The beauty of dominant women
Here’s a nice image to pair with the one in yesterday’s post. There’s another attractive blonde woman involved, but rather than a teasing contact with the tip of the tongue, it’s a full sit on the face (and tell me that you love me). I like her simple clothes and that lock of hair falling across one eye. Very cute.
I found it originally on the Rue Montorgueil tumblr. The image is watermarked but it doesn’t appear to be an active site anymore.
I was out celebrating a friend’s birthday tonight. Neither of us are exactly old, but we were both bemoaning the aging process. Hangovers take longer to recover from, bodies don’t bounce back quite the way they used to and memory gets just a little more flaky. I’m only in my late 30’s, and already significant chunks of my conversation seem to consist of “You know, they guy on that show, with the restaurant, what’s it called? The one in New York. You know the guy. He was in that other thing, with the woman.” If it wasn’t for smart phones and web search we might never get a proper noun into the conversation.
If I’m going to struggle with something just on the tip of my tongue, I’d rather it was a little more exciting than media trivia. This gentleman seems to have a much better alternative.
I found this on the Lash Kisser tumblr site.
A letter in a recent Dan Savage column got me thinking about the risks of confessing kinks to partners. The letter’s author is writing about her previous boyfriends admission that he liked to be peed on.
I’m GGG, so I mulled it over and decided that I am not comfortable with that. I was able to explain that regardless of how sanitary it may be (one of his selling points!), I am not down and he deserves to be with someone who is. Couple weeks later, I started talking to my future husband, who has the same kinks as me. Thanks for teaching me that being GGG does not mean doing whatever your partner wants but to always be respectful, even if it eeks you out.
I’m not really sure why the author felt the need to write the letter to Dan. I don’t think she comes out of it well. Having a limit on what you’re prepared to do is right and proper. But dumping the guy and making it sound like she did so for his benefit seems to be pretty poor form. As Dan points out in his reply, she can’t be certain her new love doesn’t have similar or worse kinks. After all, he’s going to be very reluctant to confess anything now he knows what happened to the last guy she dated.
While I was pondering this I came across this recent post by Miss Troy Orleans, where she commented on the sharing of kinks in a relationship.
I don’t think the men give their spouses enough credit as far as what their wives desire or what they might be open to as far as kink. I believe every marriage has room for some kink — perhaps it’s not the kind of heavy bondage, degradation, or skill-driven play typical of professional sessions — but with patience, communication, cooperation/accommodation, and an open heart, any couple can incorporate some kind of kink into their sex life.
I’ve never been married, so this is not a problem I’ve ever faced. However, I’ve read enough personal accounts of kinky confessors to realize there are many possible outcomes. Everything from kinky heaven in a newly rejuvenated relationship to divorce, despair and the fighting of wild dogs for a pork rind in a seedy back alley while the local hobos bets on the outcome. You should aim to steer clear of that last option if possible.
The one thing that always seems true is that predicting how a partner will respond is incredibly hard. I’ve yet to hear anyone say “I always thought my wife would like me to wear a fireman’s outfit and pee on her while making siren sounds, and it turns out I was right!” Complex internal sexual wiring doesn’t often manifest itself in obvious ways via someone’s personality or behavior. People will talk about indicators that seem obvious in hindsight, but they are never describing predictors they were aware of beforehand. It seems that the only answer for existing partners is to try and start with the kind of relationship Miss Orleans describes, and then hope they can find common ground.
Given I started with a letter on watersports, it seems only fitting to finish with some photographs featuring some liquid loveliness. Both of these are from the Felm Cyber Tumblr.
If you’ve ever wanted to tour the Kink studios in San Francisco then now might be a good time to do it. Groupon has an offer running where you can do the armory tour at a reduced rate. In the offer preview they draw a comparison with the Smithsonian, which seems to be pushing it a bit, but it certainly sounds an interesting thing to try.
For a little added comedy value you can also take pleasure in the fact that you’re annoying the people over at Morality in Media, who are calling for a Groupon boycott because of this offer. This is the same group that equates 19th century slavery with consensual adults filming porn, so they don’t exactly enter the discussion with a huge amount of credibility. That bastion of quality reporting, the World Net Daily, has an article and a video clip with the morality police in question.
“Groupon should be thinking of their wider commercial audience, most of which, unlike Groupon, would not support torture and humiliation of women and girls for the sexual enjoyment of disturbed men,” said Hawkins. “But since Groupon not only seems to support Kink, but is happy to profit from the torture of women, we have called for a national boycott.”
Dawn Hawkins
Quite honestly I’m a little offended. In all the quotes and the lengthy video clip she doesn’t once mention men getting tortured for the sexual enjoyment of disturbed women. I know there has been a lot of discussion about the devaluation of male submission in the femdom community. Now I’m apparently getting devalued by the anti-porn crowd as well. What am I, chopped liver? I want to be a victim to. All those filthy and depraved women out there who want to watch my poor body be tightly bound and viciously tortured by viciously sadistic leather clad *cough* sorry.
Anyway, here’s a shot from Kink’s Men in Pain featuring the aforementioned torture and humiliation of women. Although in this case the lady in question does seem to have a fair sized penis. They might want to re-check their casting guidelines.
The shot below is taken from the gallery on Mistress Alex’s site. She has a lot of great images in that gallery, with many that are far more explicitly BDSM than this. There are cages, naked men, whips, floggers and beat downs. All sorts of good stuff. But this slightly more ambiguous image is the one that really appeals to me. I think it captures a moment of balance, the point where all the possibilities of a session begin to resolve into the actualities.
There’s often a lot of laughter and banter at the start of my sessions with Lydia. Some of that is purely practical. It takes time to get ropes tied and bodies arranged, and it’s more fun to talk than not to. A larger part of it is is the nervous energy and anticipation we’re feeding off of. I don’t quite know what’s about to happen, but I’m looking forward to finding out. The domme has got a good idea what’s about to happen, but until it starts to unfold has (presumably) no idea how her ideas will translate into the energy and dynamic of the scene. I love that point of transition, the shifting balance between us, the changing gears of dominance and submission. Hallways are a natural transition place and this image, with its choice of doors and “I was waiting for you” stance, captures an element of that session moment.
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.
Yesterday’s post had me talking about gloves, and how I prefer a more functional style. Purely by chance today I came across the shot below, which features simple short black leather gloves. Happily, they’re also combined with breath play and nipple torture, two of my favorite things. I suspect a fetishist would prefer the gloves from the previous post, but as a masochist, this shot is far more pleasing.
I found this on the Thou Shall Love Via Mistress tumblr.
Here’s a very visually striking pair of Gaspar gloves being modeled by Mistress Veronique. There’s a bit of a militaristic feel to them thanks to all those metal press studs.
While I think these look great, when it comes to playing rather than simply staring, I actually prefer something far more basic. The kind of short black leather gloves you’d use to protect your hands, or improve your grip, or avoid leaving fingerprints. There’s something sexy about function. These have great form, they don’t look all that practical to wear while working a guy over.
I found this on the Bits and Pieces tumblr. It was originally shot for the Boot Lovers site.
Today’s post brings you news of an article from 2004. Don’t say that Femdom Resource doesn’t deliver the latest in BDSM culture!
I was reminded of it after reading some of the comments on my earlier post about approaching a dominant woman. Ferns linked to an excellent post she’d written on the subject, which emphasized that the person comes before the submissive. It’s a package deal, and nobody is going to spend time with someone who can scream delightfully when whipped but is an annoying jerk the rest of the time. Playing with gags can be fun, but they shouldn’t be a requirement for a relationship.
This philosophy put me in mind of an old article from Mistress Matisse on how she started dating her primary partner Max. He’s actually a male dominant, but I don’t think that fact alters the underlying point. She wasn’t attracted to some aspect of his sexuality, that actually counted against him initially. It was the fact he was capable, quietly confident and self-possessed that was a significant part of the initial attraction. I also can’t resist posting a link to an article that opens with the following line.
As Max and I approach the fifth anniversary of our first date, I’ve been thinking about the fact that if my submissive, Jae, didn’t have such a big clitoris, Max and I might never have gone on that date at all.
Mistress Matisse in ‘Me, Max and Jae’
That must be a great way to start a response to the old cliched question – ‘So how did you two meet?’
For images I can bring you shots of two out of the three people in question. The first shot below is Mistress Matisse giving Bobbi Starr a spanking in a scene for Everything Butt. The second image is Jae giving some lucky guy a good paddling, taken from this blog post.
This image comes courtesy of Otto’s Femdom spanking art. It’s a nicely executed drawing, with a pair of enthusiastic ladies providing all sorts of stimulation to their victims.
I always enjoy coming across obscure but fun drawings like this.The internet is full of talented amateurs writing stories, posting photographs, creating blogs, etc. But for some reason I find artwork particularly appealing. Seeing talent in someone else is always pleasurable, and artwork is a very immediate way to demonstrate it. There’s a quick hit of “Oh that’s hot, I like that” quickly followed by “And somebody out there created this from nothing.”
