Pro-domme – Page 35 – Femdom Resource

Revisiting the pro/lifestyle discussion

O Miss Pearl is the latest blogger to venture into the debate around the intersection of pro and non-pro female dominants. She has two recent posts on the topic here and here. I’m going to try and avoid getting deep into the details of her posts. I’ve touched on similar issues in the past (e.g. a series of posts on kink and money here, here, here, a debate with DD here), and while I may quibble about parts of Miss Pearl’s posts, I do agree with the majority of her points. I’m a huge fan of pro-dommes in general, but I still think it’s a bad thing that they’re commonly seen as the primary representation of female domination.

I will say that I think it’s important in these discussions to avoid purely binary classifications. There’s not a single type of pro/client interaction, in the same way there’s not a single lifestyle interaction. These things exist on a continuum. There’s also not a single role that people are uniquely assigned. It’s often acknowledged that a pro-domme may also be a lifestyle dominant, but that same flexibility should also be attributed to her clients. It’s not wrong to occupy multiple categories. What’s wrong is to take a dynamic unique to one and apply it to another. Pro-dommes aren’t looking for a date and lifestyle dommes don’t exist to service male submissive fantasies.

Shortly after reading Miss Pearl’s thoughts I came across this post by Ms Maya Midnight. She’s talking about clients who ask for an ‘easy session’ and what a pain in the ass they usually are. Their definition of what an ‘easy session’ is rarely chimes with hers.

My definition of an easy session is one where I can wear and do more or less whatever I want — or at least have a very wide variety of enjoyable activities to choose from. It also means an easygoing, responsive sub with good communication skills who doesn’t top from the bottom. It does not require much if any prep.

I thought it made for an interesting statement in the context of the pro/lifestyle debate. Often the complaint from lifestyle dominants is that guys expect them to dress like a fetishists wet dream and focus with laser like intensity on the submissive’s very specific fantasy scenarios. i.e. The stereotypical pro/client scenario. Yet, for a pro, her best clients are those who care about the dynamic (rather than an activity or outfit), communicate well and actually submit. I suspect the above list of attributes would strike a cord with lifestyle dominants just as much as professional ones.

The image is taken from Ms Maya Midnight’s website. She’s a NYC based pro-domme. Her interests and a link for booking a session is available here.

I don’t judge

Today’s post continues the amusing video theme. While yesterday’s was funny but a little silly, this one is funny with an edge. It’s called ‘Shit Girls Say to Dominatrices‘ and was created by Miss Ginger Millay. While ostensibly from the point of view of a pro-domme, there are plenty of comments in there that I’m sure lifestyle dommes will have also heard. The line and follow-up about accepting Jesus particularly made me smile.

The video’s creator is a NYC based pro-domme. I’m sure she’s fabulous at many aspect of her job, but I particularly like her librarian look as shown below. I never roleplay in scenes, but if there was ever a gateway scenario, it’d be Miss Millay in the library with an overdue book. Much more fun than Miss Scarlet in the study with the candlestick.

The art of marketing

Someone dropped me a link to this video advertising Wodka Vodka. It’s an amusing commercial, featuring a woman getting jobs done thanks to a quick internet ad and a succession of helpful horny slaves.

However, it particularly caught my eye because of a post I recently stumbled across from San Francisco’s Vinyl Queen. In it she lists the efforts she goes to in order to get a client to actually show up at her play space. The vodka commercial is entertainingly unrealistic, but it wasn’t until I read her post that I realized the extent of the gulf that exists in professional BDSM between advertising and closing the deal. For a lot of her new clients…

These men ultimately hate the fact they can’t rid themselves of this part of their psyche, so it comes out sideways in their dealings with the ONE person who can offer them a brief respite from their desire to submit/serve/be tortured—you get the picture. So instead of my calendar booking up like a medical office, it fills up in a manner unique to this profession. Enter: The Hand Holdee

Despite my website being very detailed and clear about my interests and limits, the Hand Holdee loses all semblance of reading comprehension and memory. It’s like he WANTS me repeat what he KNOWS is on the computer screen in front of him. He is so conflicted internally that he has to hear the words he wants come out of my mouth so he will feel more secure in the days/weeks/or months leading up to our time together.

So for a pro-domme advertising and marketing is only a starting point. Ironically enough, and to tie it all back to the starting point of the post, for vodka marketing is pretty much the first, last and only point that matters. The basic product is interchangeable, varying only slightly depending what filtering is done and what water is added. So, as this fascinating article describes, how you market it is key. The Wodka of the kinky commercial is actually trying a new approach in that respect.

Uh huh huh huh

A few posts ago I was writing about domination for dummies. This post is the double converse of that – submissive who are dumb. It was sparked by the tumblr of Mistress Ouch and her series of posts on some of the dumb things wannabe clients say to her. I found them highly entertaining. A few of my favorites were…

“Hi Mistress, I want a really simple easy session and since all that other stuff you do is gross and weird you’re probably really glad to have such a simple easy boring session. Can I have a discount?”

“I disagree with your boundaries. I am very logical and your boundaries are very illogical. Let me use my awesome logic skills to show you how stupid and crazy your boundaries are. Why aren’t you agreeing with me? You’re stupid and crazy.”

“Wait, you’re letting me choose when I get to come in? You mean you don’t dominate me during the booking process?”

She has plenty more amusing example of obtuseness from the little s brigade. They’re well worth a read as examples of the kind of idiocy that pro-dommes have to regularly sort through.

I thought picking a picture for this post might be tricky until I stumbled on the one below. Butthead would make the stupidest submissive possible. I don’t think they ever did a Beavis and Butthead episode featuring a pro-domme, which feels like they missed a trick. The dialog just writes itself. It starts with “Uh huh huh huh. We’re totally going to do it. Come to Butthead”. Swiftly followed “Owww! Get off me you asswipe! That hurts”.

This image was never part of the TV show. It’s taken from a 1997 book called The Butt Files.

Identity crisis

I’m going to do something fairly foolish in this post and disagree with someone who doubtless knows their business far better than I do. Not to mention someone who lives locally, swings a mean single tail and could almost certainly kick my ass. I’m talking about Domina Victoria Rage and her recent post on safety and screening when setting up pro-domme sessions.

There’s a lot of good information in it, but I do have to take issue with her suggestion that clients should always use aliases. She goes onto say…

Come to me with a real sounding first and last name and that’s a red flag that you might take my privacy as lightly as you’ve taken your own.
There’s no reason on the planet why personal information should be exchanged on either side, anything you say is a gamble because both of you – just by seeing each other – are in a position to do damage to the personal life of the other.

Anyone I session with, or even just meet, will know my real name. I’ll typically provide it in the first few exchanges of emails. And a domme who expects me not to do that creates a red flag of my own. It suggests to me that she’ll not take my privacy seriously and that the onus is on me to always guard information from her. I’m absolutely sure that’s not the case for Domina Victoria, but I would find it really weird to not use my real name with a domme when I’m trusting her in so many other ways during a session. I would feel inauthentic.

While using an alias is pretty much universal for pro-dommes, it’s certainly not for clients. Some dommes demand a photographic id before a session, or will take credit cards, which instantly rules out fake names. And personally I don’t buy the argument about creating risk to personal lives. I’d be much more worried about crazy ex-girlfriends than pro-dommes. The former typically know your social circle, know your intimate sexual secrets and may have nothing to lose by spreading gossip. That’s a scary mixture. In contrast a pro-domme sharing information risks her professional reputation and therefore her livelihood. She has a strong incentive to keep information private. I’m not saying it has never happened, just that as things to worry about, it’s way down my list.

As an entertaining side anecdote on identify and verification – I once had someone complain that my professional linked-in profile didn’t have enough contacts. I had a 100 or so listed, but she said she preferred to see 200+ before she trusted it! This was someone I’ve never mentioned here, and someone who crossed a few of the legal lines that pro-dommes are typically so strict about. She was therefore far more concerned about legal entrapment and demanded strong proof of identity before she’d meet. I was highly entertained by the fact that my long neglected linked-in profile might suddenly be a kinky sex deal-breaker. I wish I’d know that when I was busy deleting all their spammy emails to update it!

I’ll leave you with a shot from Domina Victoria’s blog. I love the contrast of the white skin, the red nails and the big glorious cock.

New blogs added

Like the title says, I’ve added a number of blogs to my femdom blog page and the dynamic blog roll over on the right. Hopefully many of them will be both new and interesting to my readers. Specifically the added entries are…

I’ve also added my first non-English blog – Lady Lua and net – which is written in Spanish. My foreign language skills extend as far as restaurant menus and cooking terms, so judging blogs is tricky. However, I occasionally get emailed links to non-English blogs that look interesting, so I’ve decided I’ll take a shot with on-line translation tools and include a few that I think might be good.

Also, while I’m on the subject of blogs, does anyone know what happened to Lily over at the Black Leather Belt blog? I always enjoyed her writing and she simply seems to have vanished from the blogosphere.

Finally, the image below is taken from the newly added blog of Mistress Liliane Hunt. She’s a San Francisco based pro-domme, shown here indulging in some puppy play.

Strange but true

It’s not often that I run across a new kink I haven’t heard of. Many wasted hours on the stranger parts of the internet have left me distressingly well informed about unusual kinks. However, courtesy of this Max Fisch thread, I’ve a new one to add. It’s called slaughtering or pig-play and, as far as I can tell, it means pretending to be a pig while the domme acts out a fake slaughtering process.

I guess I was aware of cannibalism being a kink in itself (thanks to the infamous Armin Meiwes case) but hadn’t realized it was actually something people role-played in scenes. I’ve never seen it offered by a US or British pro-domme, but apparently it’s not unheard of for German ones to do so. I assume something about that culture lends itself to the development of this particular kink. Perhaps raising pigs and butchering them are a more common part of the childhood experience than they are over here.

Personally the idea leaves me absolutely cold. I’ll certainly not be incorporating it into any of my future scenes. However, I’m always happy to expand my knowledge on the odder corners of the kinky world.

The image is of Mistress Kristin. She’s a German pro-domme who offers pig-play.

Reality and physicality

I had a slightly unusual session yesterday. Not so much in the ‘how’ and the ‘what’, but in the ‘who’ and the ‘where’ (the ‘why’ is left as an exercise for my therapist). It featured Mistress Yuki playing in Lady Lydia’s space. I’ve played with Mistress Yuki in the past down in San Francisco (see here and here), and was happy to hear she’d be in Seattle for a few days this month. It was a lot of fun to get together, if a little disconcerting to play with someone new and different in a space I know so well.

It was a fairly intense session, with lots of corporal play, and we finished with some piercing. I was pretty zoned by that point. Time and space were askew, and my brain really didn’t care. As Mistress Yuki moved around the table I was suddenly struck by a tremendous sense of her physicality. Attractive women in exciting undergarments always have a pretty powerful presence, but this was more than that. Her body had a three dimensional solidity that felt more real than anything else in the room, including myself.

I’ve experienced this kind of reality distortion before in subspace and, as I pondered it afterwards, it reminded me of passage from one of my favorite books – Neuromancer. The quote features a mysterious man named Armitage telling the protagonist (Case) that his lost hacking abilities could be miraculously restored to him.

“What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage, Case?” Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that soon he’d wake. Armitage wouldn’t speak again. Case’s dreams always ended in these freeze frames, and now this one was over.

That description of a character and a moment in time has always stuck with me. I read it long before I did a BDSM scene, but that sense of sudden physicality coupled with unreality, fits beautifully with what I experienced last night in subspace. That’s perhaps appropriate for the book that popularized the term cyberspace.

The above images were taken from Mistress Yuki’s tumblr. If you’re in the San Francisco area and would like to session with her, check out her main site.

As for Neuromancer, if you’ve never read it and aren’t violently opposed to the cyberpunk genre, I definitely recommend giving it a shot. It’s an incredibly influential novel, and an archetype in its genre. It’s amazing to read it now and realize it was written in the early 80’s on a 1927 Hermes model portable manual typewriter.

FYI

Just for your information, while I love getting comments and emails, I’m not the fastest in the world at responding to them. I try and respond to comments within a couple of days, but detailed emails can take a week or so. Job + Blog + Friends + Sleep = 24 hours. That doesn’t leave me much time to write emails, so I apologize in advance if your response is delayed. If I ever manage to fit dating or a relationship into that equation it might involve some fundamental rewriting of the laws of physics. Possibly that could lead to a new form of interstellar travel, but more likely it’ll just mean the end of the universe. So I also apologize in advance if that happens just when you’re finally getting to a good bit. I’ll try not to do it right before a weekend.

Perhaps an alternative solution to this equation would be for me to multitask better. For example, this gentleman appears to be combining cleaning the floor with washing his face. That has got to cut down on wasted washroom time.

The lady helping the gentleman with his ablutions is Mistress Lauren.

When in doubt, go for ambiguity

I was planning something different for tonight’s post. A radical new approach. I was thinking of writing something nuanced, well reasoned and insightful on the inherent complexities and contradictions of femdom. I’ve never tried it before, but I thought it might just work. Then I went out with friends and ate lots of middle eastern food and drank way too many cocktails. Plus a bottle of wine or two. So right now I’m lucky if I can spell femdom, let alone write about it.

I will therefore simply pick an interesting ambiguous image that I like. The fact it’s ambiguous saves me having to write too much. I’ll leave the interpretation to the viewer. It features the beautiful January Seraph who was kind enough to say nice things about my site.