Shy Puppy

The man on the end of the leash is unsurprisingly depicted as blushing in this scene. What’s slightly stranger is that, if you look closely, the artist has also given the woman holding the leash a touch of blush. That’s an unusual slant on a public humiliation scene. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a situation where both the dominant and the submissive are supposed to be embarrassed about what’s going on. Is she a switch who is pulling off both roles simultaneously? If so, that’s some inception level kink.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this artwork. There’s a hint of a signature at the bottom left, but I can’t make it out.

Cosmo Fail

Mocking Cosmo articles on sex and BDSM is a long running tradition around here. There has been the good, the bad and the highly humorous. Unfortunately, their latest example would fall under the categories of dangerous and highly irresponsible.

The article in question is ‘What you need to know about breath play in BDSM‘ and right there, that title alone is pretty problematic. The answer to that should simply be ‘More than we can possibly cover in a Cosmo article. Don’t even think about it till you’ve done some proper research.’

Unfortunately the article itself is not so succinct. It does at least start with a warning about how dangerous it can be, but that message is then rather undercut by the remaining text talking about amazing orgasms and describing how to do it. It reminds me of the South Park scene where Kenny dies of autoerotic asphyxiation.

My biggest problem with the article is that it seems to to cover the two extremes of breath play and almost entirely omits the safer and fun middle areas. It talks about voluntarily holding your breath and mindful breathing, which are fine, but probably not all that hot for most people. The rest of it talks about various ways to put hands around neck and squeeze (or not), which seems very dangerous advice. There’s a long running debate in the BDSM community around whether breath play done like that can ever be safe – with a lot of experts saying it can’t – but I’m sure 100% of the community would agree that beginners doing it based on a short Cosmos article is a terrible idea. The reader is therefore left with an unsatisfying approach and a really dangerous one.

I actually love breath play and do it a lot, but never with anything near the windpipe or arteries in my neck. A simple hand across the mouth and nose is enough to block breathing and push my buttons around being controlled, while being way less risky. Even better than a hand is an ass. Face sitting, which can be clothed or unclothed, is both fun, sexy and a good way to limit air. Even an armpit can work, although it can be tricky to get a proper seal. It seems ridiculous to me that Cosmos barely touches on these much better approaches. For more advanced scenes I’ve played with using plastic wrap and gasmasks. I don’t think either of those would be great starting point for beginners, but they’d still be better than anything involving gripping around the neck.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this particular breath play shot.

Giggles

I enjoyed this story about a woman who breaks into uncontrollable laughter after she orgasms. Apparently the sex with her boyfriend is so good that it tickles her in all the right places.

I can relate, as I often find after heavy kinky play my post-orgasm reaction is laughter. Partly it’s the sense of absurdity that follows from surveying the scene of kinky carnage. There’ll be ropes and straps and odd toys and spiky things and two slightly sweaty bodies relaxing in the post scene glow. It’s inherently absurd in the best possible way.

I suspect the laughter is also a natural reaction to the release of high tension. I personally don’t get that reaction with regular sex, as that’s fun but not intense for me. Add pain and control and long drawn out teasing into the mix, and suddenly the contrast in the post-orgasm come down is so much stronger. It’s the difference between gently stretching and releasing a rubber band or stretching it till it snaps.

We laugh at jokes because they play with our expectations and contrast reality with the twist the punchline delivers. The incongruity of a joke makes it funny, as does the release in tension from the initial set-up.  I find much same thing logic applies to a kinky scene.

Of course, while I may laugh at the end of a session, the domme typically gets to laugh all the way through it. This is Lady Pim, who plays out of the Ritual Chamber in Toronto. You can find her professional site here.

Valentine Splat

Call me Mr. Grouchy, but I really hate Valentine’s day. If you’re in a new relationship it’s a pain to figure out what the right thing to do is. If you’re in an established relationship then it’s a fake event designed to artificially force romance. And if you’re not in a relationship, then it does nothing but make you feel bad about that fact. It’s up there with New Year’s eve as an overly hyped event that nobody enjoys as much as they think they should. Like I said – Mr Grouchy.

This image from Bakerman at least looks like a fun way to celebrate it. I’m not into sploshing or food play, but I’d happily take a cake in the face from a kinky lady over an evening jammed shoulder to shoulder in a restaurant charging twice their usual rates.

This was originally published by Bakerman for Valentine’s day in 2017.

Playing with Mistress Lucy

Before leaving LA I was fortunate enough to spend time with Mistress Lucy Khan. We had a lengthy and very enjoyable session featuring a smorgasbord of different activities all wrapped in a fun roleplay dynamic. Some things on the menu included cupping, piercing, scentplay, breathplay, tease, denial and general sadism to my delicate bits.

I particularly enjoyed the rope spiderweb that Mistress Lucy wove around me towards the end of the session. You can see it in this photograph. It was one of those arrangements that didn’t make much sense to me as it was being constructed, as it didn’t feel like it’d hold me properly. Then Mistress Lucy pulled hard on the bottom two ropes and everything tightened and magically fell into place. I particularly liked the way she tied it off around my big toes. There’s always an interesting sense of vulnerability that comes with toe bondage, given how sensitive the soles of the feet are.

Reflecting on the session later that evening, still floating on buzz created, it struck me that one sign of a world class professional domme is the commitment and intensity she can bring to a session with someone she rarely sees. It had been around 9 months since we’d last got together, yet it didn’t feel like that. Mistress Lucy created and held a bubble that made it very easy for me to relax into subspace and exist with her in the moment.

This image is from Mistress Lucy’s twitter feed. That’s not me in the image, but we did indulge in some similar play.

Cuddling on the Couch

I’m back in damp Seattle. I have a couple of fun sessions from LA to blog about, but right now I just want to unpack, collapse on the couch and catch up on my Colbert recordings.

In the meantime, I’ll keep things ticking over here with this artwork by sadisticsmilez. There’s a lot to love about this. The sense of intimacy and playfulness combined with the kink is particularly well done. My favorite part though is the nipple tweak. That’s a very sexy move, as his facial expression would tend to indicate.

The original title of the piece is ‘videogames2‘. I found it via this tweet.

Strange Reaction

I’ve experienced a strange emotional response in recent weeks. People hitting me has made me angry. That’s obviously not unusual for most people but for me, in the context of kink, it’s very strange. Corporal play was one of my primary fantasies for many years and a staple of my scenes. Yet recently it has generated less of an “Ooohhh, yeah….” and more of a “Hey! That hurts goddamn it!”

I have no idea why this is. Other painful things like needles, electricity, clamps and miscellaneous spiky things still get me buzzed and into that submissive floaty space. I can lean into their pain and relax under the dominants control. Yet corporal play had triggered the bad kind of ‘fight or flight’ response where I just want to make it stop.

I’m really hoping it’s a temporary thing. Maybe it’s to do with external stress or me being general angry at the state of the world. I’m not conscious of that kind of mental shift, but clearly something is awry. I’ve never met a domme yet who didn’t enjoy some form of corporal play, and I’d hate to lose such an important part of my kinky repertoire. Anyone else find they’ve had a favorite activity suddenly twist on them like this?

While my physical response might be screwed up, my visual response to corporal is still working just fine. I love this action shot from the Glasgow based Mistress Scarlet (found on her twitter feed).

Roped Captive

I enjoyed a wonderful session today with Mistress Damiana. However, I’m going to delay writing about that in detail until I’ve have a chance to edit and share the photographs we snapped.

In the meantime, given that I spent a good portion of our session today in bondage, I’ll share this artwork by bondlicitous. It’s called ‘Connection‘, which is very much a thing I look for when I’m being tied up. There’s a touch of the fairy tale about the drawing. I’m imaging that it’s the heroic prince that has been bound in place and the fair heroine, having been through a rather torrid time, is expressing her displeasure with his performance to date.

You can see more from bondlicitous at his DeviantArt and Twitter. I found this via a tweet by maid marta.

Finding the Edge

The Daily Dot has published an interesting article on Edge Play. One of the questions it raises is what exactly is edge play? Before reading the article I thought I knew, but now I’m not so sure.

I think there are three basic definitions you can come up with. They key question is what line is being played up to?

  1. Is it the edge of the submissive’s comfort zone?
  2. Is it the edge of mainstream BDSM activities?
  3. Is it the edge of life itself?

I’ve personally always assumed the definition was (2). That means things like scat, branding or very intense corporal play that draws blood would count as edge play. I’ve also known some professional kinksters who use the definition of (3), limiting it to activities involving knifes, guns, choking, etc. In that case edge play is the kind of thing that might land you not just in the emergency room but ultimately in the morgue.

What this article suggests is that (1) is actually the correct definition of edge play. Which seems kind of odd to me. Everyone has limits and a comfort zone, and that’s going to be in a different place for each submissive. So with that definition it almost becomes a meaningless term. Normally I’d just assume it was an article from a journalist who didn’t really understand the subject, but if features quotes from genuine experts in the field.

What constitutes edge play is different for everyone. I consider edge play to be play that occurs at the edge of what one can bear. Play where there is enough trust to push past what is comfortable creates the possibility of a new outcome.
Mistress Blunt

The article also goes on to list a 24/7 dynamic as another example of edge play, which is something that I’d suggest exists on an entirely different dimension to specific BDSM activities. So where exactly is the edge correctly drawn? Is it just one of those things that is always defined with respect to the person involved? Is my edge just someone else’s light warm-up?

Here’s the aforementioned Mistress Blunt exploring an activity that I guess could be an edge play candidate – mummification. This is from this tweet.

Scene Stealer

I’ll finish this nostalgic review of my last decade of kink with the story of the strangest thing that happened to me in a session – the time I did someone else’s scene.

I’m not going to reveal who the domme was. I’ll just say that this wasn’t my first session with her and this was some years ago. Our pre-scene negotiation over email had been, as is usual for me, pretty short and simple. I don’t remember my exact words but the gist was that medical play with staples and needles might be fun. What unfolded during the session itself was a little different.

In hindsight, putting all the pieces together, it was fairly obvious what went wrong. Before I arrived the domme had opened her email folder and clicked on someone else’s session request. I obviously never got to read the original email, but based on what transpired, I’m guessing it went something like this:

“I love lots of bondage with straps and rope, particularly if you keep adjusting and tweaking it, as though you can’t quite find the perfect way to hold me. I want a heavy caning and I think it’s really sexy if the domme is very vocal about how excited and aroused she is by the marks she’s leaving. Oh, and I’ve got a thing for hair, so if you could work that in somehow that’d be great. Thanks!”

Given this email slip-up, there was obviously a fairly significance gulf between  between what I was expecting and what I was about to receive.

The first thing that struck me as weird as we started the session was that the domme seemed to have developed an OCD issue with bondage. I couldn’t figured out why she kept screwing around with it. She’d mutter about needing to get it exactly right, I’d carefully suggest that it was actually fine, and she’d still keep reworking it. Then there was all the sexy moaning and dirty talk to go along with the canes she was wielding. We’d done corporal play before, and I didn’t remember my ‘hot as fuck’ marks having quite this effect on her. Finally, why did she keep touching her hair onto my back and butt? I mean I like hair, I think it can be very sexy, but it seemed an odd thing to intersperse between cane strikes.

My initial assumption was that this was just an unusual warm-up to our medical scene, but as the time ticked past the halfway mark, it was obvious something had gone awry. Should I stop it? Given we were already over an hour in, it seemed awkward to do so. Plus, I was feeling pretty buzzed from the endorphins and she seemed to in the zone and having fun with it. I figured it was easier to roll with it and I’d only yell stop if things got a little crazy. I wasn’t about to get fisted or vomited on for the sake of avoiding awkwardness. Fortunately it turned out that my unknown scene choreographer hadn’t put in a request for a spectacular finale.

The post-scene discussion – after I mentioned what I thought had happened – was an amusing one. The domme was torn between apologizing for the mistake and expressing incredulity that I hadn’t said anything. My answer of ‘well, you seemed really into it…’ got a laugh and the response that my bruised butt was therefore my own fault.

I did wonder what happened later, when she did the scene again with the original client. Did she tell him? Or did he just get a really awesome version thanks to the  dress rehearsal I’d filled in for?

I think this is technically a birching rather than a caning, but this artwork by Jay Em still feels appropriate for the post.