Location, Location, Location

For submissives who primarily play with pro-dommes, where is the best place in the world to live? Setting aside existing relationships – assume we’re talking about a newly minted fresh faced submissive with no history or experience – what location offers the greatest possibilities?

Having just returned from the UK, I think my answer would probably be London. Obviously, like other great cities such as New York or Tokyo, it’s home to a large number of talented pro-dommes and plays host to a lot of visiting dommes. If you want to turn a kinky session into a day trip, then dommes in places like Paris, Manchester, Birmingham and most of the South of England are options. Make it into a long weekend, and suddenly cities like Berlin, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and Glasgow are all possibilities. On top of this, the UK sex work laws are less stupid than the US (while still being very stupid), and social attitudes to kink tend to be relatively liberal. It’s not perfect, but on balance I think it might just be the best place to be a kinky person in the professional scene.

Obviously quality always beats quantity, and you could have a fabulous D/s relationship with someone while living in a tiny hamlet that’s miles from anywhere. But chemistry is important whether a relationship is professional or lifestyle, and the more people you have to meet, the better your odds of finding that elusive fizzy reaction.

This is Lola Ruin, a Manchester based pro-domme. She’s about a two hour train journey from London. Not exactly a quick trip, but still faster than jetting between major cities in the US. The image is from her twitter feed.

A Session with Domina Emilia

Returning to London for a few days has given me the opportunity to sneak some more kink into the last part of my vacation. Specifically I was lucky enough to set-up a fabulous session with Domina Emilia.

The session was an unusual one for me, as we did a cuckold themed roleplay. I almost never do roleplaying in sessions, but it seemed quite natural and easy to slip into it with Domina Emilia. I think a big part of that was down to the very organized pre-session communication that she did over email, helping set the scene, explore the hot buttons and give appropriate jumping off points. I’ve always found the tease and denial aspects of cuckolding to be very exciting, but never thought it was a good fit for me in a professional dynamic. Domina Emilia showed I was wrong about that, and that the fantasy could be brilliantly spun in the constraints of a time limited session.

The session also featured another first for me – use of audio/video aids. They were very cleverly incorporated to aid the fantasy and set the mood. It made me curious about they could be used more as tools in sessions. Often we think about audio and video as a substitute for physical encounters, but why not play with the combination of them? Kinky play is a type of interactive theater, so why not make got a step further into a mixed media art form?

This image of Domina Emilia is from her twitter feed. If you’re interested in sessions in the London area then I’d absolutely recommend contacting her. I think she’d be a fabulous person to get to know and play more with.

My Bad

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. This might have been the longest I’ve ever gone without a post. I was staying with friends in a fancy Scottish manor house. It had relaxing couches and people who’d supply snacks and a bottle of scotch at any hour of the day. That is great for happy, drunken social time, but bad for my liver and writing blog posts.

Being back in London hasn’t been much better so far, but hopefully normal service should be resumed soon. Until then I’ll leave you with this image from a tweet by maid marta. The artist is identified as Caregan. As someone who has spent a fair amount of time recently dealing with travel security, this has a particular appeal. Sadly, none of my interactions have been quite this exciting.

Ending a Relationship

Autostraddle has an article on a topic that is very rarely covered in kink – The Unique Grief of Ending a BDSM Relationship. There are plenty of articles on starting BDSM relationships, and a far great number on actual kinky play within them, but very few cover the complexity and emotions in an ending. It’s written by a female dominant, but is less about the specifics of femdom and more about the dynamics that might affect the end of any kinky relationship. Not exactly sexy fun stuff, but interesting and well written.

This image is by Dirk Hooper and was created for Mistress Adreena. According to the original tweet it represents a happy memory from a session. I thought it was touching and sweet, but the emotion it captures also make it work in the context of this post. You can see more from Dirk Hooper at his site here.

Giving Tumblr a Good Screwing

Yahoo brought Tumblr for $1.1B in 2013. A few days ago it was sold for (allegedly) $3M. In between those times they managed to destroy a huge number of communities and alienate a major chunk of their users by banning adult content. Now I’m sure that enormous loss wasn’t purely due to the adult content ban – Yahoo were already writing the acquisition value down long before that – but you have to admit that it’s an impressive sequence of decision making. Less talented people might have settled for just losing money, or just pissing off their users, but it takes major skills to do both. For anyone worried about the impact on the executives involved in all this, fear not, they’re all still immensely wealthy multi-millionaires with well paid jobs. I’m sure that’ll be comforting for anyone whose site was trashed by the Tumblr rules changes.

I’ve no idea what image would best accompany this mini-rant, so I’ll pick something very hot and sexy from a Twitter user who is still advertising his Tumblr link. This is from a tweet by The Smutty Rogue. Apparently Nina is doing to Issac what Yahoo did to Tumblr.

 

See No Evil, Speak No Evil

This shot from Lady Pim is very cute and sexy. It has a lovely contrast between the sensual and the harsh.

As a personal aside, I do find it weird how things I don’t like in sessions can still continue to appeal to me visually. Blindfolds like this one are a good example. Enemas are another. Both of those are on my ‘meh’ list for kinky activities. Yet I still like the idea of them a lot.

I get how the idea of something can be exciting, but the reality of it disappointing when tried in play. That’s a fairly normal thing to happen. But how does the idea remain exciting beyond that? Somehow the reality never intrudes into the theoretical sexual fantasy.

Lady Pim is a Toronto based domme and her site for professional sessions can be found here.

Oh, Snap!

Normally a domme staring into the camera rather than engaging with her submissive spoils an image. In this case the slightly disinterested look away really makes it work. The timing and impact of the pain is a minor and secondary issue compared to making sure the camera gets a good shot of her.

I found this in an old tumblr archive, but I’m fairly certain it’s from the CBT and Ballbusting site.

The English Vice

Speaking of kinky cause and effect – as I just was – corporal punishment and impact play is another interesting example of an arguably misattributed cause. It used to be said that the English love of spanking and flagellation was derived from the use of corporal punishment in school. As a theory, it seems to make sense. Boys just coming into adolescence and packed with sexual energy were being beaten, and then transmuting that trauma into a kink. Hence, we ended up with the English Vice.

The flaw in this claim is that corporal punishment has been banned from British schools for a long time now, yet it still seems to be as popular as ever in kink. It’s also popular across a wide range of countries, even those that didn’t think beating children was a good idea. Personally, I was never beaten as a child, but corporal punishment scenes featured heavily in my fantasies in my 20’s and 30’s.

Obviously to prove the case one way or another one would need to do a proper survey and analyze kinky preferences over time and culture. It’s possible that corporal scenes are a lot more popular with a certain type of older British male than in the rest of the kinky community. But my suspicion would be that while corporal punishment in school might have colored peoples kinks, anyone who ended up indulging in it later in life would have been kinky anyway. Those submissives who were spanked or caned as children draw a correlation, where those who weren’t simply shrug and don’t worry about why they like it.

I’m afraid I’ve no idea who shot this picture of this happy lady caner.

Taboo

It’s often said that taboo subjects are a great source of kinks. Making something forbidden or secret gives it power, which in turn makes it alluring to our sexual subconsciousness. It’s a view that I’m skeptical of. There’s probably some truth in it, but it seems overstated.

The fact that kinks often involve taboo subjects doesn’t necessarily mean that the taboo is the cause of them. Correlation is not causation. For example, using mommy/daddy terms in quasi-incest roleplay is clearly a socially taboo area, but maybe people are simply kinking on the power differential between adult authority figures and youngsters. Or on the contrast between expected relationship and the distorted kinky version of it.

To show that the allure of the forbidden is the underlying cause of a kink, you’d need to show how changing the social perception of a subject also changed how people kink on it. I really struggle to come up with an example of that. A few weeks ago I wrote about the lure of the ankle in Victorian Britain. It’s clear that over the last 100 or so years, women’s fashion has changed enormously. What was taboo to reveal is now commonplace. Yet I haven’t seen any sign that kinks around clothes and bodies has diminished at all. Women in very visible boots or high heels no longer scandalize society, but the footwear fetish isn’t going away.

Toilet play is another area where the taboo is often cited as causative. If that were the case, you’d expect kinky interest in it to vary in inverse proportion to the social stigma. Yet Japan has a mainstream museum of poo, complete with poo themed video games and souvenir poo on a stick. At the same time their pornography has no shortage of scatological content. It certainly seems a lot more common than in US porn, a country far more uptight about the who/how/when of its toilets. Rather than repression creating kinks, it almost seems the other way around.

This image is from Team Rinryu, creators of the Yapoo series. Their content is fairly extreme and often scatological in nature. This scene is obviously just a simple face sitting one – and absolutely nothing more than that.

Cue the Worlds Smallest Violin

I’ve already written about my upcoming UK trip and my ability to pick dates that don’t quite align with people I’d like to see. The flip side to that is also managing to pick dates so I miss kinky visitors to Seattle. Apparently the Pacific Northwest is at its most appealing when I’m not in it.

Two in particular caught my eye. Mistress Iris will be here Aug. 19th to the 21st. Lady Grace will be here from Aug. 14th to 17th. Mistress Iris I’ve played with multiple times in the past (e.g. here and here). Lady Grace is someone I’ve wanted to connect with for a while now. If you’re a submissive in Seattle then I’d urge you to set up time with them. Partly because I think you’ll have a lot of fun. Mostly because I want their Seattle trips to be a success so they come back again when I’m actually in town. So schedule a session and it’ll be a win-win-win situation.

This is from Lady Grace’s twitter feed. When she’s not visiting Seattle, she’s based in SF. Her professional site is here.  Mistress Iris is based out of LA and her professional site is here.