Tag: Photograph

Annual Tradition

It’s the tenth month of the year, which can mean only one thing in Femdom social media. Lots of posts about Loctober.

I’d be fascinated to know how many submissives actually participate in it versus how many dommes advertise it. My instinct is that there’s a lot more of the latter than the former. However, regardless of the actual numbers, if you are participating then the very best of luck. May your October be full of frustration, denial and unmet urges.

This image is from Adreena Winters back in 2023. She’s clearly a fan of the tradition, recently publishing a video on it and a blogpost.

Heavy Bondage with Mistress Tess (Part 2)

Here’s the second and final post covering my recent bondage shenanigans with Mistress Tess. Much fun was had.

One of the great things about Mistress Tess’s space is the variety of furniture she has, which gives a lot of interesting options. In part 1 (here) I talked about bondage on a chair and a bench. The next set-up we did was on her poster bed, but with a firm board laid out across it. She adopted a different bondage style here – using straps and ropes in a tension with each other. Rather than being encased and strapped down I felt exposed, caught in a tight web that pulled me sideways and inward simultaneously (pic 1). I also got to wear some very sexy boots for this scene (pic 2). With the bondage in place it was time for some nipple torture, with the clamps tied off to the posts of the bed (pic 3). Needles also made an appearance, puncturing another delicate part of my anatomy (pic 4). While the needles look more fearsome, it’s the clamps that really bring the ouch.

For the final scenes I only have a couple of shots each, but I think they give a pretty good idea of what was involved.

We did a scene with a leather body bag, a plethora of straps and some rope under a great deal of tension (pic 5). One thing Mistress Tess has a knack for is taking what seems like incredibly tight bondage and making it tighter in ways you never expected. In this case that was done by taking a long rope through clips on the side of the bag and weaving it back and forth corset-like underneath the table (pic 6). As that gradually got tighter it pulled me down and out against the surface, making me almost feel like I was one with the furniture.

The final scene was on a leather recliner, featuring a beautiful leather straightjacket for my arms and a lot more padlocks (pic 7). My legs were wrapped in leather splints and the feet in leather booties that wrapped back and down, pulling the feet out straight (pic 8). The twist in the tail here was that the recliner seat was motorized, so slightly raising it from the horizontal position shifted the tension in the bondage and stretched me out.

An element of the sessions that photographs can’t capture is Mistress Tess’s skill in riffing on a fantasy scenario. She can take a button pushing topic and spin verbal flights of fancy alongside all the bondage and the pain. As someone who generally sucks at playing his part in a roleplay, I really appreciate that skill. It adds a whole new layer to the session.

My thanks go out to Mistress Tess for crafting such a fabulous set of scenes. Between her incredibly work and my scenes with the equally amazing Troy Orleans, I was a very lucky submissive.

This image of Mistress Tess is from her website. If you’re in the NYC area and interested in experiencing her creativity for yourself, then definitely check it out.

Maîtresse Blanche

I had intended to post about my sessions with Mistress Tess in NYC. However, the day has gotten away from me, it’s late and I’ve still not sorted out the images. So that’ll have to wait till tomorrow.

Instead I’m going to go with a very striking image of Maîtresse Blanche taken at her GNClinic. It’s both intensely erotic and unsettling all at the same time. While she’s very beautiful and captivating, there’s the disturbing white figure in the background and the material coating her glove. It has medical horror movie vibes and reminds me of shots like this or this from the films American Mary and Audition respectively.

I found this via a post from X13. She has posted about a series of very intense sessions in a blog post here. If you’d like to know more about the ominous background figure encased in white, check it out.

Playing with Troy Orleans

As I mentioned in past posts, I was in NYC recently and lucky enough to play with Troy Orleans. An afternoon of much bondage fun ensued. She was kind enough to snap some images of the session and I thought I’d share a few of those here.

We started in a standing set-up with a cock pillory (see photo 1). Standing bondage is always interesting as you can’t relax into it. I think it keeps the submissive more present in the moment. Troy added a leather corset, arm cuffs, mittens and an ass hook to complete the ensemble (see photo 2 and photo 3). I don’t think I’ve played with corsets before and I have to say I’m now a fan. Not only do they look sexy but they also have a subtle sense of restriction and control, both to the body and the breath.

From there we moved to another standing set-up, this time using a harness gag that attached to a metal upright (see photo 4 and photo 5). Having your head attached to a fixed very immobile point is a quite an unusual sensation. Moving your head around, even if it’s only subtle shifts, is a very natural part of communication. Taking that away, particular in combination with a gag, is a real rush. In this setup the hands were pulled back and locked to the corset (see photo 6). I love all the shiny metal elements in this image.

The next set-up was on the floor, in a really unusual arrangement (see photo 7 and photo 8). Here the arms and legs are wrapped in stiff leather bracers and chains and straps form a web around the body. As I tried to move an arm or a leg it would pull at the other limbs, with everything connecting to everything else. It made me feel a bit like a puppet on a set of strings. It’s a very different sense of control (or I guess loss of control) compared to a more regular set-up of tight, anchored down bondage. It might be a fun set-up to combine with electrical play, where involuntary muscle twitches in one limb would ripple out to other limbs.

We finished with some tightly wrapped leather (see photo 9 and photo 10). This was like a single sleeve for the legs, with an arm and wrist cuff arrangement over the chest. This is the kind of bondage that I can relax into and zone out. Although it’s hard to get too relaxed when you’ve a creative domme on the lose and dreaming up interesting ways to grab your attention (see photo below)!

It was – as is always the case with Troy – a fabulous and very enjoyable session. So happy that our paths could intersect again!

If you’re in the NYC area and you’d like to session with Troy, then her professional site is here. For those who are further afield, you can find her Bluesky here.

Perky

My kinky vacation has continued splendidly. After playing with Mistress Troy Orleans last week, this week I was lucky enough to spend time with Mistress Tess. Lots of wonderful heavy bondage was involved and many pictures taken. When I get home I’ll write up some more detailed thoughts on all the sessions and share some of the photographs.

In the meantime I want to talk about a downside for masochists that people rarely bring up – perky nipples. After years of play involving much nipple torture, I now have way more prominent nipples than I ever used to. That’s particularly true in the days immediately after a session. I went through 3 different t-shirts today trying to find one that wouldn’t remind people of George Clooney’s Batman. It’s pretty much permanent high beams for me now, which can be a disquieting sight in a 50 year old man. I might have to start wearing burlesque style pasties under my shirts.

This is a shot from my recent session with Mistress Tess. There are leather straps across my chest and then the nipple clamps are tied off to attachment points above and to the side of me. They weren’t serated clamps, but still packed a lot of ouch.

Domme Song Dummy

Taking a break from the vacation posts to link to this Harper’s article entitled Domme Songs. It’s an essay by Michael Robbins reflecting on his masochism, experiences with a domme and how it links to the state of the world.

It’s a piece that I’ve seen posted to social media several times recently, often with positive comments from people I respect. I find that odd, because I hate it. I’m not the only blogger to feel that way. Miss Pearl has written a passionate and detailed criticism of it in a post here. She’s done a far better job there than I will do here, so go read that if you want more than my cursory thoughts.

My main beef with the piece is his attempt to link masochism with the destruction of the planet and our unfolding ecological disaster. Which is nonsensical. We’re not destroying the planet because we get a thrill from doing so. We’re doing so because we want stuff, we want it now and we don’t want to think about the consequences. A point he seems to acknowledge later, but then he does nothing with this apparently contradictory thought.

People’s kinks are complex and highly personal. Not political. Someone who has both masochistic and anxious tendencies may well use the former to address the latter. Nobodies kinks exist in a vacuum. But the theater of BDSM play has bugger all to do with the disappearance of snails in Hawaii. I’m all for thinking deeply about kink and what it means to you, but this article fails to do that. There’s no honesty, just pretension and wordplay.

No idea what the source of this picture is but it seemed appropriate. One sometimes needs a hint on when to keep quiet.

Vacation Continued

I had a fabulous session with Troy Orleans this week. Much bondage was involved. I’ve a bunch of photographs to share, but haven’t yet had time to sort through them. I’ll try and do that in the coming days and put together a post on the session.

I have a session with someone else lined up for tomorrow, which required a very painful and unusual sacrifice tonight. I went to a fancy tasting menu restaurant, but ordered the nonalcoholic beverage pairing. I’ve never done that before. Sadly, I’m now at an age where I can’t drink a bunch of wine at night and play hard the next day. Getting old sucks. At least tomorrow should be fun, in a cleared headed way.

I’ll leave you with a shot of another kinky gentleman on his holidays.

Don’t have a source for this. I found it via tumblr.

Happiness

Greater Good Magazine has an interview with the sociologists Alicia M. Walker and Arielle Kuperberg on their new book – Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life.

The message of the interview and the book is the happiness BDSM can bring.

VL: What did you discover in your research that surprised you?

AW: I was just really shocked overall about how happy everybody was, which became the crux of the book. There’s never been another group of people that I’ve interviewed, for every single person that I talked to, who was just wildly happy. And this is a huge sample—96 completed interviews, but I talked to far, far more people who didn’t end up completing interviews. That is just extremely unusual.

Obviously, I’m happy that BDSM makes people happy. Far be it from me to knock such a positive message. But I do wonder if more careful qualification is needed here. They’re not necessarily talking about people who are kinky and attracted to BDSM. Nor are they even talking about people who simply practice BDSM. As far as I can tell, they’re talking about a narrower subset – the people who are part of a BDSM community. I think that means people who go to munches, attend play parties, go to community events, etc.

It makes me wonder what the data would look like if you separated kink from sociability. Are couples who practice kink purely in their private lives happier than non kinky couples? How about people who exercise their kinky side with pro-dommes? What about sociable community focused non-kinky people compared to people in the BDSM community? Is it BDSM that makes people happy or the community elements that form around it?

I guess I should read the book and find out if they tease apart that kind of data. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an image of a domme who certainly appears to be in her happy place. It’s less clear how the submissive feels about it, but I’m sure he’s smiling.

This is Miss Erika Rayne, a pro-domme based out of Bristol, UK. I sourced the image via her Bluesky feed. If you’re in the Bristol area and interested in finding some happiness of your own, her session and contact information is available on her website.

CFNM Fetish Style

In looking at this image it struck me how rarely I play with dommes in serious fetishwear. The common stereotype of a pro-domme is someone dressed head to toe like Vespa here from Reflective Desire. All tight latex, straps, heels and corsets. Yet in reality that look only gets widely used in content creation or in very specific fetish sessions. It looks fabulous but it’s just too much of a pain to put together and work with for a regular session of a couple of hours. If only these kind of outfits worked like the Futurama spray on bikini.

This is Vespa and Heavy shooting for Reflective Desire. You can see more via their site and their Bluesky feed.