Tag: Hood

Perversity (of the wrong kind)

Most of my posts tend to the positive and upbeat. This one might be a bit more of a rant. Let’s put a nicer spin on it, and call it constructive feedback. It’s aimed squarely at dominants and centers on something that has happened to me too many times to be a coincidence.

Here’s my rant feedback: When you’re playing with someone fairly new, and that person has outlined a few limits (hard or soft) to stay away from, then stay the hell away from those limits. Don’t try and figure out exactly where the line is drawn. Don’t try and determine exactly what about the activity makes it a limit. Don’t toy with anything vaguely related. Just avoid, avoid, avoid.

I’m not a submissive with a lot of limits. When I look at a typical list of play activities, it’s quicker for me to list what I will not do rather than what I will. I’ve a soft limit with hoods and claustrophobia, I’ve a hard limit on humiliation, and I’ve a slightly screwed up lower back that makes extreme bondage positions tricky. That’s about it. Not a lot to remember. Yet multiple times in the last couple of years I’ve played with new dommes who, having been given this list, proceeded to flirt with activities that ran awfully close to these problem areas.

The last time it happened was a couple of months ago. It was my first time I’d played with this particular dominant. Not fifteen minutes into the session, and after my standard limits discussion, she pulled out a hood and asked if it’d be OK because it had both mouth and eye holes. Suddenly I’m thrown out of my happy subby mindset and into evaluation mode. How scary does it look? Can I handle it? Is it an integral part of the scene she wants to try? It would have been fine to show the hood pre-scene to get my opinion, but why bother suggesting it after we started to play? I ended up refusing and it made absolutely no difference to how the scene unfolded.

A similar thing happened towards the end of last year. It was again someone fairly new to me and, after mentioning my screwy back, she proceeded to try for a really awkward bondage position. She had me on my back on the floor, knees pulled up towards my shoulders and my arms pulled down towards where my feet would normally be. After pointing out that this wasn’t a great position for me she gave up on the plan, but it seemed so unnecessary to attempt it at all. Maybe we could have got it to work given time, but I estimate there are around three million and seven safe positions to tie me into, so why try for the tricky number three million and eight?

None of the examples (and I have multiple others) felt like deliberate attempts to break a boundary. It just seemed the limits discussion planted ideas, and that saying “Heavy X is a limit” somehow translated into “… but let’s do light X!”. This seems perverse to me, and not in the good way. Assessing intensity or risk is very hard with someone you don’t know. Much better to stay as far away as possible from potential minefields. Just because someone has handed you a map, doesn’t mean you need to go up to the minefield boundary and start jumping up and down. There’s no shortage of other interesting places to explore.

Artwork by Shohei Yamashiro

This artwork by Shohei Yamashiro manages to capture both hoods and an awkward position to bend a slave into. Now if you can just imagine she’s calling him a worthless fool, it’ll have nailed 3 of my personal limits.

Keep it complicated

There’s a class of people who see every activity as a competitive event. There’s a right way and a wrong way, and they’ll be very happy to loudly tell everyone which is which. These people are annoying. There’s a further sub-class of them who insist that only the simplest most straightforward things can be right. Dinner should be steak, drinks should be beer or unadulterated spirits and sex should be good old PIV fucking. Anyone making life more complicated than this is pretentious, weird and fussy. I find these people incredibly annoying.

Variety in life is a wonderful thing. Both simple and fancy have their place. I personally hate discovering that I don’t like something. I feel like I’m missing out on a pleasure others get to enjoy. Anytime I see some incredibly elaborate kinky set-up I don’t think ‘Wow, that’s so unnecessary.’ I think ‘Fuck yeah! Go for it.’ I’m always happy to see someone doing something above and beyond, even when it’s not my personal kink.

Take for example this article in Serious Bondage and the scene in the image below. This has Mumman trapped in a small cell set into a deck, wearing a leather armbinder, a chastity device and a tight gasmask. Mme Suzanne is blowing smoke into the breathing tube and pulling the string attached to the chastity device. That’s not a set-up that I’d personally enjoy or want to try, but I love the fact there are people passionate enough to set these kind of scenes up. Sex is a hugely important part of life, yet as a culture we often seem to frown on people who invest major effort and time into their fantasies. We should be celebrating their effort and inventiveness.

Mumman and Mme Suzanne

Two smiles (probably)

Here’s an image to complete a trio of posts featuring smiles. Admittedly in this case I can only see her smile. His expression is a more than a little obscured. However, I’m going to guess he might be smiling. I certainly would be if presented with that particular view of Lady Natalie Black.

Lady Natalie Black with hooded slave

This rather well color coordinated image features the aforementioned Lady Natalie Black and was shot for the Kinky Mistresses site. I found it on the Mask tumblr.

Joining the medical establishment

Just hours after writing yesterday’s post on piercing I was intrigued to stumble across this article from Japan on a domme getting arrested for needle play. She’d posted images of it on her blog (link anyone?), and obviously the Osaka police have such low crime rates that they’ve time to waste hassling adults having consensual fun.  Apparently it’s illegal in Japan to do anything that might draw blood without a medical license. That would seem to make a lot of BDSM play potentially risky, as even canes or single tails can draw blood if applied with sufficient force.

Obtaining a medical license seems like a tough requirement just for getting your kink on. I’m guessing it’s not the kind of thing you can obtain with a few evening classes at your local adult education establishment. In fact according to this article, even medical students in Japan can’t do minor procedures like give an injection. They have to graduate, which takes around 6 years. Yet despite that rule, the US somehow still manages to spend 2.5x times what Japan does on healthcare. Getting arrested for play piercing images clearly isn’t the only screwed up thing here.

I really wanted to find a sensual and visually attractive piercing shot to feature with this post (something like this). Unfortunately, despite a lot of hunting around, I’ve come up short. Ironically needles tends to feature in a lot of Japanese femdom movies, but there’s little good imagery out there. Most of what there is tends to be extreme and lack any D/s vibe to it.

Instead I’ll go with the medical theme and something from the pen of the great Sardax. I’m not sure what ailment this course of treatment is for, but I’m sure it’s a highly effective approach.

Nurse with syringe by Sardax

You can find more of Sardax’s fine work at his site. You can also pick up his illustrated and translated version of Venus in Furs at Amazon UK.

Nipple torment and good hair

I’m safely back in Seattle after an interesting few days in Vancouver. While I was there I was lucky enough to meet up with Mistress Eleise de Lacy. We had a few scheduling issues that cut into our time together, but the session time we did have was highly enjoyable. In a painful ass beating, cocking piercing, type of way. You know – all the good ways.

A close-up photograph of the piercing part of the session did feature on Mistress Eleise’s twitter feed. However, I’d rather not drive all my readers away with a cock piercing shot right on the front page, so I’ll reach back into her twitter archive and pull out an older and slightly less explicit image. Here’s something she entitled ‘Heavy nipple torment meets good hair day. Happy all round’. That seems to capture the moment pretty well.

Mistress Eleise de Lacy

Mistress Eleise has feature on this blog in previous posts (here, here and here). Her site Femme Fatale Films is a most excellent source of femdom erotica. Her professional site for arranging personal sessions is here.

Beware of guys with cameras

I often turn up for a session with a camera in my pocket. I like to document some of the more interesting activities I get to experience, even if the end results aren’t exactly studio quality. However, it turns out there’s another type of guy with a camera, and as Rain DeGrey entertainingly describes in this blog post, he’s someone to be avoided at all costs. It sounds like a horrible situation, but she turns it into a great anecdote.

I wrote about the cost of hiring a professional fetish model sometime ago. At the time I commented favorable on the comparison to hiring a pro-domme (for example), while at the same time making it clear these were not in anyway comparable activities. Obviously some other guys can do the same maths, but arrive at very different conclusions.

Of course the sign of a really talented photographer is when somebody will actually pay you to shoot them. One of the best in the BDSM world is Natasha Gornik. She’s the photographer of choice for a lot of the top pro-dommes. So after Rain’s tale of terrible photography, let’s finish with a couple of great shot’s from Natasha’s portfolio.

Photograph by Natasha Gornik
Photograph by Natasha Gornik

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.”

Electrical play expressions

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

The only thing we have to fear…

When I was catching up on my blog reading over the weekend I came across an interesting sequence of posts by Lady Anna List. They described a heavy imprisonment scenario, featuring bondage, isolation and sensory deprivation. You can read them in part 1, part 2 and part 3 of a series entitled Incarceration. What particularly caught my eye was the comment about a panic attack during the scene.

He’d fallen asleep and woken up before feeling the entire world closing in around him. Experience has helped him before to talk himself out of his impending attack…
…I’m not sure I would rescue him because this is something he has to get through so he knows he can get through it again in future extreme bondage situations.

That got me thinking about the nature of panic and how we experience it, which in turn led me to this fascinating paper on the subject. It’s fairly readable for a scientific paper and it contends that panic is an evolutionary response to dangerous situations. There’s first a tendency to freeze (so a predator won’t spot us), and then a physical response to divert blood, suck in more oxygen, release cooling sweat and tension muscles before fleeing for home and safety. The paper also talks about agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder where panic attacks can strike out of the blue in everyday life. These panic attacks typical occur in certain locations (wide open or enclosed spaces), or in certain situations (being in crowds of strange people or being far from home). These are scenarios which from an evolutionary perspective represented specific threats, such as being exposed with nowhere to hide, or encountering a number of strangers from outside your tribe.

I found it fascinating because there’s a tendency to think about panic as being purely a mental process, as something you can think your way around. And it’s true that you can condition yourself against it by repeated exposure and positive reinforcement. But the basic response itself is a very deeply embedded one, with real physical manifestations. Nobody would think of telling an agoraphobic to simply snap out of it and think themselves better. And yet I find there’s sometimes a tendency to see panic as a weakness or mental failure in a submissive. In fact it’s really just a million years of evolution doing it’s thing. Like the primitive drives for sex or food, it’s all about maximizing the chances of passing the genes on.

The other interesting takeaway from the paper was in the final section, where the author talks about the difficulty of studying panic in the laboratory. He should get out the lab and into his local BDSM playspaces. I can guarantee his local dommes will have a wide collection of experimental subjects they can push into carefully controlled panic situations!

I’ll leave you with a shot of an item that is great for pushing my panic buttons – a hood. That tight enclosed feeling gets me every time.

Hood in vintage BDSM shot

I found this via the clitlickslut tumblr.