Tag: Photograph

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.

Bigger isn’t Better

As a fan of CBT I thought I knew most of the crazy things men can do, or have done, to their C’s and B’s. Turns out I was wrong. This ProPublica article is a an eye opening and wince inducing look at surgical penile enlargement. Some of the procedures it describes would have even hardcore CBT fans screaming ‘Red! Red!’ It’s really interesting, and very well written, but I can’t imagine any of the doctors featured will be too happy with it.

Personally I’ll stick to penis enlargement via painful procedures the old fashion way, no scalpel required. Just pinching, biting, slapping, whipping and flicking.

This is another old image I dug from a tumblr archive. It’s original from the Mean Dungeon site.

Ooh, Shiny!

A particularly fetishistic shot for today’s post. I don’t feature a lot of images like this one, but I do love the textures and composition of this example. It’s also a rare case where a collar on a domme doesn’t look at all out of place. It seems to be very much part of the outfit, rather than a random BDSM accessory.

I believe this is Master Trinity, a Miami based pro-domme with a particular love of latex. You can find her primary professional site here, Twitter here and OnlyFans here.

A Career in Pictures

I always enjoy when experienced pro-dommes post past images from earlier phases of their careers. It can be fascinating to see the evolution in their style, clothes and play spaces.

If you share my interest then I’d recommend browsing Domina M’s recent tweets. She’s been sharing some lovely shots from her 20+ year career. Regularly browsers of femdom material will probably recognize a number of them, as her work with Will Santillo (examples here and here) has been widely reposted. She’s also written about some of those early shoots here.

The image I’ve chosen below is a very early one from 2001 (tweeted here). It actually involves two legendary dommes. Obviously that’s Domina M herself in the shot, with her wardrobe and dungeon sourced from her mentor, Simone Justice.

Domina M is currently based in Paris and you can find her professional site here.

Moderation Madness

Tumblr continues to stumble along, a shadow of it’s former self. I just got an email out of the blue telling me that some of my tumblr content was flagged as adult. This is for a dormant femdom tumblr site I haven’t touched in 5+ years. I mean they weren’t wrong, it was adult content, but that’s a hell of a moderation lag time.

Amazingly people are still curating and maintain adult blogs on there. They seem to get blown up fairly regularly, but I have to admire their persistence. Some examples viewed via tumbex are here, here, here, here and here. Hopefully my recent email isn’t a sign that a new purge is starting and they’re all about to vanish.

This beautiful image was sourced from one of my favorite surviving tumblrs – madam is all. Its curator has a good eye for content and their site has been my source for a number of posts here. This particular example is watermarked, but unfortunately I’ve no idea how to go about translating that text into a web search for a proper attribution.

Update: Thanks to a helpful comment – I think this is by this photographer.

Lady and the Tramp

Lady Harper Chase clearly has a talent for creating interesting kinky predicaments. Last month I featured her novel approach to musical performance. This month we have the image below, combining nipple clamps, an apple gag and an unusual way to hurt someone with a bite. I assume he’s been told to hold it while Lady Harper takes a bite or two out of the apple. Seems like a lovely way to create tension, fear and intimacy all at the same time.

Lady Harper Chase is a NYC based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here and her Twitter feed here.

Celebrity Indulgence

You’ll have to excuse this post. I’m going to be e a little self-indulgent and feature a celebrity crush. Specifically, Padma Lakshmi, who just announced she was leaving Top Chef. I’m a fan of the show and a fan of Padma. She’s smart, empathetic, loves food and looks amazing while sporting some killer outfits. What’s not to love?

If you like food shows, then I’d suggest checking out her Taste the Nation series. I’ll miss her telling chefs to pack their knives and go, but it’s a fine show in its own right.

This is Top Chef shot of Padma sourced from a Bravo TV Slideshow.

Final AI Thought

This is a third and final post (for now) on the AI topic. I’m bullish on the possibilities – more so than some commenters – because it seems to be entering one of those positive spirals that happens occasionally with tech. A tipping point is reached and what was only interesting to specialists becomes usable and consumable in the mainstream. That triggers interest, publicity and funding. That drives rapid improvement, which opens up more markets, which triggers more revenue streams, etc. etc.

The same kind of thing happened with 3D graphics in the 90s. Until then it had been kind of a niche technology. Readers of my generation may remember playing things like Battlezone or Elite. They seemed amazing at the time, but were never going to be a mainstream consumer product. Then in the mid 90’s the tech reached a quality tipping point and consumer interest in it exploded. The resulting positive spiral took it mainstream, made billions of dollars for the companies involved and ultimately led to the powerful computing clusters that are now driving AI.

Of course, there are also plenty of cases where we hit a tipping point, but that positive spiral never quite takes off. VR is another spin off from the graphical revolution, but despite a lot of money and hype from the likes of Meta and Apple, it never seems to quite get the feedback loop going. Hard to know which pattern AI will follow right now. The only thing that is predictable is that people will be making porn with it.

Above is an AI image created with midjourney by Helena Manzanita. It’s part of a series using the same seed through different points in time. You can see the complete series in this twitter thread.