Minion required

I’ve spent the evening packing for my upcoming New York trip. Not a fun time. Traveling to LA or Vegas is easy. Neither the climate nor the restaurants demand any sort of significant planning in the wardrobe department. Throw a few short sleeved shirts and a sports coat in a carry-on and you’re good to go. Manhattan in January is quite a different packing proposition.

What I really need is a minion to take care of it. I think I’d suck as a dominant, but having a minion seems like it should be easier to deal with. You never see evil masterminds worrying if their minions are having their needs met. Or doing any aftercare post massacre. Or blackmailing world leaders just because their minions always had a thing for financial domination. They just stick them in a colored jumpsuit and tell them to guard the hollowed out volcano. Can we not create a D/s/m hierarchy for lazy submissives like myself?

While I return to jumping up and down on my case, I’ll leave you with a shot of someone being looked after appropriately. I’ll bet she doesn’t have to worry about shlepping her overstuffed carry-on bag around icy streets.

Submissive caring for shoes of dominant

I found this on the Domina Desires tumblr. It’s originally by Kajali on deviant art, and is entitled Venus In Furs I.

Awards season

As part of writing this post on the Adult Video News (AVN) awards, I took a look at what had won this year. The general idea of giving awards to specific movies strikes me as an anachronism. Who buys porn DVDs these days? However, I figured the specific performers and genres recognized might be interesting. I was very surprised to discover how little attention BDSM and fetish got. There were just three awards that looked vaguely relevant – Best BDSM release, best femdom strap-on release and best foot/leg fetish release. This is out of a total of more than 100 other awards.

I’ve no idea if the titles that won were actually any good. Rubber Bordello looks like it might be fun, the other two (His Booty Is My Duty 2 and Asphyxia Heels The World) look like average porn movies with just passing nods to their supposed audience. But regardless of the selections, I was shocked there was so little recognition of BDSM. They didn’t even distinguish between maledom and femdom. There are no awards for top performing domme, or best submissive, or best rigger, or really anything interesting. What a missed opportunity.

I actually attended the awards ceremony back in 2003. I can’t say I recommend the experience. It’s fun to dress up and walk the red carpet, but the awards themselves are very dull. Amazingly, they’re not allowed to actually show explicit clips, so you end up with a lot of thank you speeches accompanied by Cinemax style edited soft porn. Getting to see Larry Flynt give the hall of fame speech and sitting next to Rocco Siffredi in the bar afterwards were the highlights. Of course if you do it with someone like Mistress T then you might be in for a slightly more exciting time (Updated: You can see Mistress T & friends in her latest AVN experiences here).

Kink is one of the biggest BDSM producers these days, but the only thing they won for was ‘Best Alternative Website’, whatever that means. I’ll leave you with a shot from their Divine Bitches site featuring Maitresse Madeline getting alternative on Robert Axel’s ass.

Maitress Madeline and Robert Axel

What would your mother say

Via Spanking Blog comes an entertaining story of how an indiscreet spanking led to an awkward parental conversation. Followed by an even more awkward awakening of long dormant parental kink. I’m not sure what would embarrass me more. My parents finding out about my kinks, or me discovering theirs.

It actually puts me in mind of a conversation I’ve had about this topic with a close friend of mine. She knows about my kinky preferences and has raised the question of what I share with my family. She has a young daughter and hates the thought the she might grow up concealing a huge part of her identity. I understand that. If something’s important to their child it’s important to the parent. At the same time I can’t begin to imagine having that kind of conversation with my parents. The endless analysis of my childhood and exactly where they went wrong would drive me insane. Nobody needs to hear how their toilet training simply must be related to their interest in S&M. Amateur psychology, parental guilt and embarrassing sexual details might make great subjects for a Woody Allen film, but I don’t need it whenever my family are in town.

At least the original story gives me a chance to feature an entertaining spanking themed shot. I’m not sure if this is a plea for mercy or a prayer for punishment. Either way I suspect this ends with that hairbrush getting deployed at speed.

Spanking Prayer

I found this on the Led Marriage and Chastity (aka Carolus666) tumblr. It’s originally from Lina’s House of Discipline.

Return of a blog

I was happy to recently discover that Orlando over at In Scarlet Ink had started blogging again. He’s one of the more literate and thoughtful male submissive bloggers I’ve come across. His blog went through a period of being password protected, and then went on a long hiatus while his partner dealt with a major health issue, but it seem he’s back. If you’ve not read him before a few good background posts might be how he and his partner Murre got together (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) and his recent return post after the blogging blackout.

He also has a tumblr with a varied collection of images on it. I’ll leave you one he posted based on a theme of ‘inspections’. His comment with the image seemed pretty spot on – “O god she has a clipboard.  That can’t be good.”

Inspection

The image is originally from the Adventures in CFNM site.

Making a dramatic entrance

Making a dramatic entrance by descending slowly down a staircase is a classic movie and television trope. However, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one quite like this before. She certainly seems quite pleased by what she’s got to show us. As entrances go, she looks wonderful, but she really needs a more impressive staircase to complement her.

Staircase entrance

I found this on the Women rule, boys drool (aka willie2serve) tumblr.

Dear Abby

Pauline Phillips, more commonly known as the columnist Dear Abby, died on Wednesday. You can read her NY Times obituary here. Not having grown up in the US, she wasn’t a big part of my cultural background, but I’d certainly seen and enjoyed her writing.

Reading advice columns is always a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. It’s fun to either feel smug at coming to the same conclusion as the columnist or indignant at how foolish their advice is. Not to mention the ‘sightseeing at the asylum’ element of occasionally encountering a nutty letter from a bewildered person in a strange situation. Dan Savage, writing in his tribute to Dear Abby, quoted what is by far the best and most concise response I’ve ever seen in an advice column.

Dear Abby: Two men who claim to be father and adopted son just bought an old mansion across the street and fixed it up. We notice a very suspicious mixture of company coming and going at all hours—blacks, whites, Orientals, women who look like men and men who look like women. This has always been considered one of the finest sections of San Francisco, and these weirdos are giving it a bad name. How can we improve the neighborhood? — Nob Hill Residents

Dear Residents: You could move.

In tribute to those women who dress like men and vice-versa, here’s an entertaining image I found on the sex is not the enemy tumblr. Personally I always appreciate a woman in a sharp suit.

Woman And Man

I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution for the image.

100% goodness

Normally when I pick an image to post it’s because there are one or two interesting details that call out to me. There’s an expression I like, or a cool bit of equipment or a nicely captured emotion. It’s rare that I love everything about an image. This shot is one of those exceptions.

I love the cool inverted suspension with the colored ropes. I love the fact the women is a light sundress rather than dommey leather. The fact she’s a cutey in glasses is an added bonus. I love the books and shelves in the background. It’s not a bleak industrial space or a faux-stone clad dungeon. Most of all I love the mixture of emotions and sense of connection between them. There’s both playfulness and seriousness to it. She looks like she’s caressing his head in one hand, but ready to squeeze him with the other hand.

Inverted Suspension

I found this on Thumper’s Portfolio. Despite hunting with a reverse image search, I couldn’t track down a source for the image. If anyone know’s who shot, published or starred in this, then please let me know via a comment.

Dine and Domme tour: East coast edition.

I’ve written in the past about trips I’ve done down the West coast (for example here and here). Combining food and kink (although not necessarily at the same time) is my idea of a great vacation. It has always been a goal to replicate the idea on the East coast, and I’m happy to say that at the end of this month I’m finally getting chance to do so. I’ll be spending a week in Manhattan, doing a little shopping, a lot of fine dining and interspersing them both with some deviant kinky behavior.

The main problem planning this kind of trip is a surfeit of choice. There are just so many great dommes in the NYC area. However, there is one domme that I’ve heard so many good things about that it ultimately made my decision an easy one – Miss Troy Orleans. Fortunately she had time available on her calendar for me, and I’m looking forward to two separate sessions with her. I’m sure we’ll have a lot of fun together.

Ironically scheduling time with professional sadists turns out to be a far more pleasant process than scheduling time with organizations designed to pamper and indulge their guests. And by that I’m talking about NYC restaurants. Most of them make the DMV look like a role model for easy and efficient service. Fortunately, after a lot of listening to call waiting muzac and some mad-ninja open table skills, I snagged reservations at (amongst others) Le Bernardin, Per SeEleven Madison Park, Kyo Ya and WD-50. I look forward to blogging in a few weeks about how it all works out.

NYC

This image of a rather elegant lady admiring the New York skyline comes courtesy of the he stoops to worship (aka devoted sub) tumblr.

Printing your own toys

One of the big new things in the techy world is 3D printing. This works pretty much exactly as it sounds. You plug the printer into your computer, and rather than an image it prints out a three dimensional shape. They’ve been around for years, but have only recently dropped into the consumer price range. They’re still not cheap, but they’re now the price of a high-end television rather than a high-end automobile.

It’s a rule of the universe that any new technology will always get adopted in some way for sex. There are obviously a lot of toy possibilities with this kind of creative tool, particularly given its ability to create highly customized one off shapes. As you’d expect, companies are springing up to target this niche. Insertable toys are tricky at present, as resolution and texture issues need to be resolved. But I’d think that BDSM toys would a great area to target, with all sorts of imaginative torture and constraint options possible.

So far the only example of printable BDSM toys I’ve found is this collar and cuff combination. It’s very crude, but you can definitely see the possibilities it opens up. Starting with that as a template, it’d be interesting to personalize it by adding your own patterns and designs into the basic shape. You could even create special collars for particular events, anniversaries or certain types of play sessions. If you could imagine it, you could create it.

I’ll leave you with a shot of someone wearing a slightly more conventional collar arrangement courtesy of Mistress Alex in NYC.

Mistress Alex

I found this on the Musing of a Mistress tumblr.

The tragic destruction of the environment

It’s a sad and familiar story. A beautiful natural environment is ripped up and defoliated, resulting in the loss of the native species and an ecosystem out of balance. However, in this particular case, I’m not sure the World Wildlife Fund is going to be able to muster a great deal of public sympathy for the creatures under threat. Apparently pubic lice are on the decline, and the blame is being directed towards everyone hacking and slashing at their personal undergrowth. It turns out that when you wax or trim your pubic hair you destroy the lice’s natural habitation and push them onto the endangered species list. What a shame.

The women in the image below seems to be someone at the forefront of the fight against these pesky critters. Not only has she insisted on a very clean shave for him, she’s also beating the area just to ensure any still lurking around are killed. That’s a sign of a particularly caring mistress. He must be very grateful.

Beating his shaved balls

I found this on the Thoughts of a Dork tumblr.