Tag: Bondage

Use Your Words

Cosmo has an article out on picking and using a safeword. I’m going to go ahead and say that if you need help to pick a safeword, then BDSM probably isn’t for you. It’s only going to get a lot more complicated from that point onward. Maybe start with a good therapist to address your chronic indecisiveness and/or lack of imagination before getting the rope and whips out.

I also think it’s strange how all these articles assume beginners are starting off with heavy consensual non-consent scenes or  elaborate roleplay scenarios.

The minute you’re starting to feel uncomfy is the exact moment when you should go ahead and holler whatever safe word you and your partner chose to go with.

Obviously you could do that, but how about using your words? I’ve done hundreds of scenes, some of them pretty intense, and I don’t think I’ve used a safeword a single time. That has never stopped me communicating a wide variety of issues. In fact I think it’s quicker to say something like “I’m feeling faint” than it would be yell a safeword and then explain what’s going on.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a safeword. It’s good to have a single unambiguous stop button that brings everything immediate to a halt. But that’s not necessary for most scenes and most problems. Common issues that make people uncomfortable are pinching bondage, awkward positions, tingly fingers, anxiety, a bad fantasy headspace or just too much intensity in the sensations. It’s a lot easier to adjust for these as the scene progresses by communicating as you go rather than by simply stopping everything. Plus, it saves your safeword for those times when something is seriously awry and you want that to be communicated entirely unambiguously.

Let’s hope that these two negotiated a non-verbal safeword before starting this scene. He’s not going to be able to yell ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ with that funnel in place.

Artwork is of course by the famous Jim.

Command and Control

A few week ago Mistress Troy Orleans posted an interesting twitter thread on her approach to play and the difficulty of finding appropriate labels for it. I liked a lot of things about, particularly this sexy as hell digression, but I wanted to pick up on the following section in particular…

During a scene, I’m undeniably in control, but if something’s not working, I’ll adjust. My ego’s not attached to the action.

I think that’s an important point for people on both sides of the D/s equation. BDSM is complicated, particularly when doing heavy bondage or intense play. No matter how skilled the participants are – and Troy Orleans is very highly skilled – not everything will work out exactly as expected.

I’ve played with a small number of dommes who did tend to get frustrated or annoyed when a particular setup wasn’t working out as they’d imagined. Those were typically one off visits, because that reaction really kills the dynamic for me. I’m looking for someone in control, which means of themselves as well as of me. Control is about remaining in command of the situation when things don’t work, not trying to make the impossible possible. Plus, watching dommes creatively problem solve and experiment on me in realtime is hot AF.

On the flipside of the coin, from the submissive perspective, I think there can be a danger of treating play as a form of theater, with the domme as the actor and the submissive as both audience and props. That feeds into the bad idea of a scene as crafted narrative that needs to be executed for it to be successful. In reality it’s a highly collaborative process, where the end goal is a creation of a particular energy. Adjusting to something not work out should be viewed as part of building that energy, not a failure of the process. Variation and adaption are what make each experience unique.

Here’s a shot from Mistress Troy Orlean’s twitter feed of a man under her very tight control. You can see more media from her via her OnlyFans.

A Session with Mistress Tess

It’s time to peruse another page in the paltego family album of NYC vacation photographs. Today we’re revisiting the time spent with the amazing Mistress Tess. Much kinky fun was had by all.

There was a fair amount of CBT involved. This shot shows a combination of clips, electricity and a fancy metal ball stretcher. Oddly enough, the most painful thing was the simple sharp pinch of the clips. Needles also made a welcome appearance. For anyone who doesn’t mind viewing a cock piercing shot, then this image shows that part of the scene.

There was a lot of bondage. Some of it was Dexter style mummification – minus the serial killers – as shown here. There was a neoprene sleeping sack inside a cage, shown here from the outside and the inside. When it comes to locks, straps, buckles and chains, then Mistress Tess is firmly a believer in the more is always better philosophy. Probably the most visual spectacular bondage was the suspended leather bag as shown at the bottom of the post. That entire thing could spin around the suspension point. With my entire body floating immobilized in space, even a gentle rotation was quite a head rush.

The most unique and unusual bondage we did featured inflation. You can see a side view in this shot here. Mistress Tess first placed me inside a rubber bag, nested inside a larger outer bag. Then she built the metal framework you can see around me in the photograph. That was all bolted down to her pinboard bed. Finally she inflated the bags, squeezing me tightly into place. It doesn’t look much in the images, but it was incredibly tight and constricting, whilst still being relatively comfortable. You can see an end on shot, taken from where my head was, in this image. There’s a vibrator sticking out and the two cords going up are attached to a spiked parachute ball stretcher. So while the bondage might have been comfortable, some of the accessories were a bit more ouchy.

What the images and descriptions can’t capture is the brilliant storytelling that Mistress Tess adds to her scenes. Given just a hint of a fantasy scenario she can spin erotic tales that fit beautifully with the physical scene she’s putting together. My only real contribution to these fantasies was to supply sound effects, but I like to think I did my part by putting the screams and cries in all the right places.

For anyone who wants to see more of Mistress Tess and her amazing studio, then she has an OnlyFans here. There’s a video from my session posted there, which actually includes some more scenes that we didn’t get photographs of.

A Session with Mistress Troy Orleans

One of the pleasurable things about returning home from vacation is the opportunity to sort through holiday snaps and reminisce about the fun times you had.  In my case that normally means less in the way of shots of beaches and cute bistros discovered down side streets, and rather more in the way of leather, steel, pain and oh my! Visiting NYC resulted in lots of photographs from that second category, and the first I’m featuring here come from a really great session I did with Mistress Troy Orleans.

We started with some bondage using a post and a harness to put me in a vertical but semi-seated position. You can see photos of that in this side view, this front view and this back view. The boots I’m wearing are particularly fearsome. They hold the foot fully extended inline with the leg and grip everything very tightly. I think they’d be impossible to walk on, but in this position I can use them to take some of my weight. I love the combination of the fetishistic look of the boots and the sleeves together with the degree of control they apply. You can see a nice close-up of the locks and metal clips on the sleeves here. It’s not shown clearly in the images, but I should also point out that my throat and head are also fixed in place against the post.

Of course bondage alone is never enough. Troy always likes to throw some pain into the mix, as you can see from this shot. The nipple clamps were a little painful, but the real killer was the nasal clamp that’s holding the chain up. Nipples go numb over time, but the septum never seems to. Every time the chain moved it felt like someone sticking a needle into the inside of my nose. Even when Troy took forever some time to shoot selfies (one shown below) she left that damn nose clamp in place, creating an extended series of cries and moans of pain from me.

After this vertical bondage we moved onto a slightly more meditative horizontal position. Inspired by Savannah Sly’s writing on my chest, Troy decided to put her initials (MTO – Mistress Troy Orleans) on my back. This was also done with cupping, but where Savannah had cups with a manual pump, Troy used the fire cupping technique. The application of the hot cups created a relaxing and floaty headspace for me, but considerably upped the challenge in terms of writing anything. The suction effect is nowhere near as strong with fire cups and it’s hard to accurately place and moved them with breaking the seal. As you can see from this shot of my back, she did manage to get a pretty clear ‘MTO’, but it wasn’t as vividly defined as the ‘Sly’ from the pumped cups.

Finally, we moved onto a suspended bondage scene, using Troy’s amazing metal frame and spring set-up. You can see a side and front shot of that here and here. I’m in a leather body bag, with a tongue depressor gag and a pair of ear mufflers for some added sensor deprivation. Moving from the back writing scene to this worked really well, as it kept me a lovely spacey floaty zone that allowed me to just drift in the moment. The gag was just enough to remove the idea of talking, without being so uncomfortable it kept dragging my attention to it. Attention to small details like that really make the difference in these kind of scenes.

As is always the case when I play with Mistress Troy Orleans, it was a great session and I’m really glad I got the holidays snaps to remember it by. Although I probably will not be passing them around in the family album the next time friends drop in.

If you’re interested is seeing more of Mistress Troy’s creative work then she has an OnlyFans account here.

The Meditating Octopus

I’ve been indulging in a lot of bondage fun over the last few days in NYC. Many photos were taken and will be posted soon. Nothing I did looks quite like this however. The rigging work is by Mistress Chiaki and – via this tweet – she called the position the Meditating Octopus.

It’s an amazing bondage setup and a good name. Although I have to say the image puts me more in mind of Darth Vader after a bad allergic reaction. Maybe an alternative name might be “Suspended Vader in desperate need of EpiPen.”

A Brief Burst of Sense

I had a wonderful time with Troy Orleans this weekend. Much bondage was involved. Pictures were taken, but I don’t have my hands on them just yet, so a proper post about the session will have to wait a couple of days.

In other news, a brief and increasingly rare burst of sanity occurred in the British political system last week – the government dropped their plans for an online porn verification system. Admittedly, feeling good about this is the equivalent of feeling good about being unsuccessfully mugged by an incompetent mugger. Good to get away with, but better if it had never happened at all. However,  I’ll take what I can get right now.

The systems introduction had been repeatedly delayed and they’ve now given up on it entirely. There’s a pretty good twitter thread on why it was a dumb idea here. In the meantime let’s hope the population of the UK will be able to persevere and not be turned into sex crazed rutting beasts by continued exposure to images like this one. This is by the London pro-domme Sir Claire Black (from this tweet).

Natsukiss at Club Pedestal

Back in July I wrote that I was sad I was going to miss Mistress Natsukiss performing at Club Pedestal in London. Having now seen the shots below, and the others in this thread, I’m cursing my poor trip timing even more. It looks like it was quite the show.

Mistress Natsukiss is performing with Aoi.  You can see more shots from the evening in the twitter feeds of Club Pedestal and Derek Schiavo. Also a shoutout to Sardax and Mistress Nana for their contributions to what looks like an amazing evening.

Bondage Liberation

This is a lovely shot from Bondage Liberation and Elise Graves. What particularly makes it work for me is the contrast between the heavily fetishistic bondage scene and the human touch of Elise’s smile and casual pose. It’s great to be intense while still retaining a sense of playfulness.

Image is from this tweet. You can get a lot more similar content at the Bondage Liberation site.

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.

Ending a Relationship

Autostraddle has an article on a topic that is very rarely covered in kink – The Unique Grief of Ending a BDSM Relationship. There are plenty of articles on starting BDSM relationships, and a far great number on actual kinky play within them, but very few cover the complexity and emotions in an ending. It’s written by a female dominant, but is less about the specifics of femdom and more about the dynamics that might affect the end of any kinky relationship. Not exactly sexy fun stuff, but interesting and well written.

This image is by Dirk Hooper and was created for Mistress Adreena. According to the original tweet it represents a happy memory from a session. I thought it was touching and sweet, but the emotion it captures also make it work in the context of this post. You can see more from Dirk Hooper at his site here.