Tag: Photograph

Apologies and Shoutout

Apologies for the lack of regular posting recently. There’s a bunch of topics I want to write about, but my back has been screwed up, which precludes me sitting at a computer for lengthy periods. It’s kind of funny (although not in a ha-ha way) that I can actually trace my back issues to a specific play session back in 2011. At the time I though I’d just strained some muscles. It turns out that thanks to a couple of decades hunched over keyboards, I’d managed to screw a couple of my lower discs up, and that session was the one that pushed them over the edge. It really hasn’t been the same since that night. Who’d have though that having hot sauce smeared on your genitals would lead to chronic back issues? The human body is a truly wonderful thing.

If you’re in your 20’s or 30’s and spend a lot of time sitting at a desk, I’d strongly urge you to take regular breaks, exercise whenever possible and consider taking up yoga. Although if you’re anything like me at that age, you probably think it’ll never happen to you, so I’m  wasting my time giving advice here.

Changing the subject entirely – if you’re in LA from the 23rd to the 25th, let me point you in the direction of Lady Hinako. I’ve featured her work in the past (here and here) and she’s visiting LA from Japan on those particular dates. Lady Chiaki (previously featured here) will also be in LA at the same time. If I hadn’t been in LA just a couple of weeks ago, I’d be considering a trip down in order to play with these talented dommes. As I type this, they still have time slots available to play.

Both these images are from Lady Hinako’s twitter feed.

What seems to be the problem, officer?

This image made me smile, although I suspect it may only be my British readers who have a similar response. Stern female police officers aren’t exactly rare in femdom imagery. However, they’re typically US uniforms, or some more generic European outfit with militaristic overtones. It’s rare to see a classic British outfit, complete with a white shirt, black jumper and elbow patches.

No offense to the two stars here – Mistress Baton and Leicester Governess – but this put me in mind of the movie Hot Fuzz. That takes a classic British Bobby setting and put a humorous spin on a modern US style action movie around it. I’m sure these two talented ladies can administer a sound thrashing to a guilty man, but I also suspect a hot cup of tea might be at the end of it.

Mistress Baton (who I’ve featured here previously) is normally based in Johannesburg, but I believe she’s currently touring and taking sessions in England. The Governess is based in Leicester and her professional site is here.

Kink with Homework

This article on Mistress Velvet is (deservedly) all over my social media feeds and inbox. The title, in classic Huffington Post fashion, encapsulates the story – “Meet The Dominatrix Who Requires The Men Who Hire Her To Read Black Feminist Theory.”

It’s a surprisingly well done article. It gives Mistress Velvet space to expand on the intellectual and emotional challenges of her job, while omitting a lot of the salacious detail that usually accompanies mainstream articles like this. Her relationship as a black domme  with her mostly white, cis and well off clients is obviously a complex one. I love the fact that she’s managed to structure her sessions as positive for both her and her clients, while also creating a platform to explore issues of race and privilege.

If I’m not only doing these physical things to them, but also saying, “Hey, my graduate education is also focused on BDSM as healing for black women, and I think about this all the time.” Then they’re like, “Whoa, yeah, she’s the real deal.” They kind of get terrified. But I think it makes it more real for them.

I don’t think I’ve ever been assigned homework by a domme, but I do understand the kind of dynamic she describes above. Submissives typically enjoy things that pull them mentally back into that D/s dynamic, even many days after playing. Something as simple as a bruise can remind them of the dommes presence and physicality. I’d imagine engaging with writing and arguments that she’s passionate about would have a similar ability to conjure a sense of her presence.

Mistress Velvet is based in Chicago. If you’d like to schedule a session, her contact information is here.

Legal Matters

I had to employ the services of a lawyer recently. It wasn’t a major legal entanglement. Just papers I wanted reviewed before I filed them. Her fee for the work was $250 per hour. Oddly enough, that’s around the average fee per hour for a pro-domme in Seattle. That fact got me thinking about the contrast between the work. Actually, if I’m honest, the fact she was attractive, forceful and wearing knee high brown leather boots got my mind initially moving in a certain direction. The hourly rate just sealed the deal.

My legal session was conducted in a standard office. No fancy equipment, sound proofing or leather wrapped furniture required. After I left, I’m pretty certain she didn’t have to spend time rubbing everything with alcohol wipes and autoclaving the pen I used. Nor did she have to invest a highly specialized wardrobe that she can only wear to work or to secret lawyer parties. Touching was limited to a couple of handshakes and, despite a very warm office, I kept all my clothes on.  At no point did she have to deal with a naked me in her personal space. Her only risk was paper cuts and possibly boredom from answering my dumb questions. Safewords weren’t required, and there was no chance of me asking her to undertake a dangerous legal maneuver that could have landed me in hospital and her in jail. I don’t know what her inbox looks like but I doubt it’s full of dick pics, badly written kinky fantasies or guys suggesting if she was a real lifestyle lawyer she’d work for free. Scheduling didn’t involve intricate planning to avoid clients bumping into each other and her firms web site didn’t require dozens of up to date professional photographs of her brandishing a pen and looking stern. Oh, and I could pay with a credit card, because banks don’t mind taking money from lawyers.

I could keep going, but I think my point is made. I’m not going to claim that visiting a professional domme is cheap, but it is good value. You get a hell of a lot for your money. Rates may be charged by the hour, but there’s an awful lot that happens both before and after to make those great moments in a session possible.

This is the actress Julianna Margulies who plays a lawyer in the series Canterbury Law.

Auntie

In my last post I was ragging on the New Jersey police for stopping a former domme from becoming a cop. I thought it only fair to balance that up with an organization that is a little less puritanical – the BBC. The journalist Nichi Hodgson spent some time working as a professional domme and is now employed as a journalist by the world’s biggest and oldest broadcasting organization. According to this recent article she actually made more money working as a domme than as a journalist, but I guess that’s what you get for working for a public service company.

In years gone by the BBC was famously straitlaced. Its nickname of ‘Auntie’ or ‘Auntie Beeb’ was derived from the idea of a prudish maiden Aunt who always knew what was best. Of course, for some people, a strict maiden Aunt who thinks she knows best, is a source of joy and pleasure. This is Juliana Granger in a shoot for Auntie’s House.

Miss Granger is a professional disciplinarian based in Sheffield UK.

Catsuits in NYC

Humiliation types scenes in public spaces are pretty common in Femdom imagery. I’m sure you know the type of scene I mean. There’s a domme in sensible clothes leading around a submissive in slightly less sensible clothes, while random bystanders look on with varying degrees of amusement, shock and puzzlement. Something like this one.

It’s not really my kind of scene, so I was therefore pleased to see an alternative variation on a public scene in this post from Miss Ava Zhang. It features Miss Zhang and Domina Dia Dynasty cruising around NYC in shiny rubber suits. No humiliated submissives in sight. Just two dommes having fun in great outfits. Amusingly the only place they weren’t welcome was a kinky whip cracking meetup in Central Park, where apparently whip cracking and hot dommes in latex was just too much fun to have all in one public place.

You can see more images from their NYC adventures in the post here.

My inner feline

What’s better than playing with an awesome domme in LA? That would be playing in LA and then playing with the same awesome domme a week later in Seattle. Yes, God was good to me this week. Although technically it was more Mistress Iris and her travel schedule than God. They are at least similar in their ability to bring grown men to their knees.

I got to enjoy some amazing tease and denial, along with sensation play and some sounding thrown in for good measure. Most of my play partners would liken the noises I make in a session to a dog or a bear. There’s a fair amount of growling, snarling and barking that goes on. I think today might have been the first time I purred in a session. Clearly Mistress Iris is bringing out my inner feline. I didn’t even know I had one.

This is Mistress Iris with not me. I can only wish I rocked a garter belt and pair of stockings like that. This is from Mistress Iris’s twitter feed.

Belated SOSS

Once again, I kind of missed the boat on the Share Our Shit Saturday. Better late than never I figure, so here are some links to interesting stuff that caught my eye recently.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image. If you can help with that, please leave me a comment.

Duality

The Crave Portrait Project has recently been popping up on my social media feeds and news alerts. Its basic idea, of presenting dual images of people in their kinky gear and their regular clothes, is not a new one. I featured a similar set of images in a post back in 2014. However, it is a well executed version of the concept, with some fine black and white photography. I particularly like how happy everyone seems. I think it succeeds in projecting a very positive picture of kinky people and play.

The above shot is of Janny and you can read some of her thoughts on the project via this Bustle article. You can see all the photographs from the project via their gallery.

Slutting Around

My algorithm for picking people to play with when I’m travelling has a problem. Admittedly, it’s a problem in the sense that spilling champagne on your Ferrari’s leather upholstery is a problem, but I’m going to share it anyway. I will not be expecting a great deal of sympathy.

The original algorithm for travelling was simple: Find someone I had chemistry with and play with them exclusively. Partly that was because I wanted to build a deeper rapport and invest in a richer D/s dynamic. Partly it was because I didn’t want to have to explain my weird kinks and perversions to more unfamiliar women than I absolutely had to.

Unfortunately, no matter how careful the planning, schedules didn’t always co-operate. With only a few days in a town, there was always a chance the domme I usually played with would be travelling or busy. So I inevitably ended up occasionally playing with someone new – and I came to realize that this was a good thing. Playing with someone new was an opportunity to learn. Sometimes I learnt what I didn’t like, but more often my experiences made me a better submissive and a more self-aware masochist. Plus, once I started writing about my kinks here, explaining them to the nice ladies in the exciting outfits became considerably less stressful.

My updated algorithm therefore became: Do two sessions. One with someone I knew and liked and one with someone new. Push limits with the former and learn new things with the latter. It was a win-win.

Unfortunately, once I played with a new domme, they automatically moved into the category of ‘dommes I know’. And since so many of them were amazing and awesome to play with (like Damiana Chi from yesterday’s post), they became ‘dommes I know, like and will travel thousands of miles to play with again’.

This gave my latest iteration of the algorithm: Do three session. One with someone I’ve know for years, one with someone I’ve played with a few times and one with someone new. You don’t have to be a genius to see the pattern here, or the long term problem. It’s possible I can keep adding more sessions per trip until my body or bank account gives out, but I’m not sure it’s entirely the smartest solution.

The amusing side to this ‘problem’ is that I get called a slut by some of the dommes I play with (in the nicest possible way). Given my monastic years through my teens and twenties, that makes me smile. I’m a reserved, quiet, introverted, middle-aged British male slut. I’ll take that.

I’ve no idea what an appropriate image for this post is, so here’s a random one I like.