I was reading back through the interview with Troy Orleans I featured in yesterday’s post and this part stood out to me.
…I have an objectification fetish, and I don’t use the word fetish lightly. Objectifying— even just saying the word makes me feel a little tingle. It’s something that’s really thrilling for me. When I get to put someone in this heavy bondage and have them fully immobilized and anonymized, they become this shape, this physical sculpture that I’ve created now hanging in my salon—that to me is incredibly arousing, erotic, and powerful.
People often talk about the appearance of bondage but reading this made me think about all the different types of bondage aesthetic. The one most people probably think of in that context is Shibari, particularly suspension scenes. However, there’s also smooth parcel like bondage, old fashioned rope bondage, predicament bondage, medical bondage, etc. All have their own particular aesthetic. The kind Troy is referring to – heavy use of leather and metal to control and objectify someone – isn’t a common bondage look in either kink or mainstream worlds, but for me it’s by far the hottest kind.
I remember doing a session with Troy a few years ago and she had me suspended in a bodybag as shown here. When everything was rigged with many ties, locks and layers, she asked if she could cover my face. Not so much for my benefit, but for what she described as the aesthetic effect. She just wanted the scene to look right as she imagined it. I can’t handle heavy hoods but we came up with a lightweight material hood that I could live with. Immobilized anonymization was achieved and I became that physical sculpture hanging in her studio.
Here’s a lovely shot of Troy at work creating another of her pieces of art. This is from her Twitter feed.
Objectification is hot. Not necessarily a strong fetish for me, but hot nonetheless. Treating a person no differently than you would a vase makes the cogs start turning in my brain as well.
As a writer, I like to think about the language a Female Dominant uses to objectify Her slave (yes, capitalizing pronouns and nouns that refer to the Dominant is an important part of the process; She is a Goddess and don’t you forget it, you worthless slave). The proper pronouns for Mistress are She, Her, Hers, and Theirs for several of Them. The correct pronoun for the sub, or slave, is “it,” a thing, an object, not a person. Try to construct a sentence so that the name or pronoun indicating the slave is not the first word, which is by custom capitalized. Writing this way reinforces the notion that the slave is nothing, while the Mistress is a Divine Power.
Some even lower-case the pronoun “I” when spoken by a slave. A better approach, however, is for a slave to refer to itself in the third person, eliminating I, me, and my from its vocabulary entirely:
“Mistress, Your slave begs You to have mercy” (Although the slave knows She won’t!).
A creative writer can intensify the effect by judiciously applying adjectives: “Most Gracious Mistress, Your worthless slave begs Your kind permission to kiss the toe of Your boot,” for example. Just don’t over-do it.
A cardinal rule in verbal communication is that Mistress never asks or requests; She confidently commands, knowing She will be obeyed. Better yet, She can “allow,” with the assumption that Her slave is eager to serve, just bursting with submersion: “Very well, scum, you may crawl over here and lick the dust from My boots.”
She never says “thank you” to a slave; it is simply fulfilling its reason for existence — to serve Her pleasure — not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing Her a favor.
And of course, the slave has the last word in this conversation, or any conversation, including one with Her whip, of She is amused to flog Her chattel property: “Thank You, Mistress.”