Tag: Blindfold

Dipping Her Wand

Starting the week with something for fans of extreme femdom crossed with just a touch of whimsy. That’s probably not a huge group, but I’m sure there are some who’ll fit that description in my readership.

This is by the artist KouYou. It’s not often you see a domme outfit that’d be at home in a Harry Potter Cosplay convention. Even rarer that such an outfit would be paired with an amputation and sounding fetish scene. As a fan of extreme contrasts, I like the mix of tenderness and cruelty, but I’ll admit it’s an unusual combination of ideas.

I sourced the image from this tweet.

Tip of the Moon

Today’s post brings you a new (at least to me) artist – Tip of the Moon. Their work tends to focus on submissives and the tricky bondage predicaments they find themselves in. I’m sure that will be an appealing focus for some of my domme readers. If you like what you see, then they have very reasonably priced commissions open.

You can see more from Tip of the Moon on Twitter, on Deviant Art and on SubscribeStar.

Giggles

I enjoyed this story about a woman who breaks into uncontrollable laughter after she orgasms. Apparently the sex with her boyfriend is so good that it tickles her in all the right places.

I can relate, as I often find after heavy kinky play my post-orgasm reaction is laughter. Partly it’s the sense of absurdity that follows from surveying the scene of kinky carnage. There’ll be ropes and straps and odd toys and spiky things and two slightly sweaty bodies relaxing in the post scene glow. It’s inherently absurd in the best possible way.

I suspect the laughter is also a natural reaction to the release of high tension. I personally don’t get that reaction with regular sex, as that’s fun but not intense for me. Add pain and control and long drawn out teasing into the mix, and suddenly the contrast in the post-orgasm come down is so much stronger. It’s the difference between gently stretching and releasing a rubber band or stretching it till it snaps.

We laugh at jokes because they play with our expectations and contrast reality with the twist the punchline delivers. The incongruity of a joke makes it funny, as does the release in tension from the initial set-up.  I find much same thing logic applies to a kinky scene.

Of course, while I may laugh at the end of a session, the domme typically gets to laugh all the way through it. This is Lady Pim, who plays out of the Ritual Chamber in Toronto. You can find her professional site here.

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.

See No Evil, Speak No Evil

This shot from Lady Pim is very cute and sexy. It has a lovely contrast between the sensual and the harsh.

As a personal aside, I do find it weird how things I don’t like in sessions can still continue to appeal to me visually. Blindfolds like this one are a good example. Enemas are another. Both of those are on my ‘meh’ list for kinky activities. Yet I still like the idea of them a lot.

I get how the idea of something can be exciting, but the reality of it disappointing when tried in play. That’s a fairly normal thing to happen. But how does the idea remain exciting beyond that? Somehow the reality never intrudes into the theoretical sexual fantasy.

Lady Pim is a Toronto based domme and her site for professional sessions can be found here.

Love of the Visual

There’s an old stereotype that men respond far more strongly to sexual imagery than women do. It’s an idea I’ve always been skeptical of. Partly because as a man I’ve always enjoyed the written word just as much as the visual image. Partly because it has a suspiciously neat fit with an old fashioned view of sexuality, where men are decadent pleasure seekers and women the gatekeepers of pleasure, rather than active participants. Mostly because women’s magazines are packed with sexual imagery via their advertisements. I’m pretty certain those ads don’t exist just for men in waiting rooms browsing old copies of Cosmo and Vogue.

According to this article in the Guardian I’m right to be suspicious. A study of studies has shown that men and women’s brains respond in the same way to pornography. Basically the same bits of circuitry light up, whatever your gender. The studies authors go on to say that it’s more likely social pressures and stigma are the reason for the stereotype, rather than fundamental biological differences.

Hopefully all my readers, whatever their gender, can enjoy this image. It’s by Mistress Iris, creator of a great deal of sexy imagery.

Her Delicate Touch

Here’s something sweet to start the week. This image is from the SF based pro-domme Mistress Wild Iris, via this tweet.

Ironically, I find one of the things that makes a great pro-domme isn’t their ability to crack a single tail, or rig a fiendishly complex bondage scene, it’s the delicate touches they bring to their scenes. It’s knowing when the submissive needs a grounding contact to bring them back. The breath of a whisper into their ear. The press of a sensual warm body on a bruised back. It’s that momentary physical and emotional connection that allows intense sensations to be sublimated into a D/s dynamic.

You can see more from Mistress Wild Iris on her twitter feed.

I like to watch

I should give you fair warning, this post might be a bit of a rant. In the past I’ve vented here on topics like flirting with limits and cold playspaces. Today I’m going to take on a very popular BDSM accessory – the blindfold.

I’ll admit upfront that there are good situations for using a blindfold. They clearly work well as part of a sensory deprivation scene. If you want to change a routine up and introduce some surprises then a blindfold can help with that dynamic. They’re also great for beginners to reduce the pressure on the domme. He can let his imagine run wild while she has time to figure out exactly how the cuffs are supposed to work. What I don’t understand is why they’re so popular outside these situations. They often seem to get incorporated because they can be, rather than as a necessary component of a larger plan.

I’m particularly puzzled by how often pro-dommes tend to use them. I think it’s fair to say that most pro-dommes are very attractive women. That might not be a requirement of the job, but it’s unarguably a significant advantage. They also tend to spend a lot of money on exciting fetish gear and sexy footwear. So why on earth would they want to slap a blindfold on me so I don’t get to experience that visual pleasure? I’ve heard that it’s so I can use my imagination, but frankly I have the rest of my life to use my imagination. I’m paying money so, just for a few hours, I can enjoy an amazing reality that’s better than my kinky imagination.

The other strange thing I’ve observed is that blindfolds often seem to get used in initial sessions when the dominant and myself are still getting to know one another. That really doesn’t make much sense to me. It’s tough to quickly build the kind of dynamic necessary for intense play when you only see one another for a couple of hours ever few weeks or months. So why would you want to put up a barrier to make it harder to build the necessary chemistry? If I know someone intimately, then a blindfold can represent an interesting twist on that relationship. But if I met you for the first time 30 minutes ago, a blindfold just means a stranger I can’t see and don’t know is now hurting me. That might be a kink for some, but I doubt it is for most submissives. Pain is only hot in context, and absent a history together, a blindfold takes a lot of that context away.

I’ll admit I’ve had some fun sessions with blindfolds. I remember a scene with Lydia featuring saran wrap mummification, ear plugs, a blindfold and an e-stim device that almost pushed me into a hallucinatory state. I had difficulty speaking at the end of that. But in that case there was a very clear reason for the blindfold, and it was done when Lydia and myself had already played together for a hundred hours plus. I’ve done a lot more sessions with other dommes where the blindfold only subtracted from the scene and made it that much harder to relax into the moment.

Feel free to leave a comment if violently disagree (or agree) with me on this. I’m curious if it’s just me who feels this way, or if there’s a perspective (particularly from the domme side) that I’ve missed.

I believe this image is by Miss May of the Fetish Webmistress site.

The Epistemological Problem

My post on ‘The Path to Subspace‘ generated a number of interesting comments. One common factor that came through in them was the problem of definition. How do I know the experience I describe as subspace is similar to that experienced by others? The same could be said of any mental state, but at least life provides us with many common references points to calibrate our understanding of happiness, anger, pain, etc. Subspace is far more complex, with no common path to it and no simple reference markers.

Alex commented that a therapist had attributed subspace to dissociation. At first glance that seems logical. Dissociation can be induced by stress and is described as a detachment from reality. Subspace is reached by stressful BDSM play, and often described as ‘floating away’ or ‘zoning out’, so that seems to fit. Yet, when I read the kind of questions they use to test for dissociation, the match seems less clear. And in fact, when I look back on my own descriptions of subspace, I’m not sure I’ve done a good job of capturing the sensation.

Dissociation is described as detachment from reality, where subspace to me often feels like reality has detached from me. That might seem like silly wordplay, but I think there’s an important difference. In subspace all that matters is the domme, me and the dynamic between us. The surroundings falls away. It’s not that I’m detached, or absent from my body, but that everything in our little bubble seems hyper-real. The domme fills my world with her presence and the sensations of our play. The pain, the smells, the touch, the intimacy and the intensity. It overwhelms me, and turns everything outside our space into an afterthought. It’s not the volume on the world being dialed down, but the volume on the two of us being dialed way way up.

If you’re interested in reading more about the post title then this is worth checking out.