Tag: Thoughts

Looking Back

As part of my ten year kinkyversary I thought it’d be interesting to look back and try to figure out exactly who I’d played with over that time. I keep all my emails, so in theory I should be able to come up with a pretty accurate list. Actual sessions are way too numerous to count, but as far as people are concerned, I think the total is 37 different pro-dommes. On one hand that seems like a lot, but on the other hand, this is over a decade and spread across 9 different cities.

I wrote last year about my relative success rate in terms of identifying dommes I think I’ll have good session chemistry with. Looking at this list supports the rough estimates I made back then. There were 14 dommes who I played with once and didn’t feel that we had suitable chemistry. At the other extreme, there have been 11 dommes I loved playing with and always reached out to any time our paths crossed. The remaining 12 are dommes I’d like to play more with, but so far time, geography and circumstances have conspired against us.

Two other things also pop out from the list. Firstly, I’m surprised how many dommes on it are now retired from the profession. So if there’s someone you’ve always wanted to play with then I’d encourage you to reach out sooner rather than later. You never know when they’ll decide to hang up their whip (at least from a professional perspective).

The other thing that strikes me is the amazing diversity in styles, techniques and personalities. After all, this isn’t a random list. These are all pro-dommes I researched and decided would be a good fit for my kinks and preferred dynamic. When you browse pro-domme sites and see repeated common lists of activities and equipment you might be tempted to think the variance in play would be small. After all, when you think of other professional services – lawyer, doctor, masseuse  – you don’t expect massive variation between different providers. Yet that’s exactly what you find in the dynamics of a pro-domme session. Even the more creative professions, like a chef or an actor, don’t compare. The best analogy I can think of is a fine artist. An artist will have a distinctive personal style that is common to all their work, but every artist is unique in their own approach.

This is Mistress Eleise De Lacy, someone who definitely falls into the category of people I’d love to play more with, should time and space not conspire against us. We intersected once in Vancouver back in 2013, but since then she has been based in Europe and the opportunity for further play hasn’t presented itself. Should you be similarly constrained, she does have an OnlyFans site you can join for a virtual experience.

Strange Logic

A new documentary by Louis Theroux entitled ‘Selling Sex‘ has been creating a stir in my social media feed. As you might guess from the title, it tackles the subject of sex work, following three women involved in the industry. Most of the sex workers I follow were not impressed. This thread by Lola Ruin and this tweet by Mistress Evilyne are pretty indicative of the feedback I saw.  Even the people involved in it were not happy.

I’ve not seen the show so I can’t review it. Instead I want to review a review of it. Specifically, this review in the Guardian by Lucy Mangan. I’m sure if you asked Lucy she’d claim her article, like the show, was a balanced and nuanced take on a tricky subject. Yet I think her final paragraph, containing the sentences below, show just how illogical and confused people can be when it comes to sex work.

The true question is how we define coercion or exploitation. The aim of the law’s definition is surely to ensure that anyone selling his or her body is doing so willingly, as a matter of absolutely free choice. Whether this can be said of any of the women here, I am not sure.

The idea of selling your body is not only a tired cliche but also makes no sense. A sex worker no more sells their body that does an athlete, a fashion model or a nurse. Like all those professions, a sex worker uses their body and their brain to provide a service. At no point before, during or after the transaction does a client own any part of their body. Possibly used underwear or sweaty athletic wear might be purchasable, should both parties tastes run in that direction, but that’s a whole different dynamic.

Logically, if having sex implies some transfer of ownership, then the same must be true regardless of the involvement (or not) of a fee. So does Lucy think that a wife having sex with her husband results in him owning her body? Is she a fan of bringing back the idea of Coverture more widely? It would seem an unusual position for a Guardian journalist to adopt.

The other strange part of that final paragraph is the bar she sets for doing sex work – ‘a matter of absolutely free choice.’ How many of us do our jobs out of absolutely free choice? I love my job, but I’d drop it tomorrow if I had the financial independence to make an absolutely free choice. That’s why it’s my job and not my hobby.

Coal mining is a dangerous, dirty and physically challenging job. As a result miners are often lauded as blue collar hero’s, taking on tough work to put food on the table for their families. Are they doing that as an absolutely free choice? Maybe we should we shut down the mines until we’re 100% sure of that. The idea that miners don’t understand the choices they make would be rightly criticized as patronizing and insulting. Yet people like Lucy are happy to infantilize sex workers and imply that they other people’s judgements (the law) should replace the workers own choices. Instead, shouldn’t we be celebrating sex workers for the difficult job they choose to do?

This is a long post spun from just a few sentences in a review of a show I’ve not even seen. Yet those few sentences seem illustrative of how even intelligent people can have internalized damaging and illogical views on sex work. From the online feedback that seems to be a problem the show’s creators shared.

I’ve no idea what’s an appropriate image to accompany this kind of post. Given I mentioned Lola Ruin at the top of it, I’m going to use that as an excuse to feature a lovely shot of her (from her twitter feed).

The Modern Muse

The Guardian recently published an interesting article on the modern concept of the Muse. It highlights the unequal way artistic collaboration is viewed when it involves men working with women versus men working with men. A beautiful female actress may inspire a male director, but she is typically portrayed as passive, waiting to be molded and guided by his genius. In contrast, when it’s a male star and director, like De Niro with Scorsese or Depp with Burton, then it’s typically seen as two individual talents coming together on a collaborative venture.

The article finishes by questioning what effect the increasing number of female directors will have on the interpretation of this dynamic. That got me thinking about the kinky equivalent. Could a male submissive be a muse in the traditional sense to a female dominant? Obviously male submissives frequently inspire sexual attraction and hot kinky fun. If they didn’t we’d be stuck with only professional dommes, all of whom would be really, really bored with their job. But what about artistic inspiration? While most scenes involve creativity, I don’t think many of them are art in the traditional sense of the word. However, there are exceptions, and BDSM can clearly be a performative act. So are their male submissive muses who inspire their dominants to new creative heights while also being passive vessels for that creativity to be poured into?

If nothing else, it’d make for a great setting for femdom fiction. The beautiful submissive who inspires a dominant to increasingly sadistic and controlling acts in the name of art. The muse who sparks a creative fire that ultimately destroys him.

This artwork is of course by the brilliant Sardax, from this post on his site showing his artistic muse as a cruel mistress. 

A New Kind of Resolution

This is the time of year for making resolutions. Normally this means I pick some, fail to keep them, feel bad about that and finally forget them entirely. This year I’m going to try a new approach – giving everyone else in the world a resolution. Obviously this is unlikely to be entirely 100% successful, but the same is true for my usual resolutions and at least when this fails, it’ll be other peoples fault rather than mine. Genius.

The resolution I’m assigning is this: Resist the urge to share, re-tweet or forward stupid or ugly things on social media. Thinking that something is dumb and then simply moving on is a perfectly valid action. There’s no need to spread that shit around.

In theory this resolution should be an easy one, as it involves *not* doing something. It’ll actually save you time! Unfortunately, social media companies are very good at hacking our emotions and appealing to people’s innate sense of fairness. We want to punish wrongdoers and unite our tribe against them. Re-tweeting a slam on someone seems to achieve this. In reality it just triggers social media chain reactions, drives user clicks and makes the social media companies money.

I should qualify at this point that I’m not talking about situations where influential people or companies do or say something terrible. In that case social media actually helps balance the scales somewhat. Lots of quieter voices can unite to match a much louder one. I’m taking about the cases where some misogynistic / homophobic / anti-sexwork garbage shows up on my social feed from some random idiot with just a handful of followers. Inevitably in those cases it’s because someone I follow has shared it with comments explaining just how terrible and wrong it is. So an opinion which would normally have died quietly and alone in a dusty corner of the internet is now being broadcast to tens of thousands of people and generating all sorts of craziness.

If you’re re-tweeting a troll then you’re making them happy. If you’re arguing with an idiot then you’re wasting your time. If it’s just some random person who did a stupid thing, then leave them to their stupid thing and move on. There’s no need for to pile on and humiliate them over it. Jon Ronson has excellent book on the effects of social media on that last category of people, which I think is well worth reading.

I think we all like to imagine our social media selves as the lady below. Rather than a simple paddle we’ll deploy our cutting wit and re-tweet button to change the mind of the ignorant and punish the evil. In reality we’re more like someone who treads in dog shit on the way to a party and decides that rather than quietly scraping it off we should show all our friends just how nasty it is.

The caption is of course from Servitor over at Contemplating the Divine. Sadly, the School Mistress site that created the original image appears to have ceased to exist.

Use Your Words

Cosmo has an article out on picking and using a safeword. I’m going to go ahead and say that if you need help to pick a safeword, then BDSM probably isn’t for you. It’s only going to get a lot more complicated from that point onward. Maybe start with a good therapist to address your chronic indecisiveness and/or lack of imagination before getting the rope and whips out.

I also think it’s strange how all these articles assume beginners are starting off with heavy consensual non-consent scenes or  elaborate roleplay scenarios.

The minute you’re starting to feel uncomfy is the exact moment when you should go ahead and holler whatever safe word you and your partner chose to go with.

Obviously you could do that, but how about using your words? I’ve done hundreds of scenes, some of them pretty intense, and I don’t think I’ve used a safeword a single time. That has never stopped me communicating a wide variety of issues. In fact I think it’s quicker to say something like “I’m feeling faint” than it would be yell a safeword and then explain what’s going on.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a safeword. It’s good to have a single unambiguous stop button that brings everything immediate to a halt. But that’s not necessary for most scenes and most problems. Common issues that make people uncomfortable are pinching bondage, awkward positions, tingly fingers, anxiety, a bad fantasy headspace or just too much intensity in the sensations. It’s a lot easier to adjust for these as the scene progresses by communicating as you go rather than by simply stopping everything. Plus, it saves your safeword for those times when something is seriously awry and you want that to be communicated entirely unambiguously.

Let’s hope that these two negotiated a non-verbal safeword before starting this scene. He’s not going to be able to yell ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ with that funnel in place.

Artwork is of course by the famous Jim.

Command and Control

A few week ago Mistress Troy Orleans posted an interesting twitter thread on her approach to play and the difficulty of finding appropriate labels for it. I liked a lot of things about, particularly this sexy as hell digression, but I wanted to pick up on the following section in particular…

During a scene, I’m undeniably in control, but if something’s not working, I’ll adjust. My ego’s not attached to the action.

I think that’s an important point for people on both sides of the D/s equation. BDSM is complicated, particularly when doing heavy bondage or intense play. No matter how skilled the participants are – and Troy Orleans is very highly skilled – not everything will work out exactly as expected.

I’ve played with a small number of dommes who did tend to get frustrated or annoyed when a particular setup wasn’t working out as they’d imagined. Those were typically one off visits, because that reaction really kills the dynamic for me. I’m looking for someone in control, which means of themselves as well as of me. Control is about remaining in command of the situation when things don’t work, not trying to make the impossible possible. Plus, watching dommes creatively problem solve and experiment on me in realtime is hot AF.

On the flipside of the coin, from the submissive perspective, I think there can be a danger of treating play as a form of theater, with the domme as the actor and the submissive as both audience and props. That feeds into the bad idea of a scene as crafted narrative that needs to be executed for it to be successful. In reality it’s a highly collaborative process, where the end goal is a creation of a particular energy. Adjusting to something not work out should be viewed as part of building that energy, not a failure of the process. Variation and adaption are what make each experience unique.

Here’s a shot from Mistress Troy Orlean’s twitter feed of a man under her very tight control. You can see more media from her via her OnlyFans.

Commenting on Comments

I want to take a brief break from your regularly scheduled femdom, and comment on the comments I get here.

Firstly, I appreciate every comment that gets published. I could do without the ones asking me for a date with the women in the images, or the ones asking how they can find hot dommes in their area, but they get sent to the trash anyway. If it appears as a published comment, then I appreciate the time, effort and thought it took to write.

Secondly, I read every comment I receive. The number of people who comment is a tiny tiny fraction of my total readers. Yet, if it wasn’t for those comments, I’d probably have given up posting here by now. This site functions as an outlet for my kinky thoughts and experiences, but no matter how much I love the sound of my own voice, there’s only so long I’d continue if I felt I was shouting into a void.

Finally, I try and reply to every single comment I get, even if it’s not always the very next day. I sometimes worry that by replying a few days later, it’ll be be missed and the original comment writer will assume I ignored them. That’s almost never the case. Typically I’m busy with work stuff being teased and tortured by leather clad dommes, and just didn’t get chance to sit down and write. If a new post shows up but a comment reply doesn’t, odds are it’s because I had that post already written and queued up ready to go.

So my thanks to everyone who has already commented, or will leave a comment here in future. They are all appreciated. Just as long as you’re not asking me to find you a hot domme in your area.

Here’s a shot of a pretty typical reader of my blog in the process of posting a comment. Either that, or a random picture I found that I have zero attribution for.

A Bad Session Revisted

Thimble has published a very emotive article on a Femdom experience that went badly wrong. Despite the fact that it’s very well written, I found it hard to read. The session it describes sounds like an emotional slow-motion car crash. That sense of something careering dangerously out of control, but with no idea why or how to bring it safely to a stop.

I’ve previously  written about my own experience with a bad session in a two part post here and here. That was back in 2012 and I’m happy to say I’ve had no further posts to write on the subject. I’ve had a few scenes where the chemistry wasn’t quite right, or the activities didn’t unfold as I’d hoped, but genuinely bad scenes, the kind that leave you emotionally messed up, are thankfully rare in my experience.

My bad session wasn’t in the same league as Thimble’s. Unlike his, the domme wasn’t my dream domme, we hadn’t interacted much beforehand and for the first hour or so the session was actually fine. Despite my example being very minor in comparison, I found it interesting how many parallels can still be found. In both cases the dommes seem to lack control of their own emotions, be unable to adapt when things don’t go as planned and make negative comparisons to ‘true’ lifestyle players. From the submissive side, we were both confused, off-balance and unable to adapt to the uncomfortable dynamic. Thimble kissed the domme’s foot at the end of his experience. I thanked mine for the session. And then felt angry and upset about that for days.

Looking back at my bad session, the actual issue itself seems like a minor conflict. In normal life I’d have brushed it off. You can’t get far in life without encountering a good number of angry and unreasonable people. What makes BDSM so tricky is the heady mix of adrenaline, endorphins and powerful emotions it creates. After all, that’s one of the primary reasons people do it. Yet that also means when it turns sour, it can mess you up in weird ways for days. Kinksters are typically well aware of RACK and SSC when it comes to the physical side of play, but rarely talk about what happens when the dynamic goes wrong. So while I feel bad for Thimble, I am glad he shared his experience and cast light on this topic.

I wanted to avoid using a photograph of a practicing domme for this post, just in case anyone got the wrong idea and thought it was about them. This artwork by NK of an angry looking lady seems appropriate enough.

Happiness

This Swaddle article makes the case that BDSM can make you more successful at work. As one dominant woman in the article says…

I began to notice that especially on days after we had engaged in a play scene, I would feel more focussed, composed and clear-headed. It was almost as if the satisfied feeling I felt in bed, in that position of power, flowed over the next day. I feel like I know more about myself — my mind and my body.

I’ve blogged on the concept of flow in the past (for example here), but reading the Swaddle article made me wonder if something more basic could be at play. Is it simply that being happy makes people more effective?

I know when I’m feeling happy at work (from kinky play or any other reason) I’m more likely to engage effectively in discussions and do a better job of selling my ideas. On the flipside, if I’m feeling unfulfilled or down, I’m more likely to get hung up on pointless arguments and trying to win the debate at all costs. Being effective in my work is often as much about knowing when to let something I disagree with slide as it is about doing the right thing. If I’m buzzed and flying on endorphins from a great play session, then I think I’m smarter about picking my battles. Not looking to work for emotional fulfillment actually leads to smart decision making and hence a more productive work life.

In summary: I should be able to claim on expenses for my kinky play with pro-dommes. It’d be a net gain for my company. I look forward to trying that argument out with my boss. I’m guessing it’ll have to go under the “Miscellaneous” section on the expense form.

Talking of happiness – here’s a very cheerful looking lady. Hopefully the man destined to wear that interesting funnel gag she’s holding is equally happy with the idea.

Speaking Up (Continued)

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post on the challenge for submissives to speak up while playing. I’m certainly no expert, but I thought I’d share a couple of pieces of advice I’ve found useful.

Firstly, don’t assume that just because you’re doing a familiar activity, with someone you’ve played with before, you won’t need to speak up. Mental and physical states are always changing. I was caught out in this way one time while being single tailed by Mistress Mara Mayhem in Chicago. We’d played together several before and this certainly wasn’t a new activity for me. Unfortunately on the way to her space, my uber driver’s radio had been describing the gruesome details of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government. It was a disturbing story and for some reason, as we were playing, I couldn’t get it out of my head. My thoughts were racing and I began to feel faint. It seemed stupid. The physical sensations weren’t that intense and my position wasn’t uncomfortable. Yet somehow the combination of the session stress and my messed up thoughts almost pushed me into passing out. Luckily Mistress Mara is an expert and picked up something was going on, giving me a cue to communicate and temporarily stop the scene. I was relying on my history of play to guide me, rather than listening to what my body was telling me at that moment.

The other piece of advice I’d give to submissives is to try and be transparent and informational with your communication, rather than directive. The submissive’s role isn’t to control scene, but to give the domme the information she needs to make the scene work. For example, consider the situation of being put into an uncomfortable bondage position that you’re not sure about. Can you tolerate it? You might not want to immediately say you can’t handle it, but you also don’t want to wait until all the ropes in place and then have to stop everything. Giving informative but neutral feedback like “I can handle this, but probably not for a long period” can help the domme adjust if necessary. Maybe a short period is all she was aiming for. Maybe she’ll dig for more details so she can tweak the position.

Being transparent in feedback doesn’t have to involve words. I always try and make the volume of my cries and moans reflect the intensity of the sensation I feel. If you grit your teeth right up until you’re forced to yell ‘Red!’ then you’ve given the domme nothing to work with and then a command to stop. Giving honest feedback via my yelps helps her fine tune the scene while keeping a natural D/s flow.

Here’s an example of clear communication in the other direction from Yumine Guo. I don’t think the domme has left much doubt about her opinions.