Tag: Fm

Bound by Elise

Elise Graves was shooting for House of Gord in Seattle this week, and I was lucky enough to have the chance to session with her before she returned to the Bay area. Rope bondage, electricity, clamps and tickling were all the agenda, and much fun was had by all.

One of the great things about playing with different dommes is getting to observe many different styles of play. For the majority of dommes I play with, bondage is a complement to the main activity rather than a focus in itself. They want to make sure I’m not going to wriggle away, but once that’s achieved the emphasis shifts to hitting, poking and prodding. Elise tends to switch that up, where the bondage is the main focus, and the additional activities used to emphasize and highlight the restraint. Often in sessions I can almost forget I’m  bound, but there’s zero danger of that happening when Elise in charge. I’m always very aware of my own body and its interaction with the space around it.

Personally I find these kind of sessions very challenging but also very rewarding. It’s easy to lie back in a comfortable position and simply soak up intense sensations. In contrast, when bondage is used to stress and control the body, it forces me to think a lot more and to be very aware of how my body is reacting to it. I recently wrote about in session communication (post one and two), and I think bondage focused sessions really lean on that skill set for the submissive, even for the relatively easy positions I was put into. Awareness of your physical limits and tolerances becomes particularly important.

This is from Elise’s twitter feed and taken from a shoot for her excellent Bondage Liberation site. Elise is typically very gleeful and happy when topping and I think this image really captures that. The male model is @for_heavy. If you’d like to play with Elise in person, then her professional site is here.

Love of the Visual

There’s an old stereotype that men respond far more strongly to sexual imagery than women do. It’s an idea I’ve always been skeptical of. Partly because as a man I’ve always enjoyed the written word just as much as the visual image. Partly because it has a suspiciously neat fit with an old fashioned view of sexuality, where men are decadent pleasure seekers and women the gatekeepers of pleasure, rather than active participants. Mostly because women’s magazines are packed with sexual imagery via their advertisements. I’m pretty certain those ads don’t exist just for men in waiting rooms browsing old copies of Cosmo and Vogue.

According to this article in the Guardian I’m right to be suspicious. A study of studies has shown that men and women’s brains respond in the same way to pornography. Basically the same bits of circuitry light up, whatever your gender. The studies authors go on to say that it’s more likely social pressures and stigma are the reason for the stereotype, rather than fundamental biological differences.

Hopefully all my readers, whatever their gender, can enjoy this image. It’s by Mistress Iris, creator of a great deal of sexy imagery.

Beautiful Button Pusher

I blogged a few months back that my primary kink wasn’t a specific BDSM activity or look, but a contrast in dynamics. This image from Mistress An Li is one of the best examples I’ve seen of capturing contrasts. There’s his exposed white flesh against the black restraints and her dark outfit. The tenderness of the embrace against the severity of the humbler. The comfort of the bed against the tightness of the single arm. I picture him twisting and quivering while she strokes him gently. His moans against her murmured encouragement. It’s one of the hottest images I’ve stumbled on in a good long while.

This was from Daddy An Li’s twitter feed.

The lure of the ankle

There’s an old myth that women in Victorian Britain were so uptight that they’d dress the legs of their furniture in small skirts to save them from the lascivious gaze of men. It is of course bullshit. Unless you’ve got a very unusual kink for carved wooden furniture, nobody is getting off on piano or table legs.

I’ve also heard it said that Victorian men were inordinately attracted to the lower legs and feet of ladies, because being covered by long skirts made them all the more enticing. It’s true that something being forbidden or taboo can be a natural for kinks, but this view seems equally unlikely to me. Almost nobody wears very long skirts these days, with feet, ankles and lower legs regularly on full display. Yet despite that, foot and shoe fetishism is still a huge kinky niche. Femdom porn is packed with it. Clearly it’s just a common kink that some people have. So while I’m sure there were plenty of Victorian men who enjoyed admiring a shapely ankle, it wasn’t a function of their fashion and prudish social values, but just kinky people being kinky.

I’m not sure when or where this image was originally shot. In the original tweet I sourced it from (by @mrunderheel), it’s labelled as coming from the 1920’s (about 20 years after the Victorian era). Personally I’d suspect a scene from an early movie, but a reverse image search doesn’t give me anything to go on.

Update: Thanks to Bacchus at ErosBlog I can now attribute this to a 1925 play called The Grand Duchess and the Waiter starring Basil Rathbone. Fans of early British cinema may recognize that name, as he played one of the most famous incarnations of Sherlock Holmes in the 30’s and 40’s. So in a strange twist, if you’ve got Amazon Prime, you can actually watch the man in this image from the 20’s in several movies streamed digitally to your home. They’re pretty entertaining even today.

Never Fails

One constant of any trip I arrange is that I’ll always just miss somebody that I’d really like to have intersected with. It doesn’t matter when or where, I’m guaranteed to buy tickets, arrange hotels and then realize I should have picked slightly different dates. It’s one of those immutable rules of life, like toast landing butter side down and USB plugs never going in the first way round you try them.

For my upcoming UK trip in August, my big miss will be Mistress Natsukiss who is going to be in London doing a Club Pedestal show in September. I’ve featured Mistress Natsukiss in past posts (for example here and here). She’s someone whose style and approach to femdom has always caught my eye, but I never thought I’d ever be lucky enough to watch her in action. It turns out I was actually right about that, but only just. For anyone lucky enough to actually be in London in September, then I think it’d be a show well worth attending.

These two beautiful shots are both from the twitter feed of Mistress Natsukiss. Her main web site is here. Check out the Club Pedestal site or follow their twitter feed for event tickets.

Tender Moment

Here’s something tender and sweet to start the week. Not sure of the original source, although I suspect Japanese fan art of some kind.

I do actually have a bunch of longer posts written in my head, but I’m lacking the time to do the small but important part where thoughts get translated into keyboard impressions. Part of that time crunch is because I’m organizing a trip back to the old country, and trying to solve for all necessary planning constraints there is breaking my brain. I need to visit friends in London, spend time with family in the Midlands, attend a birthday event in Scotland and in the middle of all that, jam as much kinky play in as I think I can get away with. Some creative storytelling might be necessary in order for me to sneak away for a beating or three. It’s all a lot easier on the West coast when my relatives are 5,000 miles away.

Her Barking Dogs

This is a continuation of the public worship/service theme from yesterday’s photograph. It’s a cute shot, although in its original context I’m not sure how much D/s was actually going on. Reverse image search tells me it’s from a 2015 Japanese movie called Orange, which appears to be a mainstream teenage drama/fantasy/love story. No mention of any kinks.

A Missed Opportunity

I’m always amazed that (as far as I know) nobody has put together a site with a definitive list of kinks and fetishes. It seems so unlike the internet to miss an opportunity to combine freaky sex and an anally retentive urge to exhaustively catalog something. After all, those are two of the defining characteristics of the online world.

I’m currently deep into an PC role playing game (Divinity Original Sin 2). It’s the kind of game that has hundreds of characters, artifacts, quests and storylines. Yet, every little piece of it has been exhaustively cataloged online across multiple sites. I can bump into a wood nymph in a fictional copse, in some obscure corner of the game, and I’m no more than a web search from her backstory, details on what she’s carrying and what’s the best way to steal it. Yet, if I wanted to find out what fetishes might relate to wood and trees, I’m kind of stuck (apparently it’s xylophilia).

Last year I found a link to some scanned pages that listed 547 paraphilias. That’s a decent number, but I’m not sure how reliable they all were, and a few scanned pages with no details isn’t a convenient representation. The Bad Girls Bible has published a shorter list of 239 entries, which is at least searchable and carries descriptions along with some cross-reference links. It’s certainly an improvement, but a long way from the definitive guide you’d expect to exist. For example, while it might include obscure things like Siderodromophilia (a fetish for trains) and Nyctophilia (fetish for the night), it missed basic stuff like public humiliation and service submission. I definitely find a lot more shots like the one below than I find of people getting frisky with the back of an Amtrak.

Glee with Savannah

I had a fabulous session with Savannah Sly last night. Much slapping, spanking, pinching and hitting was involved. I particularly enjoyed the play we did with clothespins. I generally don’t find them a particularly fearsome tool, so I was pretty relaxed and unintimidated when Savannah pulled a packet out. It turns out that when you put them in just the right spots – where the flesh is taut and thin – and you grab just a narrow pinch of the skin, they really get your attention fast. It was the right kind of pain to push all my masochistic buttons, particularly when I got called a ‘good boy’ for relaxing into it.

I think at one point Savannah might have done the happy sadist dance, which put a big smile on my face. She’s definitely a very gleeful domme, as this image from her twitter feed shows. This was taken in 2009 at SXSW. It’s a wonderful happy shot, and I can say that ten years on, Savannah has lost absolutely none of that positive energy when playing. You can see a lot more of her imagery, both old and new, on her Only Fans site. If you’re not in a position to see her in person, then it’s well worth checking out.

Bad Assumptions

This Frisky article on the bad assumptions people make about kink and kinky dating made my smile, albeit in a rueful way. The anecdote that really hits home features a roommate who interprets her friends preference as a ‘dom’ to mean being a professional dominatrix, and then thinks clients are getting invited over for their games night. I guess that’s what happens when people get all their information about kink from shitty memoirs.

I struggle with the perception of kink with the friends that I’m out to. On one hand I don’t want to get into too much detail about my sessions and personal sexual practices. Describing what an awesome play piercing session I just had doesn’t really make for a comfortable dinner conversation. At the same time, I see the common representations of femdom in popular culture, and wonder how it colors their view of me. I assume they think I get off on crawling around on the floor at the end of a leash and being called a miserable maggot by a lady in head to toe leather.  Which is all perfectly fine if you’re into it, but doesn’t really look anything like how I actually play. I don’t know how to communicate the complexity and richness of D/s and kink without an uncomfortable amount of oversharing.

I’m fairly certain this vintage shot is how my non-kinky friends picture my sex life when the subject of dommes or BDSM comes up. And it’s not like I’d object to doing a scene like this, it’s just not representative.