Breathplay – Femdom Resource

Teaching an Old Pony New Tricks

This striking image is unusual in a few different ways. Heavy bondage, forniphilia, objectification, breathplay and electroplay aren’t uncommon on their own, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them combined quite like this. There’s even some candles, making waxplay another possibility. The wrapped submissive figure makes for an eye catching table center piece.

The other unusual thing about this image is who it features. This is Mistress Michelle Lacy with DrPonyBatBond. If those name seem familiar, then it might be because they’ve featured here in past posts. DrPonyBatBond has commissioned a lot of great artists over the years to portray him and Mistress Lacy in pony play scenes. Past examples include this, this and this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in a non-artwork, non-pony image before.

You can see the original full size image here on Michelle Lacy’s twitter feed. Her professional site can be found here.

I’m sadly not aware of a definitive source for all artwork DrPonyBatBond commissioned in the past. That’s a shame, as there was a lot of great work there.

Cosmo Fail

Mocking Cosmo articles on sex and BDSM is a long running tradition around here. There has been the good, the bad and the highly humorous. Unfortunately, their latest example would fall under the categories of dangerous and highly irresponsible.

The article in question is ‘What you need to know about breath play in BDSM‘ and right there, that title alone is pretty problematic. The answer to that should simply be ‘More than we can possibly cover in a Cosmo article. Don’t even think about it till you’ve done some proper research.’

Unfortunately the article itself is not so succinct. It does at least start with a warning about how dangerous it can be, but that message is then rather undercut by the remaining text talking about amazing orgasms and describing how to do it. It reminds me of the South Park scene where Kenny dies of autoerotic asphyxiation.

My biggest problem with the article is that it seems to to cover the two extremes of breath play and almost entirely omits the safer and fun middle areas. It talks about voluntarily holding your breath and mindful breathing, which are fine, but probably not all that hot for most people. The rest of it talks about various ways to put hands around neck and squeeze (or not), which seems very dangerous advice. There’s a long running debate in the BDSM community around whether breath play done like that can ever be safe – with a lot of experts saying it can’t – but I’m sure 100% of the community would agree that beginners doing it based on a short Cosmos article is a terrible idea. The reader is therefore left with an unsatisfying approach and a really dangerous one.

I actually love breath play and do it a lot, but never with anything near the windpipe or arteries in my neck. A simple hand across the mouth and nose is enough to block breathing and push my buttons around being controlled, while being way less risky. Even better than a hand is an ass. Face sitting, which can be clothed or unclothed, is both fun, sexy and a good way to limit air. Even an armpit can work, although it can be tricky to get a proper seal. It seems ridiculous to me that Cosmos barely touches on these much better approaches. For more advanced scenes I’ve played with using plastic wrap and gasmasks. I don’t think either of those would be great starting point for beginners, but they’d still be better than anything involving gripping around the neck.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this particular breath play shot.

Vintage Breathplay

It’s rare to see this activity in a vintage shot. Corporal punishment and bondage is fairly common in older shots, and medical play not unheard of, but I can’t recall seeing breathplay before.

It makes me smile, as it’s an activity I love. I particularly like the eye contact they are making, as that’s a key part of any breathplay scene for me. People talk about power exchange as an abstract D/s concept, but breathplay creates a focus that crystallizes that exchange. The power over someone’s breath is literally life and death. If I’m giving that up then I want that other person to be very much in that moment with me.

I found this image via this tweet.

Leaving Her Mark

I’ve mentioned before that if a domme knows that you’re about to jump on an airplane, there’s a near certainty of a cane being produced. Imagining a submissive forced to sit for hours on a sore bottom is just one of those things that seems to amuse the vast majority of dommes. There’s another common impulse related to travelling that tends to kick in before a trip. Namely, if it’s discovered you’ll be seeing a different domme (or two) in a few days time, they somtimes like to send a ‘message’ via your body.

I should be clear that this normally isn’t a literal message. Nobody is pulling out a sharpie or tattoo needle in order to turn me into a large and slow moving greeted card. It’s typically just a desire to leave some interesting marks for me to explain. Or maybe an obvious tender spot for the next domme to exploit with a smile. That’s the typical dynamic anyway. Ms. Savannah Sly, diabolically creative as she is, likes to do things a little differently.

I’d mentioned I had travel plans coming up, so she got busy with her cupping set. I’ve done cupping a few times before (e..g here and here), but never quite like this. Savannah used the cups like marker pens, repeatedly dragging them across my skin to ‘write’ with stretched lines of bruises. It was fairly painful as they moved. It was considerably more painful to get them moving. That initial pressure to break the local skin attachment while keeping the seal in place was a real attention grabber. You can see the end result in this image of me lying down and this one shot of me standing at the end of the session. I guess I can consider myself lucky she stopped at writing ‘Sly’ and didn’t decide to do a full ‘Savannah Sly was here.’

Personally I find mixing the intimacy of being decorated with the objectification of being a canvas and the pain of the application makes for an amazing session dynamic. Since we played I’ve found myself putting my hand to my chest and smiling to myself. It’s a lovely hidden memento I’ll be carrying with me for a week or more now.

While the cupping was the finale to the session, we also managed to squeeze in a lot of other good stuff before then – spanking, caning, whipping, flogging, strap-on, breath play and ear torture. That last one being surprisingly vicious. It was a fabulous session, and one that I’ll remember for a long time to come.

This was shot by Savannah during our session. I was somewhat distracted at the time, busy being very happy that I couldn’t breathe. You can find more great shots like this of Savannah on her OnlyFans.

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.

Checklists

Writing yesterday’s post about bucket lists reminded me of another type of list – the BDSM checklist. If you’re not familiar with the concept it’s basically a quick and easy way to build a list of activities that you’re interested in exploring or absolutely want to avoid. Typically they’re used as an aid to negotiating a scene, but I also like them to give me new ideas or reminders of things I haven’t tried for a while.

Back in the day – when kinksters had to get up half an hour before they went to bed and pay mill owner for privilege to come to work – you’d actually print out a list and mark off interests. These days you can build and share a profile online, no dead trees or leaky pens needed. For example, somebody recently sent me a link to the Kinkomatic site, which seems to have a pretty comprehensive list of activities, as well as a fairly slick interface for creating, sharing and finding lists. You can read more about it via their FAQ. Alternatively, if you’d rather go with an old school approach, there are plenty of basic activities lists online you can search for (e.g. this one has 256 entries).

Talking of old school – this magazine cover would certainly qualify. Presumably this gentleman ticked 36 (chains), 40 (choking) and 134 (leather clothing) from this list. However, I don’t see any options for ‘wearing hideous y-fronts’ or ‘roleplaying being a really bad actor’. No matter how long the list, it seems there are always a few popular kinks that get left off.

Extreme Breathplay

Rolling Stone magazine has an interesting article on waterboarding as a kink. It features Elise Graves, the bondage aficionado I played with and posted about last week.

Waterboarding is certainly a more extreme kink, although I think its intensity can vary dramatically depending on how it’s done. I actually experienced it a couple of times a few years back, but not in an inverted position and not with a huge amount of water. I was basically horizontal and could lift my head slightly, which meant the water tended to drain away from my nose and mouth. I suspect that makes a big difference to the degree of terror induced. The coldness of the water triggered the mammalian diver reflex, which combined with bondage and a D/s dynamic created quite an unusual and intense headspace.

It’s a kink I could never have indulged in during the years when America was actually using the technique to torture prisoners. That’s not entirely logical – what I did in a Seattle playspace had no bearing on what the government did thousands of miles away – but it felt wrong and immoral to get sexual kicks from something that was being used in such a horrible way. When I did eventually try a lightweight version of it, years after Obama banned its usage on prisoners, we still avoided any kind of interrogation dynamic or roleplay. That seemed too close to a terrible reality.

Of course water and cloth is just one way to take someones breath away. As this Rodzo artwork shows, there are other options.

Sign Up

The impact of the FOSTA-SESTA clusterfuck continues to be felt online and by sex workers. Sadly, I think this is just the start of it. The much bigger impact will be after the bill has been signed into law and a prosecutor picks his first set of victims to go after. That’ll focus minds and trigger a much bigger wave of censorship and purging of voices from the internet.

There’s an online partition against the bill available here. It took me just 30 seconds to sign it and click on a link. Please do the same. I don’t know what difference it’ll make with the current executive in charge but, at the very least, hitting the required signature count will raise awareness and potentially lead to more articles like this. Reversing these things is never about a single dramatic gesture, but more a slow chipping away and winning over the minds of people who might not otherwise think about these issues. So go sign it.

As a reward for those readers who sign it – here’s a delightful video of a pair of dommes reenacting the famous pottery scene from the move Ghost. Although in this case there’s rather less clay and rather more enormous dildos covered in lube. But remember – no watching unless you sign the partition! You’re on the honor system here.

The video starred Mistress Evilyne and Goddess Anastaxia (pictured above) and was created by ‘Filmed by Duke‘. If the two dommes sound familiar, that’s because they were featured in this heart warming post last month.

Her Cutie Pie

I’m continuing my theme of interesting things I’ve found on twitter. This is from Lady Hinako’s feed. You can even see a short video clip of the scene. The post title comes from that tweet.

I always feel that when I post images like this, I need to slather it in disclaimers. I have this mental image of someone dipping their toe in femdom, browsing this site and thinking that this represents the kind of activity they’ll need to get involved in. Or a domme seeing this and getting annoyed that the only representations of femdom are leather clad porn stars or shots like this of extreme play. I do get that, but at the same time, I love that there are people out there doing crazy stuff. It’s not so much that I want to do this myself – although I kind of do – but that I always enjoy seeing people pushing boundaries and exploring their desires. We should applaud the passionate and the unusual. They make the world a more interesting place.

Past Play

I thought I’d continue my 2000^th post celebration with a somewhat self-indulgent review of a few of my more interesting sessions over the years. The list below wasn’t necessarily chosen based on pure enjoyment – although some were definitely that – but more on memorable moments that stuck with me.

There was the time I tried to beat a heavy cold through the healing power of BDSM. That didn’t work out too well.
I’ve been decorated in a wide variety of ways over the years. A Victorian Christmas Tree with Lydia and a Tailors Dummy with Cynthia Stone stand out in my memory. The blood decorated plaster cast also by Cynthia rates an honorable mention.
Lydia was always an expert with needles. I loved the beautiful design she did on my back in 2015. The session I nicknamed Gulliver’s Travels was also a really interesting use of needles and twine.
The most unusual technique I’ve experienced was probably a Staple Zippering. I’ve never seen this done anywhere else and domme’s I’ve described it to tend to look at me like I’m crazy.
It wasn’t all needles and surgical staples when playing with Lydia. There was the time I almost kicked her on the ankle. Fortunately, my sense of self-preservation kicked in just in time.
I’ve had countless great sessions over the years and documented a few of them here. There’s only ever been one really bad session when things went sour. I wrote about that here and here. I never did play with that unnamed domme again.

I’ll finish with an image of my favorite domme indulging in one of my favorite activities – breathplay. Nothing pushes me more quickly into subspace than a domme playing with my oxygen supply.