Better Late than Never

The Huffpost has an article about a woman who discovered BDSM in her 50’s and ended up with a kinky partner twenty four years her junior. It’s a cute tale and I liked the part about their cleverly constructed cover story for how they met.

What I found surprising about it was the idea of being awakened to BDSM late in life by going to a class on it. I absolutely  don’t mean that critically. I’m always keen for more people to discover kink and I totally get her attitude of “OMG! I need to try all the things!” when exploring the physical side of it for the first time. It’d be great if more people could be converted to the joys of BDSM via classes. I just find it odd – as someone who had kinky thoughts from a very early age – to imagine being not kinky for decades and then suddenly getting into it. For me it seems like a very fundamental love/hate kind of thing, but obviously that’s not true for everyone.

I’m afraid I don’t know the artist for this drawing.

Update: Thanks to a helpful comment I can now attribute this to the artist Kirsty Whiten.

Location, Location, Location

For submissives who primarily play with pro-dommes, where is the best place in the world to live? Setting aside existing relationships – assume we’re talking about a newly minted fresh faced submissive with no history or experience – what location offers the greatest possibilities?

Having just returned from the UK, I think my answer would probably be London. Obviously, like other great cities such as New York or Tokyo, it’s home to a large number of talented pro-dommes and plays host to a lot of visiting dommes. If you want to turn a kinky session into a day trip, then dommes in places like Paris, Manchester, Birmingham and most of the South of England are options. Make it into a long weekend, and suddenly cities like Berlin, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and Glasgow are all possibilities. On top of this, the UK sex work laws are less stupid than the US (while still being very stupid), and social attitudes to kink tend to be relatively liberal. It’s not perfect, but on balance I think it might just be the best place to be a kinky person in the professional scene.

Obviously quality always beats quantity, and you could have a fabulous D/s relationship with someone while living in a tiny hamlet that’s miles from anywhere. But chemistry is important whether a relationship is professional or lifestyle, and the more people you have to meet, the better your odds of finding that elusive fizzy reaction.

This is Lola Ruin, a Manchester based pro-domme. She’s about a two hour train journey from London. Not exactly a quick trip, but still faster than jetting between major cities in the US. The image is from her twitter feed.

Multidimensional Sexuality

I thought this article covering the latest research on the link between sexual orientation and genetics was interesting. The short version is that’s no such thing as a single ‘gay gene’. Instead there are multiple genes that play a role in sexual orientation, and genetics are only part of the story.

Another interesting aspect – as this tweet makes clear – is that sexual attraction needs to be judged on two dimensions rather than one. The classic kinsey scale is one dimensional, running from 100% heterosexual to 100% homosexual. This latest study shows that we need to think in two dimensions – same sex and opposite sex attraction. Feeling more attracted to the same sex doesn’t necessarily mean being less attracted to the opposite sex, and vice-versa. You could be attracted to strongly to both, strongly to one or strongly to neither.

This image is from the Sunstone comic series by Stjepan Å ejić. It’s a series that manages to cover a pretty full set of sexual dimensions.

Flying Back

I’m writing this midway between Washington State and the United Kingdom. Below me is 30,000 feet of air, a jet plane and a sore bottom, in that order. The former is courtesy of Boeing, the latter courtesy of Adreena Angela and her cane. There are as many different approaches to femdom as there are dommes, but one thing is always consistent: If you session just before you fly, expect a caning.

Playing with Mistress Adreena proved to be a great way to both start and finish my UK trip. It was ridiculously hot for my final days in London, making everything very sweaty and sticky. Normally that would be a bad thing, but in certain situations and with the right set of kinks, it can actually be a bonus. I love scent play, so having her damp armpit smooshed into my face was a little slice of sweaty heaven. Mistress Adreena was also careful to keep us both thoroughly hydrated, although my liquids came to me via an indirect and secondhand route.

If you’re interested in scheduling a session, Mistress Adreena’s professional site is available here. At the time of writing, twitter has somehow managed to screw-up her account, but her instagram is available here (source for the above picture).

Lies, Damned Lies and Sex Trafficking Crackdowns

When the US government was passing SESTA/FOSTA and shutting down backpage, sex workers were very vocal in claiming it would do nothing to stop sex trafficking and would actually make it harder to track. Now thanks to this article on newly discovered government memos, we can see how right those sex workers were. Backpage was apparently incredibly helpful in tracking dubious advertisements and alerting authorities when they thought children might be being trafficked. They allowed users to report ads, flagged photographs of anyone looking underage, worked with authorities on best practices and suggested filtering based on phone numbers that law enforcement could provide.

None of this stopped prosecutors spinning horror stories in the press about backpage, because of course the attack on backpage and sex workers (by proxy) was never about stopping trafficking. It was all about the look of the thing, scoring cheap political points and imposing control over what women can and cannot do with their bodies. The end result has been exactly what sex workers said would happen. Rather than working with a site with established expertise to solve the problem, the authorities have spent a fortune prosecuting them while losing any visibility they had into genuine exploitation.

I had no idea what an appropriate image for this post would be, so I’ll settle for a drawing showing exactly what I’d like to happen to every prosecutor involved in this fiasco. The artwork is by Annmo Night. 

A Session with Domina Emilia

Returning to London for a few days has given me the opportunity to sneak some more kink into the last part of my vacation. Specifically I was lucky enough to set-up a fabulous session with Domina Emilia.

The session was an unusual one for me, as we did a cuckold themed roleplay. I almost never do roleplaying in sessions, but it seemed quite natural and easy to slip into it with Domina Emilia. I think a big part of that was down to the very organized pre-session communication that she did over email, helping set the scene, explore the hot buttons and give appropriate jumping off points. I’ve always found the tease and denial aspects of cuckolding to be very exciting, but never thought it was a good fit for me in a professional dynamic. Domina Emilia showed I was wrong about that, and that the fantasy could be brilliantly spun in the constraints of a time limited session.

The session also featured another first for me – use of audio/video aids. They were very cleverly incorporated to aid the fantasy and set the mood. It made me curious about they could be used more as tools in sessions. Often we think about audio and video as a substitute for physical encounters, but why not play with the combination of them? Kinky play is a type of interactive theater, so why not make got a step further into a mixed media art form?

This image of Domina Emilia is from her twitter feed. If you’re interested in sessions in the London area then I’d absolutely recommend contacting her. I think she’d be a fabulous person to get to know and play more with.

My Bad

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. This might have been the longest I’ve ever gone without a post. I was staying with friends in a fancy Scottish manor house. It had relaxing couches and people who’d supply snacks and a bottle of scotch at any hour of the day. That is great for happy, drunken social time, but bad for my liver and writing blog posts.

Being back in London hasn’t been much better so far, but hopefully normal service should be resumed soon. Until then I’ll leave you with this image from a tweet by maid marta. The artist is identified as Caregan. As someone who has spent a fair amount of time recently dealing with travel security, this has a particular appeal. Sadly, none of my interactions have been quite this exciting.

North of the Border

The family part of my trip has ended and I’ve headed North to meet up with some friends who have flown in from the US. Specifically I’m in Glasgow (just for a day) and then then Western coast of the Scottish lowlands. It has been an eye opening experience. Or, more accurately, an ear opening experience. I never realized just how sexy the Scottish accent is. I’ll talk to random people in restaurants and shops and be captivated by it. I’m usually a quiet introvert, but I find myself chatting to people more just because their accent is so damn attractive.

My social schedule and limited time in Glasgow has prevented me from setting up any kinky encounters, which I’m now deeply regretting. There are a lot of talented dommes here I’d love to spend time with. Miss Marilyn is one of them, and you can hear her fabulous accent in the video series she’s doing for the BBC on kink. I covered the first one in a past post here and you can hear the second video here.

This image is from Miss Marilyn’s twitter feed.  Her professional site for scheduling sessions is here.