The beauty of dominant women
I had a number of topics I wanted to write about this weekend, but social events and sunshine got in the way. So I’ll keep this short and leave you with a simple but enjoyable image of gripped nipples and big grins. In her case I think the expression is one of straightforward delight. In his, there’s a probably an element of surprise and pain, but I think there’s still a big smile in there somewhere.
The image is originally from Divine Bitches. I found it on the Girls Rule, Subs Drool tumblr.
I’m starting this post with a warning about the links it contains. Normally that would mean I was about to discuss edge play and feature potentially disturbing images. However, in this case the links are to conservative journalists talking about kink. I realize that may still constitute edge play for some people. On the face of it they’re discussing extreme porn from kink.com, but it quickly gets into general issues of consent and sexual ethics.
What started this unlikely flurry of posts was an essay by Emily Witt entitled What Do You Desire. The heart of the piece is a description of a shoot for the Public Disgrace site, but it also encompasses the tech culture, San Francisco culture and Emily’s own personal life. It’s an essay that got a lot of attention across the web, not just from the writers below. Personally I was unimpressed. As a kinky and techy person, who lives on the West Coast and visits the Bay Area often, I expected to read something I could relate to. Something that reflected, at least in some way, my experiences. Instead it comes across as a high concept piece. Rather than immersing herself into the culture and drawing conclusions from it, I got the impression Emily went in with a concept and cherry picked her observations to match.
While I might not have been impressed, a lot of other people were. What particularly entertained me were a series of posts from conservative writers. Roughly in order (as they responded to each other) there was: Rod Dreher, Noah Millman, Alan Jacobs, Noah Millman 2, Rod Dreher 2, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Conor Friedersdorf and Rod Dreher 3.
There’s enough material in those articles for a dozen posts, but I’ll try and limit myself to just this one. As you might expect they have a few interesting insights scattered randomly through a whole steaming mound of ignorance. I don’t fault them too much for that. No doubt if I was writing about Conservative Evangelical Christians in the South on the basis of a single provocative article I’d also reveal a lot of my ignorance about that group. What I will fault them for is the horrible underlying logic in some of their arguments. Particularly Rod Dreher writing here on the subject of consent.
His argument is, at the heart of it, a variant on the slippery slope fallacy. He starts out by defining consent as the way people judge right from wrong. He then points out consent alone can never be enough, because people can consent to terrible things. For example, the cannibal who ate a willing victim. And therefore, if consent is not your guiding light, then what can be? How can anyone define what is morally right? The only answer must be God.
For all its many flaws, Christianity (like Islam, like Judaism) at least offers a standard by which to judge right and wrong….
…Christianity at least holds on to the idea that Truth exists, and is knowable, however imperfectly.
The huge glaring flaw in this appeal to absolutism is of course the problem of defining religious Truth. Saying Jesus would have frowned on cannibalism is uncontroversial. But what was his position on silk scarves tied to the headboard? Or a little nipple biting during coitus? And if that’s OK, does he draw the line at nipple clamps? How about anal sex between a loving couple? What if it’s a loving gay couple? I haven’t noticed too many burning bushes appearing recently to give us guidance on these areas.
Of course what people like Rod Dreher really want to impose with a religious standard is their standard. They really know what God meant to say. Of course in reality they have no divine hotline. They’re just people making judgement calls about right and wrong like everyone else. They just don’t trust the rest of us to do it properly.
I’ll leave you with an image of two sinners doing terribly wicked things. I know it might look like a beautiful image of two people enjoying an intense and intimate moment, but that can’t be right. Nipple clamps are clearly the work of Beelzebub.
The image is from the always excellent bondage is not a crime tumblr.
I always knew I wasn’t crazy. And now I have proof. Proof I tell you!
According to the survey described in this article, people practicing BDSM are psychologically healthier than those who don’t. Admittedly the survey was of 900 BDSM practitioners from the Netherlands rather than me specifically, but I’ll take what I can get. Nice to know that paying someone to stick needles into my genitals is a sign of good mental health.
I’ve no idea how carefully they chose their sample set, but I was interested to note that the Dom/Switch/Sub percentages for men was 48/18/33 and for women 8/16/75. It was also interesting that while all categories scored higher than non-kink folks, the dominants scored the highest, then the switches and finally the submissives. So while I might saner than those people not hitting each other with sticks, I’m still bringing up the rear in the kink community.
Finally, to finish, here’s a picture of a well adjusted couple working on improving their psychological well being.
(Image Removed)
I found this image on the mira-mel tumblr. I’ve no original attribution. Weirdly, and for the first time I can remember, Google’s image search confuses it with other images and therefore returns the wrong pages for it.
I love breathplay but I’m actually not a big fan of throttling. It looks cool, but the the reality is risky, uncomfortable and hard to relax into. Squeezing all those delicate vessels contained in the throat is unwise and potentially lethal. If you’re vigorously fucking someone then grabbing them loosely by the throat is a wonderfully hot move. But if you’re trying to modulate oxygen then I think there are more interesting ways to achieve your goal.
It might seem less exciting than throttling, but try some saran wrap over the submissives face. Having clear plastic wrap gently kissed into place over my face has led to some of the great moments in my kinky life. It’s both sensual and incredibly evil. Each kiss seals the wrap closer and cuts off the oxygen a little more. Each breath warms the plastic wrap and makes it cling all the tighter. It’s not as visceral as a hand to the throat, but it’s way more effective and far easier to control.
I found this image on the I Crave Domination site. I believe this is originally a shot from the Men in Pain site.
The kink company has been in the news recently. They’re a very high profile producer of BDSM porn, so anything that happens to them tends to reflect on the wider community.
On the plus side there’s a James Franco documentary coming out about the company that apparently paints them and BDSM in a very positive light. It’s getting some good mainstream coverage, although the Hollywood Reporter writer appears to be unable to review it on its merits without lapsing into offensive speculation about who might watch such material. I haven’t noticed similar speculation being attached to reviews of thrillers or horror movies where people are shot, knifed and strangled for the enjoyment of the audience.
On the negative side there has been a lot of coverage of founder Peter Acworth’s recent arrest for possession of cocaine. The drugs issue isn’t one that bothers me, but some of the follow-up stories have presented a more complex and troubling picture of the company. The SF Weekly had a lengthy article on the company that was less than positive, and Maggie Mayhem put up a long post that detailed some significant issues she has with the kink workplace culture.
I’ve zero personal experience of the company, so I can only provide links to others with better information. I think it’s undoubtedly true that the company has improved the overall quality of BDSM porn. However, I think as an ethical porn consumer it’s always important to know more about exactly who is producing the images and videos we’re watching.
This image is from the kink site Divine Bitches. I found it on the Girls Rule, Subs Drool tumblr.
I’ve often considered writing a submissive’s guide to organizing a first pro-domme session. Not that I’m any sort of expert, but I picture it as a letter to my younger self. The sort of article I wish I’d read when I was 21. Fortunately, I’m not sure I need to write it anymore. An article entitled ‘No, a dominatrix won’t have sex with you‘ pretty much provides the definitive guide. Just do exactly the opposite of whatever this guy does, and you should be OK.
Admittedly he didn’t initially realize she was a professional (in purely a taking the money sense of the word), but I don’t think it changes the basic message. For example, if she’s happy to meet you at 2am on the street and then mistakes you for her drug dealer, don’t do what this guy did and return to her apartment. Similarly, if the pre-scene discussion consists of her mentioning her boyfriend and then saying she’ll do it for free because you’re cute, that is not your cue to take your shirt off.
My favorite part of the whole thing was his last line – “The biggest lesson I took from this is one that I will carry to my grave: A dominatrix doesn’t have sex with you.” Really? That was your big learning point? A few others did spring to my mind. Add while that statement is generally true for pro-dommes in the US, for any random OKCupid date you meet collecting garbage on the street at 2am, I’d say all bets are off.
I’ll leave you with a picture of a real pro-domme having fun with her ‘boy toy’. This is Ms Mona Rogers, a genuine professional (in all senses of that word) from NYC.
A few days ago I wrote about a Mormon who supported the idea of abstinence until marriage. It’s not an approach I’d subscribe to, but his comments did raise some interesting questions for me. Today’s post brings you a similar viewpoint, this time from a Christian, but written in a very different way. A little quote should give the flavor. This is him on his critics who said it’d never work…
Turns out that people couldn’t have been more wrong. Looking back, I think that the women saying those things felt like the floozies they ultimately were, and the men, with their fickle manhood tied to their pathetic sexual conquests, felt threatened.
I’m not linking to this article because I think the writer has anything interesting to say. He comes across as a judgmental ass who’s opinion isn’t worth the 0.000001 cents it cost to download it. I’m linking because I thought the contrast between the two original sources was interesting. The first got me thinking, the second pissed me off. The difference was writing about yourself versus writing about others.
I think it’s really hard to go wrong when writing about what is important or meaningful to yourself. In contrast, it’s really hard to get it right when doing it about others. This isn’t to say you can’t make general points about life, the universe and everything. It’s just that they work so much better when the general is revealed via the personal. The good sex blogs write about themselves. The great ones write about others by writing about themselves. The rest of us just scour tumblr for hot pictures to repost.
Today’s hot picture from tumblr comes courtesy of Girls Rule, Subs Drool.
One thing that getting involved in BDSM has taught me is how simple things can drastically alter my perception of reality. People are constantly building a model of the world in their mind. They combine the signals from their senses to create a personal version of reality. I think most people see this as a very robust and simple additive process. Faulty or missing signals should not change what reality is. I suspect we have to implicitly believe this or we’d go crazy. But in fact adding or removing a signal doesn’t simply enhance or reduce our internal model of the world. It mutates it in far more complex ways.
I experienced a reminder of this tonight, while playing with Lydia. She had me transfixed in a web of ropes, electrics attached to various points, and was scratching and piercing me with a collection of needles. As far as activities go this was pretty intense, but nothing too unusual for us. Then she introduced a blindfold. In theory this shouldn’t have changed too much of my mental model. The only thing I could see was her ceiling or her face. It wasn’t like I needed to be reminded what either of them looked like to understand what was happening. Yet it radically changed how I felt.
With the blindfold on I pulled away from the pain. I feared it. The sensation was sharper, more intense. My anxiety levels rose. I said ‘no’ occasionally, something which does nothing to slow Lydia down, but is unusual for me. My sense of the surrounding world shrank. I lost track of time.
When she removed the blindfold, everything changed. I moved towards the pain, wanted it. The actual sensation of it changed. My breathing slowed and I felt calmer. I fixated on her, and felt a powerful wash of emotion towards her. My vocalization changed from screams to moans. I found I could more easily focus without being distracted by the electric shocks. The engineer in me wants to say this makes no sense. The signal from my eyes was telling me nothing I didn’t already know. In terms of information theory, the entropy of the signal was zero. Yet, it clearly did radically change my experience and perception of what was happening.
I’ll leave you with an image of a man experiencing his own version of a modified reality, courtesy of Divine Bitches.
Today is sadly the last day of my vacation before returning to Seattle. Fortunately I’ve had a very pleasant trip, enjoyed some kinky fun, and met some interesting new people. I played with two different dommes, and got some nice piercing photographs from a session yesterday that I’ll share in a later post. In the meantime, while I pack, I’ll leave you with a picture I liked from the Thou Shall Love Thy Mistress tumblr.
From a masochist’s point of view this shot is pretty weak sauce. Those clothe pegs don’t look like they’d hurt much at all. Despite that, I like it for the fact she’s clearly getting enjoying his restrained and sensory deprived position. I always love the idea of a sadist getting off on what she’s doing. Pain that comes from anger and other negative emotions never does anything for me.
At first I thought this was a gentle teasing shot. She’s naked and beautiful, but he can’t see a thing, and only feels what she allows him to. Then I saw that big knife on the windowsill. Now I’m not really sure what to make of it. I still like it a lot, but there’s an interesting ambiguity to it.
I found this on Homer’s blog. Which, at the time I’m typing, has this truly fabulous title image.
