Thoughts – Femdom Resource

Session Time

Interesting thread here by Lady Vi on how she feels session time should be measured. In her view negotiation and aftercare is very much part of the scheduled session time, not something that happens outside it. She therefore always allows at least 15 minutes before the session ends for that aftercare and clean-up process.

Obviously every pro-domme runs her sessions how she sees fit. Totally not my place to suggest differently. However, I will make a few observations from my experience on the client side.

Firstly, while that approach is the most common one, it’s not entirely universal. I’ve sessioned with experienced dommes who used most of the booked time for play and let aftercare spill beyond that. They presumably built that fact into their schedules and their pricing structure.

Secondly, because there’s not a single approach, it can be confusing when playing with different dommes. My first domme used to play for almost all of the scheduled time, so I assumed that was the standard. I was confused and a little put out when I played with others and found that it wasn’t common. Of course I adjusted my expectations in time, but what a domme might have assumed was entitlement on my part was really just differing experiences.

Finally, there is the risk of feeling shortchanged if the aftercare period wraps up quicker than expected. Miss Grey makes this point in a tweeted reply. I’ve walked out of some sessions feeling buzzed, looked at my watch and realized there was theoretically 10+ minutes of session time left. That’s a quick way to lose the buzz.

Personally, I like the approach Miss Grey adopts. I’d rather pay a higher hourly rate and allow some flexibility on the time for aftercare. To draw a slightly odd analogy, I think of it a bit like the bonus dishes that a fine dining restaurant may send out. Logically, you know you’re still paying for them as part of the overall charge, but it creates a happy positive energy when you get them.

This shot of Miss Grey and friend is from her website. She’s an SF based pro-domme and disciplinarian.

Wise Words

@heavy, a very experienced bondage bottom, has some wise words on anchoring body parts.

Friendly reminder that when doing bondage, please remember what is anchored. If someone is standing or even kneeling and passes out/ falls and their balls, neck, hair, etc. are locked to something you are seriously going to harm someone. Potentially permanently.

I’d guess a lot of my readers are likely to be bondage bottoms rather than tops, but you should still be aware of what’s going on and willing to speak up if it looks unsafe. After all, it’ll be your delicate bits getting ripped off if the worst happens.

I remember doing a scene many years ago in a sex swing. I was on my back and the domme was tying various bits of me to the surrounding metal frame. However, the swing was a lightweight portable affair, built out of the kind of thin metal tubing you’d expect in a cheap sun lounger. The joints all seemed loosely pushed together, held with friction and I could feel it flexing as I moved. At one point the domme wrapped thin rope around my testicles and tied them to the overhead frame. Looking back now I shudder when I think of it, but at the time I was inexperienced, floating in subspace and nervous about topping from the bottom. So even though it felt dangerous, I didn’t say anything.

These days, if the same thing happened again, I’d speak up and pause the scene. If the swing had broken and I’d fallen then it could have been a very nasty situation. I’m a CBT fan, but getting my nuts ripped off by bondage on a shoddy sex swing is one of my limits. I should also add that the domme in question isn’t someone I’ve written about here or done more scenes with.

I’ll finish with a gorgeous bondage shot featuring Heavy and NYC domme Roxanne Waters, as shot by Natasha Gornick. All experts in their field, you can be sure any scene with them will be managed safely.

You can find Heavy’s twitter feed here and his professional HeavyBondage4Life site here. Roxanne Water’s twitter is here and this is her professional site.

Fixing Things

After my previous post on what not to do in a session, I thought I’d follow it with a more positive one. Namely, if things do go wrong, what are some good approaches to fix the situation.

Before doing that, I’ll add two important qualifiers. Firstly, these aren’t my brilliant ideas. These are what I’ve observed creative and talented dommes do in my sessions with them. Secondly, I’m purely talking about mechanical issues here. When the battery dies, the body won’t bend or the rope just won’t cooperate. Not issues in the scene dynamic or emotions. Those are a far trickier set of problems that are above my paygrade.

Those qualifiers out the way, here’s three tricks I’ve seen successfully employed when a domme’s plan A has failed…

Playfully blame the submissive and use that to pivot the activity. A tongue in cheek – “Well look what you’ve done now!” – remark when the clip leaps off for the third time can a great excuse to set-up a new activity. After all, if I can’t keep those clamps on my nipples, it’s only fair she kicks me in the balls a few times. Most people don’t like being blamed unfairly, but a playful funishment for something that’s obviously not the submissives fault can be a nice way to shift gears and get away from the problem.
Shift into problem solving mode, making the submissive simply part of the puzzle to be cracked. The objectification part of this can be very hot. Suddenly there’s not a one-on-one dynamic. It’s just a domme figuring out how to make some recalcitrant equipment do the right thing. I’m no more or less important than the hard points, ropes or carabiners.
Ditch the problematic activity, shift gears to something totally different and loudly announce that fact. Most submissives will be so excited at the prospect of the new thing, they’ll totally forget whatever wasn’t working. If a domme announces she’s going to stop trying to get her humbler to fit me and instead is going to sit on my face, I’m not going to be lying there, struggling for breath and thinking to myself – “I wish we were still fiddling around the wingnuts on that humber. That was so much more fun than this.”

Speaking of face sitting, here’s some courtesy of the Mistress Land site. I don’t know what activity they were doing 10 minutes prior to this, but I think it’s a safe bet that he’s no longer thinking about it.

Be Yourself

Podopheleus has written an excellent blog post on the importance of being true to yourself when sessioning with a pro-domme. Drawn from his own experiences and missteps, it has a bunch of good advice and is well worth a read.

My personal learning has been that it’s important to be clear in your own mind what aspects of the dynamic are negotiable and which aren’t. What you can’t negotiate you either need to make peace with or walk away from.

For example, the activities you do and the general dynamic of a scene should always be things you can discuss and adjust. If humiliation is a hard limit, then negotiate that up front. If a domme keeps sliding into that dynamic despite the discussed limit, it’s an easy call to walk away.

Where it gets trickier is around the more intangible elements – chemistry, style, intuition, empathy, etc. Those are things that you can’t negotiate. They’re an intrinsic part of a domme’s character and how she approaches her sessions. In a perfect word every submissive would be perfectly aligned with their dominant. In reality it’s a question of how much alignment there is and if you can live with the areas of misalignment. The mistake to avoid is being unhappy with parts of the dynamic, not recognizing those parts as being non-negotiable and then not being willing to walk away.

To pick a very prosaic example of my own: I played with a domme who took a pretty relaxed approach to timekeeping. I’m very punctual. She wasn’t. The first couple of times I was kept waiting for lengthy periods I was understandably annoyed. The third time it happened I realized that this was just how she conducted sessions. If I kept booking and kept getting annoyed by the same predictable behavior, that was then going to be on me, not her. I didn’t think it was something I could bring up with her. She obviously knew she was late and didn’t particularly care. So either I needed to come to terms with that and enjoy all the other great elements of our sessions or I should stop scheduling sessions. Starting off every session in a bad mood because I’d been stuck killing time in a local cafe for 45 minutes wasn’t helping anyone.

I’ve no idea what kind of image would best illustrate the themes of the post, so here’s something simply fun any eye catching!

Final AI Thought

This is a third and final post (for now) on the AI topic. I’m bullish on the possibilities – more so than some commenters – because it seems to be entering one of those positive spirals that happens occasionally with tech. A tipping point is reached and what was only interesting to specialists becomes usable and consumable in the mainstream. That triggers interest, publicity and funding. That drives rapid improvement, which opens up more markets, which triggers more revenue streams, etc. etc.

The same kind of thing happened with 3D graphics in the 90s. Until then it had been kind of a niche technology. Readers of my generation may remember playing things like Battlezone or Elite. They seemed amazing at the time, but were never going to be a mainstream consumer product. Then in the mid 90’s the tech reached a quality tipping point and consumer interest in it exploded. The resulting positive spiral took it mainstream, made billions of dollars for the companies involved and ultimately led to the powerful computing clusters that are now driving AI.

Of course, there are also plenty of cases where we hit a tipping point, but that positive spiral never quite takes off. VR is another spin off from the graphical revolution, but despite a lot of money and hype from the likes of Meta and Apple, it never seems to quite get the feedback loop going. Hard to know which pattern AI will follow right now. The only thing that is predictable is that people will be making porn with it.

Above is an AI image created with midjourney by Helena Manzanita. It’s part of a series using the same seed through different points in time. You can see the complete series in this twitter thread.

Life’s Rich Tapestry

Warning: A sad blog post ahead. Not this specific on. I mean this one from Mistress Simone. It’s on her experiences with her submissives that have passed away. A thought provoking and moving post.

I was going to follow it up by commenting on how complex the pro-domme and client relationship is. But that’s not entirely true. I’d hate to put off nervous potential clients by over over-emphasizing that aspect of the dynamic.

They can be very simple. A mutually beneficial but limited interaction where someone scratches a kinky itch and someone else earnings a living. They can be delightful but ephemeral. The stars align, it’s magical, and then you never manage to meet again. They can be boring and unfulfilling. I’ve had a sessions – admittedly just a few out of many hundreds – that I thought were just meh. The chemistry isn’t there and you have to move on. And occasionally, as Mistress Simone describes, they can be deep, long lasting and complex. Like most relationships, you never know what you’ll find until you try.

This is Mistress Simone as featured on her professional site. She’s a Chicago and Saint Loius based pro-domme. You can find more of her thoughts via her twitter, blog and prodcast.

Twitter Troubles

My previous post on the future of twitter under Elon Musk was lost in the great migration. Short version: It was going to be chaotic and while he might not target kink and sex workers directly, there was a good chance they’d get caught up in the general chaos.

In hindsight that seems a decent bit of prognostication, although if I’m honest I did not expect the chaos to be quite as crazy as it is. His naïve views on content moderation causing issues was predictable, but I didn’t expect him to be such a terrible CEO, technical leader and human being. There’s no ideal way to lay off a significant number of employees, but most people seem to manage it without coming across as incompetent emotionally unstable narcists. Not Elon. The story of Haraldur Thorleifsson, an ex-employee he mocked online encapsulates everything about Twitter 2.0. Incompetently handled, needlessly cruel, publicly embarrassing and potentially costly.

As for the actual product itself, changes to the curated timeline appear to be very sex and sex work negative. Twitter has always had a curated vs chronological option for browsing tweets. Under the old regime they tended to be different, but not wildly so. The curated version (called ‘For you’ in the current UI) had more popular tweets that got engagement over past days, but it was more a reshuffling of tweets than a radically different user experience. From my experience, that no longer seems to be true. I can instantly tell when I’m on the ‘For you’ vs ‘Following’ view, as the content is so different.

Because I’m a bit of a nerd, I decided to try and measure the difference. I follow almost 500 people on twitter and only 20 of those accounts are not kink or sex related. With that kind of 95+ percentage skew, you’d expect my timeline to be full of awesome kinky goodness and that’s true for one of the options. Here’s what I measured for the ‘Following’ view when I categorized ~200 tweets the other night.

Category	Percentage of Tweets
Non-kink related	8%
Kink related but non-explicit	43%
Explicit kinky content	38%
Explicit content selling (OnlyFan, etc.)	11%

That lines up with what I expect given who I follow. Now here’s the breakdown I for a similar number of tweets on the ‘For You’ view.

Category	Percentage of Tweets
Non-kink related	45%
Kink related but non-explicit	20%
Explicit kinky content	8%
Clickbait bullshit	25%

You can see that the kinky material is massively down and the non-kinky stuff is way up. I even had to add a new category for clickbait tweets – the sort of deliberately rage inducing viral stuff that’s frequently incorrect and used to be a trademark of Facebook. Now I get more of those than I do from the actual people I’ve chosen to follow. That never used to be the case.

If someone was a huge baseball fan, and 95% of the accounts they followed were baseball related, I think it’d be seen as a massive product failure if 70% of the tweets they were shown were nothing to do with baseball. Yet that seems to be the current situation with the curated feed for twitter and kink/sex right now.

I’ll close the post with exactly the kind of content that Twitter now seems to be steering me away from. This is the incomparable Mistress Iris, as featured on her twitter feed.

You can see more of her amazing work at her Mindful Surrender site and via her OnlyFans.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Here’s a follow-up thought to my previous post on pro-domme names and some client’s desire to discover their ‘real’ one: Be careful what you wish for, because there’s really only downside to this knowledge.

The first downside is you could now accidentally let it slip in front of another pro-domme. Or, even more stupidly, name drop it deliberately. Only badness can come from this. Best case scenario is you’ll be considered untrustworthy and that anything done with you in private will inevitably become public knowledge. Worst case is the domme will assume you’re a creepy boundary pusher on a power trip. Good luck getting a great session in either case.

The other major downside is that the name might not be one you associate with hot sexy fun times. What if the leather clad mistress of your dreams happens to share a name with your least favorite elderly Aunt? One minute your quivering before Mistress Cruella. The next you’re trying desperately not to picture Aunt Cheryl, your chain-smoking relative with the annoying laugh, hairy mole and slightly racist views. No matter how kinky you are, that erection isn’t coming back anytime soon.

Pictured is an actual shot of a client shortly after nagging a sex worker for her non-professional names.

Ariel on OnlyFans

My friends have occasionally accused me of being lazy. I like to say I’m not lazy, I’m just an efficient time optimizer. Put off a task for long enough and it’ll often naturally resolve itself or cease to be important. Anything that does make it past a good healthy period of procrastination is probably important.

As an illustration of my method, I give you this rather silly article on OnlyFans by Louise Perry in the New Statesman. It was in my backlog to post about and throw stones at. Fortunately, while I was putting off doing that, Ariel Anderssen wrote this excellent response to it. She’s not only a smarter and a better writer than me but, as an OnlyFans creator, she can speak from a position of authority. So I saved time and my readers got a link to a much better analysis than the rubbish I was planning on writing.

The only thing I’ll tack on is a comment about the politics of the original piece. For those that have never heard of it, the New Stateman is a politically left magazine from the UK. I expect the right to be negative about sex work but I find it depressing how often it’s also attacked by the left.

The right’s objections are predictably based around morality, religion and enforcing social standards. They focus on the sex part, which should obviously be between a man and his wife, preferably in the missionary position with the lights out. The left typically object to the work part, suggesting that sex work is inherently exploitative, both for the seller and the buyer. There are no grey area for them. Formerly moderate lefties in other areas will turn into Marxists when sex enters the marketplace.

There also seems to be an underlying streak of puritanism in the left’s objections. Not the fake morality of the right, but more a sense that people enjoying themselves is somehow unfair. When reading the New Statesman article I couldn’t help thinking of the H. L. Mencken famous definition of puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”. In this particular case it seems to be a fear that someone might be happy and someone else might make a living from that fact. A truly terrible set of circumstances.

Ariel Anderssen is a sub BDSM model, so most of her images aren’t well suited to this blog. However, I did think my foot loving readers might appreciate this one I found on her twitter feed. For anyone who does appreciate some beautifully done female submission, then her OnlyFans is available here.

Big Day

Warning: This post focuses on politics, a topic I usually avoid here. I’m granting myself a rare exception in unusual circumstances. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

America is choosing it’s next president. As elections go, it’s kind of a big one. As a newly minted American citizen, I got to vote for the first time. I can’t say I got all emotional over it, but it did at least feel like an important rite of passage. Thanks to the weirdness of the electoral college, it probably won’t count for anything, but I at least did my bit.

I think this is the point where I’m supposed to urge my readers to go out and vote. Which, if you’re a Biden support, I absolutely urge you to do. Particularly if you’re in a swing state. If you’re thinking of voting for Trump, then my suggestion to you is best summarized by Bill Hicks and his views on Marketing. Seriously though. You are Satan’s little helpers.

At this point it’s not even a left vs right thing. It’s a basic question of character, competence and human decency. I can respect a right wing political view, even if I disagree with it, but Trump is something totally different. Something from a horror movie. Don’t make me regret adopting this country as my home.

To connect back to this blogs purported theme – let me direct you to this Rolling Stones article on pro-dommes encouraging their clients to vote Blue. The story even made it into Colbert’s monologue. They’re probably not going to swing the election, but every little helps.

This is one of the domme’s featured in the Rolling Stone article – Mistress Orion. She’s an NYC based pro-domme. You can find her twitter feed here and her OnlyFans here.