Elise Graves’ twitter feed. It’s obviously from her Bondage Liberation site, which contains all sorts of interesting intense bondage shots.