Crating

I’m not sure how I missed this Reductress article on crating your boyfriend when it first came out in 2017. It’s obviously not a serious article, but it is perfectly inline with what I want for this blog – funny, kinky and weirdly hot.

I don’t have any great crating images, but this one does have a nice puppy and collar theme going on. I imagine the crate is just out of shot.

I feel I should know this artist, but annoyingly I don’t have an attribution. As usual, if you can help with that, please leave a comment.

Updated: Thanks to a helpful comment, I can attribute this to the artist zblabla. You can find more of their work on DeviantArt.

Not Like That, Like This

My post from last week entitled Mood Killer triggered some thoughtful comments on the subject of feedback after sessions. It’s an interesting topic that rarely seems to get discussed. Pro-domme websites will often feature lots of positive comments and praise from grateful clients. Femdom sites will host review forums of highly variable quality and value. Yet it’s very rare to see feedback built into the 1 on 1 scene negotiation process. I’ve done a fair number of sessions over the years with different dommes. In all that time I think I’ve been explicitly asked for feedback just twice.

I should make it clear that my thoughts in this post are primarily about professional domination. The lifestyle dynamic, where kink is just a part of a bigger relationship picture, is obviously very different. In that case the motivation for working through issues and trying to solve mismatched desires via feedback is obviously much higher than a purely kink focused professional relationship.

My default approach when I’m playing with someone new and the scene doesn’t click is simply to not see them again. With little invested on either side, walking away is the obvious answer. I think volunteering feedback in that situation would be as pointless as writing feedback after a failed first date. Nobody needs that kind of nonsense in their life. Chalk it up to experience and move on.

It’s trickier with someone where I do feel a spark, but some parts of our scenes don’t quite work. Even with someone I know very well, I’m very reluctant to give negative feedback after a scene. However, there are a few approaches that I think work pretty well in these situations.

Emphasize the positive. This is an obvious move. Emphasize the bits you really enjoyed and make them a focus of your next pre-scene discussion.

Avoid pink elephants. This is the flipside to the above. I’ve found it’s better to totally avoid vaguely negative things in pre-scene discussion. Saying X didn’t really work last time or you’re not fond of Y makes some dommes instantly start thinking about they could fix that problem for you. Now they want to try them! You’ve mentioned the pink elephant and they can’t stop thinking about it.

Use your limits. There’s no reason to have the same set of limits for everyone you play with. They’re a function of trust and negotiation between two people, not a global declaration of your submissive capabilities. Make an activity a limit if it’s really not working for you. This is different to a pink elephant because you’re putting something very clearly out of scope rather than making it sound like a problem to be fixed.

Optimize for the dynamic. It can be tempting to focus on a favorite activity or kinky desire of the moment, but I often find it’s better to go with what works well for the two of you. Better to have an amazing spin on your 2nd favorite thing rather than an average one on your 1st.

Take a hint. Sometimes, despite using all of the above approaches, I’ll still find a domme repeatedly comes back to something that doesn’t really work for me. It might be an emotional response, an activity, an attitude or even just a practical thing around scheduling. Whatever it is, I’ve found the trick is to either make peace with it or walk away. If you’re getting frustrated by a predictable thing, then you can only blame yourself.

When it comes to dommes providing feedback to submissives the options are a little broader. Here’s one who looks pretty happy with the feedback she’s about to deliver. Hopefully he’ll take it in the constructive way it’s intended.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image. As usual, if you can help me out with that then please let me know via a comment.

Playing Again

This twitter thread, started by Troy Orleans, has some excellent information on how kinky play could begin again in a Covid-19 world. It’s primarily thoughts from professionals, but I think there’s some equally valid advice for anyone playing beyond their circle of quarantine.

I personally think it’d be really weird to play in masks. I understand how they’re valuable for casual interactions in coffee shops or grocery stores. Not really sure what they’d offer in the intimate circumstances of a kinky scene. Although obviously I’m not a medical professional and I have a significant natural bias, as face to face interaction is a big part of my preferred dynamic.

Of course, necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe heavy medical scenes are going to be the kink of choice for the risk aware 2020 kinkster. Or fetish heavy outfits and masks, like the gorgeous shot below from Reflective Desire.

I found this image via this tweet from the Reflective Desire twitter feed. The image was shot back in 2019.

Mixing it Up

I like the kinky contrasts being employed here. I usual think of foot worship being a fairly gentle and relaxed kink. It’s almost mainstream it’s so popular in Femdom. Suspension in contrast is one of those serious kinks that requires taking a dozen classes, having a proper hard point available and being willing to devote serious time to get everything balanced properly. It’s rare to see those two mixed together, making this a particularly fun image.

This is obviously an older image from the kink.com family and features Madeline Marlowe. 

Random Aside

Question for any of my fellow bloggers out there – have you noticed a big drop in traffic to your site in the last few days? Mine looks like it has almost halved, which is an amazing drop. I’ve never seen anything like it in almost a decade. From this post it does look like Google rolled out a major update, but nothing described there seems to align with this kind of site. I wonder if Google is secretly taking yet another whack at penalizing adult sites?

For everyone else with no interest in search engine metrics, here’s a very hot throat grabbing picture. I don’t know the source for this, but I do love their expressions.

Human Contact

It just struck me that the last physical human contact I had was when Penny Barber peed on me back at the start of March. It was a great scene but, in retrospect, an odd note to enter quarantine on. Kind of like the condemned’s last meal, only in liquid form. If I’d known what was to come, maybe I’d have requested a gentler and more nurturing session. Although for a masochist, genital torture and watersports is somewhat nurturing.

I am craving human contact, which is very weird for a natural introvert who’s lived on his own for 20 or so years. I’d take something wet and warm, or hard and slappy, or even a simple hug at this stage.

I’ve seen a lot of people posting about being hungry to play again, but I wonder what form that play will take? Is it going to be an explosion of pent-up kinky energy resulting in many intense scenes? Or are people going to want to ease back into it? Personally I don’t think I could do an intense scene right now. I’d enjoy the holiday from thought that pain provides, but it’d be risky to flood my brain with endorphins and adrenaline in my current emotional state.  I might need some gentle warm-up sessions first. Is hugging a kink?

There’s no particular logic behind this image, other than it represents exactly the kind of playful physical contact I currently crave. This is from a series called Love Stories” by Victor Demarchelier for Numero magazine.

Revisiting an Old Favorite

It has reached the point of my quarantine where a Buffy re-watch seems mandatory. I do this every few years anyway, so why not now, while I’m trapped inside and keeping vampire hours myself?

I had forgotten just how hot the kissing scene was in the Season 1 episode ‘Angel’.  There’s a real subby masochist vibe to the kissing mixed with the cross quietly burning into his chest. Perfect TV for my angsty emotional inner teenager. Frankly, it’s getting increasingly hard to untangle him from the angsty emotional outer middle aged dude.

Positive vs Negative

It’s probably pretty clear from my recent posts that I kink very much on positive feedback when playing. Negative feedback is a real mood killer for me. That doesn’t mean I’m not open to constructive feedback or advice outside the bubble. I always want to improve and be a better kinky play partner. But mixing negative emotions like anger or disappointment with subspace and the complexity of intense kinky play never goes well for me.

That preference is clearly not true for every male submissive. There’s a lot of guys out there who love being the worthless worm under the boots of their untouchable Goddess. That’s a totally valid dynamic, but it makes me wonder what the ratio between the ‘Good  Boys’ and the ‘Worthless Worms’ is? If you believe the mainstream portrayals of femdom and the dominatrix/client relationship, then clearly almost every client is a worthless worm. Pro-dommes are always portrayed as beating, spitting on and humiliating their clients. Yet my personal observation is that it’s much more like 50/50, or even skewed more towards the positive side.

Obviously I have signification observational bias. I’m more likely to identify with people who share my kinks and play preferences. But despite that, I’m certain the ‘Good Boy’ loving crowd is not a small minority. Maybe kinky checklists should start including a tick box for ‘Good Boy’ vs ‘Worthless Worm’ vs ‘All of the Above’.

This good boy was shot by Gavin Kleinschmidt for Touch Puppet.

Mood Killer

A week or so ago I wrote a couple of posts on happy memories of dialog and sound effects from past sessions. I thought it’d be interesting to follow those up with a verbal interaction that didn’t go so well. This example is from a few years back. It’s rare that I have a bad memory of a session but this particular moment has stuck in my mind, partly because it seems so trivial. Odd for a small thing to make such a big difference to a dynamic.

It was my first session with this particular domme and part of it involved a whipping scene. I’m generally not a fan of doing whipping with someone I don’t know well, as the intensity levels can vary dramatically and it requires a certain amount of trust to relax into the headspace. However, I am a fan of being flexible and open to how a domme wants to compose a session, and so as long as it’s not a hard limit, I tend to go with the flow.

She had me tied facing a wall and the warm up period was relatively short. That already meant we had two strikes working against us. Not being able to see a domme, particularly when I’m playing with someone I don’t know well, always makes a scene harder. The pain becomes disconnected from the dynamic and simply becomes something to tolerate, rather than being channeled through my desire.

It wasn’t the most intense whipping I ever received, but it certainly wasn’t light. By the time we’d finished I was feeling pretty proud of myself for taking it all. At which point the domme said “Hmmm. Not bad I suppose. For a first attempt.”

That comment totally drained the energy out of the scene for me. Maybe it was intended as a combination of compliment and encouragement, but it had the opposite result. I felt like the scene had been set-up for failure, I’d powered through to make it work, and yet couldn’t even get a ‘Good Boy’ out of her. We didn’t play together again.

As I said at the start, it was a trivial thing. I’m sure the domme didn’t think anything of it. Yet for me, with the endorphins churning in the heightened emotions of subspace, it was a mood killer that I remember years later.

This is very much not the domme in question. Both her whip and her smile are a lot bigger than in my scene. I believe this is Mistress Ama K from the Latin Beauties in High Heels site. I’m not aware of a personal site for her.