The Chicago Studio

I’ve previously covered the difficulties playspaces are having right now with Covid-19. The latest example to reach out for help is The Chicago Studio owned by Mistress Simone. They’ve set up a GoFundMe to help it survive here.

I’ve unfortunately never played with Mistress Simone, but I have been lucky enough to use that space multiple times with Mistress Mara Mayhem. It’s a great space with some excellent equipment. I particularly like this padded table with its sturdy metal frame and a cut out section. That combination allows for all sorts of fun bondage set-ups while leaving the body of the submissive very much available for tease or torture.

If you can afford to make a donation, then I’m sure all the Mistresses who use the space would very much appreciate it. I personally just donated. I’m very much looking forward to playing more when the virus is finally under control, and it’ll be very depressing if there’s nowhere left to do so by then.

This is Mistress Simone in a photograph from her web site.

The Parthenon Studio

I think one of the biggest challenges of the coronavirus for the kinky community is going to be keeping playspaces alive. Individuals have a flexibility that bricks and mortar doesn’t possess. With people either not playing at all, or being very wary of shared spaces, there’s a grave danger that we’ll emerge on the far side of this with no quality spaces left. That’d be a terrible loss. Rising real estate prices in the last decade have pushed a lot of great spaces out of existence. Let’s not let coronavirus finish the remaining ones off.

If you have the means to do so, I would therefore urge you to support fundraisers like this one for the Parthenon Studios in NYC.  I just chipped in £50 and it was a very easy and quick process. You can also do it anonymously. I played there with Empress Wu last year and I loved the chance to visit a space I’d heard so much about. The owner is Queen Ariana Chevalier, who is one of the great dommes of NYC. Donate to the fundraiser and you’ll be supporting a black female owned business that brings joy to a huge number of kinky people. What’s not to love about that?

This rather fabulous image is of Queen Ariana Chevalier, owner of the studios. I found it via her twitter feed.

History Repeats Itself

Mainstream tech companies being hostile to kink and sex – as I mentioned in  my last post – is nothing new. Some start off friendly and become hostile over time (like tumblr), some are hostile right out of the gate (like Apple). Whatever the route, the end result has been the same for many years.

What I have found surprising is the recent negative feedback on a site created explicitly for adult content –  OnlyFans.  Like Zoom, they’ve been another winner out of the Coronavirus, with a lot of sex workers moving to offering content online. At the same time there have been a lot of threads like this and this highlighting problems content creators have had with it. Rolling Stone followed up on that feedback with an article on the problems here. Apparently this is one of those things baked into the universe like the laws of thermodynamics or planck’s constant. Online platform’s hostility to sex and sex workers grows in proportion to their mainstream success and their corresponding access to conventional funding sources.

Having said all that, I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage people from subscribing. There are a lot of awesome dommes making content on OnlyFans. So if someone you like is publishing on it, then go for it. The majority of the issues seem to be on the creator side, not the consumer side.

On the flipside, if you’re thinking of setting up an OnlyFans site, then it might be worth looking at all the options. I’ve recently seen a significant movement towards the AVN Stars site. I’ve no personal experience of that, but anecdotally there seem to be less complaints from content creators.

This is a shot from the always amazing Domina Yuki. She’s a domme with great content published on both an OnlyFans account and an AVN Stars account. Based on this tweet it seems like her bias is toward AVN Stars.

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.

Online Skills

Yesterday’s post had me angsty with not having played recently. For me it’s mainly a sense of frustration. For sex workers the current situation is obviously a much more serious one. Daddy An Li was featured in a KQED recent article talking about how she’s been dealing with it. I was kind of surprised to read this comment…

Also, An Li said many of her clients are older men. “They’re a little bit more reticent to learning online skills,” she said. “Which is fine. At some point, they’re going to have to learn depending on how long this quarantine situation goes on for.”

That a lot of her clients are older men isn’t surprising, but the lack of online skills certainly is. Isn’t everyone savvy with skyping, zooming and messaging these days? Even my parents – both in their mid-70’s – can set-up video conferencing now, and that’s just to chat about gardening and the weather. I’d assume the idea of a kinky online session with An Li would be far more motivating to a frustrated older gentleman client.

This image is from this blog post where An Li talks about some of the options she offers during the present coronavirus crisis. You can also follow her on twitter.

Pony Patronage

At the start of the year I posted artwork from Michael Manning that was commissioned by @DrPonyBatBond, featuring him with Mistress Michelle Lacy. I mentioned at the time how happy it made me to see someone actually paying an artist to celebrate their kinks and relationships. What I hadn’t realized was that this was not a first. DrPonyBatBond reached out to me and mentioned that the Michael Manning illustration was just one of over sixty similarly themed pieces that he’s commissioned over the last few years!

If you’re interested in seeing more of the pieces and hearing the background to them from DrPonyBatBond and Mistress Michelle Lacy, then Dirk Hooper has an excellent article on them here. It features more of the art and interviews with the two featured subjects. They’re a nice example of how a professional relationship can, in some cases, be a rich and nuanced one.

There are so many fun illustrations in the article that it’s hard to pick a favorite to feature, but this one by Moon Eater did catch my eye. It has a nice blend of the playful and the serious.

Creatively Frugal

It’s always fun to play with fancy equipment and high end toys. I’ve written about those kind of scenes often enough over the years.  However, there’s also a lot of pleasure to be had with pervertibles – regular household objects perverted into kinky use. Anyone can get their freak on with a cupboard full of ropes, gags and whips. It takes extra talent to do so with a handful of change and your local dollar store.

Mistress Hinako recently put up a series of posts – here, here and here – showing her rising to exactly that challenge. She uses plastic wrap, rubber tube, clothespins, stockings, sponges and plastic bags to create a very intense look bondage scene. Total cost of materials? Around three dollars.

Mistress Hinako is a Tokyo based pro-domme. Her professional site is here,  her blog is here and her twitter feed here. If you’d like to see video of her bondage work using a much wider variety of equipment, she has a bondage clinic site here.

Prepaying

While I’m on the subject of the coronavirus – as I just was – I’ve seen an excellent suggestion pop-up on social media: Prepaying for a session. Cash flow is obviously going to be a challenge for a lot of pro-dommes and other sex workers over the coming weeks. If you’re income is relatively secure, and have someone you regularly session with or have been planning to session with, why not offer to pay now for a session to be taken later?

It’s a win-win scenario. The domme gets the cash at a time when it’s most useful. You get the warm fuzzy feeling of helping out, plus something to look forward to when all this madness ends.

This is the London based Mistress Evilyne.  It’s an old shot, obviously taken before the days of social distancing, where the worst things in a crowded tube train where the heat, the smell and the risk of accidentally making eye contact with someone. Mistress Evilyne (twitter here) has an excellent value OnlyFans feed and will happily accept prepaying for sessions.

Tough Times

This is obviously a very difficult and challenging time for a lot of people. The coronavirus is shutting down a lot of the economy and ripping the heart out of big chunks of service industries. That includes professional domination and many other types of sex work. Whatever your local government ends up doing to help the economy, I think it’s a safe bet there will not be a big bailout package for sex workers.

Almost all the hot sexy content you enjoy online is created by sex workers. Blogs like this one certainly wouldn’t exist without them. So if your income is going to be relatively secure for the next few months, then I’d strongly urge you to do what you can to help. The good news is that there are a lot of ways you do that and also get exciting material to help pass the time in quarantine.

  • Buy clips from independent female creators. The iwantclips site and the clips4sale site have a ton of femdom content.
  • Join the fan sites of your favorite pro-dommes at places like AVN Stars, AdmireMeVIP and OnlyFans.
  • Buy online chat time and do virtual sessions using sites like sextpanther or niteflirt or whatever conferencing tool a particular domme prefers to use.
  • Order a custom clip. I’m sure that any pro-domme that normally offers this will currently have time on their hands to create more.

If you have a few favorite pro-dommes or sex workers, but aren’t sure how to get their content or help out, then go look them up on twitter. There will almost always be links to purchase content or information for scheduling online only sessions. Alternatively, just look through this site. I always try and provide the relevant content and site links for any pro-domme I feature here.

This is Lucy Sweetkill with Dia Dynasty. They’re both based in NYC, an area which seems about to get hit particularly hard by the virus. Domina Dynasty has an OnlyFans here, a niteflirt listing here and a sextpanther listing here.  Lucy Sweetkill has an OnlyFans here, a niteflirt listing here and sextpanther lising here. They’re both fabulous dommes who would be well worth spending time and money with.

His Expression

I post a lot of images because I like the domme’s expression, but this one is all about his expression. There’s a lot of emotion packed into that face. It’s a look of – “Oh, it’s going to hurt … but I trust you …  please don’t … please do … be kind … but hurt me.” I can relate to that look.

Her hand around his neck is also a very sexy touch. Intimacy but also a sense of control and ownership.

This is Aoi Musashi and  Mistress Natsukiss in image I found via this tweet.