Playing with Mistress Lucy

Before leaving LA I was fortunate enough to spend time with Mistress Lucy Khan. We had a lengthy and very enjoyable session featuring a smorgasbord of different activities all wrapped in a fun roleplay dynamic. Some things on the menu included cupping, piercing, scentplay, breathplay, tease, denial and general sadism to my delicate bits.

I particularly enjoyed the rope spiderweb that Mistress Lucy wove around me towards the end of the session. You can see it in this photograph. It was one of those arrangements that didn’t make much sense to me as it was being constructed, as it didn’t feel like it’d hold me properly. Then Mistress Lucy pulled hard on the bottom two ropes and everything tightened and magically fell into place. I particularly liked the way she tied it off around my big toes. There’s always an interesting sense of vulnerability that comes with toe bondage, given how sensitive the soles of the feet are.

Reflecting on the session later that evening, still floating on buzz created, it struck me that one sign of a world class professional domme is the commitment and intensity she can bring to a session with someone she rarely sees. It had been around 9 months since we’d last got together, yet it didn’t feel like that. Mistress Lucy created and held a bubble that made it very easy for me to relax into subspace and exist with her in the moment.

This image is from Mistress Lucy’s twitter feed. That’s not me in the image, but we did indulge in some similar play.

Cuddling on the Couch

I’m back in damp Seattle. I have a couple of fun sessions from LA to blog about, but right now I just want to unpack, collapse on the couch and catch up on my Colbert recordings.

In the meantime, I’ll keep things ticking over here with this artwork by sadisticsmilez. There’s a lot to love about this. The sense of intimacy and playfulness combined with the kink is particularly well done. My favorite part though is the nipple tweak. That’s a very sexy move, as his facial expression would tend to indicate.

The original title of the piece is ‘videogames2‘. I found it via this tweet.

Strange Reaction

I’ve experienced a strange emotional response in recent weeks. People hitting me has made me angry. That’s obviously not unusual for most people but for me, in the context of kink, it’s very strange. Corporal play was one of my primary fantasies for many years and a staple of my scenes. Yet recently it has generated less of an “Ooohhh, yeah….” and more of a “Hey! That hurts goddamn it!”

I have no idea why this is. Other painful things like needles, electricity, clamps and miscellaneous spiky things still get me buzzed and into that submissive floaty space. I can lean into their pain and relax under the dominants control. Yet corporal play had triggered the bad kind of ‘fight or flight’ response where I just want to make it stop.

I’m really hoping it’s a temporary thing. Maybe it’s to do with external stress or me being general angry at the state of the world. I’m not conscious of that kind of mental shift, but clearly something is awry. I’ve never met a domme yet who didn’t enjoy some form of corporal play, and I’d hate to lose such an important part of my kinky repertoire. Anyone else find they’ve had a favorite activity suddenly twist on them like this?

While my physical response might be screwed up, my visual response to corporal is still working just fine. I love this action shot from the Glasgow based Mistress Scarlet (found on her twitter feed).

Roped Captive

I enjoyed a wonderful session today with Mistress Damiana. However, I’m going to delay writing about that in detail until I’ve have a chance to edit and share the photographs we snapped.

In the meantime, given that I spent a good portion of our session today in bondage, I’ll share this artwork by bondlicitous. It’s called ‘Connection‘, which is very much a thing I look for when I’m being tied up. There’s a touch of the fairy tale about the drawing. I’m imaging that it’s the heroic prince that has been bound in place and the fair heroine, having been through a rather torrid time, is expressing her displeasure with his performance to date.

You can see more from bondlicitous at his DeviantArt and Twitter. I found this via a tweet by maid marta.

Finding the Edge

The Daily Dot has published an interesting article on Edge Play. One of the questions it raises is what exactly is edge play? Before reading the article I thought I knew, but now I’m not so sure.

I think there are three basic definitions you can come up with. They key question is what line is being played up to?

  1. Is it the edge of the submissive’s comfort zone?
  2. Is it the edge of mainstream BDSM activities?
  3. Is it the edge of life itself?

I’ve personally always assumed the definition was (2). That means things like scat, branding or very intense corporal play that draws blood would count as edge play. I’ve also known some professional kinksters who use the definition of (3), limiting it to activities involving knifes, guns, choking, etc. In that case edge play is the kind of thing that might land you not just in the emergency room but ultimately in the morgue.

What this article suggests is that (1) is actually the correct definition of edge play. Which seems kind of odd to me. Everyone has limits and a comfort zone, and that’s going to be in a different place for each submissive. So with that definition it almost becomes a meaningless term. Normally I’d just assume it was an article from a journalist who didn’t really understand the subject, but if features quotes from genuine experts in the field.

What constitutes edge play is different for everyone. I consider edge play to be play that occurs at the edge of what one can bear. Play where there is enough trust to push past what is comfortable creates the possibility of a new outcome.
Mistress Blunt

The article also goes on to list a 24/7 dynamic as another example of edge play, which is something that I’d suggest exists on an entirely different dimension to specific BDSM activities. So where exactly is the edge correctly drawn? Is it just one of those things that is always defined with respect to the person involved? Is my edge just someone else’s light warm-up?

Here’s the aforementioned Mistress Blunt exploring an activity that I guess could be an edge play candidate – mummification. This is from this tweet.

Scene Stealer

I’ll finish this nostalgic review of my last decade of kink with the story of the strangest thing that happened to me in a session – the time I did someone else’s scene.

I’m not going to reveal who the domme was. I’ll just say that this wasn’t my first session with her and this was some years ago. Our pre-scene negotiation over email had been, as is usual for me, pretty short and simple. I don’t remember my exact words but the gist was that medical play with staples and needles might be fun. What unfolded during the session itself was a little different.

In hindsight, putting all the pieces together, it was fairly obvious what went wrong. Before I arrived the domme had opened her email folder and clicked on someone else’s session request. I obviously never got to read the original email, but based on what transpired, I’m guessing it went something like this:

“I love lots of bondage with straps and rope, particularly if you keep adjusting and tweaking it, as though you can’t quite find the perfect way to hold me. I want a heavy caning and I think it’s really sexy if the domme is very vocal about how excited and aroused she is by the marks she’s leaving. Oh, and I’ve got a thing for hair, so if you could work that in somehow that’d be great. Thanks!”

Given this email slip-up, there was obviously a fairly significance gulf between  between what I was expecting and what I was about to receive.

The first thing that struck me as weird as we started the session was that the domme seemed to have developed an OCD issue with bondage. I couldn’t figured out why she kept screwing around with it. She’d mutter about needing to get it exactly right, I’d carefully suggest that it was actually fine, and she’d still keep reworking it. Then there was all the sexy moaning and dirty talk to go along with the canes she was wielding. We’d done corporal play before, and I didn’t remember my ‘hot as fuck’ marks having quite this effect on her. Finally, why did she keep touching her hair onto my back and butt? I mean I like hair, I think it can be very sexy, but it seemed an odd thing to intersperse between cane strikes.

My initial assumption was that this was just an unusual warm-up to our medical scene, but as the time ticked past the halfway mark, it was obvious something had gone awry. Should I stop it? Given we were already over an hour in, it seemed awkward to do so. Plus, I was feeling pretty buzzed from the endorphins and she seemed to in the zone and having fun with it. I figured it was easier to roll with it and I’d only yell stop if things got a little crazy. I wasn’t about to get fisted or vomited on for the sake of avoiding awkwardness. Fortunately it turned out that my unknown scene choreographer hadn’t put in a request for a spectacular finale.

The post-scene discussion – after I mentioned what I thought had happened – was an amusing one. The domme was torn between apologizing for the mistake and expressing incredulity that I hadn’t said anything. My answer of ‘well, you seemed really into it…’ got a laugh and the response that my bruised butt was therefore my own fault.

I did wonder what happened later, when she did the scene again with the original client. Did she tell him? Or did he just get a really awesome version thanks to the  dress rehearsal I’d filled in for?

I think this is technically a birching rather than a caning, but this artwork by Jay Em still feels appropriate for the post.

Kinkyversary

Today is a significant date for me. It’s exactly 10 years to the day from my very first session with a pro-domme. Which means it’s exactly 10 years from my first shared kinky experience and my first physical exploration of BDSM.

I wrote about the causative event for this a few weeks back. Despite the fact I made a decision to see a pro-domme before Christmas 2009, the anal retentive researcher that shares my brain took several weeks to figure out exactly who that should be. The final recommendation from my internal librarian was Lady Lydia McLane. I think a big part of that was the easy contact form she had on her website that simply allowed me to tick activity boxes rather than writing scary words in an email. The fact she was a stunningly attractive redhead might also have played a small part in the process. It turned out to be an inspired choice. I couldn’t have asked for a better person to guide me on the start of my kinky journey.

Lady Lydia has been retired for some years now. Her playspace, where I experienced so many of my kinky firsts, was razed and turned into condos. Such is the story of Seattle over the last decade. However, it did seem appropriate that I celebrated my kinkyversary tonight with another amazing Seattle domme – Savannah Sly. I hadn’t particularly planned to session on this specific date, but it ended up feeling appropriate that I did so. Particularly because we were playing in the same neighborhood, and I parked in almost exactly the same spot I did back on January 28th 2010.

My first session consisted mostly of a simple caning. Tonight’s also featured the heavy use of a cane, but Savannah also added paddles, staples, needles, electricity and breathplay into the mix. My kinky appetites have expanded somewhat over the last decade. What hasn’t changed is the joy each session brings me and the gratitude I feel to the dommes involved. They’ve literally changed my life.

I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on my kinky journey to share in subsequent posts. In the meantime I’ll leave you with a shot of Lady Lydia that captures the essence of her play. Astonishingly beautiful, intensely sadistic and so happy in the moment.

This is Lady Lydia shooting for kink.com with EuroSex back in 2007.

Vintage Breathplay

It’s rare to see this activity in a vintage shot. Corporal punishment and bondage is fairly common in older shots, and medical play not unheard of, but I can’t recall seeing breathplay before.

It makes me smile, as it’s an activity I love. I particularly like the eye contact they are making, as that’s a key part of any breathplay scene for me. People talk about power exchange as an abstract D/s concept, but breathplay creates a focus that crystallizes that exchange. The power over someone’s breath is literally life and death. If I’m giving that up then I want that other person to be very much in that moment with me.

I found this image via this tweet.

Communication Breakdown

The wider acceptance of kink and the corresponding uptick in mainstream articles on it is a good thing. Less stigma is good. More people open to indulging in kink is good. Unfortunately the quality of the mainstream articles is somewhat erratic. For example, take this recent Cosmo one on Cuckolding. It’s not terrible, and it’s certainly positive on the kink. In fact that’s actually kind of the problem. It’s possible to be too positive.

Cuckolding is a great way of strengthening communication in a relationship, as it requires honesty from both partners about what they enjoy, what they don’t and what their boundaries are if they do feel jealous or uncomfortable.

It’s certainly true that cuckolding requires good communication. However, this makes it sound like cuckolding would be a good option to improve communication in a relationship that has a problem with it. I’m not a therapist, but I’m fairly sure that first step in strengthening  communication with your partner isn’t sleeping with other people.

This reminds me of people who think that the solution to a rocky relationship is to have a child. Because when two people are stressed and unhappy, the obvious answer is to add a small screaming person who’ll dominate their lives for the next 18 years. I’ve known two couples like that and it worked out about as well as you might expect. I’m guessing that cuckolding, like having children, is a good way to make a great thing better and a bad thing even worse.

I’m not sure of the background to this image, or who the artist is, but it definitely has a strong cuckolding vibe to it. If anyone can help me attribute it, then please leave me a comment.

Puppy Dog Eyes

I’ve remarked before that a strong love of animals seems to be a common trait among pro-dommes. I suspect it’s actually a common trait for sex workers in general, but my personal experience obviously skews towards dommes.

It’s therefore a smart move for the submissive here – who I think is Deviant Kade – to deploy the puppy dog eyes in a search for sympathy. It doesn’t appear to be working all that well, but you’ve got to give him full marks for the effort.

This is obviously from the Captive Male site.