Tag: chastity

Cultivating the palette

I’ve been pondering on pain in recent days. What draws some people to it? What makes a masochist and why do other people find them so strange?

I think if you asked most people why they didn’t like pain, they’d assume you were crazy. It hurts. What else is there to say? However, when I look at how people experience pain in everyday life, I suspect that it’s not the sensation itself that’s the primary issue. Instead, it’s the fear and uncertainty that comes with it. Sure when you hit your thumb with a hammer there’s that brief flash of agony that temporarily blocks out coherent thought. But after that, as it subsides to a dull throb, what stays with you is the uncertainty. Have I fractured something? Did I damage the nail? Is it going to swell up? Will I need a trip to the ER? It’s a similar story with chronic pain, like a bad back or a damaged ligament. The pain might be manageable, but what stresses people is the lack of control. They don’t know when it’ll stop, when it might flare up, how much it might impact their daily life.

It’s hard to find examples of pain in normal life that doesn’t have this element of fear and uncertainty. However, there are a few – working out, eating spicy food or playful biting and scratching during sex. The sensations here are often painful ones, but are not described that way. There is no fear or uncertainty, the situation is a controlled one, and therefore the perception is a much more positive one.

When discussing masochism there’s often a lot of talk about wires getting crossed in the brain, as though there’s something fundamentally different about masochists. I wonder how true that really is. Growing up I was never particularly interested in pain. What fascinated me was exchanging control. Pain seemed like an interesting way to emphasize that exchange – I can hurt you and you can’t stop me – but it didn’t seem like an end in itself. It was only when I got physically involved in BDSM that I began to think about it differently. The very safe and defined limits of a play session allowed me to experience the sensation of pain, but divorced from the negative connotations it usually has. I began to explore and appreciate the sensation both in its own terms and as a tool for play.

I therefore wonder if there are a lot of other people out there who would be masochists, but never have the chance to find out. Is appreciating pain perhaps something not inherent in certain people but – at the risk of sounding like a cross between a Bond villain and a Cenobite – just something that needs to be cultivated? People can learn to appreciate oysters and good wine. Maybe nipple clamps and leather floggers are a similarly acquirable taste.

I’ll leave you with a couple of shots from Divine Bitches of Mistress Madeline helping somebody cultivate their own particular palette for pain. If he hasn’t developed one already, this looks like the perfect time to start.

Mistress Madeline applying a cane

Mistress Madeline doing a zippering

The delicate touch

I like this shot for the very delicate way she’s handling the situation. Part of the hotness of chastity play comes from the importance of the cock. It’s not just a piece of meat. It’s the focal point for a male’s sexuality. As Ferns recently wrote when describing chastity play…

he became sensitised in a way he had never been before, his entire way of walking around in the world changed, his view of himself changed, his relationship with his sexuality was emphasised, and I was the owner of all of it.

Often chastity shots emphasize the key or the device, but neglect the erotic and sexual nature of the play. In contrast, this shot really captures those elements for me. The delicacy and sensitivity of the appendage is highlighted, with her focus obviously on the man himself, and not the nuts and bolts of the device.

Mistress attaching chastity deviceI found this on the Volens Datorem tumblr. It’s originally from The Kinky English Lady, Miss Hybrid.

The big O

Emily Nagoski has an interesting post up in relation to this Jezebel article on female pleasure and the emphasis put on the orgasm. The writing is in the context of vanilla sexual relationships rather than kinky ones, but it got me thinking about how the ideas related to more unconventional sexual interactions.

For men, orgasm and pleasure are closely linked. They’re practically the same thing. They can enjoy arousal without orgasm, sure, but basically they can tell if they had a good sexual experience by whether or not they’ve had an orgasm.

And they apply that standard – THEIR standard, the male/masculine standard – to their women partners. As though women are men, and as though to be anything else is to be broken.

So even if a guy wants his female partner to have orgasms because he wants to make her feel good, which is lovely and very nice, why can’t he just MAKE HER FEEL GOOD because he wants to make her feel good, without the performance demands of orgasm?

Orgasm is often slower and more effortful for women than for men; it’s more variable from woman to women, more variable from day to day in an individual woman. Sometimes orgasm just isn’t there for her; she can still experience truckloads of pleasure, though.
Emily Nagoski

It’s tempting at this point to start getting pedantic about the definition of sexual experience. I’ve had some amazingly enjoyable experiences being bound, beaten and burnt that I’d consider as very sexual but that didn’t feature orgasms. However, for the sake of argument lets just consider sexual experiences as they’re more commonly defined, where genitals and stimulation of some sort is involved. In that scenario I think it’s still incorrect to say that an orgasm is necessary for a kinky man to have a good sexual experience. But I do think that the idea of an orgasm is a key part of the experience. Chastity play and tease and denial all concentrate on the removal of the orgasm. Edging is all about repeatedly approaching the point of orgasm without tipping over it. Ruining an orgasm is about spoiling the moment itself. These different type of orgasm control may or may not feature an actual physical orgasm, but they do put the idea of it right at their heart.

In contrast some women (and it’s impossible to avoid stereotyping here as Emily acknowledges) are not wired in that way. Lack of orgasm isn’t necessarily a sign of total failure in bed, in the same way that your partner achieving orgasm doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a fantastic lover. To quote Emily once again – “pleasure is a destination, not a journey; if you feel good, you have already arrived.”

Where I think this gets particularly interesting in the kinky domain is how it relates to lifestyle male chastity arrangements. I have to tread a little carefully here, as I’m not speaking from first hand knowledge of that specific type of play. However, I’ve never let lack of knowledge get in the way of my opinions before, and I don’t see any reason to start now.

I browse and read a variety of kinky blogs (not all of them linked to from here) and one of the subtexts I observe in a lot of male chastity blogs is a type of transference of sexual expectation. It often seems that simple denial or control over the male orgasm isn’t enough. To be truly satisfying their has to be frequent orgasmic sexual experiences for their female keyholder. There are no doubt a lot of complex reasons behind that, but a key factor seems to be avoiding turning a deliberate denial of sexual pleasure into a total absence of sex. From the male perspective sex involves orgasms, and if he’s not having them, then it’s necessary (or at least highly desirable) that she is.

That of course then runs directly into the issues Emily is addressing above. Male expectations around sex and orgasms can’t automatically be projected onto women. And yet long term chastity play seems to encourage that very projection, with the resulting conflicts you’d expect from that.

I’m afraid I have zero answers for how to resolve this issue. Other than perhaps being aware of its existence and using that knowledge to think creatively around the conflict. In the meantime, while I brace myself for a flood of comments from men in chastity telling me I’m full of crap, here’s a nice shot of a steelwerks chastity device. It’s from their blog and was supplied by one of their clients.

Steelwerks Chastity Device

Tenderness

Here’s another piece of artwork that caught my eye, with once again a distinct shift in style and color from the previous days post.

The depiction of a submissive wearing a chastity device while simultaneously being penetrated by a strap-on is a fairly commonly one. The additional emphasis it places on the dominants sexual control and power has an obvious appeal. However, this image struck me as showing an usually tender scene. Despite the manacles, fetish wear and padlocked cock cage, there’s a real sense of tenderness and vulnerability. She looks like she’s more likely to whisper sweet nothings in his ear than call him a slut. Which I personally think would be a definite improvement from the usual cliched domme pillow talk that often gets scripted in these scenarios.

Strap-on and chastity deviceI found this on the True Servitude tumblr site, which contains a lot of hentai images of various fetishes

The key ingredient for a perfect evening

Images of women teasing men in chastity are fairly common in femdom porn. There are a lot of keys twirled around and dangled in front of humiliated male faces. Suspending the key from a necklace is also a common theme. That not only turns the key of control into a decorative piece of jewelry, but also suspends it in a location that highlights the sexuality and beauty of the woman. So, apart from the attractive smile, this first image is nothing particularly exciting.

However, as the second image shows, Mistress Sophie Dee likes to do a little more than simply tease with a key. It seems our hero is perfectly placed (in an ingenious set of stocks) to watch her enjoy a particularly intimate encounter with another man. The rest of the evening then unfolds pretty much as you might expect.

I have to admit this is one of the occasional situations where I think “That’s really hot.” And then a few seconds later I think “How screwed up is it that I think this is really hot?”

Not, I hasten to add, that I have a problem with that kind of screwed up. I’m a kinky omnivore, and I’m happy to enjoy whatever seems interesting and exciting to my strange brain. But it does fascinate and puzzle me how my neural pathways ended up wired this particular way.

Cuckold being teased with a keyCuckold watching mistress with lover

This sequence of images comes from the Divine Bitches site and features Mistress Sophie Dee. There’s a short free video clip from the session at this page, along with the opportunity to purchase the entire picture set and full length video.

Chastity blog

I’ve added the ‘Denying Thumper’ blog to my blogroll. It’s written by a married man living with a chastity device and experiencing prolonged periods of orgasm denial as part of an evolving D/s relationship. I only discovered it in the last couple of days, and it turned into a real page turner (link clicker?) for me. It’s written with a refreshing sense of honesty that I find uncommon in the majority of sex/kink blogs. His about page is a good place to start for the backstory. I particularly enjoyed the article on the reality of living with a chastity device. The fantasy descriptions so rarely involve using one of your wife’s socks to manipulate your cock into place within the restraining tube.

Given the chastity topic, I thought I’d honor it with a suitably themed image. Here’s a two for one deal – a little cock constraint and ball bashing all at once.

Chastity And TrampleI found this particular picture on the ‘Following Blindly Again’ tumblr site (which appears to have begun posting again after a recent hiatus).

Captioned Images

There’s a curious niche porn genre where people take existing images and re-purpose them by applying captions. Essentially they subvert and twist the original erotic intent into something more suited to their particular kink. Themes that repeatedly seem to crop up are cuckolding, chastity, forced homosexuality and incest. The popularity of these themes in this particular niche makes sense to me in two ways. Firstly, they’re infrequently represented in mainstream porn (although I have seen more cuckolding titles cropping up recently). And secondly, they require deeper context beyond what body parts are inserted where. An image of two men and a naked woman is a common and unexceptional threesome scene. To make it into a cuckolding scene means supplying additional non-visual information about the relationships between the participants.

A lot of the time that captions are so clumsy and badly written the whole thing fails horribly. But I am intrigued when somebody succeeds in drastically twisting the original image intent. Here’s a pretty good example, which takes a standard glamor pose and manages to imply chastity, cuckolding and forced homosexuality all in a single image. I found this in LittlemanRayburn’s galleries on imagefap.

CuckoldOne blog that has pushed this idea even further is the ‘suck it for her’ tumblr site. As the name suggests this is all about forced (or encouraged) homosexuality, with a side-order of cuckolding. But instead of using more neutral glamor style shots, the author there starts with very explicit images of women giving blowjobs. And then subverts what would normally be seen as a submissive female role into a dominant one. A couple of typical examples from there would be this post and this post.

The problem with browsing these kind of images is that after a while you start mentally captioning any suitable image you stumble across. I found the amazingly beautiful image below on the ‘purple’ bit tumblr site. And then had to mentally slap myself when I realized I’d spent 5 minutes staring at it trying to craft a good chastity/cuckold caption. Hopefully it will only be a temporary affliction.

Lingerie

Steelwerk Gears

I’ve posted about steelwerks before. They’re makers of some of the most creative and beautiful chastity devices currently available. This piece, with its funky gear motif, is a little different. I’m not sure if you’d describe it as a chastity device, or a pleasure device or a torture device or what. In their words it’s a ‘electric cage’. Regardless of classification, it’s certainly a striking piece of art and engineering.

If you really want to see it in action, the owner posted a video of it. Note that the entire video is a close up of a penis encased in this device, so if you’re the kind of person freaked by such images, don’t click. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.