The beauty of dominant women
These two shots come courtesy of the Strap-on Dreamer site. From the public homepage it doesn’t seem much different to a lot of similar sites, with talk of hot dominant girls fucking submissive guys. However, whoever is shooting the images for it does seem to have a feel for the more playful side of pegging. From the images I’ve seen floating around tumblr (and featured here in the past) they tend more to the smiles than snarls.
I found both these images on the Private Strapon tumblr.
In the last couple of posts I talked about stress and panic in BDSM scenes, particularly when playing with sensory deprivation and bondage. Dealing with just that pairing alone can be challenging for a submissive, and it gets even tougher when pain is stirred into the mix. I therefore thought in this third and final post on the topic I’d share a technique that I’ve found helps me deal with such sessions.
What I try and do when the hoods and straps go on, and I feel that first tickle of panic, is to visualize the scene from outside. I try and create a mental model of the room and imagine what a camera would capture. I picture what I must look like, where my limbs are, how they are positioned on the furniture, where the ropes are. I picture the dominant, where I think her body is in relation to mine, what equipment she has. I try to integrate what limited sensory input I have into this mental model – the feel of a cushion, the tightness of a rope, the touch of her hand.
The goal is to overcome the turning inwards that comes with panic. That overwhelming feeling that nothing else matters but to escape. Picturing the scene helps keep a coherent thought processing running. It also ground me in the reality of what is happening. I can ‘see myself’ and reassure myself that I’m in a safe place. Typically doing this mental exercise for a few minutes gets me past difficult moments and into a place where I can relax into the bondage.
A variation on this is just to picture the dominant’s face. I often do this when pain is added to sensory deprivation. It’s an easier picture to create when rational thought is hard. It also allows me to make a stronger emotional connection and to feel that I’m suffering for a purpose. That I’m suffering to please this specific and important person.
I’ll finish with a couple of beautiful faces that I’d be happy to try picturing if they felt like inflicting some pain on me.
The first of these is the actress Famke Janssen, who played Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye (in action here and here). She also played Jean Grey in the two X-Men films (the third one only exists in an alternate universe I refuse to be a part of). The second shot is Amber Heard, an actress who was in Zombieland (good), The Rum Diary (bad) and the upcoming Robert Rodriguez movie, Machete Kills (who knows). I found both images via the Dominant Ladies tumblr.
After writing yesterday’s post on panic and stress when playing, a further personal observation struck me. This was that it’s not relinquishing control that creates significant stress. I’m happy to release control of my body, and can do quite intense activities, like breathplay or suturing, with no danger of panicking. What dramatically ratchets up the stress level is when I feel that there’s an element that is out of control. Something that we accidentally dropped on the floor when control was passed between us. For example, I’ve no problem with a mistress pulling a plastic bag tight over my head. I won’t be able to breath, but I know that she knows that. A tight hood with a small breathing hole is way more stressful. I fear that the hole will get accidentally blocked, I won’t be able to fix and she won’t know about it. I worry that nobody will be in control, and that uncertainty prays on my mind.
I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way, and so within this observation also lies opportunity. If a dominant wants to increase stress, then they should increase uncertainty. Remove both control and awareness from the submissive. Disconnect them from their surroundings and sense of time. To borrow a term from the software industry, the dominant should strive to create FUD – Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.
Conversely, with a nervous submissive, the dominant should try to eliminate ambiguity. Always be very clear about the transfer of control. Keep physical contact to let the submissive know they are still present and in charge of the situation. Encourage two-way communication and try to balance the competing stresses. For example, before increasing a level of sensory deprivation, decrease the level of bondage or the amount of pain.
Given hoods are a good way to do sensory deprivation and create stress, I figure this would be a suitable image to illustrate the post. I like the contrast between his objectified anonymity and her happy smiling face. It features Mademoiselle Belle, a pro-domme based in Madrid. Originally the image comes from her blog site, but I came to it via the darksehnsucht tumblr.
Vista published a post recently over at her Sexual Destinies blog that caught me eye. She was writing about stress reactions and her feeling of panic when being blindfolded and gently restrained. I find those kind of reactions fascinating, as they can be simultaneously very intense and yet very illogical. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. There’s no right or wrong way to react to these situations. It’s just that in hindsight the strength of the reaction can seem very out of proportion to the specific stimulus that triggered it.
I’ve written about pain in the past, and commented on the fact that it’s not additive. A more intense pain in one location can distract from a mild pain elsewhere. The body has clearly evolved to direct attention to the single point that’s currently experiencing the greatest damage. Stress doesn’t seem to work that way. It is additive, each new stressful element building on the one before and pushing you closer to your panic threshold. This means that the final thing that tips someone over the edge may seem relatively minor when considered on its own.
I experienced this effect in a scene with Lydia a couple of months ago. We were doing some heavy bondage and CBT. She’d started with a rope harness, lashing my arms to my sides and pulling my legs into a frogtie. Over this she’d layered plastic wrap, carefully encasing my limbs and body, mummifying me completely from the neck to my toes. Not content with this level of restriction, she’d then wrapped my entire body in duct tape, creating a thicker encasing shell. The final touch was a duct tape gag and blindfold, rendering me mute and blind. The only thing uncovered was my cock, which she proceeded to slap and beat.
A year or two earlier we’d have never made it that far into the scene. I’d have been freaking out at the degree of restriction. But practice makes perfect and although it was intense, I was breathing through it and getting nicely spacey. Then my right hand started to get a little uncomfortable. It had moved under the wrapping and the wrist was pressing against the top of my hip bone. The absolute level of discomfort was very low, almost trivial, but it just tipped me over the edge. I started to lose perspective of where I was, my breathing became shallow and an overwhelming sense of ‘I need to deal with this now’ pushed aside me attempts to relax into the bondage. Lydia, expert that she is, spotted the change in my body instantly and removed the blindfold and gag. That was enough to bring me back, kill the panic, and let us deal with the situation.
Logically, in terms of possible things to panic about, a little muscle discomfort in my hand should have been well down the list. I was mummified in plastic wrap, had a duct taped head and someone was slapping my cock around with a pointy stick. They all sound like pretty good reasons to panic. Not a hand twinge akin to writers cramp. Yet that was the one thing that pushed me over the line. All the others had done the job of getting me close to it in the first place.
For an image I thought it’d be appropriate to run with something featuring mummification. In this case it’s a Divine Bitches shoot featuring Mistress Madeline and Kade, plus a lot of fabric wrap.
I used to worry that getting involved in real BDSM – the physical, sweaty, dear God don’t put that in my….oooohhh! – kind, would spoil the fantasy. I enjoyed my rich and somewhat warped fantasy life, and didn’t want to discover that everything my fevered imagination created was really about as much fun as getting hit by a flying brick, and then discovering there’s a courts summons wrapped around it.
Fortunately the reality turned out to be a lot better than the fantasy and actually gave my internal porn producer a whole new set of scripts to work with. However, just now and again I find myself over analyzing an image that catches my eye. For example, I like this shot from the TopGrl site a lot. It’s got elements of bondage, objectification and worship all rolled in together. But now I’ve done suspension scenes I can’t help thinking about how comfortable (or not) the rope harness might be. How long it took to set-up the shot and get all the knots right. How much the submissives neck might ache. It doesn’t spoil the shots for me, but occasionally it does make me second guess them.
All that said, my imagination still keeps itself pretty busy. In this case it’s picturing a second domme at the other end with a cane. Cunnilingus mixed with screams of pain sounds like a wonderful combination.
I found this on the blouxsterville tumblr.
I love the moments as I drive back from a session. I almost always play late, so it’s often near midnight when I’m returning home. The city is lit-up with the neon of bars and the strings of streetlights. I’m floating along in my little cocoon of endorphins and adrenalin, wrapped in leather and metal, enjoying each blip of power as I navigate the corridor of signals and lights. I’ll often drive further than I have to, extending my route to sustain the moment. There’s a thrill to looking out at other people, silently enjoying themselves behind the windows of bars and restaurants. A sense of shared pleasure and also my secret pleasure.
I always play something on the stereo during these drives, and it’s always something very approachable. I don’t want difficult, complex or challenging. Emotional, simple and perhaps a touch cliched works just fine. My current favorite is U2’s With or Without You. It’s got a very hooky bass line, great guitar parts and lyrics which are actually pretty appropriate in places.
My hands are tied, my body bruised
She got me with nothing to win
And nothing else to lose
It works wonderfully when I’m drifting along feeling emotional and buzzed after a session.
Picking an image for this post was a little tricky. I considered going with this, which is appropriate in the use of the car, but a crash doesn’t exactly capture the mood I’m tying to portray. So instead I’ll take my cue from the U2 lyric. His hands are tied, and if he’s not bruised yet, it may well be in his future.
I found both images on the excellent Femdom Style Counsel tumblr.
I’m intrigued by this shot, mainly because I’ve absolutely no idea what’s going on. He’s acting like a towel rail, yet staring up as if he’s just spotted a large insect scuttling across the ceiling in his direction. She looks like she wants to give him more laundry to hold, yet I can’t see the impromptu towel rail taking that extra load and he’s making no effort to reach out. Is it forniphilia? CFNM? Domestic service? Art? A reverse image search led me to this blog post, which left me none the wiser (partly because the utterly retarded Google translation service can’t deal with Google’s own adult warning page on blogspot). I kind of like the image just for its strangeness alone.
I originally came across it on the Femdom Core tumblr.
I’ve done a little site maintenance work. Hopefully there will be at least a few links of interest here for people.
To the Femdom Image page I’ve added:
To the BDSM Equipment page I’ve added:
Finally, to blogroll on the right and to the Blogs page I’ve added:
The image below is of Mistress Eleise de Lacy, whose blog has been added to the pro-domme section of my blogroll. It’s by the artist Ariel Belle and was featured in Sinical magazine. I’m a sucker for vintage re-creations that play with time, fashion and cultural eras as this shot does. Alternatively, if you prefer a more modern look, I was also tempted to feature this image and this image. I can’t imagine there are too many submissive guys who wouldn’t appreciate that pair of images. Feel free to browse in the direction of the Femme Fatale Films site if you’d like to see more.
After all my blather in the last two posts, here’s something simple and to the point. A chair, a hairbrush and a happy smiling lady waiting for her victim. That is all.
I found this on the Strict Women tumblr. It’s originally from the Yes Ma’am site.
This is a continuation of yesterday’s post where I described my one, and so far only, really bad pro-domme session. I left off at the point where I was naked, fastened to an X-frame and trying to reason with an angry and somewhat irrational pro-domme. For emotional masochists this might represent an interesting predicament, but for me it had all the appeal of violent stomach cramps. While stuck in an elevator. With a deranged hobo.
She had continued to complain and moan while I shook some life back into my tingling fingers. When I was done she cuffed my hands back above my head, and asked what I thought was the scariest corporal punishment implement. That struck me as an odd question. All of them can be pretty fearsome if applied with enough force, but scary isn’t a word I associate with inanimate objects. In the end I picked the cane as having the greatest potential for mayhem. She proceeded to give me a heavy beating with one while angrily criticizing my attitude and its effect on ‘her’ session. It wasn’t by any means the severest caning I’ve had, but it was the most unpleasant. I associate negative emotions like anger or frustration with a lack of self-control, a weakness that has nothing to do with dominance. It felt like she was using the beating to deal with her temper and irrational response, not because she’d made a conscious decision that it was the right thing for our session dynamic.
I realize that some of you are probably reading this and wondering what the big deal is. After all, aren’t I there to be dominated? Isn’t being beaten to satisfy her part of the package? For some submissives this may be true, but personally I only enjoy playing in a mutually positive way. I get off on the domme’s pleasure in hurting and controlling me. Insults or humiliation push me straight out of submissive mode and straight into ‘Who the hell do you think you are?” mode. I want to feel that the domme and I are working as partners to create something together. My submission is a gift within that context.
After the caning the session shifted back into a more normal, if slightly strained, atmosphere. I didn’t bring the issue up when we’d finished and were making smalltalk, because I still hadn’t processed it properly. I had a lot of adrenalin and endorphins swirling around, and emotionally I wasn’t really sure where I was. It took me some days to get my head around it, and during that time I felt horrible. Normally a session leaves me on a big high, and I then have a mild sense of well-being that lasts for days. I never get the post-session crash that some people experience. In this case all those usual positive feelings soured on me, and I had a low grade depression for over a week. I’d even get a little tearful when I’d think about the scene. It was a really strong and quite strange reaction.
On a more positive note, it was at least a learning experience. For anyone out there who might themselves in a similar situation, here’s what I ended up taking away from it:
I’ll also re-emphasize what I said in my previous post – this session was an aberration. I’ve sessioned a lot over the last few years with several different dommes, and only once had this kind of problem. If you’re thinking of moving from the fantasy to the reality of BDSM, please don’t let this post stop you. Alternatively, for those already playing, then I found this post and this followup by Clarisse Thorn had interesting suggestions for dealing with S&M play gone wrong. Her comments are more focused around non-professional relationships, where the option to simply stop seeing someone (as I did) isn’t the default.
For an illustrative image I though I’d go with something that looked like an aftercare situation. This beautiful shot is by the photographer Jan Durina.
