Tag: Photograph

The good and the bad

A few posts ago I was ripping the Metro site for silly advice on CBT for beginners. Fortunately, the good news is that there are better sources of advice out there. Kink Weekly has some good suggestions for anyone wanting to torture a cock or two. Lucy Khan (whose CBT skills I can personally attest to) has the right idea…

restrain him, blindfold him, and simply tickle, lick, bite, and poke at his junk!

The bad news is that Metro is still publishing idiotic writing on kink. The latest is this article, which lists the following fetishes beginning with ‘F’: Face slapping, fear play, female masking, femdom, feminisation, …wait, what was that previous one? Femdom? One of these things is not like the others. What an incredibly obnoxious and male-centric categorization. It reinforces the idea of male dominance as the default BDSM configuration, and turns dominant women into objects for men with a particular femdom fetish. It’s like listing career choices beginning with F as: Farmer, Farrier, Female, Fire Fighter, etc. I’m betting that maledom isn’t going to be listed under ‘M’ when they get around to it.

Anyway, rant over, and I’ll finish with someone following Mistress Lucy’s advice on mixing biting and CBT.

Old School Tenderness

This image has a very old school vibe to it. There’s the all black outfits, the leather studded collar, the peaked cap and the grainy black and white photograph. Yet there’s a tenderness and playfulness to it that’s rare in vintage BDSM shots.

I’ve no idea where it’s from. Google tells me that its best guess for the image is ‘February’, which isn’t exactly helpful. If AI ever does take over the world, I think it’s unlikely to get its start as Google’s image search algorithms. They may be ‘A’ but they’re rarely ‘I’. My best guess for it would be a shot from an old pro-domme advertisement in something like DDI, but that’s based on nothing other than my instinct. If anyone does recognize it, I’d love to the who the domme is.

The annoying BD

While I’m talking about the definition of BDSM (as I just was), allow me to air a pet peeve. Most readers probably know that the acronym stands for Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, Sadism & Masochism. I get the second and third pairing, but that first one always bugs me. Why is bondage explicitly paired with discipline? People tend to hand wave around this issue being saying they’re related activities. For example, Wikipedia says…

  they have conceptual similarities, and that is why they appear jointly.

Frankly, that seems like bullshit to me. I think people just like the symmetry of the phrasing and the clever re-use of the letters, and therefore gloss over the fact the first pair makes no sense being tied together (ahem).

Personally, I’d drop discipline entirely. Bondage is such a common and important shared activity then I think it deserves a special place in the acronym, but discipline can slide under the D/s bit as a particular style of that dynamic. That’d keep the same four letters, but make it a lot more logical.

These beautiful bondage images come from Amaury Grisel. You can see more from the same shot in this post.

Playing Dead

This image made me laugh. His posture and expression are unusual for this kind of shot. Has he collapsed, exhausted after a vigorous rogering? Did it take her so long to put on all that fancy fetish gear that he dozed off? Or is he playing dead, in the hope that the scary lady with the enormous strap-on will get bored and leave him alone?

This is originally from the StrapOn Dreamer site.

Beginners Beware

Enlisting a domme to write an articles on kinks and fetishes is a common technique these days to attract a few clicks with some titillating content. They tend to vary from blandly boring through to offensive kink shaming, with just the occasional interesting gem. Sadly, this one from Metro, written by Miranda Kane, is no gem. It starts off with a kink shaming title, before veering into the stupid and dangerous. Specifically this part on CBT…

But beginners can’t go wrong with investing in a pinwheel (…) and urethral sounding rods (which are metal sticks that go in the pee-hole).

Urethral sounding rods for beginners? I’m not sure you could pick something less suitable for CBT for beginners. I guess scrotal inflation? A crown of thorns?

Urethral sounds are a super specialized toy. They’re very intimidating for a lot of people. They require a particular technique to use, so you don’t risk tearing any delicate internal tissue. If you’re not careful about handling and sterilizing them, there’s a risk of introducing bacteria into the urethra and getting an infection. Not to mention, as a sensation they’re not even that tortuous, so not really CBT at all. I always enjoy experiencing them, and think they’re worth exploring for those with a bit of kinky experience, but they’re not for anyone wanting to torture their first cock.

How about clothespins? Or a little slappy paddle? Or just pinching and biting? There are about a thousand ways to try out CBT at lower cost and lower risk.

This is Clair Adams in a shoot with Nomad for kink.com. I think this counts as the super advanced CBT class – an electrified urethral sound. Definitely one of the more unique sensations I’ve ever experienced.

January Seraph

I seem to be starting posts these days with an apology. Yesterday it was for a lack of blog activity. Today it’s for a topic that is probably not the kind of thing that most people come here to read, but that I feel is worth addressing. Luckily I’m English, so apologizing comes naturally.

Regular and longtime readers will have seen many past posts featuring January Seraph. For example, here, here, here, here and several others. She even had nice things to say about this blog. Sadly – and that seems a horribly inadequate word in the circumstances – she recently took her own life.

While I didn’t know her personally, I did want to write a post to commemorate her and all she achieved. She was highly talented and obviously contributed a great deal to the femdom community, working as a BDSM educator, artist, film producer, femdom model and pro-domme. She wrote intelligently on kink and it’s hard to browse the femdom tumblr’s without coming across examples of her work. The people who did work with her had many nice things to say. When a friend of hers was sick with cancer I remember her putting a lot of time and effort into raising money for her and helped to care for her.  By all accounts she was a very smart, creative and empathetic person who’ll be greatly missed. My heart goes out to her family and friends.

From  reports on social media she was suffering from the horribly destructive brain illness of depression. If anyone reading this is suffering in a similar way then please call a local hotline or a national one.

I’ll leave you with these shots of January (on the right) fooling around having fun with her friend Lady Bellatrix.

 

Learning from an expert

Last week I wrote in a post about BDSM and medical treatment that I figured medical professionals would have seen crazier things than any kink related injury I could turn up with. Apparently in Scotland they’re not leaving that kind of knowledge acquisition to chance. At Napier university in Edinburgh, healthcare professional on a graduate course are getting a lesson on sex work and kink from pro-domme Megara Furie.

It seems like an excellent idea. Sex workers and kinksters indulging in risky physical activity are exactly the kind of people who need to be able to talk openly to health professionals. As Megara says…

I’m definitely up for anything that helps to educate people and brings this out into the open. It takes away some stigma and makes everyone’s life easier.
Megara, 33, finds that her own forthright approach puts most nurses and doctors at ease.
She said: “I’m very open about what I do. I don’t explain my job and then look at my feet. I say, ‘Yeah, I’m a dominatrix, I love what I do.’ I’m very positive about it myself.

I’ve featured her in a previous post, and doing so again gives me the chance to use this image from Megara’s twitter feed. I’ve no idea what it’s about, but I do hope that teddy bear knows his safe word.

You can find Megara’s main site for arranging sessions here.

Putting the fun in

I’ve observed professional dommes offering all sorts of things for sale over the years. Their time and expertise is the traditional purchase, but some branch out into items of clothing, video clips, artwork, used toys, worn shoes, bodily fluids, etc. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen stickers before. Alice in Bondage Land has now put that right with these rather excellent ‘Putting the fun back in Femdom’ stickers. To be honest, I’m actually not sure if they’re for sale or just promotional freebies, but either way, I think they’re great. I’d certainly like one to slap onto a travel bag or computer case.

This image comes the Alice in Bondage Land twitter feed.

Desert Domination

I have several ideas for longer posts I want to write, but an unfortunate lack of time to do the actual writing. So I’m going to cheat again today, and simply feature some lovely content from another domme I’d love to renew my acquaintance with. This is from a recent gallery update from Mistress Iris and I spotted it via her twitter feed.

These kind of scenes might not be what you’d aim for in a typical play session, but I do appreciate the effort to do something both unusual and visual striking. I don’t really want to be whipped and abandoned in the desert, but I do want to play with the kind of domme who’ll use her time and imagination to put together something creative beyond the typical ‘sneering domme in fetish gear’ shots.

You can see more shots from this scene on her gallery pages. While Mistress Iris is undoubtedly beautiful, that car is pretty damn sexy as well. I love old school convertibles.