Tag: Photograph

Sade

Anyone interested in the history of BDSM and located near Barcelona may want to check out a new exhibition at the CCCB – Sade: Freedom or Evil.  As the name suggests it’s about the Marquis De Sade, the eponymous root of sadism. For those not in the area there’s a good review of it in the Guardian.

The exhibition features not just his work but also modern artists, including Maplethorpe, Dali and Susan Meiselas photographs of Pandora’s Box. It all sounds very interesting, which is more than I can say for Sade’s actual writing. That always struck me as repetitive and frequently nauseating. I can appreciate extreme kinky fiction, but there’s a level or brutality in his writing that verges more on serial killer fiction than erotica.

I’ll finish with a photograph of a very different type of Sade. This is Ms Sade, who used to work as a pro-domme in NYC. It’s one of my lasting regrets that I never got to play with her before she retired. She was quite the artist herself.

Domme Barbie

The Barbie movie opens this weekend. For a movie about a child’s toy, it seems to have taken on an outsized cultural significance.  Part of that is doubtless down to its juxtaposition with Oppenheimer, part down its very well chosen stars in Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

While the Barbie aesthetic doesn’t often cross over into BDSM, there’s certainly a lot of traffic the other way. There are countless Goth Barbie creations, with wardrobe and accessory sets straight out of the nearest dungeon. I particularly liked the one below, shared by Mistress Chloe.

Fixing Things

After my previous post on what not to do in a session, I thought I’d follow it with a more positive one. Namely, if things do go wrong, what are some good approaches to fix the situation.

Before doing that, I’ll add two important qualifiers. Firstly, these aren’t my brilliant ideas. These are what I’ve observed creative and talented dommes do in my sessions with them. Secondly, I’m purely talking about mechanical issues here. When the battery dies, the body won’t bend or the rope just won’t cooperate. Not issues in the scene dynamic or emotions. Those are a far trickier set of problems that are above my paygrade.

Those qualifiers out the way, here’s three tricks I’ve seen successfully employed when a domme’s plan A has failed…

  1. Playfully blame the submissive and use that to pivot the activity. A tongue in cheek – “Well look what you’ve done now!” – remark when the clip leaps off for the third time can a great excuse to set-up a new activity. After all, if I can’t keep those clamps on my nipples, it’s only fair she kicks me in the balls a few times. Most people don’t like being blamed unfairly, but a playful funishment for something that’s obviously not the submissives fault can be a nice way to shift gears and get away from the problem.
  2. Shift into problem solving mode, making the submissive simply part of the puzzle to be cracked. The objectification part of this can be very hot. Suddenly there’s not a one-on-one dynamic. It’s just a domme figuring out how to make some recalcitrant equipment do the right thing. I’m no more or less important than the hard points, ropes or carabiners.
  3. Ditch the problematic activity, shift gears to something totally different and loudly announce that fact. Most submissives will be so excited at the prospect of the new thing, they’ll totally forget whatever wasn’t working. If a domme announces she’s going to stop trying to get her humbler to fit me and instead is going to sit on my face, I’m not going to be lying there, struggling for breath and thinking to myself – “I wish we were still fiddling around the wingnuts on that humber. That was so much more fun than this.”

Speaking of face sitting, here’s some courtesy of the Mistress Land site. I don’t know what activity they were doing 10 minutes prior to this, but I think it’s a safe bet that he’s no longer thinking about it.

When a Scene goes Wrong

Kink Academy has a decent article here on what to do – or not do – when a scene goes wrong. The basic message is communicate, don’t blame and don’t forget the aftercare. All solid suggestions.

One ‘don’t’ that I’d add to that list, particularly for dommes, is don’t get angry. Faux anger in the context of a roleplay is obviously fine. I’m talking about losing your cool because the equipment isn’t working, or the subs body will not cooperate with the position or you can’t get the rope just the way you want it. I totally understand the desire to get mad in these situations. I curse like a sailor if some fiddly thing I’m trying to do isn’t working out. However, in a scene that’s all about the giving and taking of control, a domme that loses her own self-control is a red flag for me. I want her to be in charge, not her temper. If she can’t control that, then I don’t feel comfortable with her controlling me.

While I’m sure many dommes would love to grab particularly annoying submissives by the throat, this isn’t a recommended approach to resolving issues in a scene. I dug this image up via on an old tumblr archive, but some research took me to it’s source – a staging of Märta Tikkanen’s book ‘Men cannot be raped’.

Out and About in Paris

To continue my celebration of Summer, here’s one final post on the theme of ladies enjoying their lunch al fresco. This is, of course, the unforgettable Mistress Iris, dining in Paris with her gimpy. Her beauty and grace will turn heads at the best of times, but I suspect this dining excursion probably turned ever more than usual.

This image was sourced here from the twitter feed of Mistress Iris. You can find her professional site here, her Patreon here and her OnlyFans here.

Morning Coffee

The weather is currently warm and pleasant in Seattle, which means I can take my morning coffee sitting outside a local café. It makes for a nice change, even if the litter and occasional drift of second hand weed smoke spoil it somewhat.

Miss ExtraVaganza has had a similar idea, but is pulling it off in a far more spectacular fashion. That’s a stunning outfit, which coordinates beautifully with her surroundings. No wonder she’s attracted a worshipful servant.

Miss ExtraVaganza is a Miami based pro-domme. This was sourced from one of her tweets.

Threads

My recent post on Meta was timely, given that they’ve just launched their new Twitter competitor, Threads. Thanks to Elon’s best efforts to run twitter into the ground, Mark Zuckerberg obviously see this an opportunity to spread his data grabbing tendrils even further.

I think it can only be seen as bad news for kinky people and sex workers who use social media. As I wrote before, Meta is famously anti-adult content. There’s zero chance that the kind of adult content I follow on Twitter is going to be allowed on Threads. Users and advertising dollars flowing to it, combined with Elon’s incompetent Twitter leadership,  could end up driving the only adult ‘friendly’ social media site out of business. The idea of Elon Musk losing a ton of money because of that is highly entertaining, but not so entertaining I think it’s worth losing Twitter over.

If you are thinking of signing up for Threads, be aware of the degree of data mining that Meta do. They’ll look at anything they can find – contacts, cell location, wifi networks, account data – to try and build their graph of the world. While you might want to keep kinky and vanilla accounts separate, their goal is to connect everything they can about you, which can lead to very bad outcomes.

To finish a gloomy post, let’s use a happier picture, featuring a very different kind of rope threads. This is from another social media site that fell on hard days – Tumblr. More specifically it’s from the Dudes in Distress tumblr, which is still around but hasn’t been updated in 6+ years.

Be Yourself

Podopheleus has written an excellent blog post on the importance of being true to yourself when sessioning with a pro-domme. Drawn from his own experiences and missteps, it has a bunch of good advice and is well worth a read.

My personal learning has been that it’s important to be clear in your own mind what aspects of the dynamic are negotiable and which aren’t. What you can’t negotiate you either need to make peace with or walk away from.

For example, the activities you do and the general dynamic of a scene should always be things you can discuss and adjust. If humiliation is a hard limit, then negotiate that up front. If a domme keeps sliding into that dynamic despite the discussed limit, it’s an easy call to walk away.

Where it gets trickier is around the more intangible elements – chemistry, style, intuition, empathy, etc. Those are things that you can’t negotiate. They’re an intrinsic part of a domme’s character and how she approaches her sessions. In a perfect word every submissive would be perfectly aligned with their dominant. In reality it’s a question of how much alignment there is and if you can live with the areas of misalignment. The mistake to avoid is being unhappy with parts of the dynamic, not recognizing those parts as being non-negotiable and then not being willing to walk away.

To pick a very prosaic example of my own: I played with a domme who took a pretty relaxed approach to timekeeping. I’m very punctual. She wasn’t. The first couple of times I was kept waiting for lengthy periods I was understandably annoyed. The third time it happened I realized that this was just how she conducted sessions. If I kept booking and kept getting annoyed by the same predictable behavior, that was then going to be on me, not her.  I didn’t think it was something I could bring up with her. She obviously knew she was late and didn’t particularly care. So either I needed to come to terms with that and enjoy all the other great elements of our sessions or I should stop scheduling sessions. Starting off every session in a bad mood because I’d been stuck killing time in a local cafe for 45 minutes wasn’t helping anyone.

I’ve no idea what kind of image would best illustrate the themes of the post, so here’s something simply fun any eye catching!

Happy 4th

I wish all my American readers a happy Independence day. Hope you all get to enjoy it in whatever fashion you choose to indulge. As a dual citizen of both the US and the UK, it’s a bit of an odd holiday for me. I’m basically celebrating independence from myself, which I guess make me a patriotic schizophreniac.

Fireworks and femdom don’t really go together (with occasional exceptions) so here’s the next closest thing – fireplay. This is Lady Lola with her pyro slave from this tweet.

Lady Lola in a London based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here.

Meta Muppets

I’m always amazed when I spot a sex worker or erotic content creator with an Instagram account. It has to be the least sex friendly social media site around. My feeds are frequently full of sex workers complaining about their accounts being killed with little to no warning. Recently they even had a burst of banning general sex positive accounts, that weren’t explicit or sex work related. Some of these got reversed, but I wouldn’t bet against future waves of similar bans. If you are using Instagram for anything adult related, it’s best to treat it as a throwaway that might be lost at anytime.

Mistress Estelle Leon is another recent casualty of the capricious Instagram algorithm. How stupid does a platform have to be to deliberately ban beautiful images like this one?

Mistress Estelle is a Melbourne based pro-domme. She may have lost her Instagram account, but you can still follow here on Twitter and visit her professional site here.