BED

Gloria Brame has put together a new directory site for listing BDSM educators and groups – BED (Brame’s Educators Directory). It provides not only contact details but also things like professional qualifications, past presentations, community memberships, etc. This strikes me as a fine idea, not only for people within the community, but also for people outside it looking for useful contact points.

The site also has some fascinating historical illustrations and photographs. I particularly liked the advertisement below from the section of circa 70’s and 80’s pro-dommes. The text on the left captures – in just a few lines – how much the world has changed. These days submissives starts complaining if a domme doesn’t answer their email in a day or two. In this case Domina Verushka required you to send her a letter, together with stamped and self addressed envelope for any reply. A tape of her voice is available for $12 – which is around $28 in today’s money. Allow 8 weeks for delivery. Makes spending a few bucks for the instant delivery of a video from a modern clip site seem like something of bargain.

Based on this website I believe that Mistress Verushka is actually still offering professional domination sessions. Which I think is awesome. These days she’s in NYC (Queens) and contactable via email. No eight week wait required.

Updated: My apologies to Mistress Verushka Mandrake. As she makes clear in this comment, she’s not the same as the San Francisco based Mistress Verushka from this ad. Should you be in the NYC area and wish to session with her, then I did at least get the link to her contact information correct.

Sweet Smooshing

I hadn’t intended to do another Valentine Day themed post, but somehow these romantic fireside photographs of a ‘Happy Valentines’ cake getting smooshed were too fun not to feature. I’m not really a fan of food play or feet, but this made me smile. Possibly I need more frosting in my life. The lady doing the smooshing is Madame Ingrid, a Pittsburgh based pro-domme.  You can see other shots from the sequence in this tweet.

If the cake play isn’t doing it for you, then check out this Vice article on Valentines Day for Doms and Subs.  It interviews a variety of kinky people about what expressions of love and romance means to them. Oddly enough, licking dessert from your Doms feet doesn’t feature in it anywhere.

Domina Colette

My short sojourn in San Francisco has come to an end. Happily it finished on a high, thanks to a wonderful session with Domina Colette.

This was the first time we’d played together and initial meetings always have a touch of extra stress about them. Fortunately, any nerves quickly dissipated once we started talking and then easing into the scene. Sometimes you just know a session is going to be a great one right from the start. I’d like to think that’s about chemistry and shared energy, but I suspect a big part of it is down to the skill of the dominant in carving out a safe virtual space for the scene to unfold into.

Compared to the two sessions from the start of my trip, this upped the masochistic side slightly, whilst still retaining a lot of tease and denial elements. I particularly enjoyed Domina Colette’s very hands on approach to nipple torture.  Often when doing CBT and NT, there’ll be  a lot of the C and the B, not some much of the N. Slap a pair of nipple clamps on and then immediately head south frequently seems to be the approach. Colette took a much more balanced approach, mixing pain and pleasure between the different areas, and using her touch to alternately ground me, tease me and hurt me. She promised me a lasting memento of our session, and the tenderness across my chest the next day was certainly that. Just the movement of my clothes against it would trigger a mild wave of pain and then a happy smile.

If you’re interested in the possibility of a session with Domina Colette, or just want to see more images like the one below, then her professional site is here and her twitter feed here. She also has a passion project called Pervette, which I think deserves a post in it’s own right. It’s kind of a choose your own adventure, transmedia labyrinth and storytelling guidebook. Check it out and I’ll return to it in a future post.

This image of Colette and her silent maids is from her twitter feed.

Everyone’s Against Me

My weekend adventures in San Francisco have left me feeling a little tense. Nothing too excessive. Just the kind of mild tension where you bite a chunk out of your laptop and then start mindlessly humping the leg of the desk it’s sitting on.

I wrote a couple of days ago about my initial SF session with Mistress Iris. That left me, to phrase it delicately, somewhat on edge. My second session for the trip was with Domina Yuki. We’ve played together a lot in the past, and those sessions tended to skew towards traditional masochist play. This one did feature some CBT, electricity and a beautiful leather straitjacket, but was much heavier on tease and denial, with a particular emphasis on the denial. It’s one thing to be close to someone as desirable as Domina Yuki. It’s quite another to have her tease you about how frustrating that must be and yet deny any relief.

I don’t really cry in sessions. My standard response to pain is to yell or scream. Yet this session actually had me sobbing in frustration. Yuki even commented that I was pulling expressions she’d never seen from me before. I left the play space on a high of denial, with my whole body vibrating like a tuning fork.

Of course, the universe then chose to mess with me just a little more. Crossing Union square much later that night, a rather attractive young lady propositioned me with the idea that we might enjoy a mutually satisfying business arrangement back in my hotel room. That’s not normally my kind of scene, but just for a second or two some frustrated lizard brain cells were leaping up and down shouting “Do it! Do It!” Back at the hotel, having wrestled my id into submission and regretfully declined the ladies offer, the couple in the room next door then decided it was the perfect night for a marathon sex and spanking session. I was stuck there, horny beyond all measure, on a strict Scout’s honor of no touching, and all I can hear is endless slaps, grunts and cries of ecstasy.  I probably should have put headphones on to drown them out but, like a rubbernecker at a road accident, I couldn’t drag myself away. I might not have had any orgasms recently, but the couple in room 541 certainly made up the averages for me.

This was a shot from our scene, with me leaning over a spanking bench and Domina Yuki on top. There’s a similar shot from the same angle that better shows off Yuki’s beautiful boots here. There was also a very hot short movie, but sadly I don’t have the bandwidth to host it here. If  you can’t manage an in person session, but would like to see more of Domina Yuki and her scenes, then I’d suggest checking out her OnlyFans site. She posts a lot of great content to it.

A Brief Migration South

There’s a few inches of snow in Seattle. For many parts of America this would mean it was a mild winter day, but for Seattle it’s snowpocalypse. I’m really not kidding about that. People are stripping the local stores of produce, and emptying the hardware stores of snow clearing equipment. In terms of chaos, from my social media feed, it seems to rank somewhere above the Seahawks winning the Superbowl and just a touch below a zombie uprising.

Fortunately, I’m in San Francisco for a few days of fun, well away from the mess. Today I found the best possible way to keep warm and celebrate my well timed trip – playing with Mistress Iris. We had a wonderful session, with a lot of growling, snarling, whimpering, scratching and biting. There was no explicit animal role play, but if a nosy neighbor had sneaked up to  listen, I’m sure they would have thought otherwise. It’s odd, because I’m a fairly quiet person in normal life. Yet wrap some rope around me, and grab me by the balls, and suddenly I turn into an animal sound effects catalog.

This is Mistress Iris with some rather more attractive pets. Pedigree puppies versus me the mangy mutt. This is from a post on her instagram feed.

Canary in a Coal Mine

The Slixa site launched an essay contest in December on the subject of the SESTA-FOSTA laws. They were offering $10,000 in prize money for both the authors and their charities of choice. The winners were recently announced, and I was very happy to see that Lucy Khan had taken the top spot with her essay: Against FOSTA/SESTA: One Canary’s Cry From Inside the Coal Mine.

I’ve been lucky enough to session with Lucy multiple times in the past. She has always impressed me as a highly intelligent and insightful person, so it’s great to see her pick up this award and money for SWOP-LA. In fact LA pro-domme’s managed to score two out of the three top spots, with Grace Marie picking up the second place prize. Meghan Peterson, a researcher and sex worker rights advocate, stopped an LA/pro-domme sweep by picking up the third spot. I think all three essays are really well written and well worth reading, so check them all out here.

Given it’s Chinese New Year, this seems an appropriate image of Mistress Lucy to feature. She’s in the center, flanked by Daddy An Li (left) and Mistress Damiana Chi (right). It was taken from a Chinese New Year Play Party hosted at The Chi Temple. The submissive is appropriately attired, given it’s the Chinese year of the brown pig.

Papers, Please

This image is a fabulous item of femdom memorabilia. It’s a passport for the Other World Kingdom, more commonly known as OWK. For those that have never heard of it, OWK was a femdom micronation, designed to be an order of magnitude bigger and more immersive than your typical pro-domme playspace. This previous post contains some useful links that provide more context.

I knew that Queen Patricia ran it like a self-contained kingdom, with its own laws, flags and currency, but I didn’t realize they went as far as issuing official looking passports. This particular example belongs to Dominatrix Irene Boss,  and was featured in this tweet from her. I particularly like the fact that slaves weren’t issues passports but were instead simply listed by a count, alongside the number of animals she was travelling with (see this inside page).

Dominatrix Irene Boss is a Pittsburgh based pro-domme. You can see her official site here.

Adding Insult to Injury

Some days you just want to punch something. This would unfortunately be one of them.

The initial trigger for this anger was seeing that Alchemy Rooms, the playspace of UK based Mistress Tess, had been broken into and vandalized. You can see some of the results in this tweet and this one. It pretty clearly wasn’t a burglary or random destruction. This was some fuck head on a targeted mission to ruin the space.

As often happens these days when something like this happens, a GoFundMe was set-up to help Mistress Tess out. I was actually planning to feature a link to it in a post today. Yet, incredibly it got shut down because of some vague and unspecified terms of service violation. These was nothing pornographic in the appeal, the funds were clearly going to fix the vandalism, and the police had been informed. Professional domination is entirely legal in the UK, but apparently the merest suggestion of BDSM is enough to get a very worthwhile appeal pulled.

The good news is that, according to this follow-up tweet, Mistress Tess will at least get the money that had been raised before the shutdown. But if you ever needed a story that encapsulates the many challenges that sex workers face, this one pretty much captures it all. In the meantime, if you want to support Mistress Tess, then buy some of her clips.  You get femdom porn and she gets money to help rebuild her space. Which in turn she can use to make more money and give people amazing kinky experiences. It’s a win-win-win.

You can see more shots like this at Mistress Tess’ main site. Her clips can be purchased at clips4sale and iwantclips.

A Space for Grown-Ups

I’ve written in the past about my preference for play spaces that are light, airy and modern. Doing a session in them always feels more serious and purposeful. Adults exploring something complex, rather than kids playing at being mistress/slave in a faux dungeon or torture chamber.

One of the nicest I’ve seen in recent years has been put together by Mistress Jade Thunderstorm of New Orleans and featured in her recent tweet. I love how clean and elegant it is – there’s even trailing greenery! That devious looking chair was custom made for the space.

Mistress Jade was based in Seattle before New Orleans, and I was lucky enough to session with her a couple of years back, before she moved. She’s definitely someone worth seeking out if you’re in the New Orleans area. I just wish she’d stayed and built that beautiful space here.

Bondage Therapy in Seattle

Bondage virtuoso Elise Graves has been in Seattle for the last few days. Primarily she was here to shoot for House of Gord, but she did reserve time for a couple of private sessions, and I was lucky enough to score one of them. A lovely mix of whipping, electrical play and bondage was the result. We didn’t get pictures, but fortunately for me, she did shoot them in her other session, as shown here.  I’m not sure who the other Seattle submissive is, but my thanks to him for these shots. He appears to be doing a better job of handling the rope suspension than I did.

Rope isn’t normally my favored bondage medium. I realized today that a big part of that is the time it often takes. When I’ve limited time to play, and I’m paying by the hour, I somewhat resent burning a lot of the session getting into and out of bondage. The process can be enjoyable, but not as enjoyable as what comes afterward. Fortunately, with an expert like Elise, that becomes far less of an issue. I’ve played with a lot of word class dommes, but I think she’s the fastest rigger I’ve ever experienced. She very quickly pulled together well balanced positions, with just the right degree of stress.

Elise’s smile in this image is very indicative of the way she plays. There was a lot of happy positive energy in our scene today. This image is from her Bondage Liberate site. I found it via her twitter feed.