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When anything goes

Mistress T has an interesting and instructive post up about negotiating a scene. Her key point is that a submissive saying he’ll do ‘anything’ the domme wants is both useless and highly unlikely to be true.

My go-to (smart-ass) answer these days if they say they’re into anything that will make me happy is: “Great. You do the house work while I watch TV in my PJ’s and ignore you. Just leave the money on the counter.”

Her point is an excellent one but from the submissive point of view, it does touch on a real point of dilemma. How do you negotiate a scene without making it feel like you’re ordering from a restaurant menu? I’ve done scenes with new dommes where I’ve an expressed interest in X, Y and Z, and ended up with 40 minutes of each in that order. Pro-dommes typically complain when clients get very specific about scripting a scene and controlling how it should unfold. But the reverse situation also applies. I don’t want to feel I’m controlling exactly what the domme does.

Mistress T goes onto to suggest that of the 120 fetishes she has listed, the number of things a random submissive would hate is far longer than the list of things they’d like. I’m not sure about that. I don’t have access to her list, but I know of other examples from domme’s I’ve played with. For example, Domina Yuki’s and Lady Lydia’s. They both have 50 or so activities listed. Of those there are probably 2 or 3 that are hard limits for me and a couple of things that I’d do but aren’t particular interesting to me. The other 40+ things are all just dandy as far as I’m concerned, and I’ve done almost all of them at some point. Yet, in my experience, negotiating a very open scene based on 40 potential activities really doesn’t work well. Most domme’s tend to classify you as one of those ‘anything but not really’ guys, and assume you’re going to be unhappy when reality sets in.

I don’t have any great answers to this problem. The best advice I can give is to slowly build trust by doing multiple sessions, each featuring a limited number of different activities. Once you’ve built chemistry with someone and demonstrated a genuine breadth of interest, you’re more likely to be able to transition into a more natural and free-form dynamic. When I play with Lydia these days I suggest only a single idea as a possible direction and let her improvise from that point on. She knows by now that I’m open to a lot of different activities, and don’t have a fixed idea of how a scene should play out. I think last time I simply suggested something involving bondage on her bed, and ended up trapped in much rope, sporting an electrified butt-plug, with several piercings, many scratch marks and a plastic wrapped face.

I’ll leave you with an image of Mistress T and Amica Bentley, originally from The English Mansion that I found on Mistress T’s blog. I suspect for a lot of the ‘anything you want’ guys this particular activity is likely to transition into a ‘but not that’ response.

Swinging the single-tail

I had my back and ass well and truly striped today by Mistress Cynthia Stone. She used one of the heaviest single tails I’ve yet experienced and the resulting marks are pretty special. We snapped photographs so hopefully in a future post I’ll be able to share some images.

Until that exciting moment (settle down at the back there), I’ll restrict myself to this shot (via Selina Minx’s tumblr) of a whipping from the movie The Million Eyes of Su-Muru. With an imdb rating of 2.6/10, it’s clearly not a forgotten classic. However, it does look like the kind of film I’d have watched as a teenager with rapt attention and a strange feeling in my underpants.

It takes an act of God…

Apologies for the lack of posts in recent days. I’m pretty proud of my posting record here, and it’s rare that I miss a day. Right now I’m taking a few days vacation down in California, and unfortunately it turns out my hotel internet service can’t survive a relatively small 3.4 earthquake. Of all the natural disasters that can strike LA, you’d think earthquakes would be the one they could deal with, but apparently not.

Hopefully normal service will be resumed from this point on. I have some kinky shenanigans planned for my trip, so I’ll report on how they go. In the meantime I’ll leave you with this sweet picture courtesy of the Blue Uniform tumblr.

The rarest of kinky depictions

There’s a huge amount of images out there featuring male dominants and female submissives. There’s a lesser but still fair amount of the various Fm, Ff and Mm pairings. But it’s incredibly rare to see a shot that captures the idea of switching in a single image. Offhand I can’t think of another example I’ve seen. I think this is very clever, although I would have like to have seen a few ropes wrapped around the prone version of the male. I think the image would be a bit better balanced that way.

It’s by the photographer David Samson (free deviant art login required). The original full size version can be seen here.

Stereotypes of submission

A post by Ms Justine Cross pointed me at this interesting article on Salon by Tracy Clark-Flory. The article was written in response to one by Katie Roiphe in Newsweek suggesting that women are newly interested in submission because of the greater power and equality they’re experiencing in the workplace. The original Newsweek article stuck me as particularly muddleheaded and I’m glad to see someone pointing that out. However, in the process it does recycle an old stereotype that always annoys me. Namely that male submissives and masochists are typically powerful and successful career people who need to submit in order to take a break from all the high pressure decisions they normally have to take. It’s the cliche of the aggressive lawyer who spends all morning shouting at staff and his lunchtime wearing pink panties and getting caned.

It’s a point of view often heard from pro-dommes (as Ms Cross also mentions in her post), typically meant to describe their clients, but often applied generally to describe male submissives. And I get why pro-dommes say this. It’s a pre-emptive strike against the assumption that their clients (and by association themselves) are weird or misfits in society. Their clients aren’t just average they’re saying, they’re better than average, taken from the winners in society. But understanding it doesn’t stop it annoying me on several different levels.

Firstly, pro-domme clients are a self-selecting group, not a random sample. Seeing a pro-domme regularly costs thousands of dollars. Men who can afford this are certainly not a representative cross-section of society. Secondly, it’s not something I see discussed in non-professional circles. I’ve never seen someone write “My husband used to just want regular sex, but since he got that promotion suddenly he’s insisting I chain him up and pee on him. I like the extra income but I’ve had to spend half of it on leather outfits and a snorkel set”. Thirdly, a lot of kinky people can trace their preferences back to childhood or adolescence. Which means it’s completely unrelated to profession or success, unless you happen to have been a 13 year old investment banker.

Finally, and perhaps most annoying of all, is the implication that only powerful successful people (lawyers doctors, brokers, etc.) have stressful and high pressure decisions to take. Everyone has to deal with those kind of issues in their lives. In fact I’d say trying to bring up a family while working an underpaid job is going to involve a whole lot more stress and pressure than a rich, pro-domme visiting executive has to deal with.

The truth is that kinky people come from all walks of life. There’s nothing particularly special about having an interest in BDSM. Or at least no more so than all the interesting and quirky factors that go into making us who we are.

Given my original prompt for this post was Ms Justine Cross, that seems like a perfect excuse to feature a picture of the lovely lady in question.

Oh, that works!

I like this image because her expression is one that I know well. I suspect it’s familiar to a lot of submissives. It’s the expression of “Oh, that works, excellent! Let’s do more of that.”

There’s often a lot of improvisation in a scene. As Helmuth von Moltke (the elder) famously said “No plan survives contact with the enemy”. Most BDSM scenes start with a master strategy but degenerate (or evolve) as physics and sweaty bodies get involved. However, I’ve noticed that as the improvisation unfolds there’s often an ‘Aha!’ moment. It’s that key moment the dominant discovers which of her ideas work really well. From a submissive point of view, its a little bittersweet. There’s a shared happiness that the scene is coming together, but a sense of dread that things are only going to get significantly more painful from here on out.

This image is from the Divine Bitches site.

Clamping the tender parts

A quick post tonight, as it’s a busy holiday weekend for me. This image caught my eye for it’s sense of tenderness and togetherness. I always like play that blends a little cruelty with a little tender affection. The only thing better is play that blends a lot of cruelty with just that bit of tenderness.

I found this originally on the Work Is Never Over tumblr, but I believe it’s from a movie called Whipsmart from Good Vibrations starring Mistress Morgana. She’s undoubtedly a fan of nipple clamps, as she makes clear on her entertaining biography page.

Invisible touch

Yesterday’s post triggered several interesting comments and prompted some further thoughts on the perception of a scene. One particular comment was by Mark on the touching hands in the image I featured.

Notice her hand gently resting on his. For me, an incredibly powerful element of the scene.

I wonder if that gentle, reassuring touch would mitigate, somewhat, the ramp up in intensity that you described when under the blindfold.

I had noticed (and enjoyed) that aspect of the image, but the post was getting so long I decided not to comment further on it. Mark’s observant comment got me thinking about touch, and what a great example of shifting perceptions it can be.

Simple caresses can play a huge part in a scene. Not everything has to be about extremes of pain or pleasure. Fingers skating across the skin, tracing the lines of muscle or caressing a limb. Each little contact plays a part in building the dynamic. When I can see them, touches to me are predominantly sensual. They’re about the pleasure in the contact of another body. They might be soothing after an intense pain, or promising of what’s to come, but the underlying message is a hedonistic one.

Yet take my sight away and a touch becomes quite different. Partially they’re reassuring. Little grounding moments that tell me I’m OK, she’s right here with me. Like an animal being petted, I relax into her hand. But this reassurance is a double edged sword. It can be taken away. Giving it subtly emphasizes its importance to me. So there’s now an element of fear. What if she takes it away? What if I need that emotional contact? Losing a sensual touch is disappointing, but losing a reassuring one can be scary. It moves the balance from pleasure to control, a shift of perception unrelated to the physical contact itself.

I’ll leave you with an image of what appears to be some very pleasurable touching, with a nice undercurrent of control. It was shot by Michele Block-Stuckens and is called Toy Boy.

See no evil

One thing that getting involved in BDSM has taught me is how simple things can drastically alter my perception of reality. People are constantly building a model of the world in their mind. They combine the signals from their senses to create a personal version of reality. I think most people see this as a very robust and simple additive process. Faulty or missing signals should not change what reality is. I suspect we have to implicitly believe this or we’d go crazy. But in fact adding or removing a signal doesn’t simply enhance or reduce our internal model of the world. It mutates it in far more complex ways.

I experienced a reminder of this tonight, while playing with Lydia. She had me transfixed in a web of ropes, electrics attached to various points, and was scratching and piercing me with a collection of needles. As far as activities go this was pretty intense, but nothing too unusual for us. Then she introduced a blindfold. In theory this shouldn’t have changed too much of my mental model. The only thing I could see was her ceiling or her face. It wasn’t like I needed to be reminded what either of them looked like to understand what was happening. Yet it radically changed how I felt.

With the blindfold on I pulled away from the pain. I feared it. The sensation was sharper, more intense. My anxiety levels rose. I said ‘no’ occasionally, something which does nothing to slow Lydia down, but is unusual for me. My sense of the surrounding world shrank. I lost track of time.

When she removed the blindfold, everything changed. I moved towards the pain, wanted it. The actual sensation of it changed. My breathing slowed and I felt calmer. I fixated on her, and felt a powerful wash of emotion towards her. My vocalization changed from screams to moans. I found I could more easily focus without being distracted by the electric shocks. The engineer in me wants to say this makes no sense. The signal from my eyes was telling me nothing I didn’t already know. In terms of information theory, the entropy of the signal was zero. Yet, it clearly did radically change my experience and perception of what was happening.

I’ll leave you with an image of a man experiencing his own version of a modified reality, courtesy of Divine Bitches.

Site Updates

I’ve made a variety of additions to a number of pages.

To the blogroll on the right and the blog page I’ve added links to Veronica Volt (an LA based pro-domme) and to The Pervocracy (featured in yesterday’s post). I was also happy to move he stoops to worship out of the dead blogs section, after slave domnei left a comment indicating it had returned to life.

To the equipment page I’ve added links to Jack’s Floggers, Wild Gasmasks and Slaughter House Couture.

To the femdom fiction page I’ve added a link to Miss Irene Clearmont, who has a selection of well written femdom stories freely available.

Finally, on the femdom image page I’ve cleaned up a few dead links and added the following tumblr’s…

I’ll leave you with a shot I found on one of those added tumblrs, specifically Blue Keys.