Slacking off again

I’m back in Las Vegas for a long weekend. It might seem I love this place, given I’ve been twice in as many months, but I’m really only here because of friends. It’s a fun environment for a few days, but it’s not particularly kink friendly and there are no good cocktail bars. It’s basically gambling, food and nice hotels. Which is fine for a few days, but not an extended visit.

I’m hoping that this time I’ll be able to fit in a little kinky play between poker hands. I’ll let you know how that goes. In the meantime I’m in slacker mode when it comes to posting, so apologies in advance for that. To keep things ticking over I’ll leave you with a little eye candy. This is from the Femi’s Deviantly Romantic tumblr.

Lick

Simplify your vagina

My latest favorite way to kill a few minutes between emails is the Least Helpful site. It bills itself as ‘Daily Dispatches from the Internet’s Worst Reviewers’, and contains everything from sensitive Nazi’s to olfactory innovators.

As far as this blog goes, there are a few sex related ones. I kind of liked the guy trying to cure the aches and pains in his G-Spot, and the very unimaginative handcuff purchaser. Not to mention the guy who seems to have penises on the brain (and in the ears). But my absolute favorite was this review for She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman. I’ve no idea if the book is good, but I did learn something about the reviewer.

Women, simplify your vaginas. Make it work without making us read long books on a useless topic

I might be going out on a limb here, but something tells me he may not be a particularly sensitive and selfless lover. Or all that knowledgeable about female anatomy.

The obvious answer for him is that he should just stick to the cock. I’m guessing he’s pretty experienced with his own. If he has any difficulty I’m sure someone like Mistress T would be happy to guide him in the right direction.

Should by some miracle he find himself a lady who’ll let him near her very complex lady parts, she could try a firm hand to encourage him to learn. But I suspect the best plan is just to take him out of the equation altogether, in the manner of the image below. That’ll keep things nice and simple for him.

Man tied down and ready to be ridden

I found this on the Thoughts of a Dork (aka ephanyroyce) tumblr. It’s originally from Divine Bitches.

Just the bare essentials

I continue to mull over the ‘Desert Island Kinky Toy’ concept that I mentioned in yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read that yet, I suggest starting there before going any further. It’ll be less confusing that way.

As well as music, the island castaway also gets to choose one book to take, but the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare are also always provided. I assume they did this to prevent lots of people picking them and thus making the book selection a less interesting part of the show. I’m not sure if these two would be the standard provision if the show started today, but they probably made a lot of sense to the gentlemen running the BBC in the 1940’s.

It got me to thinking: In the BDSM  version of the show (as produced and directed by yours truly), what would be automatically given to the kinky castaways? In other words, what two items would be on almost everyone’s list, and therefore should be provided by default to avoid repitition?

I think an obvious one is rope. Great for bondage, gags, makeshift leashes, suspension from palm trees, staking people out on the beach, etc. Useful in a multitude of ways, I think it’d be something everyone would pick. Plus, years as a castaway might actually give you time to complete at least one of those fancy rope corset arrangements that look so cool.

After that obvious selection it gets a little more difficult. A whip? A bit single-purpose and not everyone’s taste. A cane? Probably easy enough to mimic from local flora and fauna. A strap-on? Chastity device? Needles? All great, but all specialist choices that not everyone would take. Quite honestly I pondered this question all day at work. I almost answered ‘nipple clamps’ to a question in a meeting on data center construction, which would at least have livened the discussion up.

It wasn’t until I was making dinner tonight that I figured out what I think is the answer – a big bed with loads of tie points. Something like this or this. It’s so versatile that everyone could use it. Good for bondage, corporal, breathplay, fucking, massage, medical and even sleeping if all that tires you out. Try doing all that on a canvas hammock slung between a couple of palm trees. Despite playing with a lot of great custom made dungeon furniture over the last few years, a lot of my best scenes have happened on a bed.

Annoyingly I couldn’t quickly locate any suitable shots featuring ropes and beds, so here’s a nice one that’s heavy on the rope and adds a little whipping into the mix.

Whipping and rope

I found this on the Fun Fantasies tumblr. It’s obviously originally from Men in Pain.

The munchies

It’s Thanksgiving in America. As an Englishman I didn’t grow up with the holiday, so it doesn’t have quite the same resonance for me as I think it does for a lot of my American friends. However, I do always enjoy getting together with friends for a good nosh-up.

That eating theme seemed to tie in nicely with these images, which show the lovely Katie from Men Are Slaves chowing down on her submissive. He’s covered in bite marks, so clearly he’s a tasty treat.

Biting
Biting
I found these images on the rather excellent Femdom Times.

The top ways we injure our genitals

Picking titles for posts is always tricky. When I have time, I like to come up with something a little more than a simple description of the post itself. Ideally it’d be a joke or cultural reference that raises a smile. However, in this particular case, I didn’t think I could beat the title of this article in the Atlantic.

Apparently around 16,000 people in the U.S. injure their genitals every year, 69% of them men. The top risk is cycling, followed by trimming/shaving and then zippers. I know there are a lot of people out there that enjoy CBT, but sex/BDSM related injuries don’t feature in the top risk categories. So it looks like most people are playing safety. Just steer clear of those bicycles.

I’ll leave you with a couple of shots of Mistress Madeline risking making Rico one of the sixteen thousand. Not content with swinging the whip, she also tries a stun baton on him.

CBT Whipping
Mistress Madeline with Rico
All shots are from this shoot at Divine Bitches.

Reasons to be cheerful

I felt like posting some happy pictures tonight. Democrats in the US are obviously going to be very cheerful over the election results. Republicans not so much, but that just means they’re in need of happy pictures to help cheer them up. For fans of marriage equality it looks like all four ballot measure are going to succeed, which is great news. And for everyone outside the US, I’m sure nobody will object to attractive smiling women having some kinky fun. Hopefully these shots will give everyone a reason to be cheerful.

Smiles
Smiles
Kisses
To find these I went to the obvious place for happy kinky shots, the Happy BDSM tumblr. They’re originally from Whipped Ass.

What happened next?

Here’s an image that I like but I’m also a little puzzled by. Normally a chair is either something to be tied into or to be paddled over. In this case, I’m not really sure what she’s planning to use it for. Perhaps she’s going to do some CBT by sitting in it and leaning backwards? Or maybe tie his balls to the top prior to a cock caning? Inquiring minds wants to know.

Mistress and slave with chairI found it on the Alternative Femdom tumblr. It’s originally from InSexM and I think that’s Princess Donna taking charge of the situation.

A nice refreshing drink

This clean couple come courtesy of this post on Homer’s blog (Japanese language). As best I can make out via the on-line translation tools, it’s a cover from an old issue of SM (Suspense Magazine). Washing a child’s mouth out with soap and water is an old punishment for bad language. I dread to think what he must have said to deserve this.

I actually did a scene featuring water in the face a few months ago, although it was poured from a bottle rather than power blasted at me. With a cloth over the face it can give some really interesting options for breathplay *. Unfortunately it was after I’d been tied to a bed for a couple of hours, and the trickling cold water against my skin just made me want to pee. With Lydia sitting on my torso, the fact of not going enough oxygen was a minor inconsequential trifle compared to the torture from my bladder!

Domme spraying water into bound submissive's mouth

* Note that breathplay is inherently dangerous, and this form particularly so. You get some oxygen through the wet cloth but not enough to stay alive. This makes it easy to slip gradually into a dangerous state of hypoxia. I’m not an expert but I do play with people who are. I don’t recommend trying it unless you’re confident the domme knows what she is doing.

The only thing we have to fear…

When I was catching up on my blog reading over the weekend I came across an interesting sequence of posts by Lady Anna List. They described a heavy imprisonment scenario, featuring bondage, isolation and sensory deprivation. You can read them in part 1, part 2 and part 3 of a series entitled Incarceration. What particularly caught my eye was the comment about a panic attack during the scene.

He’d fallen asleep and woken up before feeling the entire world closing in around him. Experience has helped him before to talk himself out of his impending attack…
…I’m not sure I would rescue him because this is something he has to get through so he knows he can get through it again in future extreme bondage situations.

That got me thinking about the nature of panic and how we experience it, which in turn led me to this fascinating paper on the subject. It’s fairly readable for a scientific paper and it contends that panic is an evolutionary response to dangerous situations. There’s first a tendency to freeze (so a predator won’t spot us), and then a physical response to divert blood, suck in more oxygen, release cooling sweat and tension muscles before fleeing for home and safety. The paper also talks about agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder where panic attacks can strike out of the blue in everyday life. These panic attacks typical occur in certain locations (wide open or enclosed spaces), or in certain situations (being in crowds of strange people or being far from home). These are scenarios which from an evolutionary perspective represented specific threats, such as being exposed with nowhere to hide, or encountering a number of strangers from outside your tribe.

I found it fascinating because there’s a tendency to think about panic as being purely a mental process, as something you can think your way around. And it’s true that you can condition yourself against it by repeated exposure and positive reinforcement. But the basic response itself is a very deeply embedded one, with real physical manifestations. Nobody would think of telling an agoraphobic to simply snap out of it and think themselves better. And yet I find there’s sometimes a tendency to see panic as a weakness or mental failure in a submissive. In fact it’s really just a million years of evolution doing it’s thing. Like the primitive drives for sex or food, it’s all about maximizing the chances of passing the genes on.

The other interesting takeaway from the paper was in the final section, where the author talks about the difficulty of studying panic in the laboratory. He should get out the lab and into his local BDSM playspaces. I can guarantee his local dommes will have a wide collection of experimental subjects they can push into carefully controlled panic situations!

I’ll leave you with a shot of an item that is great for pushing my panic buttons – a hood. That tight enclosed feeling gets me every time.

Hood in vintage BDSM shot

I found this via the clitlickslut tumblr.

Intimate rope bondage

I’m feeling pretty buzzed right now from a great session with Lydia earlier this evening. I should have some photographs to share in a later post, but all I want to do right now is collapse on the couch with a glass of wine. Before I do that, I’ll leave you with a couple of very sweet bondage shots.

I found these on Natasha Gornik’s blog. She’s the photographer of choice for a lot of kinky people in NYC, and her blog features fetish/BDSM shots along with lots of photographs of food. Since those are two of my favorite subjects, it makes for a very enjoyable read from my perspective. The models are Erin Houdini and Athena. I loved the feeling of intimacy and affection between them. It’s nice to see bondage used in a sensual way, rather than the more typical restraint orientated S&M scenarios.

Erin and Athena, photographed by Natasha Gornik
Erin and Athena, photographed by Natasha Gornik