Pro-domme – Page 39 – Femdom Resource

Form over function

Here’s a very visually striking pair of Gaspar gloves being modeled by Mistress Veronique. There’s a bit of a militaristic feel to them thanks to all those metal press studs.

While I think these look great, when it comes to playing rather than simply staring, I actually prefer something far more basic. The kind of short black leather gloves you’d use to protect your hands, or improve your grip, or avoid leaving fingerprints. There’s something sexy about function. These have great form, they don’t look all that practical to wear while working a guy over.

I found this on the Bits and Pieces tumblr. It was originally shot for the Boot Lovers site.

Savoir-faire

Today’s post brings you news of an article from 2004. Don’t say that Femdom Resource doesn’t deliver the latest in BDSM culture!

I was reminded of it after reading some of the comments on my earlier post about approaching a dominant woman. Ferns linked to an excellent post she’d written on the subject, which emphasized that the person comes before the submissive. It’s a package deal, and nobody is going to spend time with someone who can scream delightfully when whipped but is an annoying jerk the rest of the time. Playing with gags can be fun, but they shouldn’t be a requirement for a relationship.

This philosophy put me in mind of an old article from Mistress Matisse on how she started dating her primary partner Max. He’s actually a male dominant, but I don’t think that fact alters the underlying point. She wasn’t attracted to some aspect of his sexuality, that actually counted against him initially. It was the fact he was capable, quietly confident and self-possessed that was a significant part of the initial attraction. I also can’t resist posting a link to an article that opens with the following line.

As Max and I approach the fifth anniversary of our first date, I’ve been thinking about the fact that if my submissive, Jae, didn’t have such a big clitoris, Max and I might never have gone on that date at all.
Mistress Matisse in ‘Me, Max and Jae’

That must be a great way to start a response to the old cliched question – ‘So how did you two meet?’

For images I can bring you shots of two out of the three people in question. The first shot below is Mistress Matisse giving Bobbi Starr a spanking in a scene for Everything Butt. The second image is Jae giving some lucky guy a good paddling, taken from this blog post.

Peaking behind the curtain

I’ve been enjoying catching up on Domina M’s new blog – Look Like Veronica Lake; Think Like Dorothy Parker. She used to be one of NYC’s top pro-dommes, mentored one of the current stars of that city, and has since retired to Barcelona.

She’s writing about the practicalities of being a pro-domme, the behind the scene issues she had to deal with, which I find fascinating. I think it’s always fun to read about unusual jobs. It almost doesn’t matter exactly what the job is – steeplejack, hostage negotiator, matador – there’s just something innately interesting in learning the tricks of a trade. It appeals to the desire to discover a secret, as well as the intellectual pleasure of gaining understanding of a new problem space.

I particularly enjoyed her piece on micro-dommenomics and her attempt to come up with a viable model for an inexpensive session.

A simple foot or OTK session in the morning might be a nice way to start my day. What say $75 for a half hour foot or OTK session in the morning? NO ONE could beat that.
…
There was no way I was going to dilute the “Domina M” brand with a blue light special. Besides the argument was that they wanted the minimum, simply a focus on their fetish. Okay fine. I created a new yahoo email account and advertised, “Simple foot/otk sessions with a beautiful, busty, 29-year-old blond. 8AM-11AM. $75 per ½ hour” every free place I could.
…
After all of that, how many people did I see in those three months? None. Zero. Goose-Egg.
Domina M

The failure of this approach doesn’t surprise me at all. When it comes to luxury goods and services, price may not be a good discriminating factor, but it is normally a good filtering factor. I probably can’t simply use price alone to choose between a $50 bottle of wine and $100 bottle of wine. But I can normally safely exclude the $5 bottle of wine from consideration. If I saw a very cheap price for an unnamed and unreviewed pro-domme I’d assume either she wasn’t smart enough to price herself correctly or was so bad that she couldn’t get business at a higher price. Neither are appealing characteristics. And, as Domina M discovered, the type of clients who don’t make that kind of assessment turn out to be the type of clients not worth cultivating.

In the comment section Miss Troy Orleans remarked on the fact that she’d recently offered a significant session discount to celebrate her eight year dommiversary, and had been surprised when only one person took her up on it. That also surprised me at first glance, but actually makes some sort of sense from a psychological perspective. A discount suggests that, compared to the normal exchange, one person is losing out on the deal. A client with enough disposable income to regularly see a top pro-domme is unlikely to value a transitory financial saving over the negative psychological association of the discount.

If Miss Orleans had reworded the offer to suggest she was going to extend the session length but still charge her normal rate, I wonder if it would have changed the uptake rate? The cost/time ratio is unchanged, but it creates a different emphasis. Now the client isn’t taking something away, but is instead being gifted with something extra. A bit like how restaurants don’t give regular customers discounts, but do send out additional free courses.

Perhaps that might also have been an answer to Domina M’s discount session experiment. Offer it only as a bonus to regular clients who have already paid the full session rate in the past. That weeds out the wankers while rewarding the regulars. Although of course that does still risk diluting the brand. These things are never simple.

I’ve added her blog to the pro-domme section of my blogroll, so hopefully she’ll be popping up there with many more interesting posts in future. Thanks to hmp for the original pointer.

Photograph is of Domina M. For a little background on the photographer see this blog post.

Playing footsie

I’m feeling a little sore right now. I’m also buzzed, floating, happy. Lady Lydia gave me a good working over with a variety of slappy, swishy and swingy things. There was one particularly evil device, a short heavy plastic/rubber cane, that had the biggest delay from impact to pain that I’ve ever experienced. It was a case of WHAP…wait…wait…make a coffee…phone a friend…do your taxes….wait…OWWW – fuck me that hurts. Particularly evil when applied quickly in succession so the pain radiates and spreads in layers over time.

Two good learning points. One is that somebody digging their nails into my thighs and then dragging them hard across a very red and bruised posterior gets a spectacular yell out of me. Two is that being beaten on the feet and then tickled on the soles is a truly evil combination. In honor of that second point I thought I’d feature a little bastinado as the image.

This is Lady Jenny, a pro-domme based in Hungarian. I found the image on the Whipping Mistress blog.

Healthcare, British style with Lady Anna

A few weeks ago Lady Anna emailed me to ask if I’d be interested in reviewing her site – The Anna List Medical Fetish Clinic. She’d give me free access for a month and in return I’d write an honest review on what I found there. Obviously my first thoughts were around the ethical dilemma this posed. The best reviewers – the Michelin inspectors, the New York Times correspondents – never accept any kind of gratis service. They pay as they go. Don’t my readers deserve the same kind of journalistic integrity? My second, third and fourth thoughts were “Woohoo! Free kinky porn!”. After wrestling with these complex issues for at least 7 or 8 seconds, I rationalized that my readers deserve an honest appraisal of the kinky content that’s out there, whatever the risk to myself. I shouldn’t be worrying about the cost to my public image when I have a higher duty to look at all this porn for my readers. And if you don’t like that rationalization, I have others.

Immediately after emailing her to accept I was struck by another troubling thought. What if the material sucks? It’s one thing to comment on random images I stumble across on the web, but quite another to write my typical nonsense when the creative person in question is staring over my shoulder. Fortunately for me, and other kinky porn connoisseurs out there, it definitely doesn’t suck. I think she’s managed to capture on video a really good sense of some very compelling D/s sessions.

I guess I should start with the technical stuff first. She has four main video sections – dental, medical, rubber and operating. There’s also a collection of audio only files and an archive with older footage that’s less overtly medical. Most films are 10 to 20 minutes in length, and are shot in high def with solid camerawork. It’s not simply a static camera that captures everything from a single wide angle viewpoint as I’ve seen elsewhere. There are around 60 films, so far mostly in the medical and rubber clinic sections, and a new film is added each week. As should be obvious from her facilities page, she has a very well equipped set-up, with one of the best collections of medical equipment that I’ve seen. It gets used to for a lot of breathplay, anaesthetic roleplay and immobilizing bondage.

When it comes to the actual sessions themselves, her style is very cool, calm and collected. There’s no ice queen or snarling mistress here, just a matter of fact, it’s for your own good style of domination. There’s a genuine feel to it, which seems a weird thing to say given the heavy medical trappings. After all, you’re clearly not watching genuine medical procedures. Yet there’s a real sense of connection and trust between Lady Anna and her patients. This isn’t a couple of fetish models who just met an hour or so before a scripted scene. She also has a nice style of communication, chatting to the patient, but adding commentary for the viewer in the process.

Sometimes in professional porn it feels like you’re watching a circus act, a kinky cirque du soleil. The submissives are super-subs, pushed through a rapid sequence of extreme and amazing acts. They might express pain, but it’s rare to get a genuine sense of fear or a difficult limit being flirted with. In contrast both Lady Anna and her patients come across as a lot more human. There’s a feeling that the submissive is being challenged and the D/s dynamic between them explored. It’s not fast cutting, high paced material, but it does capture more of the feel of a real session.

Downsides? There’s really nothing that shouldn’t be obvious from the site itself. Obviously it’s just Lady Anna playing with her submissives in a medical fetish context. So if you’re looking for a wide variety of skinny models wearing traditional pro-domme gear then you’re liable to be disappointed. And while there’s less pure medical roleplay than you might expect, the setting is clearly a clinical one. If medical type activities doesn’t appeal, or you’re looking for lots of non-medical style play (e.g. corporal, cuckolding, strap-on, etc.), then I’d look elsewhere. But if the preview material is appealing to you, then I can’t think of any reason not to give it a shot.

A congress of dildos

I’m not really sure what the collective noun for a group of dildos is. Searching on the web didn’t result in a definitive answer, although I did like the suggestions I saw for ‘A quiver of dildos’ and ‘A battery of dildos’. Personally after the last few years in the US, I’m thinking that ‘A congress of dildos’ might be a good collective form. Plus, it opens up all sorts of japing potential around the misfortune of spoiling your congress with some Santorum.

My dildo train of thought (an expression which according to google has unsurprisingly never been uttered before) was triggered by some of my friends who work at the giant Internet retailer Amazon. They’re in the software and management part of the company but, as per company policy, had to spend a week running around a giant shipping warehouse preparing orders for customers. Apparently it’s mandatory for all employees to do it, whatever their level. It’s so they have some idea what it’s like at the retail cutting edge, where the virtual turns into the material. One thing that surprised them, and in turn me, was the sheer number of sex toys that they had to deal with. I’d always assumed that people tended to shop at specialist retailers for that kind of item, rather than a large general purpose site. Their comments were confirmed by this (long) Mother Jone’s article on what its like working for an online shipping company.

Really, a staggering number of dildos. At breaks, some of my coworkers complain that they have to handle so many dildos. But it’s one of the few joys of my day.
…it’s a welcome distraction, really, to imagine all these sex toys being taken out from under a tree and unwrapped. Merry Christmas. I got you this giant black cock you wanted.
Mac Mcclelland

With a little reflection it became less surprising why people would turn to Amazon or other large retailers for these kind of purchases. I assume it’s for safety. The boxes are commonplace, the credit card entry unspecific and the chance of being scammed zero. There’s no fear that a package is going to turn up in your condo lobby labelled “Freaky Sex Toys Inc. Please treat this giant vibrating penis as fragile. This way up.”

For an illustrative image or two I turned to the site of Mistress Nina. She has a very fine congress of dildos in some unusual shapes (additional shot of a few more here). It also seemed a shame not to also show the lady herself, so here she is looking rather fearsome is in the woods with a pair of whips.

Mistress Nina is a pro-domme based out of Belgium. Her session information is here and information on her private members site is here.

BDSM equipment page now live

The eagle eyed reader may have spotted a new option in the top menu bar – Equipment. This is a new page listing all the interesting sites selling equipment, furniture or clothes that I’ve come across. A few of the links are ones I’ve discovered via my usual random web browsing, a small number are from where I’ve shopped in the past, but the vast majority come from the comments and wish lists of pro-dommes. I figure that they’re probably the best people to listen to when it comes to BDSM hardware and outfits. After all, they buy a lot of it and give it a tougher workout than the average lifestyle player ever will.

If anyone has suggestions for other sites to add to the list then please leave a comment. I’d particularly like to know of smaller sites that offer very specialist craftsmanship. They’re typically the harder ones to track down whilst simultaneously creating the most interesting items.

For illustration I’ve picked two images. The first is from Walsh Metalworks and features Mistress Alex, shot by Natasha Gornik, wearing a metal corset fabricated by Sullivan Walsh. The second is a padded bondage chair from MetalBound. I’m afraid I don’t know the names of the models involved in the second shot.

Update: Both Jim and Lily kindly pointed out via comments that the submissive in the chair in the second shot is Madison Young.

Surrender v’s Submission

Troy Orleans has a new blog post up where she talks a little about her blogging history and what motivates her to write. It also includes an ask for interesting questions for her to answer via the blog. I’m kind of surprised that some readers see her blog as a source of wank material, and simply ask to have scenes described. Given the vast flood of porn available online, with an almost infinite supply of images and fiction, a pro-domme blog seems an odd place to try and elicit material to bash the bishop to. Clearly I have too high a respect for my fellow man. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

I didn’t realize she had had a formspring account for questions, and I enjoyed browsing back through it. One particular comment caught my eye.

I sorta think that most of my play partners are fairly submissive to me, but their submission is something that I’ve earned over time and not “submission” in a fetishistic sense. I’m rarely asking my play partners to do things they don’t want to do or “forcing” them to “submit” to anything. Rather, it’s that they give themselves over to me out of trust and respect and a passion for the journey that comes with good, intense, highly skilled play. Throughout my practice, I’ve always maintained that what I seek is not submission, but surrender.
Troy Orleans

If you look up the dictionary definitions of ‘surrender’ and ‘submission’ they’re almost identical, and yet surrender resonates with me and the way I play much more than the idea of submission. To surrender feels like a voluntary act. When I’m in a session the mistress doesn’t need to be overtly dominant. I cooperate. Encourage even. I enjoy being a partial instrument in my own demise. In contrast the concept of submission seems to suggest a response to a forceful act of domination. The other term often used in this context is ‘bottom’, but that never quite aligns with me either. That loses too much of the power exchange component. After all you can be a dominant bottom. Perhaps I need to coin a new word. Surrenderist? Surrendission? Surrmission?

My ugly neologistic musings aside, if you’ve got an interesting question for one of the top NYC dommes, then I suggest firing it in Troy Orlean’s direction. Just don’t try and use it to pad your wank bank. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an impressive image of heavy bondage from her Salon d’Orleans.

All the more to aim at…

I thought I’d finish my short sequence of whip posts with these two beautiful images from Mistress Trish and thrash. She’s aiming at a particularly delicate target, and he’s giving her a pretty big bulls eye to go for.

Aside from the visual pleasure of the whip in motion, these shots caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I like the way he’s leaning into the strike. He’s helping her to hurt him, which I think is always hot. I also like their expressions. Hers is gleeful and happy. She’s clearly concentrating on what she’s doing, but taking the time to enjoy it. In contrast he looks very inwardly focused, concentrating on his sense of self. I suspect it feels like time is running at a very different pace for the two of them.

Mistress Trish is a professional dominant based out of NYC. This was taken from her gallery page and shot by Aeric Meredith-Goujon photography.

Beautiful red lines

While I’m on a whipping theme, here’s an ‘after’ shot courtesy of Mistress Simone Kross (on the left). The whips aren’t quite as fearsome as the one from yesterday, but they certainly seem to have done an effective job on this slave.

I love having marks like this. I’ll inspect them immediately after a session, and then every morning and night as I’m changing. There’s something very satisfying about them, particularly if they raise the skin and I can actually run my hand across the surface to feel them. Partly it’s the reminder they give me of the session. The intensity of that moment. Partly it’s a sense of pride. I took it all without quitting. But mostly I think it’s the sense of connection. They’re the marks the dominant chose to give me. It’s a very personal gift and I’m always sad when they fade.

Update: Thanks to a comment from Jim I can supply a little additional background. This is a shot from ClubDom and the mistress on the right is Goddess Deanna of Boston.