Uniform – Page 7 – Femdom Resource

For Science!

The io9 site recently published an article discussing four fascinating papers on the subject of measuring pain. The studies in question were all done back in the 1940’s with the goal of coming up with a reliable and reproducible method for quantifying levels of pain. The scanned versions of papers can be read online: Paper 1 (1940), Paper 2 (1947), Paper 3 (1947) and Paper 4 (1948). They’re fairly readable and easy to understand, assuming you having a grounding in basic maths and science.

Pain in itself is a curious topic, as it’s such a uniquely subjective experience. We normally build understanding by shared references. Yet, if I tell someone my back hurts, how do we establish a common reference point? With external stimulus, like color or sound, we can measure the spectrum or the loudness irrespective of a person. Something like taste or smell is a little more complex, but there’s at least an external object (the food itself) to breakdown and analyze. It’s also possible in those cases to construct a common language from more primitive elements (sweet, bitter, salt, etc.) Just look at wine tasting notes for an example of that approach in action. But with pain? How do you measure something that’s completely internal, and can manifest at any point in the body, to a huge range of stimulus, or sometimes to no apparent stimulus at all?

The scientists behind these papers tackled the problem by proposing a scale for measuring pain, with a unit called the dol. They created it using controlled doses of heat on volunteers, and measuring when they could detect a difference between the heat intensity levels. They discovered that on average people could distinguish 21 levels of different intensity between nothing and maximum pain. This maximum wasn’t some safety limit set by the scientists. It turns out that there’s an upper limit on pain, a maximum beyond which increased intensity isn’t detected as greater pain. Working with this 0 to 21 detectable level changes, they assigned 1 dol =equals 2 levels, and created a 0 to 10.5 pain scale.

There’s all sorts of interesting bits of data in the papers. For example, mood and fatigue made no difference to the perception of pain, but gripping an iron bar tightly or hearing a very loud sound did. That fits the common intuition that being distracted from pain lessens it. They also showed that pain did not sum over an area. In other words, the intensity of the pain was purely related to the intensity of the heat energy applied, not the size of the area it was applied to. Initially that seems a little count-intuitive, but it does fit to the idea that being distracted can help reduce pain. One thing that can distract you is a different pain. That wouldn’t be true if pain was additive.

The most interesting finding is one that I think the io9 article misunderstands, or at least misrepresents. It says…

The study’s authors concluded that 8 dols of pain equaled four successive two dol experiences. This arithmetic aspect of the dol contrasted existing beliefs of the subjective nature of pain.

That seems to suggest some sort of progression in time, where you can reach very high pain levels by repeatedly applying a low pain stimulus. That’s not what the study found. What they discovered was that the scale is linear. So the increase in intensity between 1 and 2 dols, is perceived as the same increase in intensity when moving from 8 to 9 dols. I think most people would think of a pain scale like the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes. That’s a log scale, and so going from a magnitude 4 to 5 earthquake is basically nothing, where going from a magnitude 7 to 8 is huge. Similarly, you might expect that a 1 to 2 change in pain isn’t much, where going from 8 to 9 is very scary, but it’s actually perceived as the same change in intensity. This also means that the standard 0 to 10 scale doctors often use, where 0 is no pain and 10 is worst pain you can imagine, actually makes sense. There is an upper bound to pain and the scale between zero and that maximum value is a simple linear one.

The io9 article has a sense of ‘Wow, look what these crazy scientists used to be able to get away with.’ To me it didn’t seem that bad. As a masochist I may have a distorted view on this, but it’s only temporary pain. I suspect if they’d hired an attractive female doctor with an authoritative attitude to perform the tests, as in this artwork by Waldo, then they’d have been inundated with volunteers. Although that might have thrown their experimental results off. They claimed mood didn’t make a difference, but I doubt they also considered or induced sexual arousal.

Searching for a little inspiration

The last few days have found me hunting through my archives of femdom art and erotic fiction in search of a little creative inspiration. I’m trying to carve out time to do some more femdom fiction writing, which for me is an enjoyable but slow process. Normally I just start bashing away at whatever random theme comes to mind, typically without any prepared plan or structure. Occasionally that turns into something worth publishing, but more often than not it bogs down and ends up being left to rot in my unfinished ideas folder. This time I’m trying to be a little more scientific. I’ve been analyzing some of my favorite authors (e.g. Tyjord, drkfetyshnyghts and Anne Gray) to see what parts of their stories really push my buttons. It has been interesting and educational to try and deconstruct why certain passages really grab me. For example, I liked this a lot.

Jason panicked as he felt the tugging on the front of his collar as Victoria pulled the chain through the ring on the ceiling. For a moment he thought they were going to hang him as he choked from both the gag and the pressure on his collar.

Seeing the distress in his eyes, Kristi leaned over his ear and whispered to him, “you can ease off the pressure a bit if you lift yourself up on your toes.” Gratefully he did so, putting all of his weight on the rubber encased balls of his feet. Immediately, Victoria took up the slack in the chain and hooked the taught metal to another ring in the wall near her. Kristi then grabbed another strap and buckled it around his newly exposed instep.
From ‘Jason’s Vacation’ by Tyjord

The apparent concern, the whispered words of apparent comfort and advice, and then the cruel betrayal. That’s hot.

I’m thinking of setting a story inside a medical establishment, so I’ve been browsing artwork along those lines. The piece below is one that particularly grabbed me. I know from personal experience that a little Icy Hot or VapoRub can be pretty painful when applied to delicate tissues. I can’t imagine what it’d be like when slathered on liberally with a painters brush.

It’s not signed but from the style I believe it’s from Tink2001. His work has featured here in the past (for example here, here and here). He has a personal site with a small collection of images located here.

On an entertaining side note I tried putting this into Google’s image search to see what it would come back with. That’s often a good way to find other sites that have featured particular artists. In this case it came back with “Best guess for this image: 3d animal porn”. Not exactly what I was hoping for.

Healthcare, British style with Lady Anna

A few weeks ago Lady Anna emailed me to ask if I’d be interested in reviewing her site – The Anna List Medical Fetish Clinic. She’d give me free access for a month and in return I’d write an honest review on what I found there. Obviously my first thoughts were around the ethical dilemma this posed. The best reviewers – the Michelin inspectors, the New York Times correspondents – never accept any kind of gratis service. They pay as they go. Don’t my readers deserve the same kind of journalistic integrity? My second, third and fourth thoughts were “Woohoo! Free kinky porn!”. After wrestling with these complex issues for at least 7 or 8 seconds, I rationalized that my readers deserve an honest appraisal of the kinky content that’s out there, whatever the risk to myself. I shouldn’t be worrying about the cost to my public image when I have a higher duty to look at all this porn for my readers. And if you don’t like that rationalization, I have others.

Immediately after emailing her to accept I was struck by another troubling thought. What if the material sucks? It’s one thing to comment on random images I stumble across on the web, but quite another to write my typical nonsense when the creative person in question is staring over my shoulder. Fortunately for me, and other kinky porn connoisseurs out there, it definitely doesn’t suck. I think she’s managed to capture on video a really good sense of some very compelling D/s sessions.

I guess I should start with the technical stuff first. She has four main video sections – dental, medical, rubber and operating. There’s also a collection of audio only files and an archive with older footage that’s less overtly medical. Most films are 10 to 20 minutes in length, and are shot in high def with solid camerawork. It’s not simply a static camera that captures everything from a single wide angle viewpoint as I’ve seen elsewhere. There are around 60 films, so far mostly in the medical and rubber clinic sections, and a new film is added each week. As should be obvious from her facilities page, she has a very well equipped set-up, with one of the best collections of medical equipment that I’ve seen. It gets used to for a lot of breathplay, anaesthetic roleplay and immobilizing bondage.

When it comes to the actual sessions themselves, her style is very cool, calm and collected. There’s no ice queen or snarling mistress here, just a matter of fact, it’s for your own good style of domination. There’s a genuine feel to it, which seems a weird thing to say given the heavy medical trappings. After all, you’re clearly not watching genuine medical procedures. Yet there’s a real sense of connection and trust between Lady Anna and her patients. This isn’t a couple of fetish models who just met an hour or so before a scripted scene. She also has a nice style of communication, chatting to the patient, but adding commentary for the viewer in the process.

Sometimes in professional porn it feels like you’re watching a circus act, a kinky cirque du soleil. The submissives are super-subs, pushed through a rapid sequence of extreme and amazing acts. They might express pain, but it’s rare to get a genuine sense of fear or a difficult limit being flirted with. In contrast both Lady Anna and her patients come across as a lot more human. There’s a feeling that the submissive is being challenged and the D/s dynamic between them explored. It’s not fast cutting, high paced material, but it does capture more of the feel of a real session.

Downsides? There’s really nothing that shouldn’t be obvious from the site itself. Obviously it’s just Lady Anna playing with her submissives in a medical fetish context. So if you’re looking for a wide variety of skinny models wearing traditional pro-domme gear then you’re liable to be disappointed. And while there’s less pure medical roleplay than you might expect, the setting is clearly a clinical one. If medical type activities doesn’t appeal, or you’re looking for lots of non-medical style play (e.g. corporal, cuckolding, strap-on, etc.), then I’d look elsewhere. But if the preview material is appealing to you, then I can’t think of any reason not to give it a shot.

Dirty dirty boy

Here’s a little artwork I came across on my random ramblings through Japanese BDSM blogs. I believe the artist is Haru Kano and he has a blog featuring his femdom and fetish artwork. There’s also a thread containing more of his work available at this image board. His style is quite distinctive and in some cases reminds me a little of Namio Harukawa. For example, this face sitting shot definitely puts me in mind of some of Namio’s work.

The image below of a slave getting a good wash and scrub down isn’t something that would normally appeal to me. I’m typically not a fan of humiliation type play. However, I do like his bound kneeling posture, and it’s very hard to not be taken with a trio of attractive aggressive Japanese nurses.

A helping hand

I like this picture for a kind of odd reason. It’s not the beautiful mistress, although that’s certainly a bonus. It’s not the latex outfit or boots, although I am partial to an authoritarian uniform. No, what appeals to me is the fact that he’s holding the rope for her. I’m not sure if he’s trying to untangle it or just make it easily available, but I do like that he’s helping out.

When I used to just fantasize about BDSM, I was always attracted to the idea of forceful control. Not non-consensual play, but not quite fully consensual either. I never really enjoyed corporal punishment movies if it looked like the guy could simply stand up and walk-away. It didn’t make sense to me. Why would a more powerful man put up with being beaten unless he was held in place? How would he be able to stop himself resisting?

Now that I’ve got a little experience under my belt, I finally get it. In fact these days I love being a partial architect in my own demise. It’s fun to give up control a little piece at a time. To position myself as I’m asked. To hold the instruments of torture. To accept the gag or the hood. To push my back out towards the swinging whip. Each little helpful action is a pleasurable reaffirmation of the D/s dynamic between the mistress and myself.

This is Domina Sreni, a pro-domme based in Milan. If you are lucky enough to live in the that part of the world and wish to pay her a visit, her contact page is here.

Adding a little realism to medical play

I had an interesting day today, as it featured a minor medical procedure. My back has been giving me grief for a few months now, although nothing painful enough to stop me working or playing. Its just been an ongoing discomfort that’s more annoying than anything else. Physical therapy helped but didn’t fix it, so today I went for a steroid shot into the spine. It’s no big deal, I was in and out in a couple of hours, but it did involve multiple injections, fitting an IV tap into my arm and wearing a silly backless hospital gown. Not to mention being bossed around by multiple nurses (all female) and a doctor (also female) in the hospital surgical unit.

This was the first time I’ve been involved in any kind of medical treatment in years, and the first time I’ve had real injections since I got physically involved in kink. In the last few years I’ve had hundreds of needles shoved into all sorts of tender spots, and documented a few of them on this blog (as listed in this post). I was therefore pretty blasé beforehand about the whole thing. Unfortunately the BDSM experience turned out to be less helpful than I thought. Without the erotic subtext it’s a very different experience. And the added uncertainty around the success (or not) of the whole thing doesn’t help matters. Nothing was particularly painful, but the discomfort level was still how I remember it from before kink.

I did consider trying to fantasize an erotic component to make use of my personal pain relief mechanism. After all my doctor is intelligent, attractive and forceful. Those are all very appealing qualities. Unfortunately those skimpy hospital gowns don’t leave much to the imagination. It seemed like it might be a fine line to walk between just enough fantasy to help out but not so much so as to cause a major talking point for the nurses afterwards. I didn’t fancy trying to explain that I was temporarily immobilized on the surgical table because I’d been imagining the anesthesiologist knocking me out by sitting on my face. I have to think that sexually harassing people in charge of injecting things into your spine is not a good survival trait.

Anyway, in honor of my little excursion today, here’s some medical femdom. A disturbing but strangely attractive image.

I found this on The Room of a Domme blog (Japanese language).

Emotional Masochism

HMP over at Her Majesty’s Plaything pointed me at an interesting thread over on Max Fisch’s forum. The initial posting by Miss Darcy was mainly about submissives over-committing and going too far in trying to please. But it then evolved into a discussion about drama, emotional involvement and boundary management with Miss Darcy, Irene Boss and alx. The relevant posts are here, then here, then here, and…well you can probably figure the rest out.

HMP’s original post quoted at length from the thread, and I don’t want to simply repeat his post. Instead I want to pick out a particular aspect of the play they’re talking about.

Moths to the flame, they will be attracted to the scenes that upset them the most. It’s just the nature of things when emotional masochism is part of a person’s psycho sexual makeup. Unfortunately if you are going to practice within the extremes you can expect this behavior to continue
Irene Boss

…..forced bi, cuckolding, and full toilet are three of my favorite things. With my emphasis on humiliation and mind control I seem to both attract and be attracted to the delicate, fascinating psyches of slaves, some of whom inevitably gravitate towards emotional masochism. It is the psychological play that grips me, and in some ways I think that is the most dangerous kinky activity out there.
Miss Darcy

It seems strange, but I realized as I was reading this, that I’d never really thought about emotional masochism. I’d only ever thought about it as a physical concept. This is no doubt because that’s the way I’m wired. Any anger, insults or humiliation in a scene really kills the mood for me. Cruelty and objectification are great, but being insulted quickly pulls me out of submissive mode and into ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ mode. However, regardless of my personal wiring, in hindsight it seems pretty odd that in years of thinking about femdom I’d never really pondered emotional masochism.

Now I do come to think about, I realize how incredibly difficult it must be to explore, on both side of the D/s equation. When I play the thing I’m trying to ultimately optimize, my emotional state, is not the thing that’s being directly messed with. A great session might be very cathartic and leave me emotionally on a high, but it’s not always necessary to get there. I can just have a good session and end up feeling happy and lightly buzzed. In contrast emotional play seems far more risky and volatile. It could be fantastic if you have a cathartic breakthrough, but terrible if you don’t reach that tipping point. To use a slightly odd but apt analogy, it seems a little like flying from an aircraft carrier. Once you commit to it there’s either going to be a plane in the air or a big expensive splash. There’s no middle ground.

The other thing that struck me was how differently the same activities can be viewed. For example, Miss Darcy talks about cuckolding as an example of emotional masochism. I find cuckolding an intriguing idea, although I’ve not had the chance to experience it. But if I was to do it, I’d always think about it in the context of tease and denial. A case of – “He gets to enjoy the greatest pleasure while you’re frustrated.” I could never do it as – “You’re not enough of a man so I need this guy to satisfy me.” That would just be annoying, and life is already too full of annoying things.

Similarly any forced-bi play would have to be in the context of a hot sexual scene enabling her pleasure. Doing it as a kind of punishment or humiliation would just seem weird to me.

I guess I can be grateful that, through no skill of my own, I got lucky in the nature/nurture dice game that molds our kinks. Physical masochism just leaves me with some odd marks to explain. I don’t have to risk an emotional rollercoaster or a nervous breakdown each time I play.

– Image removed on request –

Extreme Edge Play

I always endeavor to give this blog a broad appeal, across both the gender divide and the top/bottom divide. Obviously everything I post has to be of interest to me at some level, but I try and avoid limiting it to a narrow range of activities or styles of play. I’m fortunate, or possibly cursed, with a wide range of kinks, so finding topics interesting to me is never too difficult. And anyone looking for a simple stream of hot domme images has plenty of other options.

One area that periodically pops up is edge play, involving activities that some might consider extreme. My post from yesterday would be a good example, as would some of my personal posts on butterfly boarding or suturing. I’m always careful how I present this kind of information, as I don’t want people to casually browse to my frontpage and get some enormous disturbingly graphic image shoved in their face. At the same time, I think edge play is an interesting topic to talk about and don’t want to ignore it entirely.

In that spirit, I want to talk about a type of edge play that scares the hell out of me. It makes branding or cutting look positively delightful, and I doubt I’ll ever try it, or even be in a position to. The description of it comes courtesy of a post from Em called ‘The Real Deal‘ over on Mrs, Kelly’s Playhouse. Let me quote the relevant part:

…. Scott will be totally and completely financially dependent on me. He gets a small social security check that no one could actually live off and that’s it. And though he is well-educated and smart, America hasn’t been nice to him in the job department. He’d have a really hard time making it on his own. Now that’s power.

Fortunately, for Scott, I really love him and will keep my promise to always give him a place to stay (probably the garage) no matter what happens. But when I consider how I want to wield my new — more genuine — power, whips, hoods, and cages, are not the things that come to mind.

I love all the naughty things we get up to, but I want a clean bathroom. I want laundry that is folded and put away properly. I want spotless floors and a meal on the table when I come home. I want organized files and clean counters. And I want all this without a word of complaint. No whining about time for himself.

This is actually a more interesting journey to me. We’ve had great fun but now it is not about fun, it is about what I want.

I find this fascinating to think about on a number of different levels. My immediate reaction was to recoil from the concept. I’ve been an independent and (relatively) successful person for well over a decade now. The idea that it’d be possible for me to voluntarily give-up that type of freedom is abhorrent to me. I’d always want the option to be able to walk away from a situation. But that led me thinking about what femdom mean to different people. Is it femdom to play a few hours a week with a casual play partner or a pro-domme? Or is that simply a sensation seeking physical encounter of a sexual nature? What about a lifestyle relationship where the male is the only financial provider? Even if she controls the bank account, he can walk away or change the arrangements at anytime. Does it make sense to talk about the degree of dominance as defined by the difficulty of ceasing the relationship? And at what point do issues of consent start to become relevant?

I wonder how many men out there, who purport to crave a 24/7 lifestyle relationship, would actually be happy with the kind of approach Em and Scott are exploring. I don’t think I could ever put myself in that situation. I’ve written in the past about the enjoyment I find in being pushed towards my limits. I think a lot of that enjoyment would dissipate if I didn’t have the option to step away.

I found this image on Becoming Nathalie, it’s obviously originally from Nylon Jane. It’s completely unrelated to Em and Scott, but as a nice illustration of a housemaid being scolded it seemed to fit the post.

90’s Flashback (continued)

Continuing my root through the archives, after the earlier Leda post, I came across this image from Taboo magazine. I don’t post a vast amount of F/f material here, but some images are too good not to share.

Taboo always struck me as an odd magazine. For its time it was fairly extreme, and touched themes rarely seen in other glossy top shelf magazines. It also hired very attractive models, used high end fetish gear, and was edited by Ernest Greene, a well known member of the BDSM community. It looked like it should have every ingredient necessary to produce some great fetish and BDSM pornography. And yet it always seemed to me that they frequently hired photographers who really didn’t get kink. They’d chop and change D/s roles as sequences progressed, have models take off the fetish gear mid-way through, and frequently end scenes with conventional legs spread faked lesbian sex shots. It was as if they didn’t quite believe they could do a purely kink based photo shoot and still make money. It really wasn’t until post 2000 that we finally saw other companies successfully pull together high end production values and really serious BDSM and fetish play.

Fortunately, some of the Taboo photographers did get it, and the sequence this image was taken from was always a favorite of mine.

You’re doing it wrong…

I always enjoy needle and piercing play. There’s a beautiful sense of rhythm to it. The pressure as the point slowly presses into the skin. The sharp stab of pain as it breaks the surface. And then the slow sliding sensation as it penetrates. Repeated needle after needle after needle.

There are a lot of places that are fun to pierce. But I’m pretty certain the eye isn’t one of them. I dont’ know where she was taught to do piercing, but she might want to go back and check her notes. And what’s with the smile on his face?