The post title sounds like it’d be more suitable to Martha Stewart’s blog, but instead I’m going to talk about a (relatively) recent post from Mistress Rex. Specifically there are two sections in her post I wanted to pick up on, one negatively and one positively.
The negative is more of a quibble than anything, triggered by a certain phrasing in the post.
There are endless complaints by Dommes on various social media platforms regarding contact from clients who don’t “get it” – men who don’t know their place and compose emails that in no way defer to the addressee;
Mistress Rex
It often strikes me that some pro-dommes want to have it both ways. They’re understandably insistent that session play doesn’t carry across to the real world. The D/s dynamic is very much a timed and negotiated agreement, lasting just while the session does. They don’t want to have to deal with guys acting submissively and trying to force them into a mistress role when communicating outside of a session. Yet at the same time, some of them often seem happy to carry across D/s elements when it turns out to be useful to them.
I should emphasize at this point that I’m not referring to Mistress Rex herself (who I’ve sadly never interacted with professionally), or any of the dommes I’ve named and written about on this blog in the past (who all behaved entirely professionally). But the word ‘defer’ in that quote, along with the bit about ‘know their place’, sat uncomfortably with me and put me in mind of some on-line behavior I’ve seen and experienced. For example, a domme claiming she can’t be bothered to check email to often, so slaves should be prepared to email her several times and not get impatient if she doesn’t respond with a week. Or domme’s using stupid capitalization rules to put me into a specific role when we’re only just making initial email contact. Or domme’s expecting some sort of different or special allowances when sessions have to be cancelled or re-arranged.
Outside a session a domme will get respect, politeness and consideration from me, but not deference. And I’ll expect exactly the same thing back from her in return. Bleeding the D/s dynamics across that divide is only OK if that’s part of an ongoing and agreed relationship, and not if it’s simply a double standard at work.
That minor quibble aside, the positive part of the post that really spoke to me is quoted below.
…I like inviting vanilla into sessions rather than leaving it at the door, because I like there to be a perceivable exchange of power right there between the two of us. I don’t want to keep vanilla at a safe distance, outside the walls of the dungeon where it can be preserved and slipped back into unaltered; I want it right there in the room where it can be mutilated, transformed.
…
This is what I reckon is the problem with many commercial sessions: you can’t make it real until it gets real. You can’t force it; the organic exchange does not occur by walking through a door.
Mistress Rex
One of the things that put me off going to see a pro-domme for the longest time was the idea of the transition. On one hand I had this mental picture of a cliched pro-domme session (naked guy, on all fours, leashed, getting whipped) and on the other hand I had me. Normal, boring me, standing in a room with a woman I’d never met before. Somehow it seemed impossible to see how one vision could transition to the other. I didn’t want to fake it or act out a role that wasn’t me. This was supposed to be BDSM, not the local amateur dramatics society .
Fortunately, when I did finally arrange a session, I was lucky enough to find a pro-domme in Lady Lydia who really understood what Mistress Rex is talking about here. When we play there isn’t a hard transition point. We don’t suddenly go from friendly chatting into full D/s mode. There are jokes. A little two way teasing and perhaps some prodding of old fading marks. Then slowly, a little edge slips in. She’s still has a smile, but now there’s a sadistic glint in it. The pain levels go up and my options go down. Over the next fifteen or twenty minutes the balance and interaction between us may shift back and forth, but there’s only one general direction, and that’s into our respective top/bottom headspaces that lie at the heart of the session. Without any force or artificiality she takes the sensible plain vanilla me that walked in the door and mutates him into a far more interesting flavor.
I wasn’t exactly sure what image was best fitted to illustrate this post, so I just went into my folder of general images I like. This one is from the Femdom Proper tumblr site and caught my eye for her quirky smile.
