The Hits Keep on Coming

Last week Germany’s Studio Avalon announced it was closing after nearly 23 years. I’ve featured the space in past posts and visiting it was high on my kinky bucket list. Sadly for me and kinksters all over the world, it seems our opportunity has gone.

This week it’s the turn of NYC’s Parthenon. Queen Ariana Chevalier has announced that it’ll be closing at the end of the year. It has been a fixture of the BDSM scene in NYC for 17 years. I think the comments on the twitter thread and posts like this one from Vinyl Queen testify how widely used and appreciated the space was. I played their just once, visiting last year with Empress Wu, and would have loved to return.

I covered a fundraiser back in June for the Parthenon. Given its location in Manhattan, home to some of the richest people in the world, I find its closure particularly depressing. How many wealthy Wall St. types have had the balls crushed or backsides blistered inside that space? With the markets hitting record highs, could none of them step up to help out until the Covid vaccines come through next year? We’re going to return to ‘normal’ in 2021 and discover it’s going to take years to rebuild we lost in 2020.

This is Mistress Ariana Chevalier in an image sourced via this tweet.

Tis the Season

In the US we just celebrated Thanksgiving. It’s an important event on the calendar. Reaching it can mean only one thing – time to start shopping for Christmas! While the turkey roasting pan is still soaking in the sink, people are already hitting the (online) stores for gifts.

For kinksters looking for gift ideas then let me steer you in the direction of this post by Miss Pearl. She has a number of fine suggestions from the domme perspective.

Alternatively, for fans of corporal play, I’d suggest a perusal of the London Tanners site. Daddy An Li recently received a number of their toys and enthused at length about them in this video stream. Their equipment looks to be particularly fearsome and of a high quality.

This is Daddy An Li with a heavy leather cane from the London Tanners. Image sourced via this tweet.

Note: Anything I mention or link to comes with zero benefit to me and zero guarantees. I don’t carry ads and I don’t use affiliate links. I’m just sharing what I find interesting.

Leading the Pack

This stylish dog walking shot is of Ms Aerys, as found via her twitter feed. It’s not immediately obvious at first glance, but there’s two ‘dogs’ at the end of the chain.

It reminds me a little of another of my favorite dog walking shots – this one with Mistress LucySweetKill. That also has a highly anonymized pupper, an elegant fetish attired domme and an abstract background. In Mistress Lucy’s case it’s obviously a photographers set, where I think this is the TD Centre building in Toronto. Both images present a great combination of glamour, fetish and objectification.

The photograph itself was taken by @TinyTaylorOakes and the submissives are @MrDexParker and @buttplugart. You can find more from Ms Aerys at her main site here

Mistress Blunt and her Former Submissive

Mistress Blunt is continuing to produce some really top quality blog content. I previously featured her interview with her finsub, and she has now published a lengthy new interview with her former submissive Emmy. It’s very sweet and thoughtful. I loved this little exchange in it…

Emmy: …. So service in a D/s relationship… I do have this innate thing as a submissive of really enjoying being a support, or a pillar in somebody’s success and wellbeing. It’s both sexy and personally fulfilling. Whenever I was serving, especially cleaning and taking care of your space, I could fall into a meditative state, very similar to yoga. I would go through a flow in your house.

Mistress Blunt: I will say I would love to come back and see you napping. I’d come back, and you weren’t allowed on the bed or the furniture. So, you’d be curled up on the sheep skin like a little angel. I was just like, “My little heart.”

You can go read the whole thing here. I think it’s well worth it.

This is Mistress Blunt with Emmy Lewis, in a photograph from the interview.

Mistress Blunt is an NYC based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here, her twitter feed here and more from her blog here.

Emmy Lewis a NYC based pro-switch. You can find her professional site here and her twitter feed here.

Big Day

Warning: This post focuses on politics, a topic I usually avoid here. I’m granting myself a rare exception in unusual circumstances. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

America is choosing it’s next president. As elections go, it’s kind of a big one. As a newly minted American citizen, I got to vote for the first time. I can’t say I got all emotional over it, but it did at least feel like an important rite of passage. Thanks to the weirdness of the electoral college, it probably won’t count for anything, but I at least did my bit.

I think this is the point where I’m supposed to urge my readers to go out and vote. Which, if you’re a Biden support, I absolutely urge you to do. Particularly if you’re in a swing state. If you’re thinking of voting for Trump, then my suggestion to you is best summarized by Bill Hicks and his views on Marketing. Seriously though. You are Satan’s little helpers.

At this point it’s not even a left vs right thing. It’s a basic question of character, competence and human decency. I can respect a right wing political view, even if I disagree with it, but Trump is something totally different. Something from a horror movie. Don’t make me regret adopting this country as my home.

To connect back to this blogs purported theme – let me direct you to this Rolling Stones article on pro-dommes encouraging their clients to vote Blue.  The story even made it into Colbert’s monologue. They’re probably not going to swing the election, but every little helps.

This is one of the domme’s featured in the Rolling Stone article – Mistress Orion. She’s an NYC based pro-domme. You can find her twitter feed here and her OnlyFans here.

Spooky Time

This is traditionally the time of the year when my social media feeds are full of kinky people in spooky outfits. I’m on record as not being a fan of Halloween, but I do enjoy the costumes. Sadly this year has been somewhat lacking in that regard. Not sure if that’s due to a Covid related lack of parties or if the upcoming US election has put too much stress on everyone.

While there might have been less Halloween dress-up overall, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some great examples. My favorite is probably the shot below from Maya Midnight. It’s doesn’t feature a complicated outfit or fancy special effects, but it is a wonderfully moody and atmospheric shot. That’s the kind of Halloween I could get into.

Ms. Maya Midnight is a NYC based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here.

Locktober to the Max

I’m continuing the metal bondage theme with this astonishing metal body cage owned by Amanda Wildefyre. Forget locking just the penis up – here’s a way to guarantee there’s no hanky-panky of any sort. It looks like it has been paired with an inflatable rubber body suit, just to really crank the confinement kink up to 11.

Amanda Wildefyre is a Minneapolis based pro-domme, with a really incredibly collection of equipment. If you can’t visit in person, then she also has a clips store here.

Financial Blackmail

This post gives me an opportunity to pull together two of my recent themes – technology and financial domination. My path to this unholy union is via this Vice article on Mistress Harley. She’s a self-proclaimed Techdomme, dominating her clients via their dataspace. The information she gleans then feeds into kinks around humiliation, shame and consensual blackmail. Financial domination with a very sharp edge.

Personally, that kind of play scares the hell out of me, and not in a sexy way. It seems like extreme edge play. My data and computers are extensions of my brain and thoughts. Letting someone loose in them would feel like handing a amateur surgeon an ice pick and tell them to have a rummage in my perfrontal cortex. That’s not to kink shame, it’s just a very definite case of YKINMKBYKIOK.

That said, there are parts of the article that don’t seem quite so OK.

“I’ve definitely exposed people. I’ve posted dirty pictures of them on their Facebook or I’ve posted ‘I have a hot internet mistress’ along with a picture of myself.”

She’s also faked mental breakdowns on client’s profiles. She just starts with a simple post of “I’m not feeling well,” and as people respond in real time she begins to escalate up to something resembling schizophrenia.

That seems to violate rules around consent. Her client might have been OK with it, but what about the friends and family that see the pictures or get dragged into a fake  mental breakdown? Social media drama is bad enough, without later discovering that your friend is getting off on involving you in their fictional kinky storylines. Although if you begin to think about social media as being one huge humiliation scene, that does make a kind of sense.

If you are into financial and technical domination then Mistress Harley is clearly an expert. You can find her main site here, where she offers a wide variety of clips, customs and findomme options.

Mistress Blunt and her finsub

I’m continuing the financial domination theme by linking to this article by Mistress Blunt. It features a lengthy interview with her female financial submissive. That combination of a professional domme, a female submissive and a findomme kink is pretty rare.

I really enjoyed the way the interview unfolded, and their dynamic comes across as both very hot and cute. It really captures the appeal of financial domination, even for those not into it. However, the intensity of the play did make me a little uncomfortable, particularly given that it only started this year (based on comments in the interview). I’m guessing the submissive is a young professional, in a career with a high earnings growth potential. I really hope she doesn’t do anything to cause her future self to curse the foolishness of youth.

I was lucky enough to find myself in a similar position in my career when I moved to the US. In hindsight, there are a lot of things that make me want to reach back in time and slap some sense into the younger me, but fortunately money management isn’t one of them. I always split my finances into essential (food, rent, etc.), discretionary (luxuries, trips, etc.) and investment (saving for retirement). One thing I did right was to be strict about funding my kinky fun purely from the discretionary bucket. Obviously I was hugely privileged and lucky to be able to fund all three, but I’m very glad now that I kept that distinction. I don’t have a financial domination kink, but it would have been very easy to have gone wild splurging on multi-day multi-domme play and lengthy kinky foreign trips.

For me it’s important to always treat professional kinky interactions as a luxury item. That’s not to say kink itself is optional, but paying for it with a professional certainly is. I imagine that it becomes a lot harder to maintain that kind of distinction when your kinks are intimately bound up with money and how its distributed. I can only hope the finsub in question can picture a conversation with her future self and ensure she’s careful to make it a happy one.

This is the beautiful Mistress Blunt, in an image from her gallery page. She’s a NYC based pro-domme whose professional site can be found here and her twitter feed here.

Looking Back

After a decade of blogging I thought it might be interesting to look back and see what has changed.

The obvious answer is that there are a lot less bloggers. I love and appreciate the people on my blogroll, but social media has sucked in a lot of people’s attention and creative output. That in turn has created some interesting knock on effects. When I started blogging I posted and linked to a lot of debates around femdom. They were centered on topics like the invisibility of the domme  in society, the negative perception of submissives, the distorting effect of professional dominance, cliches in femdom porn, etc. Sadly, I’m not sure we’ve improved from a cultural perspective in those areas, but there is less writing about those issues. I think the angst about it has moved to social media and that’s a far more ephemeral medium. It’s hard to capture a serious debate in 240 characters or less, particularly when they’re randomly mashed into a stream of thoughts from dozens of other people.

Another change has been a reduction in curated image and artwork sites. Artists and their fans used to create dedicated sites to collect artwork. Kinky porn companies used to shoot a lot of still imagery and publish galleries from scenes. Now most artists and fans publish via social media and kinky porn tends to focus on video only clips. For someone like myself, with a minor fetish for archiving and collating material, it’s somewhat frustrating. I’ve been less compelled to update my resource links, because there is less ‘permanent’ content to link to.

When I started blogging it felt like the dominant model of the internet was a library that anyone could donate a book to. Now it feels more like a big party house with endlessly swirling conversations, a lot of which feature bad faith actors and paid for guests. Much as I enjoy things like Twitter and Reddit, it doesn’t feel like a healthy change. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and yell at some kids to get off my lawn.

Birthday celebrations should usually be accompanied by cake, so here’s Lucy SweetKill serving one up. I’m not sure this approach is one Emily Post would recommend, but it works for me. Fittingly enough, given the contents of this post, I found this on twitter, via Lucy’s feed. It was photographed by JCPhotoMedia.