Dine and Domme NYC: Conclusion

This is a fairly belated conclusion, as my NYC trip ended almost 2 week ago. I’ve been sadly slacking on sorting through my session photographs, but I’m happy to say I had the time to fix that this weekend.

On the domme front I had two fantastic sessions with Miss Troy Orleans. We grabbed a lot of photographs and I’ve post the results on a separate page: Bondage with Miss Troy Orleans. I should warn my readers that there’s a lot of bound naked me in those shots. So if you’re just here for the pictures of hot dominant women (who in this case was holding the camera), I suggest scrolling on.

On the dining front, I’m not sure anyone comes to my blog for restaurant tips. However, just for completeness I’ll say that the three stand out meals were Le Bernardin (lunch), Jean George (lunch) and Eleven Madison Park (dinner). If you’re looking for a great meal in NYC I’d recommend those three wholeheartedly. Per Se was flawless but somehow unexciting. I can’t criticize any element, but nothing really wowed me. Del Posto, WD-50 and Kyo Ya were interesting in their own way, but all suffered from a few missteps. I did have a lot of fun browsing and eating at Eataly, so that’s another food spot I’d recommend.

Suspended Sleep Sack

The image is me suspended in a sleepsack at Salon d’Orleans. For those of you looking for the blogs tagline of ‘The beauty of dominant women’, I direct your attention to the elbow in the mirror.

The Victorian Christmas Tree

Lydia has been pretty busy with her Land of the Sweets show leading up to Christmas. Fortunately I managed to grab some time with her on a rare night off, and we indulged in a suitably festive get together.

My only suggestion prior to the session was that we might use her bondage chair. Other than that I had no idea what she’d planned. As soon as I saw the disposable blue medical cloth on the chair I guessed piercing might be involved, but I was a little puzzled by the lengths of festive ribbon piled close by. It quickly became apparent that she was feeling in a decorative mood, and intended to pin the ribbons to me like an old fashioned Christmas tree.

The end result can be seen in the shot below. A more colorful version (taken with flash on) can be seen here. I lost track of how many needles were used, but I’d guess it was at least 50. As is often the way with these kind of sessions there was a nice rhythm to it as each ribbon was positioned and pinned. There was also a pleasant feeling of objectification, a focus on my body but not me. It’s both intimate, as she’s working very closely on me, and yet distancing, as she concentrates on getting the ribbon just how she wanted it. You can see a couple more close-up shots of the needles with ribbons here and here.

She capped everything off with a ribbon that ran from ear to ear and sported a big bow on top of my head. This was held with ear piercings and a needle through the scalp at around the hairline. The skin is really thin at that point, so it hurt going in and bled a lot coming out. Unfortunately I can’t really show you the best shot we got, which was me giggling like an idiot while the blood dripped down my face. However, I can share this after shot, which shows some of the body marks left and the dripping blood on the side of my nose.

All in all it was a great way to celebrate the festive season and I’m endlessly grateful to Lydia for taking the time to put together such an imaginative session. Not to mention that I’ve now got a great image to put on all my Christmas cards! I’m sure everyone will be happy to have this on their mantlepiece over the holidays.

Ribbons and needles

Bondage as an art form

I’m not sure this is a great set-up for actual kinky play. But as as a piece of craftsmanship and artwork, it’s pretty special. If you were hosting a kinky party, he would certainly make an excellent display and conversation piece to hang in the entrance way!

Male BondageI found it originally on the Work Is Never Over tumblr. The photographer is Heiner Welchert, the model is Mode-Yo and the ropework is by Reraizure.

Getting there is half the fun

My cunning plan to minimize the effort of posting while on vacation is to steal from help publicize other blogs. First up is Lily from theblackleatherbelt who recently wrote these very wise words…

This is something I learned from having sex with women: the fact that THERE WAS NO TIMELINE was a complete revelation. We could make out, fuck, have a sandwich, do some stuff that would look like foreplay in another context, fuck some more, talk, then do it all over again. There was no standard kissing > petting > other assorted foreplay > penetration > the end sequence going on, at all, and the way that increased the quality of the sex is impossible to put words to.

Her whole post was a good one, but this part particularly spoke to me. I’ve always been a fan of the journey rather than the destination. Except when the journey involves flying in economy. In that case, unless the destination features Beelzebub and all his hellish minions, it’s always better to arrive than to travel.

But in the case of sex, when the journey is just so much fun, it always seems a shame when it’s over. I wonder if that’s a view more commonly held by kinky people, and particularly submissive guys, than the general populace? After all we’re used to extended sexual play. Bondage takes time. Endorphins don’t flow instantly. Tease and denial, edging and chastity are all popular kinks with submissive men. Personally I’d always take a couple hours of relaxed kinky fun over a few minutes of wham bam thank you ma’am.

Woman biting man's neck

The picture is from the Food, Fucking and Femdom tumblr. I have to say that as tumblr titles go, that’s a pretty good one. Throw in books and cocktails and you’d have my idea of heaven.

I really don’t give a fig

There aren’t a lot of kinky physical activities I don’t enjoy. Obviously I haven’t tried everything, should such an accomplishment even be possible, but my strike rate on trying and enjoying new things is pretty high. That doesn’t mean that I love everything equally. I’ll always enjoy a good beating over a more gentle foot worship session, but I’m happy if either comes in my direction.

In all the sessions I’ve done I can only think of one thing that I absolutely disliked and never want to do again. That would be figging. For those that have never tried it, this consists of using a carved ginger root as a butt plug, as shown in the photograph below. The idea is that the ginger creates a stinging burning sensation that is particularly painful if the submissive clenches around the plug. It is sometimes combined with spanking, with the plug used to encourage the submissive to keep his or her muscles relaxed.

Unfortunately when I tried it, the only thing I could think of was curry. Red hot, melt the plastic bag, take-away curry. The kind I used to get in England after consuming many beers on a Friday night out. The kind that tasted so good at the time, but I always knew I’d pay for the next day. At any moment during the figging I expected the taste of stale lager in my mouth and a flock wallpaper flashback. The pain from the ginger wasn’t enough to be masochistically interesting, but it was enough to make me think of churning stomachs, hangovers and hours spent anchored to the porcelain throne.

After over ten years in the States there’s only three things that I still miss about England. My immediate family is one. Proper fish and chips wrapped in newspaper is another. And the final thing would be good Indian take away. Figging is a great way to recreate its exit conditions. Now I just need to find an equivalent for the tasting part.

FiggingI found this image on the Girls Rule, Subs Drool tumblr.

Zippering with Lady Lydia

Last week I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours doing some zippering with Lady Lydia. As I mentioned in this post from the night itself, I had a wonderful time and it has jumped high on my list of interesting activities to do. For the uninitiated zippering uses clothespins (or somethings similar) in combination with some thin cord. As the clips are attached the cord is passed through them, connecting them as a single continuous line. Then a swift pull of the end of the cord rips them painfully away from the skin.

I have to admit to going into the session with a little bit of blasé attitude. I’ve had clothespins attached in the past and haven’t found them all that painful. I normally need something with a sharper narrower jaw to get my attention. However, it turns out that having lots of them attached very close together does hurt. And having them quickly ripped away really hurts. It almost reminded me a little of a caning. There’s the moment of shock, where you feel the sensation but not the pain. Just the briefest of pauses. Then the pain strikes like a sharp hot line across the body. A line that in my case was then made worse by Lydia squeezing and pinching the vivid red marks left behind.

Another surprisingly enjoyable aspect was the rhythm of the session. There’s a slow-build up as each clip is put into place. It’s like being decorated, with an associated sense of objectification. Then comes the moment of tension. The little tugs on the cord. The smile as she teases, watching me shift nervously as the anticipation builds. Finally, the sudden jerk and the snapping jaws as they pop free of flesh. The pain hits and there’s that moment where everything in the world is about that sensation. The brain can’t process anything other than the nerves that are screaming at it. The whole sequence is a wonderful combination of slowly building tension and sharp punctuating pain.

The first shot on the left (click to enlarge) was taken at the end of the first half of the session. We were using Lydia’s St. Georges chair and she’d already done a number of zipper lines across different parts of the body. The one shown was probably the biggest and the most painful, running all the way from under the arm to the outer hip. Although there are a number of clips on the cock Lydia (thankfully) didn’t zipper those. Too much danger of ripping the skin there.

The other two shots show a little bit of zippering bondage we did towards the end of the session. I was on a tilted padded leather table, and Lydia arranged the clips and cord across both my arms, chest and belly. The end result was that any movement of my arms tugged painfully against my torso, leaving Lydia free to tickle, tease and generally torment me.

A couple of hours after the session I shot some pictures of the resulting bruises. In these you can see my chest area, my left side and my right side.

ZipperingZipper bondageZipper Bondage

For anyone tempted to try this stye of play, I’d offer the following tips.
  1. If the submissive is skinny like me then adopt a position that’ll give some slack in the skin. Seated worked well for us. Being stretched taut, either horizontally or vertically, can make it too easy for the clips to pop free ahead of time.
  2. The placement of the clips really makes a difference to the pain level. Down the sides of the torso isn’t too bad. Across chest where the skin is thinner hurts a little more. Across the belly is surprisingly painful, and almost a little nausea inducing (although that soon passed for me). Down the inside of the thigh is the most painful spot of all (at least of what we tried).
  3. Once the clips are in place don’t be in too much of a hurry to pull them off. The top can create some really interesting sensations by pushing and stretching the skin with their hands. That also has a very strong psychological effect, as the close contact is both simultaneously comforting and painful.
  4. Tickling when the clips are in place is a particularly sadistic thing to do. It creates a bunch of involuntary movement that stretches the skin and makes the clips wriggle in place.
  5. Ripping only part of the clips away is another very sadistic trick. This happened with the diagonal zipper shown on the left. The submissive gets a big blast of pain, and then just as they recover from that, there’s the rapidly dawning realization that isn’t over yet and more is about to come.

 

Waiting for a customer

There’s a niche porn genre that focuses on men being turned into feminized depersonalized sex toys. Bruce Baker tends to specialize in that kind of art, and I’ve featured other illustrations of it in the past, for example here and here. Normally the art in this area tends to be fairly explicit, with lots of whimpering sissys, cruel dommes and big macho bulls.

This image therefore makes for an interesting contrast to that norm. It struck me as being quite clever. The room is depicted as being very ordinary, and yet there’s the ominous locking bars across the door and a complete lack of furniture. The feminized toy isn’t reacting with horror to her new appearance, or being brutally buggered by a bull, s/he’s just drinking a coffee and reading the only printed material they’ve left for her. It seems kind of ludicrous to describe such an over-the-top idea as ‘realistic’, particularly given her sex doll mask and large jutting cock, but the artist has managed to impart a disturbing sense of normality to the scene. She’s just killing time, waiting to be summoned for her next customer.

It put me in mind of an old DX story called the ‘Perfect Bride’. It doesn’t look like there’s a live copy online these days, but using my mad porn tracking skills, I found a version using the way back machine.

Sex ToyI believe the artist is called Tink. I’ve several examples of his work, but I’ve failed to track down any details about him or a homepage for his renderings. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any information on him I can add.

Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist

I recently watched Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. It’s a documentary detailing Bob’s life as a writer, performance artist and sexual submissive masochist. What made him particularly extraordinary was that he suffered from cystic fibrosis, a disease that normally kills people before they reach their mid 20’s. He died age 43, making him one of the worlds longest lived suffers from it.

If you’ve never seen it I’d urge you to rush out and get a copy. I thought it was an extraordinarily moving film. I’m not ashamed to say I cried a little at the end. I also think it captures some aspects of masochism, submission and D/s better than any other film I’ve seen. Using a fairly standard documentary format, cutting interviews of friends and family into home movie footage, it paints a very frank and honest picture of his life with his partner and mistress Sheree Rose.

This is actually the second time I’ve seen the film. I first saw it over 10 years ago, before I’d gotten physically involved in BDSM, and I remember being fairly horrified at some of the SM activities they did. Now I look at the footage and think “Yes, done that. Loved that. Oh play piercing, that’s fun. Drinking piss, done that…..” I’ve never actually nailed my cock to a board as Bob does at one point in the film, but my sense of ‘normal’ has clearly shifted.

There’s some attempt in the film, particularly by his parents, to tie his early childhood experiences with his illness to his kinkiness. I understand that desire to look for a cause and effect, but it seems to be misplaced. The vast majority of kinky guys don’t have major childhood trauma and medical procedures. I think he was someone with cystic fibrosis who happened to be kinky. The one clearly influences the other, but it seems misplaced to think of it as a cause.

Two quotes really stuck with me. The first from Bob was near the start of the movie. The second is from Sheree and was towards the end when he was getting very sick.

People don’t think of the masochist as being a strong person. The stereotype that the masochist is sniveling and weak is actually not true. The masochist has to know his or her own body perfectly well and be in full control of their body, in order to give control to somebody else or to give control to pain. So the masochist is actually a very strong person.
Bob Flanagan

I don’t even think he’s a masochist anymore. I think life has beaten him down too much. The pain he lives with every day is so intense that there isn’t any other kind of pain that he can even think about right now.
Sheree Rose

I certainly agree with the first quote, and I think the second helps emphasize the same point. Being a masochist (or submissive) doesn’t mean being a needy person or someone who has no control over their life. You need control and a strong sense of self in order to successfully gift that to another. By the end he’d lost that, the disease was taking over and he could no longer give away power. His body and its sickness had already stolen it.

Bob FlanaganThe movie is available on DVD from amazon. You can read Roger Ebert’s review of it here.

Update: Scott of Mrs Kelly’s Playhouse was actually friends with Bob in the early 90’s. He’s left a lengthy comment on this post describing some of his memories of Bob. My thanks to Scott for that additional information.

All sorts of good stuff

A quick post tonight. Having fun in Vegas is not particularly conducive to writing thoughtful and intelligent blog posts. Some might argue I struggle to achieve that under the best circumstances, let alone after much food and wine.

Fortunately this image contains all sorts of good stuff that speaks for itself. There’s a cute cross-dresser. I particularly like her flowing curly hair. There’s an interesting CBT humbler device. And finally there’s the predicament bondage involving high heels. I’ve no idea what the context for this shot is, but I like it.

Cross dressing with humblerI found this image at the Curious Asian tumblr site.

I know why the caged slave sings

It’s because someone is shocking his genitals with an ErosTek unit.

Readers will be happy to know that this is the last of my “What I did on my holidays” posts. That was always the first school essay assigned for the fall term when I was child. In those days it always ended up being about sandcastles and ice-cream on the beach. These days it’s more about whips, electroshock and being pissed on. But I guess spanking and screaming are still common elements, so not everything has changed.

The shots below were taken during my double domme session with Mistress Yuki and Mistress Ai-Li. The quality isn’t great, as they were snapped quickly with an iPhone mid-session, but given then inventive nature of the set-up I thought it was worth sharing (click images to enlarge).

Our session space had a narrow free standing cage I was told to climb into. Once the door was locked they started attaching vicious little clips all over my body and tying them off to the cage bars. Very quickly they built up a web of tense twine and painful clamps. The last image on the right shows a good close-up of that. With dozens of clips pulling tightly in all directions it made any slight movement very painful. Swaying forward to reduce the strain on the nipples and cock would pull the clips attached my back and lower legs, and vice-versa. Of course that’s when the ErosTek unit and its remote control fob came into play. It’s quite hard to stand still when your genitals are being shocked with a very large number of volts. And amazingly that wasn’t the worst part. Standing still while Mistress Yuki zapped my cock was tricky, standing still while Mistress Ai-Li tickled the sides of my feet was impossible. That was a sneaky trick and resulted in much screaming.

Caged with clips and electrostim Caged with clips and electrostim Clips on chest