Tag: Photograph

Just a little off the sides

I’m endlessly fascinating by why unexpected things can  elicit strong emotional reactions in people – both in the good and bad sense. I very much include myself in the target category, as even in my 40’s I’m still discovering stuff that can push my buttons in ways I didn’t expect. Normally that’s a good thing – it means there’s a fun new experience to explore – but not always.

One thing I only just discovered I had a strong negative reaction to was head shaving as part of a kinky dynamic. Isabella Sinclaire recently did a sequence of posts with the female submissive Greyh0und who’d been shaved just a few days before. From the comments a lot of people liked the look, but I personally found it very disquieting. I think because it puts me in  mind of concentration camp prisoners, and once that thought enters my head there’s no getting rid of it. I don’t make that connection with shaved heads in daily life, but there’s something about the combination with a power dynamic that pushes my internal ‘nuh huh’ button.

For those that do enjoy it, the image below is from a fun video for Charly Calderon photography. Check it out if a woman on a mission with a razor is your kind of thing.

Sniffder

I’m used to flipping past some fairly crazy kinky outfits on my tumblr and twitter feeds. This one gave me a moment of pause however. Lots of kinky equipment focuses on controlling movement, breathing, eating, sight, etc. There’s not much that targets the sense of smell. If it’s considered at all, smell is usually a second order effect from materials like leather and latex. This cuts all those out and goes straight for the natural pheromones.

Amazingly, it’s not actually from a kinky source. It’s an art/science project by James Auger focused on blind dating and predicting compatibility. It was part of an exhibit at Moma and was featured in the NY Times.

It may not have started off with a kinky slant, but I can imagine a lot of people wanting to use it that way. Particularly if modified from a two  way to one way flow.

Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spider can

This image isn’t femdom, but I liked it too much to not feature it in a post. It’s normally hard enough to get a suspension scene with a single person right, let alone get a small crowd suspended successfully and simultaneously.

It puts me in mind of a scene from a Spiderman comic, where he’s just zipped past a bunch of dimwitted henchmen, sticking them to the walls and ceiling with webbing. In the best traditions of supervillain henchmen, they’ve even all got color coordinated outfits on.

I found this image via this tweet. Based on the translation, I’m guessing it’s from a bondage workshop in Paris.

Face Torture

One of the fun things about social media is the random insights it gives you into other cultures. It’s hardly a scientific analysis, but it is entertaining from an anecdotal (and possibly highly inaccurate) perspective. For example, domme twitter accounts from Japan seem to feature way more food shots than similar Western ones. I’ve no idea if that’s typical for twitter in Japan in general or something more specific to Japanese dommes.

My other entirely random and anecdotal observation is that facial bondage and torture is bigger over there than it is here. I almost never see Western dommes offer it as an activity or post pictures of it. Yet it seems not uncommon in Japan, with awesome twitter posts like this one or the image below (from here). Typically Western dommes are very functional when it comes to the face. It’s all about covering the eyes, plugging the ears, opening/closing the mouth or locking the whole thing away. I see plenty of that in Japanese BDSM as well, but they also seem to enjoy screwing around with the face a lot more. Distorting it, hurting it and exposing it in unusual ways. It doesn’t particularly appeal to my kinky side, but it does make me curious as to the reasons behind it (assuming my anecdotal observation isn’t complete bullshit).

Suspended Target

A few posts back I was musing on scenes where the level of pain is radically different from the visual the scene presents. This is the exact opposite of that. The scene looks awesome. I love the suspended bondage, the minimalism of the space and the dynamism of the whip. Yet I’m sure it also hurts like hell. The bondage alone looks challenging. Adding the sting of a single tail against taut flesh is particularly cruel.

This is from twitter feed of Mistress Iris. However, I believe that’s Mistress Rika on the other end of the whip.

Silly Lists

The KinkD people have played one of the standard cards that kink related companies use to get free PR, releasing a list of top kinky US cities based on their user data. Given this is such a common gimmick, you think they’d put some effort into crunching the numbers to produce an interesting story, but no such luck.

The top 3 cities for the largest numbers of kinky people (or at least KinkD subscribers) are NYC, LA and Chicago. Unsurprisingly, if you look at the top US cities by population, the top 3 are … wait for it … NYC, LA and Chicago. Obviously they’ll have the most the kinky people. They’ve got the most everything.

Really the story here shouldn’t whats good, but what places suck to live in if you’re kinky. Phoenix, San Antonio, Dallas and San Jose are all in the top 10 most populous US cities, but despite their numbers, don’t make the KinkD top 10 list. They’re the ones bucking the trend here, not places like NYC or LA.

Another way to look at is the ratio of kinky people to city population. If you assume the KinkD subscribes numbers correlate to kinky people in general, and the city definitions they’re using are the same as here (two pretty big assumptions), then sorting their top 10 by that ratio gives…

  1. Portland
  2. Seattle
  3. Austin
  4. San Francisco
  5. Philadelphia
  6. Los Angeles
  7. San Diego
  8. Chicago
  9. Houston
  10. New York City

Now the smaller cities known for more alternative culture leap to the top three spots. Of the massive cities, LA now does the best in the mid-pack, and NYC goes from top spot to the bottom.

Silly numbers aside, the truth is that anyone living in the above 10 cities will have access to a pretty large kinky community. The real challenge is for the kinksters who finds themselves in places like Emmetsburg (Iowa), Centerville (South Dakota) or any of the thousands of small towns scattered across the country.

I sadly don’t have any hot femdom images from kinksters in Emmetsburg or Centerville. Instead I’ll go with something from one of the major metropolitan areas. This is Mistress Tess, one of NYC’s top pro-dommes.

Teasing with the Tongue

For anyone cringing after yesterday’s cock piercing close-up, here’s a little sexy eye bleach for you.

I like her unconventional outfit and his tight rope bondage. What makes me smile is the tattoo on his torso. Maybe it’s some famous figure from history that I don’t recognize, but to me it just looks like someone going “Oh, Jesus. Not this shit again…”

Subverting Expectations

The joke from last weeks post about the pain of stepping on a lego brick (and Servitor’s smart ass comment) got my thinking about the correlation between the visual and physical experience in kink. More specifically, when the two radically misalign. A single tail looks painful and is painful. Nobody sees one in action and thinks that it’ll probably just be a slight tickle. In contrast, a Lego brick looks like nothing, and yet hurts like hell if you unwittingly step on one. So what kinky activities are the equivalent of the sneaky Lego brick? Or on the flip side, look horrifying but are actually pretty mild? What give the biggest contrast between their visuals and their sensations?

In the ‘looks easy but hurts like hell’ category I’d suggest kneeling on rice on a hard floor. Troy Orleans did that to me a few years back. It didn’t look like much. I assumed it’d be uncomfortable but tolerable. In actuality I was on the point of fainting after a few minutes. I had the whole cold sweat, white skin and tunnel vision thing happening. We had to stop and give me a timeout to recover. Maybe I’ve got particularly bony and sensitive knees, but for me that was the most unexpectedly painful thing I’ve encountered.

On the ‘really not bad as it looks’ I’d suggest play piercing in the cock. Not the head – which definitely does smart – but the skin along the shaft. The visual is very dramatic, and make most guys wince, but the reality (for me) is it’s actually one of the milder spots to pierce. I find areas like the chest, the legs, the belly and the scrotum are all far more painful. Having had my hand sutured to my cock a couple of weeks back, the ones in the cock were a walk in the park compared to the single suture in the hand.

Obviously degrees of pain and visual drama are highly subjective. Any readers have any suggestions of activities that are either much more or much less painful than their visual appearance would lead you to believe?

For an image, given I just mentioned cock piercing, I thought I’d go with Mistress Yuki’s seasonal variation on a butterfly board. From a timing perspective, I probably should have featured this last week. Visually dramatic but, apart from that one needle through the head, I bet it didn’t hurt as much as you’d expect it to.

The New Wonder Woman

I finally got around to seeing the new Wonder Woman movie tonight. It’s not exactly the Godfather II script, but it was a lot of fun. Gal Gadot was perfect in the role and it was a real pleasure to watch a female superhero be the star and kick some ass for a change.

Of course the history nerd in me was squirming throughout the WWI scenes. If you’re going to pick a major German figure as a bad guy, and then kill him off, don’t make it one who was a significant part of post-war Germany and actually played a role in the rise of Hitler. I can suspend my disbelief on the history books leaving out Wonder Woman’s role in the victory, not so much on Ludendorff killing his general staff, trying to extend the war and then not being around afterwards. Also the British not wanting to upset the Germans during Armistice negotiations made no sense. There was no significant negotiation, given how desperate the Germans were to sign, and the armies were killing each other right to the very last minute before the ceasefire.

I know that doing kinky superhero roleplay is a thing for some people. I intellectually get the appeal of tight skimpy outfits and powerful figures, but it never really turned my crank. However, I would absolutely love to do a scene with someone dressed in the period outfit Gal Gadot sports in London. Something about that neatly tailored suit and the glasses that really work. Not sure what roleplay that’d be however. Maybe I could pretend to be a conservative politician opposed to Women’s suffrage and the domme a righteously pissed off suffragette?