Gag – Page 9 – Femdom Resource

Estrogen and subspace

While I was writing yesterday’s post on the brain’s response to pain I stumbled across another related article. It addresses the hoary old argument of pain tolerance in men versus women. It’s commonly said that women have a higher tolerance and this article claimed to have found a reason for that – estrogen.

One way estrogen helps women to cope with pain, he says, is by increasing the availability of endorphins — brain chemicals that help dampen the pain response.
When estrogen levels are high, there’s an increased number of areas in the brain where endorphins can “park.” The more “parking places” available, Zubieta says, the more endorphins there are on call, waiting to flood the body with “feel good” chemicals capable of overriding pain signals.

According to the article in yesterday’s post, brains all react to pain in a similar way. How individuals respond is down to social conditioning and secondary factors like the production of endorphins. And based on this article, women have a natural advantage on the endorphin front. When it comes to bragging rights, I’m not sure this really helps. It implies that it’s not down to simple mental toughness or fortitude. Women (in general) just have more natural opiates floating around their brain.

More pertinently, for the purposes of this blog, it makes more wonder if women tend to experience a more intense subspace. The rush associated with endorphins is a big part of subspace, and having more on tap would suggest a potential for a deeper experience. The fight or flight reaction is also part of getting into subspace, and that’s another thing men and women experience differently. Both sexes produce cortisol from the adrenal gland under stress, but women produce more oxytocin which counters the effect of cortisol and creates more relaxing and nurturing feelings. I know from personal experience that my subspace contains elements of all these things, from the rush of endorphins through the edginess of adrenaline to the calmness of oxytocin. But if men and women typically produce different proportions of these it would suggest the subspace they experience might typically be different as well.

Whatever the science of all it – and I’m most definitely not an expert – it does give me an excuse to feature some hot F/f artwork.

This artwork is by Shiniez and you can find a lot more on his Deviant Art pages.

Tumblr hunting

This is a follow-on thought from yesterday’s housekeeping on the Femdom Image page. It’s also a request for help.

My image page is surprisingly popular. It actually attracts more views than even my front page. I’m glad people like it but, to be frank, finding conventional femdom tumblrs isn’t exactly hard. There are hundreds of them out there. Hopefully my page is good starting point for some of the better ones (e.g. Alternative Femdom, Femdom Style Counsel, Girls Rule, Subs Drool, Undiscovered Limits, etc. etc.) but it’s still a pretty basic resource.

However, I do think there is one particular area where I could add significant value, and that’s around finding femdom tumblrs that focus on male submission. These are always hard to locate. So far I’ve only come up with twelve and two of them are pretty dormant. I regularly see female dominants bemoaning the lack of good femdom imagery and I’d like to help with that. So if you stumble across or own a tumblr (or blog) that features femdom with a submissive slant then please send it in my direction. Either add a comment or email me.

I’ll leave you with an image that so far has popped up on 3 of my 12 so-called (by me) submissive focused tumblrs (Geek Domme, Work Is Never Over and Beyond the Valley of the Femdoms). It was originally shot by Barbara Nitke and is titled ‘Madame and mine’.

A smile and a handful

As is often the way, it was the expressions of the people rather than their naked bodies that first caught my eye here. He looks nicely zoned and spacey, while she has a very mischievous grin. Not to mention a very firm grasp of the situation.

I believe this is originally from Divine Bitches. I found it on the Thoughts of a Dork tumblr.

Communicating with smile and a stare

I got to enjoy some electrical play with Lydia tonight, so I’m in a particularly happy frame of mind. We didn’t snap any photographs to share but, given the nature of the play, the shot below caught my eye as a suitable one to commemorate it with.

There’s not a lot to see from an equipment perspective, but their exchange of looks really makes the image a memorable one. His is one that I’m sure most submissives will recognize. It’s the look of “I know you’re going to twist that knob, and at some level I kind of want you to do it, but I’m still going to try my forlorn puppy dog look in the hope you’ll only turn it to 9 rather than 10.” Her look suggests amusement but also inevitability. It’s the “I love it when you make those faces, but you really should know by now it’s not going to help.”

I found this on the BDSM++ tumblr (which has some fairly extreme pictures, so browse with caution).

Escape

Tomorrow I flee the freezing NYC region to return to the warmer and wetter state of Washington. It has been a fun trip, and it ended on a very high note. I spent a good portion of today with the brilliant Miss Troy Orleans. We had a great session and snapped a lot of photographs. Hopefully, when I’ve had chance to sort through them, there will be a detailed session post.

Given I enjoyed some heavy bondage and restraints today, it seems fitting to finish the post with a pointer to an interesting article I read on Harry Houdini. I’m not sure he could be described as a femdom aficionado, but he certainly seemed to have a strong interest in bondage, masochism, exhibitionism and edge play. Given his skill, I’ve no doubt he could have emerged from the ropes in the photograph below in a matter of seconds. For the rest of us submissive types, even if we had the skill, I’m not sure escape would be our first choice…

I found this on the darksehnsucht tumblr. I don’t know the original source, but I’d guess it’s from one of the kink.com sites.

The mirror shot genre

Using a camera phone to snap a reflected mirror shot is one of the new genres in candid porn. There are entire web sites dedicated to it, typically involving young women. It often hits the news when celebrities do it, or when the girls involved are teenagers and inadvertently create completely ridiculous legal problems for themselves and their friends.

Here’s a fun variation on the theme – showing your bound, gagged and cock locked slave off. Personally I’d say that it’s the best version yet.

I found this on the Fuck Yeah Femdom tumblr.

Labeling the world

I received an interesting comment recently on my Femdom Images page. It was from the curator of the Work Is Never Over tumblr and related to my tumblr categorization. Until today the two options were ‘Femdom’ (i.e. All those featuring pictures with a dominant woman somewhere in there) or ‘BDSM and fetish’ (i.e. Anything else I liked that didn’t fit in the first category). Since her tumblr focused heavily on male submissives it ended up in the second group. You can read her entire comment here, but the essence of it was her ambivalence to the categorization.

I’m not sure how to feel about not being categorized as a “femdom” blog— on the one hand, waaa, visibility! (Not to mention: I *am* a female dominant. Hmf. 😉 )
But on the other hand… I despise standard femdom imagery (“Femdom™”)— hence my blog— and I’m distinctly proud that my blog is recognizably different enough from that to have not made it into that list! 😀
(Of course, on the third hand, I always kind of hope that people looking for Femdom™ would come across my blog and see that it doesn’t have to look like that. I guess I’m back to that first hand! XD )

My first thought was how great a three handed domme would actually be. She could tease, tickle and torture you all at once! But stretched metaphors aside, she raised a good point. I’m personally not against a bit of stereotypical femdom imagery now and again. It’s popular for a reason. At the same time I recognize the huge imbalance in the type of material that’s floating around out there. And I’m very much in favor of people who are venturing into femdom being able to find material that will attract them and represent how they might want to play. You don’t need to pull on a thousand dollars of fetish gear, convert the spare room into a dungeon and plaster a sneer onto your face to experiment with female dominance. My goal on this site has always been to provide an interesting mix of material that will have broad appeal (to no doubt mixed success).

In an effort to categorize better I’ve therefore split the tumblr section into 4 rather than 2 sections: General femdom, dominant focused, submissive focused, and BDSM/fetish. These are obviously very imprecise labels, and tumblrs are typically not single themes, but hopefully they’ll provide at least a little guidance when searching for particular types of material. It’ll also give me a chance to expand the submissive focused section which, as a male submissive, I suspect I’ve neglected in the past.

I’ll leave you with an image I liked from the tumblr in question (originally from Men in Pain). It captures a nice moment of connection.

After the fact

Here’s a nice brace of shots to pair with yesterday’s post. That showed the build up to a cuckold scene. This shows what I assume is the aftermath to one. I guess it could be his own cum she’s about to feed him, but I suspect not.

Incidentally, these plug style gags seem to be very popular in Japanese BDSM porn, but rare in the Western equivalent. I’m not really sure why that is, as they look pretty sexy. All the benefits of a ring style gag, without the risk of it rotating in the mouth. Plus, the insertable plug adds a nice touch of objectification.

I found these images on the Felm Cyber tumblr. I’m afraid I have no idea where they originally came from.

Back home

I’ve returned safely from my vacation in LaLa land. However, I’ve now got a relative flying in to stay with me for a couple of weeks, so posting may continue to be a bit erratic. Apologies in advance for that.

I’m looking forward to sharing the photographs of my sessions from the last few days. I got to experience all sorts of interesting activities, and we photographed a lot of them. In the meantime, while I go and prepare the spare room for my new guest, I’ll leave you with this shot that I found on reddit. Not sure of the context or who created it, but I thought it was striking and a little unusual.

See no evil

One thing that getting involved in BDSM has taught me is how simple things can drastically alter my perception of reality. People are constantly building a model of the world in their mind. They combine the signals from their senses to create a personal version of reality. I think most people see this as a very robust and simple additive process. Faulty or missing signals should not change what reality is. I suspect we have to implicitly believe this or we’d go crazy. But in fact adding or removing a signal doesn’t simply enhance or reduce our internal model of the world. It mutates it in far more complex ways.

I experienced a reminder of this tonight, while playing with Lydia. She had me transfixed in a web of ropes, electrics attached to various points, and was scratching and piercing me with a collection of needles. As far as activities go this was pretty intense, but nothing too unusual for us. Then she introduced a blindfold. In theory this shouldn’t have changed too much of my mental model. The only thing I could see was her ceiling or her face. It wasn’t like I needed to be reminded what either of them looked like to understand what was happening. Yet it radically changed how I felt.

With the blindfold on I pulled away from the pain. I feared it. The sensation was sharper, more intense. My anxiety levels rose. I said ‘no’ occasionally, something which does nothing to slow Lydia down, but is unusual for me. My sense of the surrounding world shrank. I lost track of time.

When she removed the blindfold, everything changed. I moved towards the pain, wanted it. The actual sensation of it changed. My breathing slowed and I felt calmer. I fixated on her, and felt a powerful wash of emotion towards her. My vocalization changed from screams to moans. I found I could more easily focus without being distracted by the electric shocks. The engineer in me wants to say this makes no sense. The signal from my eyes was telling me nothing I didn’t already know. In terms of information theory, the entropy of the signal was zero. Yet, it clearly did radically change my experience and perception of what was happening.

I’ll leave you with an image of a man experiencing his own version of a modified reality, courtesy of Divine Bitches.