Context Matters

The Guardian has a new article on a subject dear to both masochists and sadists hearts – pain. Its basic premise is that the perception of pain is highly contextual and complex. Someone might have a serious injury but power through the situation. The same person on another day might stub their toe and spend 10 minutes hopping up and down and swearing about it. Pain is perceived in the brain and so our mental state is a big factor in how intense we think it is.

It’s an interesting article but I don’t think its conclusions will be surprising to kinky folk who play with pain. I know my tolerance varies significantly, depending on things like stress, arousal, uncertainty and past history with my play partner.

One thing I hadn’t thought about was the how the perception of risk can affect tolerance…

“If we think ‘this is terrible, this is awful, it’s going to do me serious damage’ – those types of people will have lower tolerance.” This includes people who tend to be anxious or who catastrophise pain.

The perception of the damage being done can have a substantial role. A violinist is more likely to report higher levels of pain when a pain stimulus is applied to their dominant playing hand than when their other hand is subjected to the same stimulus, Moseley says – because an injury to their dominant hand could end their career.

That makes sense to me and is a useful thing to keep in mind when planning sessions. If you want to play harder then being able to relax and not worry about the end result is important. If you’re stressing about marks or injuries it’ll hurt all the more.

I hope this gentleman is feeling relaxed and worry free, otherwise that’ll really sting. I’m not entirely sure of the source here, but it looks like something from the Cruel Punishments site.

Needles

I mentioned a few posts back a recent sessions I did with the fabulous Savannah Sly. I was lucky enough to sneak in a second playtime before she left town. Needles were on the agenda.

The fun thing about doing piercing play is how varied the dynamic can be. It can be meditative and contemplative. Moving progressively across the body, decorating as you go. It can be quite sadistic and intense. A needle in a delicate part of the body gets your attention fast. It can also be sensual and stimulating. Piercings in erogenous zones heighten sensation and make gentle touches light up your pleasure center.

This session was a bit of all of the above. A lovely mix of the mean and the mischievous. Savannah wasn’t using particularly large needles, but they were plenty big enough to get my endorphins surging.  You can see a photograph of my chest taken mid-scene here. It always surprises me the variety of sensation different piercings can trigger. One needle might slide in with barely a pinch, the same size an inch over might have me yelping in pain. You just never know till the pointy end meets the skin.

All this needle talk does give me an excuse to re-post one of my favorite piercing images. Indeed one of my favorite kink shots ever. While my position was similar, this isn’t me and Savannah – it’s Domina Yuki and her submissive (originally posted in 2011 here).

More Google Bullshit

Everyday, in everyway, the internet gets a little bit shittier.

I stumbled across the image below via tumblr and was trying to figure out an attribution. My starting point for that is always Google’s reverse image search. However, that came back with no results and a message I’d never seen before: “This search can’t be processed due to content guidelines. Please try a different image or keywords.” What fresh hell is this? I have safe search off and the image isn’t particularly explicit. Just a cute scene of a fully clothed woman and her pup.

Digging around it seems like I’m not the only one hitting this issue. Google – not for the first time – appears to be getting more puritanical and less useful (if that were possible). Trying  a few different images from my post queue had about a 50/50 block/pass rate. So much for organizing the world’s information and not doing evil. Over the last decade or so the leadership of Google has taken a company that was the pride of the tech world, a brilliant search engine that every developer wanted to work on, and turned it into a pile of AI and Ad infested crap.

Sadly, as the above post should make clear, I don’t have an attribution for this. Bing and Yandex did allow me to do a reverse image search, but couldn’t find the source. If you can help me out with that, then please leave a comment with the info.

Mitia C.

This is by the artist Mitia C, one of the more interesting and unusual kinky artists I’ve come across recently. An Osaka based illustrator, his work blends humor and very modern kinks with a contemporary Shunga artistic style. You can find a number of femdom works on his website under the ‘Strong Women‘ section. I think they’re great – hot and fun. It’s not often you that see a Shibu Ina blended with watersports and kink.

This piece by Mitia C is entitled 柴犬 / Shiba Inu (a dog’s dinner).

Text Based Playfulness

Most pro-dommes invest a bunch of time in brand management and marketing. It’s no good being a wizards with whips or looking lovely in leather if nobody know that. To that end they build websites, curate their social media, film clips, write articles, model fetishwear and generally put their dominant diva selves out there.

I thought I’d seen most ideas for domme brand building over the years – until I stumbled on this article on a domme’s bespoke typeface. London’s Jane Grey worked with WMH&I to create a custom typeface for her brand.

The brand’s distinctive asset is “binds”, strips of their bespoke typeface distorted to appear like ropes or leather, adding a subtly erotic edge to the campaign without nudity. The ability to suggest and entice is key in WMH&I’s arsenal of text based playfulness. “The ‘binds’ are a visual representation of Jane Grey’s psychological control,” says Mark. “Always taut, the binds emanate directly from Jane when present in the scene or act as her omnipresent control when she’s just off camera.” Aiming to disarm an audience of willing “subs”, this text-based experimentation dabbles in the dark arts of mind tricks and manipulation.

You can see the typeface in action via Jane’s website. I’m not sure how much it’ll help attractive submissives, but it is interesting to see the effort that can go into brand building.

This beautiful shot was sourced from one of Jane’s social media feeds.

The All Knowing Algorithms

It can be spooky when the social media algorithms figure you out. Particularly if you’re trying to maintain separate worlds.

For example, I have a Reddit account, but I keep it clean. I use a totally different username and follow things related to my non-kinky interests – restaurants, cooking, programming, games, books, etc. I’m not even logged into it on machines I use for this blog and other kinky activities.

I was therefore a little surprised when my reddit feed featured an item from what looked like a martial arts shitposting forum. I’ve zero interest in either of those things. Yet this did catch my eye, as it featured a woman’s kickboxing champion throwing around a male UFC fighter. Maybe it was just a coincidence and a popular post? Then today, my feed featured another item from that same forum, with a woman repeatedly kicking a male ‘sparring partner’ in the nuts. I checked the rest of the forum and those are the only posts it selected to put on my feed. That can’t be a coincidence. I think it’s on to me.

These are images from the first item I mentioned. That’s Katarina Kavaleva (kick boxing world champion) having some fun with Merab Dvalishvili (UFC Bantamweight champion).

Dirty Secrets

LA’s Miss Mae Ling recently gave us an entertaining episode of the Dirty Secrets Podcast with Kate Shelor. Although they did have a bit of a challenge discussing some activities while staying with the Apple and Spotify content guidelines. The text below is taken from the podcast transcript., see if you can guess what they were talking about…

KS: Are you sitting here and his head is here so you can kind of see his face
ML: Yeah.
KS: And where in your, yeah, go on, not like not on the chest.
ML: Some people.
KS: Do most people want it directly in their mind? We literally cannot post any of this on this platform.
ML: Like this whole entire thing is cut.
KS: Just chopped up. Sorry. It’s even like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
..snip..
ML: Okay. So most people want it directly in their mind?
ML: I mean, it’s like the lowest of low, right? Like that is the most gross could you possibly get? I don’t think anything really tops that.”

If you’re still unsure, then I’ll give you a hint and say that the words chocolate and texture also popped up in connection with this.

If that’s not your thing, it’s still worth checking out the rest of the conversation, as they cover a whole bunch of other topics and activities. It’s a great insight into the world of a top class pro-domme.

This is Miss Mae Ling in a shot from her website. If you’re in the LA area and interested in seeing her for a session – chocolatey or otherwise – then it has all her info and application form. If you’re further afield then she also has a clips4sale store.

Disconcerted

Writing my last post about BDSM professionals and switching made me think of my first domme – Lady Lydia McLane. That’s not because she was a switch. As far as I know, she was a stone cold top in private life. However, as a professionally hot and kinky person, she did do a bunch of modelling work in all sorts of roles. For example, kink.com has some scenes she shot for House of Gord. I’m therefore periodically disconcerted to stumble across an image of her in a sub role. Given how I knew her, it’s always pretty odd to see.

I was disconcerted in an entirely different way when I spotted the .gif below of Lydia on tumblr. My first thought was – “Is that me?” It’s not, but given I got spanked and caned exactly that way on that couch multiple times, it did give me pause for a moment. This was filmed in the entrance room to her Seattle Dungeon. I have so many happy memories of sitting on that couch and doing either pre-scene discussion or decompressing after an amazing session. Now it has all gone – razed the ground and replaced by condos. Such is life.

While this isn’t me, there a bunch of my scenes with Lydia documented in the early days of this blog. For example, here, here and here.

Keeping It Real

One final medical themed post to finish off this short series of them. The last couple of posts were very much fantasy based, where this image depicts a far more realistic medical scene. It’s from Doctor Jill who plays out of The Cellar in Antwerp.

I think one of the fun things about medical scenes is how varied you can make them. You can go for over-the-top medical fantasies that are clearly very sexual, or you can shoot for something that looks straight out of a regular hospital. Doctor Jill clearly tends to the latter category, as you can see from some of the medical scenes on her site. While I personally lean to the more fantasy medical play, I do love seeing the skill and detail applied in scenes like this.

Committed

Phil left a comment on my last post to the effect that the end of the linked story was pretty dark. That’s fair comment. I enjoyed all the heavy bondage and medical themes, but didn’t love where it left our ‘hero’.

If you like the idea of imprisonment and bondage in a medical setting, but prefer something not quite so dark, then checkout ‘Committed’ over on Literotica. I’ve been on a bit of a hunt for hospital/asylum bondage stores recently, and thought this was one of the better examples around.

I’ll finish with some appropriately themed artwork. This isn’t signed, but I believe it’s by Tilly Monster (Deviant Art and Patreon).