When a session goes bad (part 1)

My experience of playing with pro-dommes has been an overwhelmingly positive one. I’ve had many great sessions, and I’ve documented a few of them on this blog. In all the time I’ve been playing I’ve only had one really bad session. While that session was clearly an aberration, it struck me that it’s probably worth writing about. After all it’s easy to find lots of posts eulogizing great dommes and amazing sessions. It’s much harder to find discussion on the effect of play that turns sour. Looking back at the session the physical interaction itself doesn’t seem particularly significant, but what was interesting was the way it left me feeling for days afterwards.

I should start by saying that this session wasn’t with anyone I’ve named here in the past. Dommes like Lydia and Yuki have been unfailingly enjoyable to play with and I’d never hesitate to recommend them. The domme in question here will remain unnamed, as she’s still active and I don’t particularly want to get into a back and forth with her or any of her fans.

We’d played together a couple of times previously and I’d enjoyed those sessions, but I had been a little surprised at her reactions when things hadn’t gone as planned. In my experience a good domme is always able to adapt and modify the flow of a scene based on the feedback she gets. She’s always in control, but that doesn’t mean everything has to happen exactly as she originally envisioned. This particular domme seemed to become frustrated and react with a touch of anger when things didn’t work out. That struck me as a bad sign. Being in control of the scene means being in control of yourself as well as the submissive.

The unpleasantness started about an hour or so into our third session. She had me spread on an X-frame and had spent 20 or so minutes working me over with various floggers and paddles. At a natural break, while she switched implements, she asked how I was doing. My fingers were going numb thanks to the overhead position and tight leather wrist cuffs, and I mentioned this fact. This was apparently a mistake. I’m not sure what feedback she was looking for, but this clearly wasn’t it, as she got rather vexed. I actually hadn’t asked to stop, but she did stop and unhooked my hands in an angry fashion.

What followed was a quite surreal conversation/argument. I was naked and still shackled to the X-frame by my feet, but with my hands free so I could work the feeling into them. She was sulking in a chair across the room complaining how I was wasting her time. Apparently I shouldn’t be doing such long sessions (we were scheduled for 3 hours) if I couldn’t take it. This struck me as ludicrous. The length of overall session was irrelevant to this particular issue, and if anyone was missing out on active play time it was me. She also tried to make some bizarre point that if this was lifestyle play I wouldn’t be getting the option to stop. That didn’t seem a particularly convincing line of reasoning.

I’m normally not someone to let a stupid statement slide without comment. When my friends describe me the expression “Doesn’t tolerate fools gladly” is often in there somewhere. The problem was that just seconds before we’d been in a D/s mode, which made for a very confusing dynamic. I wanted to talk through the situation, but still had a submissive mindset. The intellectual bit of my brain was saying “Fuck this. She’s out of line.” where the emotional part was saying “She’s in charge. Don’t argue.” Suddenly all the tools of dominance that I enjoyed seemed to conspire against me. Being naked, bound and vulnerable is normally wonderful, but when the energy turned bad it made it hard to be assertive and take back my submission.

In hindsight I should have simply stopped the session at this point. I never want to play in an angry negative context. However, at the time it never occurred to me to try and stop. I was too busy trying to deal with my conflicting instincts of arguing versus submitting. The end result was a confused discussion that only made her more stroppy.

…To be continued in part 2…

Picking a picture for this post wasn’t easy. People typically don’t post pictures of bad sessions. Instead I’ve gone with a shot of some play from Men are Slaves that features both corporal and a cuffed X-position. I’m sure the participants below are having a lot more fun than I ended up having.