The beauty of dominant women
This is the model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley shot by British photographer Rankin. The odd thing is that this version of the image, which I believe is the original one, isn’t the one that has been widely shared. That would be this cropped and color modified version that I originally found. I guess people are happy to trade bad composition for a closer look at Ms Huntington-Whiteley.
This is from a book by Rankin called Ten Time Rosie shot in 2010.
A tweet by Mistress Tess recently caught my eye.
I was helping him into a dress. He put his hand near my shoulder and said “May I?” instead of just automatically putting his hand on my shoulder to balance. This is called having RESPECT AND MANNERS! It’s not okay to freely touch your Goddess. Remember that guys.
I liked this for a number of reasons. Firstly, politeness is all sorts of hot. I’m not big on high kink protocol, but love the more gentle dance of manners and courtesy in daily life. Secondly, it reminded me of my yoga teacher, who is a stickler for checking before touching any part of me. Initially it made me smile. I’m not used to women checking before grabbing me. Over time I’ve come to appreciate it and her attention to that kind of detail.
Finally, I liked it because denial leads to desire. To be close to someone as amazing as Mistress Tess, to have her do terrible but wonderful things to you, and yet to not touch her is a gift in itself. To be so near, and yet so far. As a masochist I deal with pain by drawing on my feelings and submission to the domme. The deeper those feelings, the greater the reverence I hold for her, the harder and further I can push into intense play. Respect and restraint really helps build that kind of dynamic.
This image is from the website of Mistress Tess. The post title comes from this rather well done fight scene.
Mistress Lola Ruin has published a lovely blog post on her experiences of sharing her own vulnerability with slaves and letting the facade of being a perfect dominant Goddess slip. I like the post a lot because I’ve always thought the idea of needing to present a perfect invulnerable facade to be a great domme was badly flawed. Deep down we know that we’re all human, so to pretend otherwise lacks authenticity. A domme shouldn’t have to fit herself into a submissive’s fantasy in order to be respected and exalted. Those things should come even with knowledge of the dommes humanity and vulnerabilities. That’s what makes them meaningful.
Mistress Lola Ruin is a pro-domme based in Manchester, UK. You find her twitter feed here and information on arranging a session with her here.
This isn’t particularly femdom, but I think it’s interesting, so allow me to return one more time to the thought experiment I described previously.
It was actually inspired by a study Jonathan Haidt described in his book The Righteous Mind (which I’ve mentioned before). He came up with a set of scenarios that violated social norms in fairly disgusting ways, but didn’t actual cause any harm. For example, a man buys a chicken in a grocery store, takes it home and has sex with it before cooking and eating it. Is that morally wrong? Another one featured a family whose pet dog was run over, and rather than simply bury it, they cooked and ate it. He discovered that general disgust at the scenarios was universal, but that moral judgement varied. Wealthy liberal Westerners, brought up to believe in the primacy of the individual, tended to say nothing was wrong if no one was harmed. Almost everyone else outside that specific narrow group took the opposite view. They treated these major violations of social conventions as moral violations. Haidt went on to point out that the liberal western viewpoint of putting the individual first is actually the exception, both through history and in the world today.
I didn’t actually describe a scenario for Mary or Sam, but it’s pretty easy to come up with one that’d fit Haidt’s study. Imagine if they were roleplaying an actual lynching from the Jim Crow era South. I’d expect (hope) that people would find that disgusting but, assuming they never take it beyond the two of them in their playspace, there is no obvious harm to point at. From a purely Utilitarian viewpoint, they’re happy and nobody else is affected. Of course, the assumption that they can 100% compartmentalize their kinks is a big and questionable one.
Given that my readership skews to Western liberal (in the general rather than political sense) and given what I’d read in Haidt’s book, I predicted that most people would think Mark and Sam can’t do any moral harm in the original thought experiment. That did indeed seem to be consensus. I fit that mold myself. But it’s interesting to reflect that it’s an unusual viewpoint. The majority of people across the world and through history would not share it.
As I’ve said before, it’s tough to come up with an image for these kind of posts. Controversial activities tend to have controversial images. I’m going with an old shot from an ageplay scene in Taboo magazine. I’m not ageplay fan myself, but something about this image always worked for me.
Weird question of the week for my readers: Has anyone done a flogging or whipping scene that left their skin incredibly itchy?
Playing in LA last week, I did a scene featuring a fairly heavy flogging and a moderate whipping. It left me with some beautiful marks on my upper back, but it also left that whole area very rough and itchy. Given its inaccessible location for scratching, that makes it particularly frustrating. I’m guessing the skin was dry from the LA heat, and then damaged enough by the heavy flogger to trigger the wound healing itch reaction. It’s kind of odd however, as I’ve never had this kind of reaction before, and certainly nothing that lasts this long. Really hoping I’m not suddenly developing an allergy to leather. That would really cramp my play options.
Given the topic of leather and whips, this striking photograph of Mistress Adrienne of NYC seems an appropriate one to feature. Whatever I was hit with, it was nothing as fearsome as that particular single tail.
My kink-tastic LA 2018 tour (fall edition) continues apace. Yesterday I was lucky enough to get to play with Mistress Damiana Chi. Flogging, whipping, heavy bondage and CBT all had their opportunity to feature in the proceedings. Also screams, yowls, groans and whimpers.
Mistress Damiana was kind enough to snap a few images of me mid-torment. This shows saran wrap bondage, with layers of rope added on top, all based on suspended bondage board. The design of the board is quite clever, as the ropes quickly snap into the eyelets on the side, making it relatively fast to rig. You can see another angle here, showing the legs are wrapped and immobilized separately. The bondage and the gentle swaying movement of the suspended board was quite relaxing, which is more than can be said for the CBT devices deployed.
The metal ring around the cock (show in this close-up) is a Kali’s teeth type device. I think the general idea is to prevent erections by creating pain as the cock swells. That’s clearly a flawed design when masochists get involved. Pain = Exciting = Engorging = Pain. It’s basically the self-sustaining fusion reaction scientists have been searching for all the years, just with the output being endless whimpering rather than clean energy. Fortunately, the spiked vice on the balls was uncomfortable enough to damp down the effect, and prevent a runaway reaction and a critical penis mass. Nobody wants to deal with that kind of fallout.
This photograph of Mistress Damiana Chi is from her site. You can also follow here on twitter here.
Welcome to another post in my occasional series on women who were awesome without necessarily being dominant in the BDSM sense. In the past this series has included motorcycle racers, resistance fighters, film stars and aristocratic swashbucklers. The newest entrant into this series is all around daredevil and badass Kitty O’Neil, who died recently aged 72.
You might not know the name, but the odds are you’ve seen her in action at some point. She was the stuntwoman for the original Wonder Woman TV series, as well as movies like the Blues Brothers and Smokey and the Bandit. She also set water speed records (275 mph), water skiing records (105 mph), land speed records (512 mph average, peaking at 621 mph) and participated in tough off road races like the Baja 500 and Mint 400. If all that wasn’t enough, she did it after overcoming spinal meningitis in her teens and two bouts of cancer in her 20’s. Oh, and she was also deaf, thanks to a childhood combo of measles, mumps and smallpox. What an amazing woman.
This is Kitty performing a 127 foot dive from a hotel balcony for the Wonder Woman TV show.
I’ve had a variety of book related links come my way recently, so I thought I’d gather and share them via a post.
Ferns has published volume 2 of her Happy Femdom Stories. She’s shared a series of these on her blog and they always put a big smile on my face. There’s a huge amount of fantasy and professional femdom content online, but very few positive stories about real femdom relationships, so I love what Ferns is doing here.
Domina Jen is working on a book of her own and using Patron to support it. Check that out if you enjoy her writing and want to interact with her as the novel progressed.
Miranda Birch sent me a link to her site and asked if I’d feature her femdom fiction here. She has a large back catalog of work covering all sorts of kinky femdom scenarios, so that might be worth a look if you’re after new erotica.
Finally, I enjoyed this article on the passage of the bill that decriminalized sex work in New Zealand. There’s an associated book ‘My Body, My Business‘, featuring the stories of sex workers and their thoughts on the industry that’s due out later this month. That’s one to add to my Christmas list.
This pin-up librarian is by the American artist Gil Elvgren.
I believe it’s compulsory around this time of year for blogs like this to post a sexy Halloween picture. It’s part of the contract you sign with the domain registrar. Or possibly the web hosting company. Somebody certainly requires it if you want to go on blogging.
I’ve done my bit in the past, but I generally not a happy Halloween participant. So here’s something a little different to the usual big breasted horror movie character. While not an obvious mystical theme, I think the woman has a mysterious dark witchiness to her. She looks like she might have a beautiful modern house, with an extensive underground wine cellar, and you should pay no attention to the oddly out-of-place iron manacles or the strange chalk markings on the floor down there. Now run along and fetch her another bottle of that dark claret she loves so much.
This is by the artist Jn3 and you can see a lot more of his elegant work on his tumblr ‘Lost in the Echo‘. You can also buy prints here.
I have a secret fear of checking out of hotels. Particularly if there’s a big line of people at the desk. Each time as I go to slide across the key, I give a little nervous smile and try not to catch the hotel employee in the eye. I always picture them fiddling around on their computer and then saying “Ahhh, yes sir. You were in that room. We’d be obliged if you didn’t make any future bookings at our hotel.”
I’m obviously shocked at this statement, but as I start to protest they look me straight in the eye and loudly say “You know what you did. We all heard the noises! The young couple in the next room were most disturbed. We told them the screams were just a loud horror movie you were watching, but I know what that young lady was doing to you! You should be ashamed.”
Of course this has never happened and almost certainly never will. If hotels barred people for getting a little freaky in their rooms, then they’d have a lot of empty hotel rooms (with some exceptions). But that doesn’t stop me getting just that little bit nervous and sweaty when it comes time to pay the bill.
My most recent reason for this fear was an opportunity to play with Miss Margot of NYC in my hotel on the last full day of my trip. We had a blast, indulging in all sorts of great kinky activities. Like most NYC hotels the room was pretty small, but unlike most hotels, the bed had all sorts of useful tie points to take advantage of. That fact, combined with Miss Margot’s skills and travelling bag of rope and toys, made for a great way to spend a final afternoon in Manhattan. Hopefully we didn’t scare the other guests too badly.
This photograph of Margot doesn’t exactly fit my femdom theme, but I liked it so much I wanted to share it. It was taken by @ohgodwhy_me and shared via Margot’s twitter feed.
Miss Margot actually works as a professional switch, offering sessions as a bottom, sub, top or domme. I checked very carefully before leaving Seattle and, despite looking under the bed and down the back of the couch, still couldn’t find my dominant side. However, if you lean switchy and are looking for a versatile professional in NYC then you should definitely check out her site. And if you also fear the hotel front desk, I’m sure she could arrange a playspace for two of you.
