Crazy for you

Continuing the theme of artwork and fictional characters, here’s Bellatrix Lestrange (from the Harry Potter series) as illustrated by Chris Ables. I’ve never actually read the books, but I do appreciate the sentiment. The crazy evil characters are always the most interesting ones in any story. Doesn’t matter if it’s Hannibal Lecter, Malificent, Blofeld or the Joker. Conventional evil is simply unpleasant and quickly dispatched by the hero. Crazy evil is fascinating and always gets to return in the sequels.

Bellatrix LeStrange by Chris Ables
You can find more of Christopher Ables’ work on his site.

Alter ego

Catwoman has not been treated kindly by the movies. Anne Hathaway played the character beautifully, but got stuck with an incoherent sprawling mess of a movie. Michelle Pfeiffer looked fabulous in her latex outfit, but got stuck with another incoherent mess of a movie. In both cases the the respective directors (Christopher Nolan and Tim Burton) turned in their weakest movies when they incorporated the catwoman character. Clearly attractive women with whips have a detrimental effect on screenwriters and directors.

On the plus side the movie characters have resulted in a lot of great fan art. This particular take on the Michelle Pfeiffer version is by hotcake on deviant art.

Catwoman by Hotcake

The common man’s guide to bad books

The growing mainstream visibility of BDSM has led to a burst of kinky novels, guides and memoirs. A particularly active niche within this growing category has been the pro-domme autobiography and how-to guide. In theory this should have led to a lot of exciting reading. Anyone who has chatted to an experienced pro-domme will know they have many great stories to go along with their technical skills and insight into the complexities of human sexuality. In reality the results have been pretty mixed, with most books being, shall we say, less-than-great.

The latest contender is The Posh Girls Guide to Play by Alexis Lass aka Domme Dietrich, as featured in this NY Post article and this MF thread. It’s a kind of guide and memoir combo deal. The good news is that it’s not in that less-than-great category. The bad news is that it’s much worse than that. Admittedly I haven’t read the whole thing, but the look inside feature on the Amazon site told me all I needed to know.

I could probably deal with the juvenile writing style that reads like a cross between a teenager’s diary and a Cosmo article. The frequent mentions of her posh upbringing is weird, but I don’t think that would ruin it for me. I could even cope with her crass attempts to tie the whole things into the awful 50 shades trilogy. But some other things are just too annoying to ignore.

You might think that a book by a pro-domme would feature some positive thoughts on female domination. Even if the book covered a variety of gender and D/s combinations, surely the F/m one should be there somewhere, right? Yet no. As far as I can tell (both from the book and her interviews) it automatically defaults to the conventional submissive female role. The only submissive males are laughable clients in the commercial dungeon. Write about female submission by all means, but don’t act like it’s the goddam natural order of the world.

Next on the list of the “You’ve got to be kidding me…” was this gem.

S&M is archaic and rusty term that does not represent all or most popular dominant and submissive roleplay …. [We’ll have] nothing plucked from the psycho torture toy chest. This guide is intended for adventurous, whole and healthy women…

Well fuck you very much lady. A lot of us like a little S and a touch of M. And we don’t appreciate the implication that we’re not whole or healthy because of it. You’re drawing a bunch of arbitrary lines between what’s kinky and cool and what’s weird and deviant. I think I must have missed your nomination as ultimate ruler of acceptable kink. Is it to late for me to vote?

The final gem that almost made me laugh out loud was the guide to who the book is for. Apparently if you answer yes to just one of these questions, then BDSM is for you…

6. My lover and I are fighting too much, and it’s taxing our relationship.
7. I would love to tone down the stress in my life.
8. I am a dominant female and I’m wondering how it would feel to be relieved of control and play a submissive role in a ‘tryout’ play experience.

Yes, that’s right – if your relationship isn’t working out, and you’re fighting a lot, then clearly the best thing to do is to get ropes, gags and whips involved. That applies even if neither of you have any interest in BDSM. Just go ahead and get your kinky freak on. There’s absolutely nothing that could possibly go wrong in that situation. As for (8), I refer you to my earlier comments. Obviously if you’re a dominant female who brought a book by an ex pro-domme expecting some suggestions on female dominance, well more fool you. You probably deserve a good spanking.

Domme Dietrich

The image is the author in question – Domme Dietrich. I might not appreciate her writing, but I have to admit she does look fabulous in a black corset.

Comparative stupidity

I’ve not exactly been kind to 50 shades of Grey in the past. Posts like this one and this one have made my feelings pretty clear on the subject. I was therefore shocked to discover an article on the topic that was even dumber than the source material itself.

You’d think that the trilogy would be a God send to the anti-kink and anti-porn brigade. After all it portrays a horribly dysfunctional relationship with many BDSM themes. Taking pot shots at that should be easy, yet somehow Gail Dines in this Guardian article screws it up. She attempts to conflate Christian Grey with an Irish serial killer because – and I can hardly believe I’m typing this – they’re both played by the same actor. On that basis we should assume that Richard Nixon was a serial killer who invented corn flakes. After all, Anthony Hopkins played all three characters (Nixon, The Silence of the Lambs and The Road to Wellville). I guess I should be grateful that someone who holds views so diametrically opposed from my own is such an idiot.

I wasn’t really sure what image to feature with this post, so let’s just go with something elegant and beautiful. Feel free to assume there’s a dominant lady waving a whip just off frame if the lack of overt femdom offends you.

Arc

This image is tagged ‘William’ but I’ve failed to locate an original source for it. If you know then please fill me in via a comment.

Bits and pieces

A few different links in today’s post. No particular theme, other than what’s lurking in various browser tabs I have open.

Anyone who enjoyed the image in my post entitled ‘Hope the wind doesn’t change‘ might want to check back on it and read the comments. It turns out the gentleman featured is a reader of the site, and he gave a bit of background to the image of him and his wife. As I mentioned in my reply, that kind of interaction is one of the things I love about this blog. The web can be feel like an endless deluge of impersonal images and writing, so it’s great when I feature something I’ve randomly stumbled across and then make a connection with someone who was involved in creating it.

Sex and food is an old and famous pairing. BDSM and food is a less favored duo, but a Russian company plans to change that with these fetish lollipops. I’m not sure if they’re purely a concept or a real product, but I can’t see them catching on. I like painful food when it’s spicy, but not if it’s simply gouging my mouth out with sharp bits of oddly colored sugar.

Tom and Thumper pointed me at this article on Male Chastity. Despite the judgmental title it’s actually one of the better mainstream articles I’ve seen on the the topic. Shock horror probe as journalist actually researches a topic before writing about it. He’ll never make it to the big leagues.

Finally, it was Halloween recently, which always leads to lots of fluffy articles on celebrities in costumes. It’s a safe bet that kinky outfits will feature, and that both the wearer and the press will make a total hash of it. My favorite example of that this year was Nicole Scherzinger. She went for a submissive catwoman, which makes no sense, and was described in this article as ‘a dominatrix sex kitten slave’. I’d think that any journalist with an IQ above room temperature would figure out that a dominatrix is the opposite of a slave, but obviously the hiring standards for the Daily Star aren’t that high.

At least the catwoman theme gives me a chance to feature an image of somebody doing it properly. This is Colorful-Ayako as photographed by Troy Thomas.

Catwoman by Colorful Ayako

 

Virtual reality kink

The Oculus Rift headset is one of the hot stories in the tech world. It’s getting a lot of positive reviews and some heavyweight support. Virtual reality started out as the hot new thing in the 90’s, and quickly became a joke thanks to the limits of display technology. It seems that after almost two decades the hardware is finally catching up with the concept.

Of course, it wouldn’t be an exciting new technology without someone trying to use it for sex, and fortunately this is no exception. Their sales pitch suggests imaging playing Leisure Suit Larry but actually being in the game. Frankly that sounds terrible, but I do think the concept is an interesting one. It’s a step towards the Holodeck and, as Scott Adams rightly observed, that will be society’s last invention.

I’ve a personal interest here, as I worked in a research group on VR in the 90’s. Back then only incredibly desperate teenagers would have been turned on by the low resolution graphics, but today it looks like the visuals are rapidly becoming a solved problem. Haptic techology – meaning touch and tactile feedback – is the next big area. I can imagine that BDSM sex apps have an advantage here. After all, it’s easier to create a painful sensation that it is a pleasurable one. However, I wonder if BDSM also requires a greater degree of connection between participants. After all, a lot of people can enjoy masturbating to images or movies, and not feel any particular connection with the people they’re watching. Yet most masochists in my experience don’t get off on hurting themselves. Pain is only enjoyable in the right context and establishing that context might be trickier when some of the participants don’t actually exist.

Evolution by tink2001

The image above is by Tink2001 (sites here and here). I think he was one of the most talented femdom artists working in the rendering world, but sadly seems to have stopped publishing new work. As an image I think it’s a great fit for this particular post for several obvious reasons.

Enter the dominatrix

Apparently there’s a new videogame due out called ‘Enter the dominatrix‘. That’s a really stupid title, but that’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to videogames. In a similar vein, I can’t get too annoyed at the use of a dominatrix as the main villain. Yes, it’s lazy and cliched, but so are most videogames. Given the stereotypical view of a dominatrix – an attractive woman in fetish gear who enjoys hurting people – I’m surprised more games haven’t featured them.

The thing that’s even more annoying than the title and the cliched villain is the plot and accompanying press release…

In order to thwart her nefarious schemes and escape to the real world, the Saints will have to counter her army of gimps and sex-workers…

Sex-workers? Really? I’m supposed to fight off hordes of strippers, escorts, cam girls and sensual touch masseuse? The evil minions in this game are people who offer sexy fun times in return for money? Those are not the kind of people I want to virtually gun down. I get that Nazis, demons and aliens have been over-worked as protagonists at this point, but swapping them out for sex-workers is pretty fucked up.

As a further demonstration of the idiocy of the game developers, they couldn’t even put together a super sexy dominatrix to battle. If you’re going to play to a cliche, at least really go for it with a smoking hot domme, and not someone with a stupid cloak and a penis helmet. There are hundreds of better virtual dommes floating around on the web. Take the one below for example, created by Andrew Hickinbottom. It’s excessively exaggerated, and the ring on the collar is a classic fetish faux paus for a domme, but she still looks a way more interesting character than what the Volition team were paid to come up with.

Maria by Andrew Hickinbottom

Are you verified?

The Sliax site recently rolled out a verification scheme for professional BDSM and Tantra providers. I was at first hopefully that this meant that they were hiring submissives be professional BDSM reviewers. Sort of like the Michelin inspectors, but with one to three whips rather than stars. I’m not saying I would have instantly quit my job to tour the world having crazy kinky fun with fabulously skilled women for money, but if I thought it’d be a positive contribution to the community, I could have been talked into it. What can I say? I’m just the kind of guy who wants to help others.

Unfortunately the scheme turned out to be based more on community involvement and history rather than scratching my kinky itches. Once I’d gotten over my disappointment, it struck me that the idea of ‘BDSM verification’ was problematic in itself. After all how do you verify someone’s BDSM skills? It’s not like checking that your accountant has passed their CPA exam. There’s no single set of skills, or common training courses, or guild of professional dominants. Who defines the standards? Would verified mean someone was safe? Or skilled? Or simply that they owned a whip and hadn’t stolen their photographs from Vogue?

Fortunately, while I was puzzling over this, someone with real experience and knowledge got involved in the discussion – Mistress Matisse. You can follow her progress via tweets here, here, here and here. The end result is that they’re going to change it to simply a ‘BDSM professional’ badge rather than one that says ‘Verified’, which sounds a better idea. From my perspective, I doubt it’ll make any difference to who I session with. I’ll still prefer to do my own research. But I can imagine it being useful for people who don’t spend quite as much time on kinky web sites as I do (i.e. the other 99% of pro-domme clients).

The image below is of Mistress Shae, taken during her class entitled “The Hard Fuck- Embracing and mastering the art of the mind fuck.” Perhaps she should issue a scout style merit badge for it – “Verified Mind Fucker.” That’d certainly be an eye catching thing to sew to the side of a domme’s peaked leather cap.

Mistress Shae - "mommy dearest MF"

Gulliver’s Travels

Last week I mentioned a piercing session I’d done with Lydia featuring a fair number of needles. This week I bring you a few photographs from the session. If you’re at all squeamish about piercings or naked gentleman bits, then I’d suggest not clicking on the image links. Both elements feature heavily. On the plus side, there is a sexy picture to finish.

The original plan A for the session was to do a butterfly boarding. We’d done this before, back in 2011, in one of the first sessions I documented. Unfortunately, Lydia couldn’t track down any foam board at short notice. Ever creative, she moved onto a plan B of using my body as the board. Specifically my thighs and stomach. The idea was to pierce through the genitals and then through the torso skin, stitching everything into place with needles. That sounded good in theory, but several painful minutes demonstrated it didn’t work well in practice. The needles tended to pull out too easily. Fortunately, it was a case of third time lucky, as plan C was a striking success. This stuck to using my body as the board, but combined pairs of needles acting as anchor points with cords to stretch everything into place.

This top shot and this side shot show the arrangement pretty clearly. It led to a fascinating headspace, as every small movement pulled at different needles and communicated sensation across my body. Piercing always makes me floaty and the bondage elements of this approach pushed me deeper into that subspace. It also created an interesting feedback loop. Arousal pulled at the needles and, masochist that I am, that made me more aroused, which pulled the needles even more painfully. Lydia always likes to layer sensation, so the nipples also got involved, with cord running from them down via a belly piercing to the top of the cock. You can see the nipple piercing here and a torso view here. That connection across the body brought my breathing into the picture, each breath pulling at the taut cord and signalling down to the needles in their sensitive homes. Very intense but equally stimulating.

I’m always happy and laughing at the end of a scene, but in this case I was particularly amused when it came time to take everything out and I could examine the arrangement more closely. It put me in mind of the famous scene in Gulliver’s travels when he visits Lilliput and gets tied down on the beach. Except instead of Gulliver and ropes there’s my cock and a lot of frayed cords. It’s not really how Swift first imagined it, but possibly my genitals might pull off the role better than Jack Black did.

Given all the naked me in the image links, it feels only fair to finish with someone who’s not only far more photogenic but also responsible for conceiving and executing the scene. This is the wonderful Lydia, taken from her new and excitingly revamped website.

Lady Lydia

A lack of forethought

Today I learned that drinking a lot of rum cocktails is not a wise way to prepare for a scene the next day, no matter how delicious said drinks are. Being hungover and feeling extra delicate really adds an edge to nipple piercing and ball spanking. On the plus side, the rush of endorphins those activities provoke do help ease the symptoms of over indulgence. I can’t sell them as a hangover cure, but they certainly helped take my mind off my aching head.

Fortunately I was playing with Mistress Ai-Li who, expert that she is, worked well around my planning failure. She managed to push me, without provoking any unpleasant reactions, which I’m sure was a result we both desired.

Domina Ai-Li

The image is from Mistress Ai-Li’s website. She’s based in the Bay area should you wish to experience her session skills for yourself.