Self-Improvement

I’m starting on my New Year’s resolutions early this year by ordering myself a tight neoprene hood from Mr S Leather. Admittedly, buying fetish gear sounds more like kinky fun times than self-improvement, but there is method to my madness.

Regular blog readers may be aware that I have an issue with hoods. They stress me the hell out. A fact which I find annoying. Anytime I don’t like something it annoys me. I feel like I’m missing out. Hoods tend to be a big part of heavy bondage and I’d love to be able to incorporate them into my scenes. I totally understand both their aesthetic and sensory value, but so far that knowledge hasn’t helped when it comes to my stress levels.

My brilliant plan for 2020 is therefore to buy one for home and wear it in non-stressful situations. Like while washing up or doing food preparation. If I can train my brain to realize that wearing a hood doesn’t equal instant death by suffocation, then perhaps I can start to use them in scenes. I know of at least a couple of dommes who’d love to get me into their hood collection. In the meantime, if any of my Seattle readers spot a strange hooded man through the windows of a condo building, then rest easy. It’s just your friendly neighborhood femdom blogger trying to improve his kinky life skills. I shall keep you all up to date on how my experiment goes.

This is exactly the kind of fun hood I hope to condition myself to handle. Sadly I don’t have an attribution for it. As ever, if you know the source for this image, then please leave me a comment.

Adjusting His Level

Here’s a somewhat unusual way to do foot worship. I can’t tell if it’s clever or really lazy. I think I’m going to work on the assumption that it’s a hello or goodbye moment, and so he’s paused briefly on the stairs to mark that. Not that he’s been standing halfway up his staircase for the last 20 minutes because he can’t be bothered to kneel down. I certainly can’t imagine that the white wood railing is doing much to improve the kinky mood.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image.

The Joy of Slaves

Dommes have it easy. For most people getting a clean glass is a major challenge involving dishwashers. Not so for your average domme. She just has to pull on some tight, impractical and possibly chilly fetish wear. Then she whistles up her nearest naked slave and stands over him during the cleaning process to ensure he does it properly. A well practiced disdainful look can be helpful at this stage. Possibly he might screw-up on purpose to get a beating. Possibly he might decide halfway through that this isn’t his kind of scene and he wants to re-negotiate it. But, those pitfalls safely dodged, in just a few short hours she’ll have a clean glass. She is then just two slaves and one whipping away from getting that glass of Chardonnay she’s after.

This vintage image come courtesy of a tweet by mrunderheel.

Most Overrated Pose

This post was originally going to feature the most overrated item in the BDSM toolbox. After the last couple of posts on underrated equipment, I thought that might be a fun way to finish this series. Unfortunately, after pondering the idea, I’m not sure there are any good candidates for that category. Everything commonly used has its fans. I’m personally not a fan of blindfolds, but I know that a lot of other kinksters love them. Figging would be another personal choice for overrated activities, but I’m not sure something so niche could ever be described as overrated.

Instead let me go with the most overrated BDSM pose, as exemplified by the image below. This kind of shot crops up in fashion shoots all the time. It’s a strong visual and one photographers always reach for when wanting to portray a femdom dynamic. Yet in my opinion, it doesn’t work well in real play. There’s no sense of connection between the domme/sub and, if you want to do objectification, then a footstool or table position is much easier to maintain for a longer period. It’s a pose that’s great for a camera but not much else.

This is the model  Lydia Possner as shot by Markus Brink. More images from the same shoot in this post.

Most Underrated Implement

Yesterday’s post featured floggers, an implement with a high utility in play but comparatively limited representation in BDSM imagery. As soon as I published the post it occurred to me that there was another implement that had a much stronger claim to the most skewed misrepresentation. That would be the humble clothespin. Relatively rare in BDSM porn. A staple of kinky play.

The beauty of clothespins is their versatility. You can attach them to any part of the body. Grab a thin slice of tight skin and they can be very intense. Pick a generous fleshy part and they’re a mild buzz. You can twist them, rub against them and yank them off. Tie them together and you’ve got a zipper. Shave their ends down and you’ve got a much tighter and more focused pinch. Small ones feel different to the big ones, and plastic ones different to the wooden ones. Most fun of all – once you pull them off then rubbing the pinched spot is a whole different sensation. In terms of cost versus benefit, there’s no question that the simple clothespin is the kinky bargain to beat all others.

This image – featuring a simple clothespin zipper – is from the Kink VR site. 

Flogging Fun

It’s a shame flogging doesn’t get more love when it comes to corporal play. Whips have more drama. Canes more visual appeal. Spanking pushes more psychological buttons. Yet in terms of factors like the intensity of sensation delivered, control over the escalation of intensity, the overall skill required and the margins for error, flogging is arguably the best bang for buck in corporal play.

I’d also say that out of all the corporal toys,floggers have the greatest variety in the type of sensations it can create. They can be light or heavy, thuddy or stingy, blunt or sharp. Some can feel like a great massage and others like you were lashed with razors. Whatever the masochistic mood, there’s probably a flogger that’ll suit it.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image.

A Session with Mistress Troy Orleans

One of the pleasurable things about returning home from vacation is the opportunity to sort through holiday snaps and reminisce about the fun times you had.  In my case that normally means less in the way of shots of beaches and cute bistros discovered down side streets, and rather more in the way of leather, steel, pain and oh my! Visiting NYC resulted in lots of photographs from that second category, and the first I’m featuring here come from a really great session I did with Mistress Troy Orleans.

We started with some bondage using a post and a harness to put me in a vertical but semi-seated position. You can see photos of that in this side view, this front view and this back view. The boots I’m wearing are particularly fearsome. They hold the foot fully extended inline with the leg and grip everything very tightly. I think they’d be impossible to walk on, but in this position I can use them to take some of my weight. I love the combination of the fetishistic look of the boots and the sleeves together with the degree of control they apply. You can see a nice close-up of the locks and metal clips on the sleeves here. It’s not shown clearly in the images, but I should also point out that my throat and head are also fixed in place against the post.

Of course bondage alone is never enough. Troy always likes to throw some pain into the mix, as you can see from this shot. The nipple clamps were a little painful, but the real killer was the nasal clamp that’s holding the chain up. Nipples go numb over time, but the septum never seems to. Every time the chain moved it felt like someone sticking a needle into the inside of my nose. Even when Troy took forever some time to shoot selfies (one shown below) she left that damn nose clamp in place, creating an extended series of cries and moans of pain from me.

After this vertical bondage we moved onto a slightly more meditative horizontal position. Inspired by Savannah Sly’s writing on my chest, Troy decided to put her initials (MTO – Mistress Troy Orleans) on my back. This was also done with cupping, but where Savannah had cups with a manual pump, Troy used the fire cupping technique. The application of the hot cups created a relaxing and floaty headspace for me, but considerably upped the challenge in terms of writing anything. The suction effect is nowhere near as strong with fire cups and it’s hard to accurately place and moved them with breaking the seal. As you can see from this shot of my back, she did manage to get a pretty clear ‘MTO’, but it wasn’t as vividly defined as the ‘Sly’ from the pumped cups.

Finally, we moved onto a suspended bondage scene, using Troy’s amazing metal frame and spring set-up. You can see a side and front shot of that here and here. I’m in a leather body bag, with a tongue depressor gag and a pair of ear mufflers for some added sensor deprivation. Moving from the back writing scene to this worked really well, as it kept me a lovely spacey floaty zone that allowed me to just drift in the moment. The gag was just enough to remove the idea of talking, without being so uncomfortable it kept dragging my attention to it. Attention to small details like that really make the difference in these kind of scenes.

As is always the case when I play with Mistress Troy Orleans, it was a great session and I’m really glad I got the holidays snaps to remember it by. Although I probably will not be passing them around in the family album the next time friends drop in.

If you’re interested is seeing more of Mistress Troy’s creative work then she has an OnlyFans account here.

Medical Problems

I’m safely back in Seattle, my NYC trip sadly at an end. My last full day there was enlivened by a great session with Empress Wu. This was our first session together and much fun was had, accompanied by a steady stream of snarling and whimpering from me. I’ll hopefully be able to share a few photographs from that in a future post.

In the meantime let me leave you with some light reading in the form of this article on coming out as kinky to a medical professional. Doctors and nurses are a common roleplay, but the reality of combining kink and medical professionals is typically less enjoyable. In many areas BDSM occupies an odd legal gray zone, particularly around the ability (or not) of an individual to consent to be hurt. Simply saying you consented to an act doesn’t necessarily make it legal. That gives medical professionals leverage if they choose to use it. Hopefully that’s an unlikely thing to happen, but it’s really not something you want to have to worry about when seeking medical help.

This artwork belong firmly in the fun fantasy style of medical play. The style seems familiar, but I can’t currently put a name to an artist. It appears to be signed jh 18, which doesn’t mean much to me.

Update: Thanks to a helpful comment I believe this is the work of joerggum, and you can find more on his deviantart account. Fans of heavy medical play should definitely appreciate his art.

Sound Advice

For anyone tempted by the idea of urethral sounding, Madame Li Ying has put together an informative blog post on the practice. It covers basic safety, technique and the anatomy involved in the process.

A few comments I’d add, after being on the receiving end of sounds…

  • Drink a bunch of water either just before or immediately after. Having a good pee helps flush out any lube (or Listerine) that’s lingering around.
  • A firm or semi-firm cock helps slide the sound in easily. So use a bit of manual stimulation if necessary.
  • Treat sounding as a distinct and self-contained event. It’s not something to mix in with a bunch of other play, as you’ll risk contaminating the sounds. Clean the area, create some clear space to work and enjoy using the sounds. Then set them aside to be sterilized properly before you touch them again.

This is Mona Wales and Owen Gray in a Kink shoot. Normally it’s the guy who enjoys the sounding experience, but somehow it seems like Mona is the one getting off on it here.