Femdom Resource – Page 250 – The beauty of dominant women

Screaming as a second language

This is a continuation of my post from yesterday on safewords and control in a scene. Anybody who read that probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I’m also not much of a fan of the commonly used green/yellow/red safeword scheme. I get the utility of that approach, but it again feels too much like taking control from the bottom. I want to give feedback, but the very unambiguous labeling of the colors feels (to me) more like direction than feedback.

Of course that begs the question – how should the bottom give feedback? Obviously talking after a scene is good. And responding to direct questions during a scene also works. But my favorite mechanism is screaming. Or moaning. Yelling. Whimpering. Grunting. Growling. Basically, any kind of proportional verbal feedback that helps the top know where I’m at.

It sounds kind of obvious when I write it down. Doesn’t everyone cry out when they get beaten, whipped or pierced? The key word though is proportional. I always want the domme to be able to trust the cues that she gets from me. I never try and play the stoic hero. I also try and avoid exaggerating my response, even though it’s sometimes tempting to do so as a defense mechanism to avoid escalation of the pain. Occasionally, when a sensation catches me unawares, and I react more from surprise than hurt, I’ll even comment to let the domme know what happened. I never want her to doubt the honesty of my reactions and start second guessing the intensity of the scene. I’m lucky in that I get to play with a lot of great dommes who are experts at judging non-verbal cues, but I always still make a conscious effort to communicate those cues as transparently as possible.

I’ll leave you with an image of someone about to provoke some non-verbal communication. I’m sure screaming will be involved, let’s hope it’s proportional.

The image comes via the Pure Beauty tumblr.

A suspension scene (for my disbelief)

A few posts ago I made a remark to the effect that frequent use of a safeword suggested somebody was doing something wrong. Femi then left a comment containing this…

I know at least one submissive who sees ProDommes, and doesn’t feel he got this money’s worth if he doesn’t safeword. He wants to be pushed that far.

I found that interesting, as I’d never thought to play like that, and it instinctively felt wrong to do. I don’t mean wrong in a pejorative or objective sense. If that’s the way you play then by all means have at it and good luck to you. I meant wrong for me personally. However, I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why. It took a couple of days of pondering to really get a handle on it.

I think it ultimately comes down to control. I like to be pushed in a session, but I also like to feel I have no control over it. Knowing that I’m always going to safeword gives me a decision point that will constantly be in the back of my mind. A session structured around a climatic moment where I take back control seems like the wrong focus. In reality I can always stop any scene at any time (despite having no official safeword when playing with Lydia). But I prefer to immerse myself in the idea that I have no options, suspend my disbelief, and let the domme decide when it’s over.

I suspect part of this is the difference between being a pure masochist and being a submissive masochist. I’m generalizing here, but I’d say the pure masochist is interested mainly in sensations. It’s an inward focus on his pain. I enjoy that as well, but I get off more on the enjoyment of the sadist. It’s an outward focus on her, almost to the point of becoming disembodied. My physical presence is no longer my own. To safeword therefore feels like taking something away from the domme and breaking that spell. To a pure masochist it’s simply an indication that a certain threshold in pain has been successfully reached (or not reached in some cases).

The comic is from the entertaining Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. I might start trying this approach in meetings and seeing what reaction I get. Although some of our more brutal design reviews might genuinely benefit from the idea!

Getting plastered

Domina Victoria Rage has an interesting post up about a scene she did involving a full plaster of Paris body cast.

For over an hour he held still, waiting patiently in near breathless anticipation as each layer was applied. I was happy to see how quickly it hardened into an ever expanding prison of white. As the minutes ticked by, more and more of him became enveloped and secured, he was stiffened, no movement in his feet or legs, his torso, arms or fingers…. just stillness. All that was left was his neck and his head, and he was SO eager for me to finish the job.
Inescapably Mine by Domina Victoria Rage

With his head and body fully encased she then goes on to do some breathplay, repeatedly cutting off his only lifeline to the outside world.

A few years ago I might have read that post and thought ‘So what?’ I lie still for hours at a time every night in the dark, and I can hold my breath. There’s no pain, so what’s the big deal? Now I’m a touch older and a touch wiser. There’s a big difference between choosing not to move and not being able to move. It takes considerable mental strength to give-up this kind of control for hours at a time.

I love breathplay and bondage, and I’d be fascinated to try this kind of scene out, but it would definitely stress me. There’s very little room for compromise or adaptation. There are no ropes to loosen or hoods to unzip. The submissive either immerses himself into it or the scene is broken. And if he does succumb to panic, it’s not going to be a particularly quick process to cut the plaster away. It takes a lot of trust on the part of the submissive and a very fine degree of judgement on the part of the dominant to pull this kind of thing off.

Victoria Rage is a Seattle based pro-domme. You can visit her professional site here, and read the rest of her blog here.

The internet is not for porn (so says Google)

Google has been messing with their search algorithms again. Specifically image search. The change has not been for the better in my opinion.

Adult bloggers and content providers have long had issues with their approach to sexually explicit content. For example, here’s Bacchus back in 2008 and then again in 2011 highlighting the strangeness of the auto-suggest feature. Now they’ve changed their image search to make it far more reluctant to display sexual images. The algorithm used to be based on classification of the content and your ‘safe search’ settings. With safe search on it filtered porn, with safe search off it didn’t filter. Seemed sensible enough. Now they’re also classifying the query you use. Unless the query shows specific intent to search for porn, they still suppress those images, no matter what your safe search settings. This leads to some pretty bad results.

For, example try image searching for one of my favorite female bloggers and adult stars, Mistress T. Here’s the search on Google and the same search on Bing (you need safe search off in both cases). The Google results are basically garbage, with John Edwards and even Mitt Romney featuring for some bizarre reason. The Bing ones are pretty much what you’d expect for a popular porn star/producer. Or try the famous bondage model Ashley Renee on Google and on Bing. One gives you what you’d expect and one gives you a bunch of police mugshots.

Searching for site names is equally weird. For example, searching for ‘captive male’ gives you a bunch of animal pictures, rather than shots from the site itself. Searching for ‘men in pain’ gives you men with migraines, and the query ‘whipped ass‘ returns random junk. Of course you can always refine your query to really make it clear what you’re after. For example, searching ‘men in pain bdsm‘ does return shots from the kink.com site. However, that refinement is going to change the results returned. Now it’s not giving me the top ranked men in pain images. It’s giving the top ranked ones that also feature the word BDSM near them. Before I could always filter out porn by simply changing my safe search settings to be stricter. Now I have to try and force it to show up by guessing the right query to use. What a stupid change.

Here’s an image from someone else affected by the change. That’s Mistress Madeline, who now barely features in her own image search result page.

Girls with slingshots

I recently stumbled across the Girls with Slingshots comic and have been enjoying catching up with it. And by ‘catching up’ I mean reading from first to last in consecutive evenings over several glasses of wine. It’s funny, smart and beautifully drawn. It also manages to treat sex as a normal part of life, rather than ignoring it or using it purely for shock value.

It helps that one of the characters, Clarice, is a dominant woman. In fact a geeky, smart, dominant librarian, which is a combination I wouldn’t describe myself as averse to. I also like the fact that her sexuality is treated seriously, in that it’s the basis for jokes but not the butt of them. However, it is a bit unfortunate that the artist chose to make her work as a part time pro-domme. As regularly readers of this blog are no doubt aware, I’m a big fan of pro-dommes, but the stereotype that dominant woman equals pro-domme does get a little old. It’d be nice to see a woman portrayed who can simply enjoy her dominant nature without feeling the need to turn it into a money spinner.

The BDSM lingo and protocols are pretty accurately depicted, but I do have to quibble with the first comic below. Either he’s a bad submissive and using his safeword incorrectly, or he’s wrong about her skills. Being a good dominant is not about how quickly you can get the submissive to cry uncle!

These three comics come from a short sequence featuring Clarice starting here. You can see the sequence where her friends discover her secret life starting here. There’s a few comics on her dating life starting here, and a storyline here where she deals with a very unsuitable suitor. However, I highly recommend browsing the entire comic. It’s a very well executed piece of art.

Starting the week with a bang (and a whimper)

I got well beaten by Lydia late on Sunday night so I’m feeling particularly happy about life right now. Monday mornings are never the best time of any week, but bruises to admire and residual endorphins really help take the edge off. Certainly better than a cup of coffee to start the day, although Starbucks could probably be considered a form of masochism in itself.

The scene was mainly a corporal one, with a lot of whipping to my back and buttocks. Towards the end Lydia switched to a short cane and, after working it across my nipples and cock, added some clothespins to those delicate body parts. Normally I find clothespins pretty mild, wherever they’re attached, and flying high on adrenalin and endorphins I expected to barely notice them. To my surprise the use of the cane to stimulate the skin beforehand really made a big difference, and the clips felt far more intense than usual. It was one of those interesting transitions where the cane seemed to both increase my pain tolerance by pushing me further into subspace and yet also increased my sensitivity to pain.

I’m not sure if the gentleman below was beaten before the clips were applied, but he certainly looks like he’s feeling them. I particularly like her look of amused concentration, with her tongue cheekily poking out as she tortures his.

There’s no watermark, but I believe this is a Men in Pain shot. I found it on the Thoughts of a toy named roy (aka royb8771) tumblr.

Updated the BDSM Equipment Page

Given we’re now into the Christmas season (at least in some parts of the world), and gift giving is a tradition of this time, I thought I should make an effort to update the equipment page. I’ve added a number of new links on there (indicated with a New suffix), all courtesy of helpful people sending me pointers to interesting places (particularly James). So thanks to all of them for that.

I’m hoping all of my readers are on the naughty list, because that’s always where the fun stuff happens. But I also hope they get whatever toys their kinky hearts desire under the tree this year. Personally, I’d love the Ultra-Chair MK II Advanced, from Style Fetish Industries as shown below (another angle here). Unfortunately, while it look’s like an amazing bit of kit, I doubt I could blend it into my apartment furnishings effectively. While I could accurately claim it as the latest in European furniture design, the big red dildo attachment might give the game away somewhat.

The dominant act

Several times in the past I’ve got involved in on-line arguments over what constitutes a dominant act. My view has always been that almost anything can be a dominant act. Context is king. The opposing view has been that sexual activities like handjobs or blowjobs cannot be a dominant act. They are always inherently a submissive act.

This opposing viewpoint is one advanced by some pro-dommes, and I do get where they’re coming from. They have to navigate a bunch of legal and personal boundaries, and set expectations for their clients. It’s much easier for them if the set of things globally recognized as dominant acts is equal to the set of things the majority of pro-dommes offer. That removes uncertainty and shifts the discussion from personal limits to external predefined cultural limits. But while I understand the desire to do this, I don’t agree with the definition. A dominant act is whatever a dominant chooses to do in each unique situation.

The lady below might be kneeling to give him a blowjob, but I don’t think there’s any question who’s in charge. I think it was particularly nice of her to bring her big knife in case he uses his safeword and she has to cut him free. Being able to free a bound partner quickly is all part of safe, sane and consensual kink!

The image is by the artist Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri and is from his Druuna series. You can find more images at the official homepage.

Flogs like a girl

To say someone ‘throws like a girl’ is an age old schoolyard insult. Yet it turns out there’s a solid scientific basis to it. Studies have shown that in may ways boys and girls are far more similar than people think. In areas such as academia (spelling, maths, vocabulary, etc.), behavioral (negotiation, impulsiveness, self-esteem, etc.) and physical (balance, jumping, aggression, etc.) the differences are small to zero. The main stand out areas of difference turn out to be masturbation, attitude to casual sex and throwing. Oddly enough the popular press has ignored the first two, but jumped with great interest on the last one. There have been a bunch of articles on it, some suggesting the reason is nature and others that it’s nurture.

The reason I mention all this is because the image below brought it to mind. A key part of throwing effectively is good rotation, where the entire body is involved a pivot to generate maximum speed at the point of release. From her stance, it looks like Kimberly Kane has mastered this skill, and is about to impart a nice high velocity thwack. I hope he appreciates the fact.

The image is originally from the Divine Bitches site.

Obviously you’re not a golfer

Because I’m sure those shoes don’t have the regulation spikes.

The image is of Sophie Horn who, ironically, is actually a very good golfer. I found it on the Alternative Femdom tumblr. And for anyone unaware of the title reference, shame on you.