The beauty of dominant women
Continuing the pegging theme from the previous post with an image that made me smile. There’s a lot going on in those two expressions. I also like her relaxed confident pose in comparison to his nervous and slightly tentative stance. It’s got a real predator/prey vibe to it.
This is obvious from the Strapon Dreamer site.
I’m always interested to read mainstream descriptions of kinky behavior. When you spend a lot of time reading sex blogs it’s easy to get blasé about all sorts of activities. Seeing it filtered through a vanilla perspective can help illuminate how other perceptions might differ.
Take for example the article from yesterday’s post featuring the unfortunate domme who was arrested for needle play. It’s not particularly judgmental (compared to some of these articles), but it still talks about drawing blood, sticking needles into genitals and suturing. I can imagine most vanilla people, and quite a few kinky ones, reading that and going “Ewww! That’s crazy. What kind of insane masochist would do that?” Yet I’ve done all those things, and they don’t really hurt that much *. I’d say an old fashioned caning is way more painful. Hell, smashing my toe in the dark into the corner of the kitchen table is more painful. Familiarity normalizes them.
It’s also a good example of the importance of language. Call it play piercing and it sounds relatively innocuous. Play isn’t exactly a scary word and lots of people get decorative piercings these days. Describe it as needle play and the intensity ramps up a little. Describe it as needles stuck into genitals and it sounds nuts. I touched on a similar theme with respect to the idea of sadism a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a concept that applies pretty broadly in BDSM. Spanking sounds fun and lighthearted. Corporal punishment not so much. Breath play is innocuous next to asphyxiation or smothering. Would you rather say you were pegged or that you were anally penetrated with a dildo? And talking of which…
I found this on the Pegging with a Smile tumblr. I’m afraid I’ve no original source for it.
* One possible exception to the “don’t hurt that much” comment is suturing. It’s OK if you use hypodermic needles to pass the thread through the skin (as I experienced here), but using a genuine suturing needle hurts like hell (as described here).
Just hours after writing yesterday’s post on piercing I was intrigued to stumble across this article from Japan on a domme getting arrested for needle play. She’d posted images of it on her blog (link anyone?), and obviously the Osaka police have such low crime rates that they’ve time to waste hassling adults having consensual fun. Apparently it’s illegal in Japan to do anything that might draw blood without a medical license. That would seem to make a lot of BDSM play potentially risky, as even canes or single tails can draw blood if applied with sufficient force.
Obtaining a medical license seems like a tough requirement just for getting your kink on. I’m guessing it’s not the kind of thing you can obtain with a few evening classes at your local adult education establishment. In fact according to this article, even medical students in Japan can’t do minor procedures like give an injection. They have to graduate, which takes around 6 years. Yet despite that rule, the US somehow still manages to spend 2.5x times what Japan does on healthcare. Getting arrested for play piercing images clearly isn’t the only screwed up thing here.
I really wanted to find a sensual and visually attractive piercing shot to feature with this post (something like this). Unfortunately, despite a lot of hunting around, I’ve come up short. Ironically needles tends to feature in a lot of Japanese femdom movies, but there’s little good imagery out there. Most of what there is tends to be extreme and lack any D/s vibe to it.
Instead I’ll go with the medical theme and something from the pen of the great Sardax. I’m not sure what ailment this course of treatment is for, but I’m sure it’s a highly effective approach.
You can find more of Sardax’s fine work at his site. You can also pick up his illustrated and translated version of Venus in Furs at Amazon UK.
I try and pick images for posts that will be generally interesting for a broad range of people, provided that people = kinky and interested in femdom. I didn’t start this blog for it simply to become my online porn collection. There are plenty of tumblrs out there if that’s all your after. However, now and again I feel the urge to post something that’s just for me. Something that pushes all my buttons and makes me silently sigh with a sense of wistful happiness. This is one of those times.
The two shots below are of Mistress Natsukiss. She’s featured in several of my posts in the past (for example here and here). I’ll be the first to admit that a tight leather outfit, black boots and a whip is a look that has featured in countless generic femdom images. But there’s something about Mistress Natsukiss that makes them work afresh for me.
I found these shots via the Phobos tumblr.
Another day, another image I can’t attribute to the original artist. I’m beginning to get a touched vexed by my repeated failures in that respect. I’m not finding or researching images differently. I’m beginning to wonder if Google’s reverse image search is crawling less adult images these days.
Whoever the artist is, I like the sense of energy they’ve brought to the image. There’s aggressive some hair pulling, ass slapping and buzzing vibrators. It’s playful, but with an edge. Based on the visual evidence, he’s certainly not too upset about the situation.
I found this on the Elegant Femdom Art tumblr.
I thought this was an interesting article on the history of the word pervert. Apparently it started off as a word to describe an atheist. It wasn’t till the end of the 19th Century that it became associated with sexual depravity. Prior to that unconventional sexual acts were simply seen as a sign of moral degeneracy and decadence. It was the early sexologists who created the idea of sexual desire being an orientation and re-purposed perversion (‘turning away from the right course’) to describe people who fitted into that group.
The really shocking thing about this is that it means the highly historically accurate Blackadder II, set in 16th Century Elizabethan England, used the word incorrectly for the character of the baby eating bishop of Bath and Wells.
Bishop: Yes. You see, I am a colossal pervert. No form of sexual depravity is too low for me. Animal, vegetable or mineral — I’ll do anything to anything.
Edmund: Fine words for a Bishop. It’s nice to hear the Church speaking out for a change on social issues.
The clip itself can be seen here. And for any of my US readers who have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, I suggest checking out one of the most brilliant comedy series ever recorded. It’s currently on NetFlix streaming, although I’d recommend skipping the first season and sticking to seasons 2, 3 and 4.
As for an image I wanted something featuring a whole heap of perversity, and the one below seemed to fit the bill. There’s bondage, cross-dressing, cuckolding, homosexuality and butt plugs. All sorts of good stuff.
I found the image via the sissiebondage tumblr and once again I’ve failed to track down an original source for it. Either Google reverse image search is really sucking these days or I’m picking particularly obscure images. If anyone knows the artist then feel free to leave a comment.
A few weeks ago I wrote about scene negotiation and one particular way it could go wrong. I originally planned to follow that up with a post on the right way to do it, before realizing how incredibly egotistical that would be. I’m no expert to be telling others what to do. Instead let me simply describe what has worked for me in the context of negotiating professional sessions. That has been a learning experience for me over the years, and maybe there will be something relevant to others.
One of the primary things I’ve discovered is that familiarity breeds understanding. My best sessions have always featured people I’ve played with multiple times in the past. That’s not to say I haven’t had great first sessions, but it’s hard to have a really intense and moving scene when I’m still getting to know someone. I therefore play exclusively with Lydia in Seattle and I try to revisit dommes I already know when traveling. It’s so much easier to do scene negotiation when I’ve got past history to draw on and a shared understanding to work with.
That said, there are definitely learning opportunities that come with playing with new people, and all relationships have to start somewhere. So here’s my approach when I’m getting to know someone…
Hopefully that short list might be useful for a few readers. I’ll save some follow-up thoughts for another post. Picking an image for this post was kind of tricky. Nobody photographs pre-scene negotiation. So going in completely the opposite direction, here’s an image of the kind of session you’d really want to negotiate carefully upfront. Guns don’t do much for me, but I do appreciate their iconic nature. It’s just not the kind of activity I’d want to be surprised with!
The image features Mistress Eve, a pro-domme based out of London. She has a very extensive list of interests, so if you’re in the area I’m sure you’ll be able to negotiate something interesting.
I’m not sure who the artist is, but this drawing puts a smile on my face. What submissive guy, or indeed any guy in touching distance of sanity, doesn’t want this? It’s simple but sexy.
I feel the need to return to the topic of sadism and sadists. Some of the comments left on my post from a few days ago were thought provoking. In particular I was struck by how overloaded the term ‘sadist’ is.
Most labels we apply to people also carry a judgement about their behavior. Consent (or the lack of it) is seen as so important it’s often baked right into the label itself. For example, if I have consensual sex with a partner them I’m a lover, but non-consensual sex with anyone makes me a rapist. I can be a consensual flirt, but never a non-consensual one. That’s sexual harassment. I can be an employer of consenting workers, but only a slaver or trafficker of non-consensual ones. Actions themselves can be neutral, but the labels we use on people rarely are. A punch is neutral, but a boxer is not the same as a mugger.
Sadism is fairly unusual in that respect. It carries no information on consent. It’s accurate to describe a domme who enjoys S&M as a sadist. It’s also accurate to describe a horror movie psychopath in the same way. This strikes me as problematic when talking about kink in a mainstream context. As hmp accurately pointed out, non-kinky people really don’t get the idea of consensual sadism at a gut level. Having the same label used for very different behaviors is therefore particularly confusing. People are used to labels implying judgement about behavior, and given their gut feel about the infliction of pain, their default view of sadism will always be a bad one.
Masochism doesn’t have this problem. It’s a more passive label and consent is naturally implied. We really need another word for sadist that pairs more tightly with masochist. That way we could leave sadism as the general label for non-consent and save the new word for only when masochists are consensually on the receiving end. I’ve no idea what that word should be however. Any suggestions? Maybe I should get Dan Savage on the case. He’s done a pretty good job so far coining pegging, GGG and Santorum.
Given the subject matter it seems only fitting to finish with an image of a sadist in action. This is from the Divine Bitches site.
Apologies to anyone who has recently left a comment I haven’t responded to. My blogging time on this particular vacation is proving to be even more limited than I expected. I will get back to all the comments in the next day or so.
In the meantime here’s a fun bondage shot featuring Princess Kali and a neatly packaged male. I really like the little extra touches like the big toe ropes and the wrap around his balls. I imagine that’s a pretty stressful position to be in.
The image has been messed with as so often happens on tumblr (I found it via Continuous State of Desire). I believe it’s originally from a Men in Pain shoot with Princess Kali.
