Medical – Page 5 – Femdom Resource

For Science!

The io9 site recently published an article discussing four fascinating papers on the subject of measuring pain. The studies in question were all done back in the 1940’s with the goal of coming up with a reliable and reproducible method for quantifying levels of pain. The scanned versions of papers can be read online: Paper 1 (1940), Paper 2 (1947), Paper 3 (1947) and Paper 4 (1948). They’re fairly readable and easy to understand, assuming you having a grounding in basic maths and science.

Pain in itself is a curious topic, as it’s such a uniquely subjective experience. We normally build understanding by shared references. Yet, if I tell someone my back hurts, how do we establish a common reference point? With external stimulus, like color or sound, we can measure the spectrum or the loudness irrespective of a person. Something like taste or smell is a little more complex, but there’s at least an external object (the food itself) to breakdown and analyze. It’s also possible in those cases to construct a common language from more primitive elements (sweet, bitter, salt, etc.) Just look at wine tasting notes for an example of that approach in action. But with pain? How do you measure something that’s completely internal, and can manifest at any point in the body, to a huge range of stimulus, or sometimes to no apparent stimulus at all?

The scientists behind these papers tackled the problem by proposing a scale for measuring pain, with a unit called the dol. They created it using controlled doses of heat on volunteers, and measuring when they could detect a difference between the heat intensity levels. They discovered that on average people could distinguish 21 levels of different intensity between nothing and maximum pain. This maximum wasn’t some safety limit set by the scientists. It turns out that there’s an upper limit on pain, a maximum beyond which increased intensity isn’t detected as greater pain. Working with this 0 to 21 detectable level changes, they assigned 1 dol =equals 2 levels, and created a 0 to 10.5 pain scale.

There’s all sorts of interesting bits of data in the papers. For example, mood and fatigue made no difference to the perception of pain, but gripping an iron bar tightly or hearing a very loud sound did. That fits the common intuition that being distracted from pain lessens it. They also showed that pain did not sum over an area. In other words, the intensity of the pain was purely related to the intensity of the heat energy applied, not the size of the area it was applied to. Initially that seems a little count-intuitive, but it does fit to the idea that being distracted can help reduce pain. One thing that can distract you is a different pain. That wouldn’t be true if pain was additive.

The most interesting finding is one that I think the io9 article misunderstands, or at least misrepresents. It says…

The study’s authors concluded that 8 dols of pain equaled four successive two dol experiences. This arithmetic aspect of the dol contrasted existing beliefs of the subjective nature of pain.

That seems to suggest some sort of progression in time, where you can reach very high pain levels by repeatedly applying a low pain stimulus. That’s not what the study found. What they discovered was that the scale is linear. So the increase in intensity between 1 and 2 dols, is perceived as the same increase in intensity when moving from 8 to 9 dols. I think most people would think of a pain scale like the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes. That’s a log scale, and so going from a magnitude 4 to 5 earthquake is basically nothing, where going from a magnitude 7 to 8 is huge. Similarly, you might expect that a 1 to 2 change in pain isn’t much, where going from 8 to 9 is very scary, but it’s actually perceived as the same change in intensity. This also means that the standard 0 to 10 scale doctors often use, where 0 is no pain and 10 is worst pain you can imagine, actually makes sense. There is an upper bound to pain and the scale between zero and that maximum value is a simple linear one.

The io9 article has a sense of ‘Wow, look what these crazy scientists used to be able to get away with.’ To me it didn’t seem that bad. As a masochist I may have a distorted view on this, but it’s only temporary pain. I suspect if they’d hired an attractive female doctor with an authoritative attitude to perform the tests, as in this artwork by Waldo, then they’d have been inundated with volunteers. Although that might have thrown their experimental results off. They claimed mood didn’t make a difference, but I doubt they also considered or induced sexual arousal.

Searching for a little inspiration

The last few days have found me hunting through my archives of femdom art and erotic fiction in search of a little creative inspiration. I’m trying to carve out time to do some more femdom fiction writing, which for me is an enjoyable but slow process. Normally I just start bashing away at whatever random theme comes to mind, typically without any prepared plan or structure. Occasionally that turns into something worth publishing, but more often than not it bogs down and ends up being left to rot in my unfinished ideas folder. This time I’m trying to be a little more scientific. I’ve been analyzing some of my favorite authors (e.g. Tyjord, drkfetyshnyghts and Anne Gray) to see what parts of their stories really push my buttons. It has been interesting and educational to try and deconstruct why certain passages really grab me. For example, I liked this a lot.

Jason panicked as he felt the tugging on the front of his collar as Victoria pulled the chain through the ring on the ceiling. For a moment he thought they were going to hang him as he choked from both the gag and the pressure on his collar.

Seeing the distress in his eyes, Kristi leaned over his ear and whispered to him, “you can ease off the pressure a bit if you lift yourself up on your toes.” Gratefully he did so, putting all of his weight on the rubber encased balls of his feet. Immediately, Victoria took up the slack in the chain and hooked the taught metal to another ring in the wall near her. Kristi then grabbed another strap and buckled it around his newly exposed instep.
From ‘Jason’s Vacation’ by Tyjord

The apparent concern, the whispered words of apparent comfort and advice, and then the cruel betrayal. That’s hot.

I’m thinking of setting a story inside a medical establishment, so I’ve been browsing artwork along those lines. The piece below is one that particularly grabbed me. I know from personal experience that a little Icy Hot or VapoRub can be pretty painful when applied to delicate tissues. I can’t imagine what it’d be like when slathered on liberally with a painters brush.

It’s not signed but from the style I believe it’s from Tink2001. His work has featured here in the past (for example here, here and here). He has a personal site with a small collection of images located here.

On an entertaining side note I tried putting this into Google’s image search to see what it would come back with. That’s often a good way to find other sites that have featured particular artists. In this case it came back with “Best guess for this image: 3d animal porn”. Not exactly what I was hoping for.

Healthcare, British style with Lady Anna

A few weeks ago Lady Anna emailed me to ask if I’d be interested in reviewing her site – The Anna List Medical Fetish Clinic. She’d give me free access for a month and in return I’d write an honest review on what I found there. Obviously my first thoughts were around the ethical dilemma this posed. The best reviewers – the Michelin inspectors, the New York Times correspondents – never accept any kind of gratis service. They pay as they go. Don’t my readers deserve the same kind of journalistic integrity? My second, third and fourth thoughts were “Woohoo! Free kinky porn!”. After wrestling with these complex issues for at least 7 or 8 seconds, I rationalized that my readers deserve an honest appraisal of the kinky content that’s out there, whatever the risk to myself. I shouldn’t be worrying about the cost to my public image when I have a higher duty to look at all this porn for my readers. And if you don’t like that rationalization, I have others.

Immediately after emailing her to accept I was struck by another troubling thought. What if the material sucks? It’s one thing to comment on random images I stumble across on the web, but quite another to write my typical nonsense when the creative person in question is staring over my shoulder. Fortunately for me, and other kinky porn connoisseurs out there, it definitely doesn’t suck. I think she’s managed to capture on video a really good sense of some very compelling D/s sessions.

I guess I should start with the technical stuff first. She has four main video sections – dental, medical, rubber and operating. There’s also a collection of audio only files and an archive with older footage that’s less overtly medical. Most films are 10 to 20 minutes in length, and are shot in high def with solid camerawork. It’s not simply a static camera that captures everything from a single wide angle viewpoint as I’ve seen elsewhere. There are around 60 films, so far mostly in the medical and rubber clinic sections, and a new film is added each week. As should be obvious from her facilities page, she has a very well equipped set-up, with one of the best collections of medical equipment that I’ve seen. It gets used to for a lot of breathplay, anaesthetic roleplay and immobilizing bondage.

When it comes to the actual sessions themselves, her style is very cool, calm and collected. There’s no ice queen or snarling mistress here, just a matter of fact, it’s for your own good style of domination. There’s a genuine feel to it, which seems a weird thing to say given the heavy medical trappings. After all, you’re clearly not watching genuine medical procedures. Yet there’s a real sense of connection and trust between Lady Anna and her patients. This isn’t a couple of fetish models who just met an hour or so before a scripted scene. She also has a nice style of communication, chatting to the patient, but adding commentary for the viewer in the process.

Sometimes in professional porn it feels like you’re watching a circus act, a kinky cirque du soleil. The submissives are super-subs, pushed through a rapid sequence of extreme and amazing acts. They might express pain, but it’s rare to get a genuine sense of fear or a difficult limit being flirted with. In contrast both Lady Anna and her patients come across as a lot more human. There’s a feeling that the submissive is being challenged and the D/s dynamic between them explored. It’s not fast cutting, high paced material, but it does capture more of the feel of a real session.

Downsides? There’s really nothing that shouldn’t be obvious from the site itself. Obviously it’s just Lady Anna playing with her submissives in a medical fetish context. So if you’re looking for a wide variety of skinny models wearing traditional pro-domme gear then you’re liable to be disappointed. And while there’s less pure medical roleplay than you might expect, the setting is clearly a clinical one. If medical type activities doesn’t appeal, or you’re looking for lots of non-medical style play (e.g. corporal, cuckolding, strap-on, etc.), then I’d look elsewhere. But if the preview material is appealing to you, then I can’t think of any reason not to give it a shot.

Medical Artwork

In the last few days, as I’ve hunted around for interesting medical style femdom images, I’ve been surprised by the numerical differences between photographs and artwork. There’s a relatively limited amount of interesting medical photographs. The English Mansion has a pretty extensive clinic section and there are some dommes that specialize in medical shots (like Lady Anna’s clips), but it’s generally not a common theme. In contrast it seems to be a very popular subject for artists. Just looking through my Femdom Artwork section, artists such as Augustine, Dmitrys, Namio Harukawa, Rubex, Sardax, Kami Tora, Vernice61 and Waldo have all done non-trivial amounts of medical themed work.

I suspect that’s partly because suitable equipped spaces are hard to find, where dungeon and domestic interiors are a dime a dozen. I also suspect it’s something to do with balancing the harder reality a photograph presents to the viewer. A domme in a Halloween style nurses uniform and a toy stethoscope just looks kind of silly. But a fully equipped and realistic medical space (like this German one) is probably too much for all but the most hardcore medical fetishist. Balancing between those two seems difficult. I’d guess a lot of submissives want to take some of the themes of control, invasion of personal space and helplessness from medical procedures but recast them slightly. This kind of fantasy projection seems easier in artwork, where more is left to the viewers imagination.

Obviously to illustrate this I needed a medically themed image that illustrates this flexibility of fantasy. So here’s something from the obscure artist known as German. There’s a lot going on, with a feminized young man, some oral worship and a nurse with an enema in progress.

I found this image on a new site dedicated to this artists work that someone was kind enough to email me. If you like this image then I’d suggest taking a look at the site, as there’s a huge number of similar drawings there. Here’s another one from there that I particularly liked.

Inspecting the goods

I’m still suffering from some random flu bug, so I’m going to use that as an excuse to continue the nurse/medical theme.

This shot is a little more serious than the dominatrixy over-the-top latex uniforms often seen for medical play. She looks like a woman with a plan. If he’s lucky a sperm sample is somewhere in his future. Although if she follows that by reaching for a felt pen and marking dotted cut lines then his luck will have taken a decided turn for the worse.

I found this on the Felm Cyber tumblr.

Tis but a scratch

Lady Annisa has an interesting new post up that prompted a little reflection and thought on my part.

I enjoyed the post for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the temporary role reversal, with the medically inclined domme ending up in the local A&E unit is an unusual ending to a session! Obviously getting gashed on the scalp isn’t exactly amusing, but the picture she paints of the scene with the fresh faced registrar certainly is. Secondly, I also appreciated it as an illustration of just how into a scene a domme, and specifically a pro-domme, can get. Here’s someone so into playing with a particular submissive they don’t even notice a suture worthy head wound. It’s not until the blood starts splattering around that they figure out what’s going on.

There is a school of thought, often expressed by lifestyle female dominants, that a pro-domme can never be a real domme. She’s just doing a job. She’s being paid, so she’s not really in control. It’s all a bunch of smoke and mirrors, and really she’s bored/submissive/exploited/powerless.

Possessors of this kind of viewpoint always bemuses me, as it seems so incredibly simple minded. It’s as if they can’t deal with multiple simultaneous concepts. It can both be a job and enjoyable. A session can involve financial exchange without precluding power exchange. She can offer a service without automatically giving up control of the situation, or how, when and who can experience it. People can be friends and have intense meaningful interactions whilst still retaining a professional relationship.

Personally if I’m doing something I don’t enjoy, then any minor issue turns into a distraction I’ll make use of. Forget blood gushing head wounds. I’ll take a stubbed toe or a tight muscle as a reason to give-up and go do something else. In contrast when I’m immersed in a situation then a small bomb blast may go unnoticed. As Lady Annisa says…

That’s what happens when you’re enjoying yourself, you just don’t notice the pain or you process it differently

Clearly, while she might have been getting paid for her time, she was also very much enjoying herself.

For an image to illustrate this post my thoughts turned to medical play and then in turn to Kami Tora. He’s always a good source for images of sadistic medical torments.

Manscaping with Cybill Troy

Here’s a fun sequence of action shots. They feature nurse Cybill B Troy very kindly helping out a gentleman with his personal grooming. Judging from the redness on his chest and armpits it’s clear this has been a fairly major work of topiary. I know there a different waxing styles, perhaps they should call this one the Full Cybill?

I’ve never suffered this extent of body hair removal, but I did have a fairly painful experience involving duct tape. The mistress (Lady Lydia) had wrapped me in it prior to some heavy CBT and breathplay. Two or so hours later I’m feeling very spacey and happy at the ‘end’ of the session. Then the duct tape starts coming off, together with large chunks of hair from my arms and legs. It’s one thing getting tortured when you’re braced and ready for it. Quite another when you’re relaxed and unwound, expecting at any moment to rejoin the real world. Lydia was of course delighted by this particular turn of events and laughed throughout the removal.

The image comes from this set on the Den of Iniquity site. There’s also a video in their members section to go with it. If you’re not a fan of edge play you may want to click carefully, the image set contains a lot of needle shots and a little blood.

As a complete aside, I just noticed that the wikipedia page on waxing has this comment on the Brazilian – “some believe can become more unpleasant if receiving cunnilingus from a bearded partner.” How random is that? It even has multiple footnotes to support the comment. Weird. Still, if you’re a lady with a bearded partner and you’re contemplating a Brazilian, now you know. Either everyone’s hair has to go, or it all has to stay.

Adding a little realism to medical play

I had an interesting day today, as it featured a minor medical procedure. My back has been giving me grief for a few months now, although nothing painful enough to stop me working or playing. Its just been an ongoing discomfort that’s more annoying than anything else. Physical therapy helped but didn’t fix it, so today I went for a steroid shot into the spine. It’s no big deal, I was in and out in a couple of hours, but it did involve multiple injections, fitting an IV tap into my arm and wearing a silly backless hospital gown. Not to mention being bossed around by multiple nurses (all female) and a doctor (also female) in the hospital surgical unit.

This was the first time I’ve been involved in any kind of medical treatment in years, and the first time I’ve had real injections since I got physically involved in kink. In the last few years I’ve had hundreds of needles shoved into all sorts of tender spots, and documented a few of them on this blog (as listed in this post). I was therefore pretty blasé beforehand about the whole thing. Unfortunately the BDSM experience turned out to be less helpful than I thought. Without the erotic subtext it’s a very different experience. And the added uncertainty around the success (or not) of the whole thing doesn’t help matters. Nothing was particularly painful, but the discomfort level was still how I remember it from before kink.

I did consider trying to fantasize an erotic component to make use of my personal pain relief mechanism. After all my doctor is intelligent, attractive and forceful. Those are all very appealing qualities. Unfortunately those skimpy hospital gowns don’t leave much to the imagination. It seemed like it might be a fine line to walk between just enough fantasy to help out but not so much so as to cause a major talking point for the nurses afterwards. I didn’t fancy trying to explain that I was temporarily immobilized on the surgical table because I’d been imagining the anesthesiologist knocking me out by sitting on my face. I have to think that sexually harassing people in charge of injecting things into your spine is not a good survival trait.

Anyway, in honor of my little excursion today, here’s some medical femdom. A disturbing but strangely attractive image.

I found this on The Room of a Domme blog (Japanese language).

Once upon a time…

I don’t feature a lot of femdom fiction or erotic writing in my daily posts. There are a couple of practical reasons for that. A few pages of text is less visually appealing than an image, and I like my front page to be aesthetically interesting. There’s also considerable more investment needed on the part of the reader. If someone doesn’t like one of the images I post they can quickly move on. Reading a story is a much greater time sink.

Despite that I think I should really make more of an effort to highlight good erotic writing. It’s actually my porn of preference, and I’m sure I spend longer browsing fiction sites than I do photographic or video alternatives. Even as a teenager I enjoyed the letters and fiction over the images in the tattered porn magazines we’d pass around at school. My friends always used to think that was kind of weird, so I guess nothing much has changed there.

My fiction pages lists a whole bunch of resources for finding good writing. Author’s like Anne Gray, drkfetyshnyghts, Abe Froman and Musker have produced some really excellent work. I’ve even given it a shot myself, albeit with mixed results.

One author I’ve particularly enjoyed recently is Tyjord. His writing can be a little extreme, featuring lots of enemas, intense predicament bondage, watersports and humilation. There’s also older sister with younger brother interactions, which some people might find off-putting. But if you’re like me, and enjoy your femdom fiction a little edgy, featuring over-the-top situations, he’s definitely worth investing some reading time in. For a gentle introduction I’d start with ‘A place to stay‘, or alternatively head for ‘Christopher’s Predicament‘ to go straight into the more extreme stuff.

Picking an artist to accompany Tyjord’s work is a on-brainer. Augustine’s art fits it perfectly. I believe they’ve already collaborated a few times together, and I’d love to see what they could do in a longer joint work.

drkfetyshnyghts

Added Rubex to Femdom Artwork

Fans of medical torments, nurses and breathplay may appreciate the artwork of Rubex. He’s featured a couple of times in posts in the past here and here (although sadly the femdom-wiki gallery referenced has since vanished).

Incidentally, if anyone has suggestions for artists I should add to my femdom artwork pages then feel free to leave a suitable comment or email me. No guarantees I’ll feature them, but I’m always on the look out for interesting femdom artwork and artists to promote.