Here’s something simple yet beautiful to start the weekend. A lovely blend of rope bondage, sensory deprivation and sweet sensuality. This is Mistress Juri from Ginza Prezis.
I originally stumbled across this image on the Sensual Fetish tumblr.
Tag: Pro-domme
Caught in a rope web
I enjoyed some rope bondage with Lydia tonight and now I’m left with some beautiful rope marks across my torso. I was positioned on my back, but rather than simple anchor me at the wrists and ankles, Lydia used a number of ropes to enmesh by whole body. Everything was in tension, the ropes working against each other so I could constantly feel them hugging me. Typically I don’t struggle much in bondage, so I can sometimes almost forget that I’m tied up. There was no danger of that tonight, as every breath and twitch pulled against the web that held me.
The image below is obviously a suspension scene, which is a little different to mine, but I’m guessing he’ll also be left with some nice rope marks afterwards. The domme and rigger is Ms Tytania of London. You can see more image from the same session in this post. Suspension is always fun, but I particularly like the little teasing touch on his cock in this shot.
If you’d like the chance to enjoy some of Ms Tytania skills in person, her contact information is available here.
The serious end of the flogger
Mentioning Dan Savage in yesterday’s post prompted me to go and catch up with the latest entries in his advice column – ‘Savage Love’. It’s an entertaining column and his answers are frequently funny and insightful. Even the comments, normally garbage on any popular mainstream public forum, can be thoughtful.
For kink lovers his column from a couple of weeks back, entitled Working the Kinks Out, was particular relevant. Of the three kinky folk featured, the letter that caught me eye was the third one on the page, sent by a woman married to a submissive man. She didn’t fancy ‘squeezing into an uncomfortable corset and using a flogger on him’ so allowed him to see a pro-domme. Now she’s upset that he’s going too often and spending too much money. Dan’s answer is a fair one, but I think it’s impossible to judge the situation without a hell of a lot more context than the letter gives. What really piqued my interest was the comments that followed the column.
As you’d expect the comments covered a lot of viewpoints, but a common one was that she should stop complaining and start hitting him. The reasons given ranged from being GGG, being financially smart, learning to like it, not being selfish and it’s easy once you try it. I’m all for more women topping and playing the dominant role, but I can’t help feeling that these comments overlook the complexity of D/s play. I wonder if they’d say the same kind of thing if the husband were dominant and wanted to tie her up and beat her? Would they suggest a non-submissive should just suck it up, stop being selfish and take the punishment? I doubt it.
Submission is often treated as something fixed, an in-built need that must be satisfied. Conversely dominance is treated as an act or activity, an option that can be turned on or off. I understand that coming from a vanilla perspective (nobody wants pain, but anyone can choose to inflict it), but it doesn’t make sense from a kinky background. Dominating someone is a very complex dynamic, and scenes can create a lot of powerful emotions. Nobody should feel they have to tap into that kind of energy if they don’t want to. I don’t know where the wife in question chose to draw the kinky line in the sand, but I do think she can’t choose to be dominant anymore than he can choose to not be submissive.
Given the letter writer seemed unhappy about using a flogger, this seemed a particularly apt picture to use. This lady certainly doesn’t seem unhappy about her flogging options. This is from a 2012 Divine Bitches shoot with Phoenix Marie and Parker London.
Share the wealth
I’m a fan of Maitresse Madeline. As an independent and a kink.com performer I think she’s produced some interesting material, and I’ve featured some of it here in the past (for example – here, here and here). Apparently I’m not alone in appreciating her work, as somebody just paid $42,000 in an auction for a 1 hour web cam session with her. Assuming it’s not a stunt by the kink.com PR people, I’d guess that’s the most anyone has ever paid for a webcam session.
I’m not somebody who gets upset at rich people spending money. Moving cash from the wealthy to the less wealthy seems a fine thing to do. However, no matter how attractive and talented Maitresse Madeline might be, this didn’t strike me as an entirely optimal use of this gentleman’s kinky dollar. That got me to wondering what kind of alternative experience he could have got for the money.
Let’s stick to the West coast of the US. This guy was from Australia, so a first class round trip ticket will set him back around $6,000. Obviously he’ll need somewhere nice to stop, say a suite at the Beverly Wilshire (setting for the film Pretty Woman) at $1,500 a night. He’ll also need wheels to get around, and a Ferrari 458 runs to around $2,000 a day to hire. If we assume a 5 day trip, and throw in $500 per day for fine dining, that’s $26,000 so far. Now we get to the kinky stuff. I don’t think Maitresse Madeline does private sessions anymore but there are any number of gorgeous and amazingly talented dommes on the West Coast. For example, the famous Isabella Sinclair has recently started offering sessions again. Let’s shoot for an entire weekend of crazy kinky fun. At $300 per hour, that’s $14,400 for 48 hours and grand total of $40,400. That leaves him $1555 to splurge at the Stockroom retail store, with $45 left over to tour the kink.com Armory location.
Or, as a not at all crazy alternative to all this decadence, he could have a 1 hour web cam session. Let’s hope his network connection doesn’t freeze.
The image shows Maitresse Madeline doing a zippering in a shoot for Divine Bitches. I love the look on his face and the puckering of his skin as the zipper pulls away. Having been in that position many time I can definitely empathize.
Book Club: Dominatrix on Trial
Welcome to a new series of occasional posts featuring femdom or kink related literature. The plan is to review and recommend books I think might be interesting to my readers. The reality will probably consist of me blathering about whatever caught my eye recently in the kindle store.
First up is Terri-Jean Bedford’s Dominatrix on Trial : Bedford v’s Canada. She’s the retired pro-domme who was recently in the news for taking on the Canadian prostitution laws. This is her autobiography and it splices the drama of her legal entanglements into her life story and work as a pro-domme. She had a troubled upbringing, and an early life that featured drugs, prostitution and low paid jobs. She eventually found stability and a profitably career working as a pro-domme in a dungeon space she designed and created. That is until the police raided it in a very public fashion and splashed her name across the front pages. Rather than take the easy plea bargain she fought back, and the book describes how and who helped do so.
I’ll get the negative stuff out of the way first. Bedford is a solid writer, and communicates the who/what/why information clearly. However, she doesn’t bring it vividly to life in the way a professional writer might have done. I believe she wrote the book over a number of years as the cases progressed, and it’s a shame it couldn’t have been as a collaboration with someone with more literary experience. She also writes a fair amount about her dungeon and the interests of the people who visited, which might be shocking to vanilla readers, but will probably be old news to regularly visitors to this blog. Finally, in several spots she makes sweeping statements about BDSM and why people, particularly submissive men, are kinky. She may be accurately describing her experiences, but I don’t think they can be extended universally, given how complex and varied the world of kink is.
All that said, I did enjoy the book. Some righteous anger at the broken legal system and those who enforce it can be cathartic. Her life has been a turbulent one, and it was inspiring to hear how she kept fighting and about the people who rallied around to help, contributing time and money to her cause. A lot of the lawyers worked pro bono, but the court expenses still racked up quickly, and she was in no position to pay them. The lawyer Alan Young comes across as particularly heroic, leading her original defense to the charges, and then leading the constitution challenge that was eventually successful. The book itself stops just before the recent Supreme Court announcement, but watching that final chapter play out on the news made for a particularly satisfying conclusion all of its own.
You can pick the book up at a variety of online locations – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Google, etc. Given she’s now retired with health issues I’m sure she’d be very grateful for every copy sold.
Two smiles (probably)
Here’s an image to complete a trio of posts featuring smiles. Admittedly in this case I can only see her smile. His expression is a more than a little obscured. However, I’m going to guess he might be smiling. I certainly would be if presented with that particular view of Lady Natalie Black.
This rather well color coordinated image features the aforementioned Lady Natalie Black and was shot for the Kinky Mistresses site. I found it on the Mask tumblr.
More claws
Continuing the claw theme, here’s an image from Mistress Eve. Her gloves aren’t quite as sophisticated or visually appealing as those in yesterday’s post, but I’m guessing to anyone on the receiving end, that’s a moot point. Sharp and pointy is all that matters when you’re feeling the effects. And they do have a nice vampiric look to them. The early depiction of vampires in movies tended towards animalistic talons like these. The suave Dracula with the twinkling eyes and natty line in capes came much later.
Study in contrasts
I like this image, but I’m not sure why. I’m never a big fan of kinky images set in derelict urban environments. It seems such an impractical place to play, and I’ve no fantasies around getting tetanus shots. This combination of wrist rope bondage and a potentially suspended position (if he slips) also doesn’t look too clever. Even if this is really safer than it looks, I’d hate to think of anyone with limited BDSM experience trying to emulate it.
All that said, I think it does work well as an image. I’d guess it’s the contrast between Domina Liza’s very tailored and smart appearance, the obvious decay of the space and his naked, stretched and vulnerable pose.
Domina Liza is a UK based pro-domme. You can find out more about her at her main site. I found the image via the Dominalova tumblr.
Go East, young man
I’m going to be taking a few days vacation in New York. Blogging may therefore become a bit hit and miss until early next week. Apologies in advance for that.
My timing was very fortunate, as I’ve managed to arrange some time with Troy Orleans before she begins her sabbatical / extended break. This wasn’t entirely down to happenstance. I had some friends dithering about taking a NYC trip around this time, and then when I saw MTO’s post, I decided a firm nudge was needed and got them to commit. So I’m now looking forward to doing some great restaurants and bars with them, and indulging in some kinky fun with Miss Orleans. Other than the horribly early flight I have to catch, I’m looking forward to every minute of it.
This great bondage shot is of Miss Orleans as taken by the talented Natasha Gornik. I found it in this post on her blog.
Random datapoints
The relative proportions of dominants to submissives, and the splits along the gender lines, are a well debated topic. Not only are the ratios for active kinksters up for question, but there’s also the issue of how many potential kinky people there are, or even what the percentages would look like if society was less screwed up. It’s a topic I’ve commented on in the past.
It’s also a topic that’s horribly lacking in hard data, and I’m afraid I’m not about to fix that problem. However, I did do a small experiment recently that’s related and I thought kind of interesting. The methodology was pretty simple. I went to the CollarMe site, randomly looked at profiles (with the widest possible selection criteria), and counted the proportions I saw. It actually started as some random browing over a coffee, but after a few minutes I got curious about what I was seeing, and started a tally chart. To keep it simple I just counted straight singles who didn’t switch.
The end results, before I got bored counting, were: Male Dominants = 40. Female Submissives = 22. Male Submissives = 23. Female Dominants = 7. Of those 7 female dominants, the number who were pro-dommes = 6. Leaving me with a grand total of 1 non-professional female dominant.
Now that doesn’t tell us anything about the ratios in the real world. It’s just a small sample of the people who choose to advertise on a particular site. But I was interested in how accurately it matched my intuition of what the numbers would be. I expected male dominants to be the largest group, submissives to be fairly evenly split along gender lines, and female dominants to be rare. I just wasn’t expecting them to be that rare. The contrast of 40:1 across the gender divide is striking.
I have to admit it wasn’t always easy to differentiate the professionals from the lifestyle ads. A couple of what I classified as professional ads didn’t mention payment. However, when I see numerous well lit/composed photographs of an attractive lady modelling several different exciting leather outfits, the cynic in me tends to assume she’s a pro. The non-professional dominants are normally dealing with enough dick pic shots as it is, they don’t need to encourage the hairy knuckle brigade.
While I’m on the subject of exciting leather outfits modeled by professionals – and as an aside let’s just admit I’m a genius at subtle segues to my post images – here’s Dominatrix Ella Kros in a rather striking black ensemble.
If you’re in either Tel-Aviv or London and would like to session with Ella Kros then her contact page is here.