Tag: Photograph

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?

The Challenge of the New

Writing yesterday’s post on the new experiences I enjoyed with Mistress Cynthia got me thinking about the dynamics of doing new activities. More specifically, doing an old activity for the first time with a new play partner. There are a few different ways to approach this, and one of them niggles me every time it happens. I’m not sure it rises to the level of a pet peeve, but it’s something that I think is worth raising awareness of.

Some dominants don’t care what I’ve done in the past. They just pull out the toys they have in mind to use and get on with doing their thing. Others ask in order to gather information they can use. If it’s a new activity then maybe they’ll build intensity more slowly or check in more often. I’m perfectly happy with either approach. What I find odd is when a domme will be visibly disappointed if they discover the activity they’ve decided on isn’t a new one for me. Sometimes they’ll almost seem to be verging on frustration that they can’t ‘surprise’ me with a particular toy or new experience. I’ve had session where, after this kind of exchanged had repeated 3 or 4 times, I almost wanted to start lying and claiming ignorance, just so we could get out of that repeated negative interaction.

I’ve tried out a lot of different kinky activities over the last few years. That’s not down to any skill or achievement on my part. I’m just lucky to have had the time and opportunity to do a lot of different session with experienced dommes in well equipped spaces. So it’s pretty rare to find a fairly general activity that’s both inside my limits that I haven’t tried at some point. Yet, in all that time, I’ve never once thought to myself “Oh, we’re doing this shit again. Let’s get through this as fast as possible so we can get to something different.” I’ve had sessions ranging from just OK to awesome, and that difference has never been made by the uniqueness or novelty of the activity. The quality of the experience is always about the dynamic between myself and the domme and our interaction in the moment. The way every scene unfolds is unique, even if some of the building blocks repeat. Or to put it in cruder terms, I’ve jerked off a fair amount over the last decade or three, and I’ve never got bored with that activity, so let’s assume that novelty isn’t the deciding factor in how fun something is.

For any dommes out there, I’d suggest always treating past experience with an activity as a positive. It means the submissive will probably be able to give good feedback during it and will have greater capacity for handling it.

Given the post subject matter I thought it’d be worth trying to pick an image of an activity I’ve not really tried. So here we go – cross dressing. There was a domme 6 or 7 years ago who put me in stockings a few times, but apart from that I’ve been lingerie free. I’m not sure of the source of this vintage picture, but that young guy is carrying that outfit off pretty well.

Ending on a high

I survived my kinky odyssey to LA and I’m safely back in Seattle, albeit bruised and sore. I ended up doing four different sessions over five days with three different dommes. It was a lot of fun but also a lot for me to handle in a short period of time. Although, as problems go, ‘too much hot kinky fun’ is not a bad one to be stuck with.

My final session was with Cynthia Stone and was also the most intense. She’s a very creative and imaginative domme, and often  comes up with something new for me to experience. In this case, after some spanking and bondage, it was torturing the web of skin between my thumb and index finger. It’s not a part of the body that typically features in kinky play, but it turns out to be surprisingly sensitive. She used a scalpel to nick the skin on each hand – like two nasty paper cuts – and then clamped them closed with magnetic balls  on each side of the hand (like this). Normally clamps hurt when they go on, then fade over time, only to hurt again when they’re pulled off and the blood rushes back. In this case the pain just kept growing the longer they were on, almost like a cramping sensation, and then spiked horribly when they were pulled off. I’m not sure if that reaction was down to the cuts or simply the way the nerves in the hand responded over time.

Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of the story for that particularly body part. She also decided to suture my hand to my cock, punching the suture thread through that same piece of skin below the thumb. Surprisingly, the suture into the hand hurt way more than the multiple ones she used to attach the thread to the cock. A gag was even necessary for the hand one. To complete the arrangement, Cynthia held the free end of the thread taut while I slowly and very carefully slid my hand down it towards my cock. The sensation of the thread slowly slipping through the suture hole in my hand was strange and disquieting. Not something I’ll forget in a hurry.

One of the most amazing things to me about these intense sessions is how quickly everything returns to normal afterwards. Cynthia is great at getting into her play partners heads and ratcheting up the tension and drama. By the end I always think I’m going to be a shivering wreck, falling off the bondage table covered in blood and bruises. Yet, when the lights come up and the ropes come off, my reaction to seeing the damage is usually “Really? That’s it? I was expecting it to look way worse.” All that’s needed is a spritz of disinfectant and a quick shower and I’m ready to rejoin the civilized world.

This photograph is from Cynthia’s gallery page. If you’re interested in experiencing her creativity for yourself, then her session information is here.

Strike a Pose

I took a vacation day off from my vacation today. After three days of being beaten and abused (in the best possible way) I relaxed and did touristy stuff. I did get to enjoy some instruction on wine from a very attractive sommelier wearing a short leather skirt and sporting a slash of dark red lipstick, but I’m going to consider that more a happy bonus than a part of my kinky trip.

The break also gave me chance to catch up on the world and write a post featuring the happy couple below. I generally steer clear of politics on this site. As much as I despise the current US administration, I don’t think readers comes here for my political opinions. However, the moment I saw the pictures below, I knew they’d end up as blog post. For anyone who missed the story, that’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin with his wife Louise Linton. She’d already made a lot of new friends via twitter spat earlier this year,  and this photograph was just her latest PR success story.

The reason I feature it here is because it reminds me of so many images I see on my twitter feed. There’s an attractive lady staring down into the camera, brandishing a stack of bills, and offering a look that mixes sexy, smug and condescension . It’s a fin-domme classic. Normally – on my twitter feed at least – it’s accompanied by comments about everyone being pathetic losers and the need to drain their wallets, but I think with these two that context goes without saying. Louise even accessorized correctly with the fetishistic black leather gloves and skirt. Given Mnuchin is worth a fortune, I doubt she’ll need to start a new career as an online financial domme. But if he’s the first up against the wall in a revolution, she’ll at least have career options to fall back on.