Fm – Page 159 – Femdom Resource

Perfectly positioned

Here’s my last post in what turned into a trio of happy strap-on posts. This particular one has a teasing feel to it. The strap-on hasn’t actually been deployed yet, but judging from the smiles and the bound position of the gentleman, it can only be a matter of time. She also finds a few other uses for that tongue she’s grabbing.

This is from a Divine Bitches shoot, featuring January Seraph with Adam Russo. I found it on the My Miss in Control tumblr, where you can get the original full sized version.

What a big…smile

These two shots come courtesy of the Strap-on Dreamer site. From the public homepage it doesn’t seem much different to a lot of similar sites, with talk of hot dominant girls fucking submissive guys. However, whoever is shooting the images for it does seem to have a feel for the more playful side of pegging. From the images I’ve seen floating around tumblr (and featured here in the past) they tend more to the smiles than snarls.

I found both these images on the Private Strapon tumblr.

Adding to the stress

After writing yesterday’s post on panic and stress when playing, a further personal observation struck me. This was that it’s not relinquishing control that creates significant stress. I’m happy to release control of my body, and can do quite intense activities, like breathplay or suturing, with no danger of panicking. What dramatically ratchets up the stress level is when I feel that there’s an element that is out of control. Something that we accidentally dropped on the floor when control was passed between us. For example, I’ve no problem with a mistress pulling a plastic bag tight over my head. I won’t be able to breath, but I know that she knows that. A tight hood with a small breathing hole is way more stressful. I fear that the hole will get accidentally blocked, I won’t be able to fix and she won’t know about it. I worry that nobody will be in control, and that uncertainty prays on my mind.

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way, and so within this observation also lies opportunity. If a dominant wants to increase stress, then they should increase uncertainty. Remove both control and awareness from the submissive. Disconnect them from their surroundings and sense of time. To borrow a term from the software industry, the dominant should strive to create FUD – Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.

Conversely, with a nervous submissive, the dominant should try to eliminate ambiguity. Always be very clear about the transfer of control. Keep physical contact to let the submissive know they are still present and in charge of the situation. Encourage two-way communication and try to balance the competing stresses. For example, before increasing a level of sensory deprivation, decrease the level of bondage or the amount of pain.

Given hoods are a good way to do sensory deprivation and create stress, I figure this would be a suitable image to illustrate the post. I like the contrast between his objectified anonymity and her happy smiling face. It features Mademoiselle Belle, a pro-domme based in Madrid. Originally the image comes from her blog site, but I came to it via the darksehnsucht tumblr.

Accumulating stress

Vista published a post recently over at her Sexual Destinies blog that caught me eye. She was writing about stress reactions and her feeling of panic when being blindfolded and gently restrained. I find those kind of reactions fascinating, as they can be simultaneously very intense and yet very illogical. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. There’s no right or wrong way to react to these situations. It’s just that in hindsight the strength of the reaction can seem very out of proportion to the specific stimulus that triggered it.

I’ve written about pain in the past, and commented on the fact that it’s not additive. A more intense pain in one location can distract from a mild pain elsewhere. The body has clearly evolved to direct attention to the single point that’s currently experiencing the greatest damage. Stress doesn’t seem to work that way. It is additive, each new stressful element building on the one before and pushing you closer to your panic threshold. This means that the final thing that tips someone over the edge may seem relatively minor when considered on its own.

I experienced this effect in a scene with Lydia a couple of months ago. We were doing some heavy bondage and CBT. She’d started with a rope harness, lashing my arms to my sides and pulling my legs into a frogtie. Over this she’d layered plastic wrap, carefully encasing my limbs and body, mummifying me completely from the neck to my toes. Not content with this level of restriction, she’d then wrapped my entire body in duct tape, creating a thicker encasing shell. The final touch was a duct tape gag and blindfold, rendering me mute and blind. The only thing uncovered was my cock, which she proceeded to slap and beat.

A year or two earlier we’d have never made it that far into the scene. I’d have been freaking out at the degree of restriction. But practice makes perfect and although it was intense, I was breathing through it and getting nicely spacey. Then my right hand started to get a little uncomfortable. It had moved under the wrapping and the wrist was pressing against the top of my hip bone. The absolute level of discomfort was very low, almost trivial, but it just tipped me over the edge. I started to lose perspective of where I was, my breathing became shallow and an overwhelming sense of ‘I need to deal with this now’ pushed aside me attempts to relax into the bondage. Lydia, expert that she is, spotted the change in my body instantly and removed the blindfold and gag. That was enough to bring me back, kill the panic, and let us deal with the situation.

Logically, in terms of possible things to panic about, a little muscle discomfort in my hand should have been well down the list. I was mummified in plastic wrap, had a duct taped head and someone was slapping my cock around with a pointy stick. They all sound like pretty good reasons to panic. Not a hand twinge akin to writers cramp. Yet that was the one thing that pushed me over the line. All the others had done the job of getting me close to it in the first place.

For an image I thought it’d be appropriate to run with something featuring mummification. In this case it’s a Divine Bitches shoot featuring Mistress Madeline and Kade, plus a lot of fabric wrap.

Music to float by

I love the moments as I drive back from a session. I almost always play late, so it’s often near midnight when I’m returning home. The city is lit-up with the neon of bars and the strings of streetlights. I’m floating along in my little cocoon of endorphins and adrenalin, wrapped in leather and metal, enjoying each blip of power as I navigate the corridor of signals and lights. I’ll often drive further than I have to, extending my route to sustain the moment. There’s a thrill to looking out at other people, silently enjoying themselves behind the windows of bars and restaurants. A sense of shared pleasure and also my secret pleasure.

I always play something on the stereo during these drives, and it’s always something very approachable. I don’t want difficult, complex or challenging. Emotional, simple and perhaps a touch cliched works just fine. My current favorite is U2’s With or Without You. It’s got a very hooky bass line, great guitar parts and lyrics which are actually pretty appropriate in places.

My hands are tied, my body bruised
She got me with nothing to win
And nothing else to lose

It works wonderfully when I’m drifting along feeling emotional and buzzed after a session.

Picking an image for this post was a little tricky. I considered going with this, which is appropriate in the use of the car, but a crash doesn’t exactly capture the mood I’m tying to portray. So instead I’ll take my cue from the U2 lyric. His hands are tied, and if he’s not bruised yet, it may well be in his future.

I found both images on the excellent Femdom Style Counsel tumblr.

Guess the fetish

I’m intrigued by this shot, mainly because I’ve absolutely no idea what’s going on. He’s acting like a towel rail, yet staring up as if he’s just spotted a large insect scuttling across the ceiling in his direction. She looks like she wants to give him more laundry to hold, yet I can’t see the impromptu towel rail taking that extra load and he’s making no effort to reach out. Is it forniphilia? CFNM? Domestic service? Art? A reverse image search led me to this blog post, which left me none the wiser (partly because the utterly retarded Google translation service can’t deal with Google’s own adult warning page on blogspot). I kind of like the image just for its strangeness alone.

I originally came across it on the Femdom Core tumblr.

Fashion, Sardax style

I don’t normally post Sardax artwork. Not because I don’t love it, he’s without doubt my favorite femdom artist, but because he earns a living via his paysite. It’s one thing to share a single photograph from a commercial site. They typically make money from videos and any one scene will have dozens of photographs clicked off. It’s quite another to freely share a single piece of artwork that the artist spent hours slaving over.

The Sardax images below are a little different. They were done in collaboration with Afira, a British based contemporary women’s clothing brand. As the designer herself explains in an interview…

I have known and admired Sardax’s work for a long time. Then one evening I found myself sitting next to him at a dinner party! We hit it off immediately, became friends and creative collaboration soon followed.
….
I hope my customers will see images of women experimenting with, enjoying and flaunting their sexual power. I can only imagine Sardax’s fans will see the same, but perhaps from the very particular perspective of men who adore that power in women.

My first thought was: Why don’t I get invited to those kind of dinner parties? My typical dinner party experience is someone explaining how new types of switch routers will change the design of data center network fabrics. I need less geeks and more femdom illustrators to split a bottle of Cabernet with. My second thought was around how brilliant it was to see this kind of crossover. It’s not a freakshow collaboration. The kind where a mainstream brand gets some free publicity by doing some ‘shocking’ S&M images and briefly flirting with controversy. Instead it seems to be the case where artists in two different but related fields saw a chance to work together. The end result is some great art and a message of normality* and acceptance for femdom. That can only be a good thing.

You can see the rest of the images at the Afira site under the Dark Daze collection.

* OK, so the images don’t depict anything close to normal. But neither does a lot of advertising. I mean that it’s normal in the same sense that a brand might choose a sports star or a music start to cast a positive light on their products. It’s halo style advertising, which is very unusual in a BDSM context.

Popping my cherry

A recent post by Underling posed what I thought was an interesting question for submissives. He was writing about spanking, and in particular that first experience…

…do you remember your first time? What prompted that initial collision of palm and derriere? Was it spontaneous, planned, paid for? Was it all you’d dreamed of and more, or were you left wondering what all the fuss was about?

He follows the question with a nice story describing his own first time, featuring a slightly surreal but ultimately satisfying session with a nice professional dominant lady.

My first adult spanking was also in a professional session, but it was oddly late in my kinky career. During my first few months of BDSM ‘for real’ (as opposed to in my fevered imagination), I did a pretty good impression of a kid in a candy store (apologies for the clashing mental image). I wanted to try everything. Ropes, whips, canes, needles, nipple clamps, gags, cuffs, pegs. You name it, I wanted it attached, inserted or applied at speed. Yet oddly I never got around to a traditional over the knee spanking. Somehow it seemed a little old fashioned.

I ended up having my first spanking almost accidentally. We’d been trying to do a suspension scene, and it just hadn’t worked out. I was having some joint issues, we couldn’t get the balance right, the rope harness was too tight, Libra was on the cusp of Capricorn, the BDSM gods were grumpy, etc. Normally a suspension will take a full session, so when it didn’t pan out we suddenly had extra playtime, and Lydia decided that a spanking was the right way to fill it. So like Underling my first time had a touch of the surreal, but in my case it was because it caught me so unawares. My thought process ran along the lines of “This is weird. Why am I getting over her knee? How is this going to work? It’s almost like…ohhh…we’re spanking! That’s kind of fun!”

Since then I’ve done it a number of times and always enjoyed it. I don’t get the rush from it that I think true spanking aficionados experience, but I like the close physical contact and the intimacy of it. Whipping and caning can be quite isolating. The pain makes me turn inwards and focus on my body. But a spanking is definitely a shared experience.

Image is by Underling from his site Underling’s Humblings.

When a session goes bad (part 2)

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post where I described my one, and so far only, really bad pro-domme session. I left off at the point where I was naked, fastened to an X-frame and trying to reason with an angry and somewhat irrational pro-domme. For emotional masochists this might represent an interesting predicament, but for me it had all the appeal of violent stomach cramps. While stuck in an elevator. With a deranged hobo.

She had continued to complain and moan while I shook some life back into my tingling fingers. When I was done she cuffed my hands back above my head, and asked what I thought was the scariest corporal punishment implement. That struck me as an odd question. All of them can be pretty fearsome if applied with enough force, but scary isn’t a word I associate with inanimate objects. In the end I picked the cane as having the greatest potential for mayhem. She proceeded to give me a heavy beating with one while angrily criticizing my attitude and its effect on ‘her’ session. It wasn’t by any means the severest caning I’ve had, but it was the most unpleasant. I associate negative emotions like anger or frustration with a lack of self-control, a weakness that has nothing to do with dominance. It felt like she was using the beating to deal with her temper and irrational response, not because she’d made a conscious decision that it was the right thing for our session dynamic.

I realize that some of you are probably reading this and wondering what the big deal is. After all, aren’t I there to be dominated? Isn’t being beaten to satisfy her part of the package? For some submissives this may be true, but personally I only enjoy playing in a mutually positive way. I get off on the domme’s pleasure in hurting and controlling me. Insults or humiliation push me straight out of submissive mode and straight into ‘Who the hell do you think you are?” mode. I want to feel that the domme and I are working as partners to create something together. My submission is a gift within that context.

After the caning the session shifted back into a more normal, if slightly strained, atmosphere. I didn’t bring the issue up when we’d finished and were making smalltalk, because I still hadn’t processed it properly. I had a lot of adrenalin and endorphins swirling around, and emotionally I wasn’t really sure where I was. It took me some days to get my head around it, and during that time I felt horrible. Normally a session leaves me on a big high, and I then have a mild sense of well-being that lasts for days. I never get the post-session crash that some people experience. In this case all those usual positive feelings soured on me, and I had a low grade depression for over a week. I’d even get a little tearful when I’d think about the scene. It was a really strong and quite strange reaction.

On a more positive note, it was at least a learning experience. For anyone out there who might themselves in a similar situation, here’s what I ended up taking away from it:

When the dynamic goes bad in a session, stop and step away from it. It’s easy to say but hard to do, particularly if you’ve been eagerly anticipating the play. At the time I didn’t really consider it as an option. Next time (which is hopefully never) I will make that alternative available.
If you need to step back, then make a very conscious effort to switch headspaces. It’s tough to go from D/s back to a more normal power balance. Typically this is a gradual process at the end of a session, so it takes a real effort to change gears quickly mid-session. I suspect getting a glass of water and sitting down away from the play space would help this process.
When playing with someone new pay attention to how they deal with setbacks and plans not unfolding perfectly. Reacting emotionally and irrationally is rarely a positive sign. A good domme treats these issues as interesting problems to be solved. A great domme can anticipate them and adjust before they even become an issue.
If the worst happens and a session does go bad, expect and plan for a significant emotional reaction that can last for days or even weeks. All those powerful emotion amplifying effects can turn and bite you when the wrong dynamic enter the mix.

I’ll also re-emphasize what I said in my previous post – this session was an aberration. I’ve sessioned a lot over the last few years with several different dommes, and only once had this kind of problem. If you’re thinking of moving from the fantasy to the reality of BDSM, please don’t let this post stop you. Alternatively, for those already playing, then I found this post and this followup by Clarisse Thorn had interesting suggestions for dealing with S&M play gone wrong. Her comments are more focused around non-professional relationships, where the option to simply stop seeing someone (as I did) isn’t the default.

For an illustrative image I though I’d go with something that looked like an aftercare situation. This beautiful shot is by the photographer Jan Durina.

imagine a boot stamping on a human face

I’m a bit of a hypocritic. I often rail against conventional femdom porn, complain about the stereotypical dommes, and then go ahead and feature exactly that material. It’s sad to say, but stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason. I’m certainly not immune to the lure of leather or latex coupled with a crop brandishing domme.

However, I like to think that when I do feature that kind of material, there’s at least an element or two of interest. In this particular case it’s the relaxed attitude of the submissive. The domme has all the classic elements, with her thigh high boots, riding crop and white jodpurs. Yet he seems to be in a very accepting pose, relaxing into the pressure of the boot. I like that. It’s unusual for this kind of shot, but it corresponds to the way I play. I don’t want to be forcible subjugated. I want to give myself up to the domme, in the same way this gentleman seems to be doing.

I found this on the StellaNova’s Realm tumblr.