Tag: Pro-domme

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.

 

It has been a while since I played, and a while I traveled anywhere. I don’t have an immediate plan to fix that, but I’m beginning to feel the urge to put one together. Browsing the twitter feeds of some of my favorite dommes and seeing their session snaps is certainly adding fuel to that fire. For example, the shot is from Domina Yuki’s twitter, and looks like a very fun way to spend an afternoon.

I couldn’t write about German BDSM studios (as I just was) without mentioning Studio Black Fun. They’re based in Leipzig and, based on their website, have some pretty crazy toys. For example, this, this and this. It looks skewed to high-tech fetish rather than the more traditional Avalon space, but no less impressive for all that.

There’s one special they offer – Yellow 3D Vision – that has more kinks packed into a single scene than I think I’ve ever observed before. You can see a video of it here. To start with the guy is in a metal chastity device and wearing a full rubber body suit, complete with a custom hood. Then they add bondage via plastic buckles and mummification with a latex sheet. A video headset is used to feed him an image of the scene, while a special toilet is fitted above him, complete with plumbing to his hood. Finally, there are two dommes, both in elaborate fetish gear, one to pee into the toilet and one to film it and feed him the video picture. Frankly, I’m just surprised they didn’t add nipple clamps, an anal plug and a rubber chicken into the scene. That would have been BDSM bingo all in one shot.

If I’m honest, while I might be joking about the scene, I’d actually love to try it out. That level of objectification, coupled with the out-of-body experience the headset/camera would offer, seems pretty hot. The images below show the toilet set-up, in this case with a latex straitjacket and spreader bar. You can see more from this variation here.

I’ve written in the past about the impressive facilities at Avalon Studios in Germany (for example here and here), but I’ve never had a first hand account from anyone who played there. Now, thanks to Mistress Troy and Slave Latigo, I can correct that omission with this article from Mistress Troy’s site. It features an eye opening description of a multi-day scene featuring the imprisonment, trial and punishment of her slave.

I have to say that the scenario described wouldn’t at all appeal to me. Too serious, too formal and too much protocol for my tastes. But I do admire the skill and effort required to realize these kind of scenarios. You certainly don’t need a cell, courtroom and interrogation center to pull off an amazing femdom scene, but it’s great that some people do choose to set-up these kind of facilities for others to enjoy.

This is Mistress Troy at Studio Avalon, along with slave Latigo, Lady Mercedes and Lady Marlon.

Buzzfeed generally produces a fair amount of dreck, but this video featuring a day in the life of Damiana Chi is pretty good (Facebook version here). Produced by Tania Safi, its features Damiana Chi, her sister Jezebel Chi and a variety of their submissives and slaves. I particularly liked Max and Roxy, whose blissed out happy sub expressions mirror the way I feel when I play.

The above image of Damiana indulging in some rope bondage isn’t from the video, but from her twitter feed. She’s an LA based pro-domme, and if you’re interested in a session, then her professional site is here.

The post title is how I feel right now. A happy gooey puddle of endorphins and adrenaline, accompanied by a big dopey smile. I was lucky enough to play with Mistress Iris tonight. She’s normally based in LA, but she was visiting Seattle and I was fortunate enough to a/ spot this and b/ get time on her calendar.

It was an unusual session for me, as it was heavy on tease and sensual tension. I normally lean towards masochistic play, so being pushed from a more psychological angle made for an interesting alternative. A case of pleasure withheld or delayed, rather than pain inflicted. I think it might be the only time I’ve ever slipped into subspace but not ended up with marks all over my body. She simultaneous managed to be very forward and aggressive, while remaining teasingly unobtainable. It’s a neat trick to pull off.

This image of Mistress Iris comes from her website. She’s also very active on twitter and instagram.

As weekends go, this one didn’t suck. It was my birthday, so I had many drinks with friends to celebrate that. After a wet and miserable winter, we finally got some beautiful sunny weather in Seattle. And finally, best of all, I got to play with Mistress Mara Mayhem.

Regular readers with good memories may remember I last got together with Mistress Mara in Chicago last year. This time she was visiting Seattle and, despite a tight schedule, we managed to fit in a session on Sunday afternoon. It was a lot of fun, despite a rookie error on my part. I thoughtlessly mentioned it had recently been my birthday which, for pretty much every domme in the world, can mean only one thing – birthday spanks. You can see the end result on my posterior in this twitter picture Mistress Mara shot. I will not say how many spanks it was, but I think it’s safe to say my ass will be red for a few days to come.

This is the beautiful Mistress Mara in a shot from her twitter feed. I believe it was taken immediately before our session. If you’re interested in arranging a session with her then this is her site.

Melissa Febos is back in the news to annoy my over my morning cup of tea. For those that haven’t heard of her, she’s the author of a book called Whip Smart about her time working as a pro-domme in a dungeon in NYC. Her story is a familiar one. Full of the confidence and immortality of youth, our author-to-be does a bunch of drugs and develops a heroin addiction. She then spends several years trying to combine a normal life, a drug habit and a secret job that can sustain said habit. Eventually she kicks the drugs, ditches the job and writes a book about how crazy it all was. It’s a time honored tale, and one practiced by many authors.

I’m happy she got clean, got published and got a different job that she’s clearly better suited for. What annoys me is that in the countless interviews she does, she never provides broader context for domination or shows any self-awareness of herself in the bigger kinky picture. You get the impression she thinks she’s a truly representative example of a dominatrix and is providing a valuable insight into that world. Where in reality she was hired as a pretty face, working with zero training in a McDungeon. It’s a bit like a 3rd string quarterback, who never made it beyond the practice squad, writing a book on being a professional NFL player. He might have a great personal story, but he’s not exactly Tom Brady. In that case I’m sure he and his interviewers would understand that. In the case of Febos and her coverage, I’m not sure that distinction gets drawn.

I also find it odd that the dangers of what she did never get addressed. For example, she did risky kinky activities like breathplay while high on drugs. I wonder how the interviews would have gone is her side gig had been say a carer at an old peoples home? I’m guessing all the funny stories about the stupid shit she did with the crazy patients while on heroin wouldn’t have gone down so well.

The other thing that bugs me – while I’m ranting here – is how she trades on her time as a dominatrix while also complaining about people bringing it up. Several times in this recent Guardian article she writes disapprovingly about people mentioning it, and is mad that a colleague makes a joke about it. You don’t get to write a book, and do countless interviews on a subject to flog said book, and the declare it off limits for comments. If you’re making money off it, you should probably learn not to be embarrassed by it.

Mistress Mattisse wrote a review of the book and also chatted to Febos. I think she covers the issues pretty well.

Photograph is of Melissa Febos. Post title and ‘McDungeon’ stolen shamelessly from Mistress Matisse.

Some people use BDSM to temporarily escape reality, while for others it’s a way of working through and exploring real world issues. I’m definitely in the escapist camp. I like to take a vacation from my overactive and constantly nagging brain by giving it a big wash of adrenaline and hormones. Being reminded of stuff that depresses me on a day to day basis is the last thing I want sneaking into my kink.

The people in this Broadly article clearly feel differently. The title sums it up pretty well – ‘Inside a BDSM Dungeon with a Hillary Dom and a Guilty, Diaper-Clad Trump Voter’. So on top of wall to wall political coverage in the media, you can now also politics in your local playspace. Assuming your local playspace is La Domaine Esemar that is.

The Domme in question is Mistress Couple (featured here in the past), who started offering a Hillary/Trump roleplay as joke before the election. When Trump won, and the joke became decidedly less funny, she continued with the twist that wannabe Trump submissives had to prove a donation to the ACLU or Planned Parenthood before a session.

I like the idea of generating money for a good cause and giving Mistress Couple the satisfaction of hitting a Trump voter in the nuts with a golf club. I just wish our politics wasn’t so fucked up that it’s ripe for being turned into BDSM role play material.

This street artwork, featuring Catwoman and Trump, is entitled ‘The revenge of women’ and is by Herr Nilsson.

It’s unlikely the ‘Mike’ featured in the Broadly article is a reader of this blog, but on the off chance he is, I’d just like to say: ‘Mike, you’re a goddamn idiot’.

I’m safely back in Seattle, recovering from my LA hijinks. Doing 8 intense hours of sessions over 6 days definitely wasn’t wise, but it was a lot of fun.

I finished by playing with Mistress Lucy again, whilst sporting fresh and vivid whip marks from Mistress Isabella Sinclaire. You can probably guess what happened next. Do you think that on being shown the day old marks…
a/ Mistress Lucy observed how tender they looked and was careful to avoid them for the rest of the sessions, or
b/ Gleefully raked her fingernails across them and then pulled our her slappy leather whip to add her own layer of marks on top?

The vivid bruises on my back will testify to answer (b). There’s something about showing a tender spot to a sadistic top – they just can’t help poking at it to get a reaction. Or, in this case, beating it with a big leather thing to get a scream.

This isn’t me in the picture with Isabella below, but my marks were (and are) remarkably similar in pattern. Or at least were until the next layer got added!

I found this on Mistress Isabella’s Instagram.