The Final LA Shivers

I’m back in Seattle and quite literally shivering. It’s cold here, at least compared to the balmy SoCal weather. When I’m old and decrepit, or least more so than I am now, I may have to move permanently to LA to warm my bones. I quite fancy retirement as an old submissive who potters around cleaning up dungeons in between sessions and spends the rest of his time sitting outside in the sun sipping tea.

Anyway, setting aside the ghosts of paltego’s future, my last day in LA was as good as any of those that had gone before. I was lucky enough to be able to schedule time with Mistress Damiana Chi. She’s has a stellar reputation, and she certainly lived up to it. Heavy bondage, nipple torture, CBT and electrical play were on the menu, and she quickly got me spacey and shivering with adrenaline. I think it’s the mark of a skilled dominant to be able to quickly zero in on the appropriate level of intensity even with new play partners. Enough to get the endorphins flowing, but not so much that it causes stress and nerves to spike unpleasantly. She had me right in that zone for a very happy two hours, and I got to bask in the afterwash of it for the rest of the day. Even dealing with TSA and LAX couldn’t knock that out of me.

This image is from Mistress Damiana’s site. It’s a beautiful picture and I think she’s actually even more striking in person.

More Shivers in LA

My kinky LA trip continued today with a lengthy session with Mistress Cynthia Stone. More adrenaline derived shivering was involved, although from a very different session dynamic to Friday’s session. Where Mistress Iris might utilize a playful pinch or a light scratch, my play with Mistress Cynthia is more like a hand to the throat swiftly followed by a kick in the balls. In the best possible way of course.

I’m not going to do a detailed write-up now because we shot some video and images, so hopefully I can put a proper post together on it when I’m back in Seattle. I’ll just finish by saying that at some points I was shaking enough to become audible. I was bound to a floated bed, suspended via chains at the corners, and in quiet moments we could hear the metalwork clink and rattle as my body oscillated back and forth. Of course that faint sound was only audible when somebody wasn’t moaning or screaming, and there weren’t too many moments like that.

If you’re interested in playing with Cynthia yourself, her professional site is available here.

Show some link love

One unfortunate trend I spotted when refreshing my blogroll was the number of sites that don’t have a blogroll at all. I’m not sure if that’s a new trend, or an ongoing thing that I’ve just not noticed before. Either way, I’m not a fan.

A blogroll (or a links page) is the original version of Share Our Shit. In many ways, it’s a human version (in a very hand wavy way) of the classic Google PageRank alogrithm. If I like the writing of this blogger, there’s a good chance I’ll also like the stuff they read. Ironically, search engines themselves tend to suck at queries like “Femdom Blog”. I’d say 80% of the blogs I find come via links on other people’s blogs, with the other 20% from social media, comments or email.

So if you’ve got a blog, please put up links to other blogs you like and read. It can be a traditional blogroll or a separate page or whatever. Just show a little love to your fellow bloggers and gives your readers some interesting people to explore.

I’ve no idea what image goes with this kind of post, so here’s a sexy as hell shot of Sophia Loren, taken at her home in Rome in 1955. You’re welcome.

Should have used more lube

I had all sorts of serious posts to write today. Yet here I am, featuring this image from CNN. I just couldn’t resist it. Great headline? Or the greatest headline?

I can only assume that Senator Collins was wielding something like the weapon below and was sparing on the lube. Poor Donald. It does of course beg the question – what would his safeword be? Typically you’d pick something you’d never say accidentally. So I guess “Sorry” would work pretty well.

Boys and Men

While I appreciate the sentiment, I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate. If memory serves, I’m fairly sure strong women excited me as a boy as well as a man. I guess the slogan ‘Strong women intimidate adult males who are figuratively boys, while exciting adult males who are figuratively men as well as some literal boys’ might not have fitted.

Cate Blanchett in Leather

This photoshoot from Sean & Seng for 032c magazine isn’t exactly femdom. In fact there’s a couple of images in there of Cate in Shibari style bondage. But I did like this particular shot of her sporting a leather jacket and just a glimpse of her boot tops showing. It’s considerably better than the outfit she was stuck with for the recent Thor movie. It’s quite an achievement to cast Cate Blanchett as the Goddess of Death, dress her in a tight leather catsuit, and have her look as silly as this. Admittedly, it works better in action, but it still seems a missed opportunity. The Dark Knight Rises might have been a ridiculous movie, but at least they knew how to get a tight leather costume right.

 

St. Vincent

The image below is promotional material from St. Vincent and her current tour for Masseducation. It popped up on my vanilla facebook feed (probably because she’s playing Seattle next month), but the kinky elements made me briefly wonder if I’d crossed the streams with my kinky social media life. She’d definitely sporting the kind of stare that features on many pro-domme gallery pages.

If you like this image then her video for Los Ageless has some similar themes. I only started listing to her music recently, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve found so far.

Silly Lists

The KinkD people have played one of the standard cards that kink related companies use to get free PR, releasing a list of top kinky US cities based on their user data. Given this is such a common gimmick, you think they’d put some effort into crunching the numbers to produce an interesting story, but no such luck.

The top 3 cities for the largest numbers of kinky people (or at least KinkD subscribers) are NYC, LA and Chicago. Unsurprisingly, if you look at the top US cities by population, the top 3 are … wait for it … NYC, LA and Chicago. Obviously they’ll have the most the kinky people. They’ve got the most everything.

Really the story here shouldn’t whats good, but what places suck to live in if you’re kinky. Phoenix, San Antonio, Dallas and San Jose are all in the top 10 most populous US cities, but despite their numbers, don’t make the KinkD top 10 list. They’re the ones bucking the trend here, not places like NYC or LA.

Another way to look at is the ratio of kinky people to city population. If you assume the KinkD subscribes numbers correlate to kinky people in general, and the city definitions they’re using are the same as here (two pretty big assumptions), then sorting their top 10 by that ratio gives…

  1. Portland
  2. Seattle
  3. Austin
  4. San Francisco
  5. Philadelphia
  6. Los Angeles
  7. San Diego
  8. Chicago
  9. Houston
  10. New York City

Now the smaller cities known for more alternative culture leap to the top three spots. Of the massive cities, LA now does the best in the mid-pack, and NYC goes from top spot to the bottom.

Silly numbers aside, the truth is that anyone living in the above 10 cities will have access to a pretty large kinky community. The real challenge is for the kinksters who finds themselves in places like Emmetsburg (Iowa), Centerville (South Dakota) or any of the thousands of small towns scattered across the country.

I sadly don’t have any hot femdom images from kinksters in Emmetsburg or Centerville. Instead I’ll go with something from one of the major metropolitan areas. This is Mistress Tess, one of NYC’s top pro-dommes.

The New Wonder Woman

I finally got around to seeing the new Wonder Woman movie tonight. It’s not exactly the Godfather II script, but it was a lot of fun. Gal Gadot was perfect in the role and it was a real pleasure to watch a female superhero be the star and kick some ass for a change.

Of course the history nerd in me was squirming throughout the WWI scenes. If you’re going to pick a major German figure as a bad guy, and then kill him off, don’t make it one who was a significant part of post-war Germany and actually played a role in the rise of Hitler. I can suspend my disbelief on the history books leaving out Wonder Woman’s role in the victory, not so much on Ludendorff killing his general staff, trying to extend the war and then not being around afterwards. Also the British not wanting to upset the Germans during Armistice negotiations made no sense. There was no significant negotiation, given how desperate the Germans were to sign, and the armies were killing each other right to the very last minute before the ceasefire.

I know that doing kinky superhero roleplay is a thing for some people. I intellectually get the appeal of tight skimpy outfits and powerful figures, but it never really turned my crank. However, I would absolutely love to do a scene with someone dressed in the period outfit Gal Gadot sports in London. Something about that neatly tailored suit and the glasses that really work. Not sure what roleplay that’d be however. Maybe I could pretend to be a conservative politician opposed to Women’s suffrage and the domme a righteously pissed off suffragette?

Ending on a high

I survived my kinky odyssey to LA and I’m safely back in Seattle, albeit bruised and sore. I ended up doing four different sessions over five days with three different dommes. It was a lot of fun but also a lot for me to handle in a short period of time. Although, as problems go, ‘too much hot kinky fun’ is not a bad one to be stuck with.

My final session was with Cynthia Stone and was also the most intense. She’s a very creative and imaginative domme, and often  comes up with something new for me to experience. In this case, after some spanking and bondage, it was torturing the web of skin between my thumb and index finger. It’s not a part of the body that typically features in kinky play, but it turns out to be surprisingly sensitive. She used a scalpel to nick the skin on each hand – like two nasty paper cuts – and then clamped them closed with magnetic balls  on each side of the hand (like this). Normally clamps hurt when they go on, then fade over time, only to hurt again when they’re pulled off and the blood rushes back. In this case the pain just kept growing the longer they were on, almost like a cramping sensation, and then spiked horribly when they were pulled off. I’m not sure if that reaction was down to the cuts or simply the way the nerves in the hand responded over time.

Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of the story for that particularly body part. She also decided to suture my hand to my cock, punching the suture thread through that same piece of skin below the thumb. Surprisingly, the suture into the hand hurt way more than the multiple ones she used to attach the thread to the cock. A gag was even necessary for the hand one. To complete the arrangement, Cynthia held the free end of the thread taut while I slowly and very carefully slid my hand down it towards my cock. The sensation of the thread slowly slipping through the suture hole in my hand was strange and disquieting. Not something I’ll forget in a hurry.

One of the most amazing things to me about these intense sessions is how quickly everything returns to normal afterwards. Cynthia is great at getting into her play partners heads and ratcheting up the tension and drama. By the end I always think I’m going to be a shivering wreck, falling off the bondage table covered in blood and bruises. Yet, when the lights come up and the ropes come off, my reaction to seeing the damage is usually “Really? That’s it? I was expecting it to look way worse.” All that’s needed is a spritz of disinfectant and a quick shower and I’m ready to rejoin the civilized world.

This photograph is from Cynthia’s gallery page. If you’re interested in experiencing her creativity for yourself, then her session information is here.