Perky

My kinky vacation has continued splendidly. After playing with Mistress Troy Orleans last week, this week I was lucky enough to spend time with Mistress Tess. Lots of wonderful heavy bondage was involved and many pictures taken. When I get home I’ll write up some more detailed thoughts on all the sessions and share some of the photographs.

In the meantime I want to talk about a downside for masochists that people rarely bring up – perky nipples. After years of play involving much nipple torture, I now have way more prominent nipples than I ever used to. That’s particularly true in the days immediately after a session. I went through 3 different t-shirts today trying to find one that wouldn’t remind people of George Clooney’s Batman. It’s pretty much permanent high beams for me now, which can be a disquieting sight in a 50 year old man. I might have to start wearing burlesque style pasties under my shirts.

This is a shot from my recent session with Mistress Tess. There are leather straps across my chest and then the nipple clamps are tied off to attachment points above and to the side of me. They weren’t serated clamps, but still packed a lot of ouch.

Domme Song Dummy

Taking a break from the vacation posts to link to this Harper’s article entitled Domme Songs. It’s an essay by Michael Robbins reflecting on his masochism, experiences with a domme and how it links to the state of the world.

It’s a piece that I’ve seen posted to social media several times recently, often with positive comments from people I respect. I find that odd, because I hate it. I’m not the only blogger to feel that way. Miss Pearl has written a passionate and detailed criticism of it in a post here. She’s done a far better job there than I will do here, so go read that if you want more than my cursory thoughts.

My main beef with the piece is his attempt to link masochism with the destruction of the planet and our unfolding ecological disaster. Which is nonsensical. We’re not destroying the planet because we get a thrill from doing so. We’re doing so because we want stuff, we want it now and we don’t want to think about the consequences. A point he seems to acknowledge later, but then he does nothing with this apparently contradictory thought.

People’s kinks are complex and highly personal. Not political. Someone who has both masochistic and anxious tendencies may well use the former to address the latter. Nobodies kinks exist in a vacuum. But the theater of BDSM play has bugger all to do with the disappearance of snails in Hawaii. I’m all for thinking deeply about kink and what it means to you, but this article fails to do that. There’s no honesty, just pretension and wordplay.

No idea what the source of this picture is but it seemed appropriate. One sometimes needs a hint on when to keep quiet.

Vacation Continued

I had a fabulous session with Troy Orleans this week. Much bondage was involved. I’ve a bunch of photographs to share, but haven’t yet had time to sort through them. I’ll try and do that in the coming days and put together a post on the session.

I have a session with someone else lined up for tomorrow, which required a very painful and unusual sacrifice tonight. I went to a fancy tasting menu restaurant, but ordered the nonalcoholic beverage pairing. I’ve never done that before. Sadly, I’m now at an age where I can’t drink a bunch of wine at night and play hard the next day. Getting old sucks. At least tomorrow should be fun, in a cleared headed way.

I’ll leave you with a shot of another kinky gentleman on his holidays.

Don’t have a source for this. I found it via tumblr.

On the Road

Apologies for the lack of recent posts. I am on vacation for the first time in a good while, so the last few days were all about planning, packing and traveling. Happily, I’m now safely ensconced in a comfy hotel room, looking forward to a few sessions of kinky fun and a lot of good food. My kind of getaway.

While I contemplate that exciting prospect, I’ll leave you with some visual loveliness.

Sadly, I’m not sure who the artist is for this work.

Happiness

Greater Good Magazine has an interview with the sociologists Alicia M. Walker and Arielle Kuperberg on their new book – Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life.

The message of the interview and the book is the happiness BDSM can bring.

VL: What did you discover in your research that surprised you?

AW: I was just really shocked overall about how happy everybody was, which became the crux of the book. There’s never been another group of people that I’ve interviewed, for every single person that I talked to, who was just wildly happy. And this is a huge sample—96 completed interviews, but I talked to far, far more people who didn’t end up completing interviews. That is just extremely unusual.

Obviously, I’m happy that BDSM makes people happy. Far be it from me to knock such a positive message. But I do wonder if more careful qualification is needed here. They’re not necessarily talking about people who are kinky and attracted to BDSM. Nor are they even talking about people who simply practice BDSM. As far as I can tell, they’re talking about a narrower subset – the people who are part of a BDSM community. I think that means people who go to munches, attend play parties, go to community events, etc.

It makes me wonder what the data would look like if you separated kink from sociability. Are couples who practice kink purely in their private lives happier than non kinky couples? How about people who exercise their kinky side with pro-dommes? What about sociable community focused non-kinky people compared to people in the BDSM community? Is it BDSM that makes people happy or the community elements that form around it?

I guess I should read the book and find out if they tease apart that kind of data. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an image of a domme who certainly appears to be in her happy place. It’s less clear how the submissive feels about it, but I’m sure he’s smiling.

This is Miss Erika Rayne, a pro-domme based out of Bristol, UK. I sourced the image via her Bluesky feed. If you’re in the Bristol area and interested in finding some happiness of your own, her session and contact information is available on her website.

CFNM Fetish Style

In looking at this image it struck me how rarely I play with dommes in serious fetishwear. The common stereotype of a pro-domme is someone dressed head to toe like Vespa here from Reflective Desire. All tight latex, straps, heels and corsets. Yet in reality that look only gets widely used in content creation or in very specific fetish sessions. It looks fabulous but it’s just too much of a pain to put together and work with for a regular session of a couple of hours. If only these kind of outfits worked like the Futurama spray on bikini.

This is Vespa and Heavy shooting for Reflective Desire. You can see more via their site and their Bluesky feed.

Before and After

I remain conflicted on the topic of AI and femdom content. On one hand, I do like the fact people are producing interesting new material. For example, the image below by VelvetLash (who I’ve featured here before). I love this image and it’s not the kind of thing you’d see in regular femdom content. Medical and bondage material certainly exists, but this feels like something new and worthwhile.

On the other hand the sheer amount of AI dreck filling up sites is depressing. It’s so easy to pump out hundreds of variations on a theme. There’s a danger that any creative examples like this one will be buried beneath a tsunami of identikit Nvidia dommes.

Thinking about it tonight put me in mind of Low Background Steel. That’s an odd connection, but hear me out. If you’re making sensitive laboratory grade radiation devices, you need to use steel made prior to the late 1940’s. That’s because later steel is contaminated by airborne particles from nuclear testing. This uncontaminated steel can be collected from old shipwrecks or other pre-war steel construction. I wonder if in the future we’ll think about imagery having a similar before and after time. Images shown to be published pre 2024 (or thereabouts) will be considered differently than anything later. Post the AI explosion, we’ll always have visual contamination to keep in mind.

Pink and Black and Why?

After featuring some strikingly beautiful images in the last few posts, I thought we’d go in a different direction with this one. Although I guess it is still striking.

I’m always astonished by the fashion industries ability to take beautiful women, dress them in exciting fetish fashions and yet somehow produce weird unsexy images. Past examples include Monica Bellucci and Anne Hathaway. To that list we can now add Carmen Cass in this shoot for Vogue Czechoslovakia.

What is with that pink decor? And that oddly placed ugly vase? And the lights and lighting? So strange. It does make me think that if a domme ever wants to create a really scary dungeon space, she should forget the bondage furniture and black walls. It’d be a lot more disconcerting to do a scene in a room like this one – all pink, twee and 1980’s.

Dressing for the Evening

The image in my previous post got me thinking about dommes who create images with a similar aesthetic. That is to say, combining beauty and elegance with explicitly kinky elements, but in a restrained way. Pun possibly intended.

One such domme who immediately came to mind is Natalie Noir. She’s a  Zurich based pro-domme who creates some very beautiful imagery – as featured here before. The shot below, sourced via her Twitter, seemed an appropriate follow-up to the last post. A similar idea, with a smart hooded male and an elegant domme standing over him, but shot in a different way. This shot, I assume from the photoshoot, is equally striking.

If you’re in the Zurich area and would like to session with Natalie, you can find information here.

Dapper

This is a lovely blend of ideas. The neatly fitted and well made gag and blindfold both align with the suit and contrast against it. Her pose and outfit is more casual and relaxed, yet her positioning is clearly dominant. He looks in control of himself and yet controlled at the same time. Plus, it’s not often you see a pocket square in a bondage scene.

I’ve hunted around online but sadly I can’t find an original source. I’m wondering if it has been cropped from the original. It looks a bit like the kind of image that Domina M creates, but I can’t prove that. If anyone can help attribute then please leave me a comment.

Updated: Domina M kindly left a comment to indicate it’s not her (although she’s a fan of the aesthetic), but is fairly certain it’s Miss Grey of SF.