Tag: Photograph

Sex is Bad, Mkay?

There aren’t many winners when it comes to the Coronavirus, but Zoom is undoubtedly one of them. They went from nothing to being a household name. It’s therefore both depressing and inevitable to see articles like this one – ‘Zoom says it uses machine-learning to detect nudity as virtual sex parties spread‘.  Obviously ensuring people can get dragged into boring business meetings all day is vital, but God forbid anyone actually uses their product for sexy fun. It’d be particularly bad to allow that when a lot of people are alone and frustrated.

Can you imagine if phone companies adopted a similar policy? There’d be a national outcry if they monitored calls and cut off cell service for anyone having an intimate conversation with a partner. Yet apparently tech startups from liberal California have pretty much the same attitude to sex as Mike Pence. Good job guys.

Of course kinky people have a secret workaround. They can combine a boring office meeting with hot femdom activity. I’d like to see the machine learning algorithm that could figure out what was going on here.

This is the amazing Mistress T shooting for The English Mansion. I found the image this post from Mistress Sidonia.

Contact

This week gave me my first physical contact with another human being in almost three months. On the plus side, it was with a woman, unusual outfits were involved and she hurt me. On the downside, it was with my dental hygienist and getting my teeth scraped wasn’t exactly the kind of physical contact I was craving.

It also wasn’t the kind of in-person conversation I was looking forward to after many months of isolation. She wanted to know how my quarantine had been. I wanted to know why she was asking me questions while she had her fingers in my mouth and was repeatedly jabbing me with a metal spiky thing.

If you have a fetish people dressed like extras from the movie Outbreak, then I suspect the next few months are going to be quite fun for you. It really felt like I was potential Ebola patient, rather than someone who might have occasionally exaggerated his flossing habits. Personally I’m more old school when it comes to medical outfits.

This is of course Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver in Kill Bill.

Honor Blackman Throws Down

Last month I put up a post commemorating the passing of Honor Blackman. While I knew she had trained in self-defense, I hadn’t realized quite how seriously she’d taken it. That was until Phil, one of my awesome readers and commenters, shared that she’d actually published a book on the subject. More importantly, he had a copy and was willing to share scans of it with me.

I’ve no way to gauge how well the book holds up today. I’m guessing that it’s probably pretty dated. However, as this article makes clear, it was unusual for its time and, as one of the first books targeted at self-defense for women, it struck a chord with its intended audience. The same article highlights the fact that she shot the Avengers with no stunt artists. She just packed her week with Judo training, stunt choreography and shooting scenes. Quite a woman.

These are two of the images are from her self-defense book. My thanks to Phil for taking the time and effort to share them with me.

Telling Tales

This is one of those images that instantly makes me start spinning story lines in my head. Is she the daughter of the house, humiliating but maybe also secretly delighting one of their older servants? Is it a newly married couple? He’s the the foolish older man who has been ensnared by his lust for a young attractive bride. Or is she perhaps a college friend of the man’s daughter? She spotted his sidelong glances during a visit over the summer break, and now she’s returned to wreck havoc in his life and take everything from him. It’s a real choose your own adventure of an image.

I believe that is Lady Fatale, a pro-domme based out of Amsterdam. You can find her professional site here and twitter feed here.

Not Like That, Like This

My post from last week entitled Mood Killer triggered some thoughtful comments on the subject of feedback after sessions. It’s an interesting topic that rarely seems to get discussed. Pro-domme websites will often feature lots of positive comments and praise from grateful clients. Femdom sites will host review forums of highly variable quality and value. Yet it’s very rare to see feedback built into the 1 on 1 scene negotiation process. I’ve done a fair number of sessions over the years with different dommes. In all that time I think I’ve been explicitly asked for feedback just twice.

I should make it clear that my thoughts in this post are primarily about professional domination. The lifestyle dynamic, where kink is just a part of a bigger relationship picture, is obviously very different. In that case the motivation for working through issues and trying to solve mismatched desires via feedback is obviously much higher than a purely kink focused professional relationship.

My default approach when I’m playing with someone new and the scene doesn’t click is simply to not see them again. With little invested on either side, walking away is the obvious answer. I think volunteering feedback in that situation would be as pointless as writing feedback after a failed first date. Nobody needs that kind of nonsense in their life. Chalk it up to experience and move on.

It’s trickier with someone where I do feel a spark, but some parts of our scenes don’t quite work. Even with someone I know very well, I’m very reluctant to give negative feedback after a scene. However, there are a few approaches that I think work pretty well in these situations.

Emphasize the positive. This is an obvious move. Emphasize the bits you really enjoyed and make them a focus of your next pre-scene discussion.

Avoid pink elephants. This is the flipside to the above. I’ve found it’s better to totally avoid vaguely negative things in pre-scene discussion. Saying X didn’t really work last time or you’re not fond of Y makes some dommes instantly start thinking about they could fix that problem for you. Now they want to try them! You’ve mentioned the pink elephant and they can’t stop thinking about it.

Use your limits. There’s no reason to have the same set of limits for everyone you play with. They’re a function of trust and negotiation between two people, not a global declaration of your submissive capabilities. Make an activity a limit if it’s really not working for you. This is different to a pink elephant because you’re putting something very clearly out of scope rather than making it sound like a problem to be fixed.

Optimize for the dynamic. It can be tempting to focus on a favorite activity or kinky desire of the moment, but I often find it’s better to go with what works well for the two of you. Better to have an amazing spin on your 2nd favorite thing rather than an average one on your 1st.

Take a hint. Sometimes, despite using all of the above approaches, I’ll still find a domme repeatedly comes back to something that doesn’t really work for me. It might be an emotional response, an activity, an attitude or even just a practical thing around scheduling. Whatever it is, I’ve found the trick is to either make peace with it or walk away. If you’re getting frustrated by a predictable thing, then you can only blame yourself.

When it comes to dommes providing feedback to submissives the options are a little broader. Here’s one who looks pretty happy with the feedback she’s about to deliver. Hopefully he’ll take it in the constructive way it’s intended.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image. As usual, if you can help me out with that then please let me know via a comment.

Playing Again

This twitter thread, started by Troy Orleans, has some excellent information on how kinky play could begin again in a Covid-19 world. It’s primarily thoughts from professionals, but I think there’s some equally valid advice for anyone playing beyond their circle of quarantine.

I personally think it’d be really weird to play in masks. I understand how they’re valuable for casual interactions in coffee shops or grocery stores. Not really sure what they’d offer in the intimate circumstances of a kinky scene. Although obviously I’m not a medical professional and I have a significant natural bias, as face to face interaction is a big part of my preferred dynamic.

Of course, necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe heavy medical scenes are going to be the kink of choice for the risk aware 2020 kinkster. Or fetish heavy outfits and masks, like the gorgeous shot below from Reflective Desire.

I found this image via this tweet from the Reflective Desire twitter feed. The image was shot back in 2019.

Mixing it Up

I like the kinky contrasts being employed here. I usual think of foot worship being a fairly gentle and relaxed kink. It’s almost mainstream it’s so popular in Femdom. Suspension in contrast is one of those serious kinks that requires taking a dozen classes, having a proper hard point available and being willing to devote serious time to get everything balanced properly. It’s rare to see those two mixed together, making this a particularly fun image.

This is obviously an older image from the kink.com family and features Madeline Marlowe. 

Random Aside

Question for any of my fellow bloggers out there – have you noticed a big drop in traffic to your site in the last few days? Mine looks like it has almost halved, which is an amazing drop. I’ve never seen anything like it in almost a decade. From this post it does look like Google rolled out a major update, but nothing described there seems to align with this kind of site. I wonder if Google is secretly taking yet another whack at penalizing adult sites?

For everyone else with no interest in search engine metrics, here’s a very hot throat grabbing picture. I don’t know the source for this, but I do love their expressions.

Human Contact

It just struck me that the last physical human contact I had was when Penny Barber peed on me back at the start of March. It was a great scene but, in retrospect, an odd note to enter quarantine on. Kind of like the condemned’s last meal, only in liquid form. If I’d known what was to come, maybe I’d have requested a gentler and more nurturing session. Although for a masochist, genital torture and watersports is somewhat nurturing.

I am craving human contact, which is very weird for a natural introvert who’s lived on his own for 20 or so years. I’d take something wet and warm, or hard and slappy, or even a simple hug at this stage.

I’ve seen a lot of people posting about being hungry to play again, but I wonder what form that play will take? Is it going to be an explosion of pent-up kinky energy resulting in many intense scenes? Or are people going to want to ease back into it? Personally I don’t think I could do an intense scene right now. I’d enjoy the holiday from thought that pain provides, but it’d be risky to flood my brain with endorphins and adrenaline in my current emotional state.  I might need some gentle warm-up sessions first. Is hugging a kink?

There’s no particular logic behind this image, other than it represents exactly the kind of playful physical contact I currently crave. This is from a series called Love Stories” by Victor Demarchelier for Numero magazine.