Thoughts – Page 10 – Femdom Resource

The end

I played with Lydia for the final time last night. Unless she’s going to retire in the manner of a 70’s rockstar, with endless comeback tours, I’m going to have to adapt to life without her.

Our sessions are usually intense, but this last one was particularly so. Layering sensations is traditionally a big part of our play. Last night in the space of about 30 seconds I was screaming in pain, struggling for oxygen, moaning in orgasm, laughing in relief and crying at the finality of it. Being sweaty, sticky and teary makes for an interesting post session clean up.

She has left me with a lot of memories. I remember her look of concentration when trying to get a needle in just the right place. I remember her professionalism. In hundreds of sessions she was always on time, always prepared and never ever cut corners. I remember her gleeful sadism. She could always channel her inner child playground bully to magical effect. I remember her imagination. Elaborate bondage or interesting predicaments were often the result of ideas she’d dreamed up days earlier. I remember her creativity and the great dynamic we shared. Most of all I remember her laughter. We laughed often together, but the commonest reason for her was my growling or snarling at some particularly sadistic thing she’d done. I might scream or moan in the really intense parts, but it was afterwards, in the quieter moments, that a pinch or a squeeze could trigger a growl from me and a happy laugh from her. I’ll miss that most of all.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to curl up on the couch with several stiff drinks and binge watch Buffy Season 2. I feel in the mood for some teenage angst and heartbreak featuring vampires. I’ll leave you with an image of Lydia very much as I remember her. That’s obviously not me with her in the photograph, but it does show her smile and the kind of play we so often enjoyed together.

Keep it down in there

Stories about noisy kinksters scaring the neighbors and getting a visit from the local authorities are not uncommon. I featured the story of Mistress Evilyne and her nosy neighbors a few posts back. The latest example is this story from Germany featuring a vocal kinky couple. I’m not sure whether to be impressed or scared that the police had to force the door down to get their attention.

This kind of thing might seem amusing, but it can have very significant consequences. In many US states, including mine, the police have a mandatory arrest law for domestic violence. What this means is that the police will always arrest someone if they believe there is probably cause that any kind of domestic violence occurred in the last few hours. It doesn’t matter what the ‘victim’ says or what the context was – somebody is going away in the back of the police car. The word of a neighbor, marks on a body or just an anonymous report of suspected violence is enough to get you arrested with no discretion allowed.

I understand the rational behind the law. A genuine victim of domestic violence needs the opportunity to escape from his or her abuser. They might not feel able to speak up until they’ve been separated. Yet for kinksters it can have serious consequences. It’s one thing to have your friends and neighbors know you’re kinky. Quite another to have them think you’re a domestic abuser after seeing you taken away in a police car.

I actually know (indirectly) of a Seattle couple this happened to. They thought their playroom was more soundproof than it actually was. The end result was not only an arrest after the neighbors reported the noise, but a full blown court case featuring their friends called as witnesses. It didn’t matter that the submissive repeatedly told everyone it was consensual activity. Justice is not only blind, but also slow and frequently stupid.

I’m not sure who these lovely whip marks belong to, but I hope they were inflicted in a soundproof space. They look like they’d have resulted in some serious screaming.

An ending

This has been a depressing week for me for a number of reasons. Some of those I can’t share here, but the one I can share is a big one: Lydia is retiring. Regular readers will be aware that Lydia is the domme I’ve played with for years and has been a big part of my development both as a person and as a submissive. I’ve documented a small fraction of our play on this blog (for example here, here, here and many more). Amazingly she was actually the first pro-domme I ever played with, almost 6 years ago now, and we’ve got together for 2-3 hours every couple of weeks ever since then. Hearing that she planned to retire, and possibly leave Seattle, wasn’t entirely surprising but it really shook me up.

From a purely selfish and practical perspective I’m going to miss the joy of playing with her. She’s without doubt the most talented domme I’ve ever interacted with. In what is literally hundreds of sessions that we’ve done together, I can’t think of one time where it felt like we were repeating something or simply going through the motions. Every time I stepped out of my clothes, and went to meet her naked and smiling, it was the beginning of something magical. Certain activities formed common starting points – piercing, corporal, bondage, breathplay – but each time she’d take our play in some new exciting direction.

Emotionally it has hit me pretty hard. Partly because I’m not sure how to process it. I’m not someone who ever had a problem with the professional boundary. I’m not saying I’d have turned down the chance to make it a non-professional relationship, but that was never anything I expected or particularly hoped for. I just enjoyed the relationship for what it was. Now its ending I don’t have a natural way to move through the change. I end other professional relationships all the time, but my realtor or doctor hasn’t spent hundreds of hours with me in very intimate and intense sexual situations. The closest analogy I can draw is to losing a very close friend. Someone important to you and who knew you in a way nobody else did, is suddenly no longer going to be in your life.

Fortunately there a few weeks left before she hangs up her whip (as a professional at least), and I have the chance to play with her a couple more times. It’ll be kind of strange. I almost didn’t want to play again at all. But given all the fun we’ve had together, it seemed like it’d be silly not to enjoy our last opportunity. I’ve never yet cried in a session, no matter how hard the beating. I’ll be kind of ironic if I end up crying when the beating stops.

T & D

Mistress T has a nice post up on the joy of not fucking her. It’s all about the pleasure (from her perspective at least) of tease and denial. I like it because it’s a topic that pushes my buttons. I’m not a fan of the humiliation slant it can take (the ‘not worthy to fuck’) but I do like the teasing aspect (the ‘oh you’re so close’).

It got me thinking about why sexual denial and frustration can be so hot. Generally speaking I’m not someone known for his patience. As a kid reading instructions and getting the right tools was never a starting point for a project. That was something that happened later, once I’d already dived in and screwed everything up with my ignorant enthusiasm. Learning to delay gratification is a good thing. I just always thought the delay should be really really small.

I wonder if for me the delight in tease and denial came about as a process of transference. Maybe it started with trying to prolong pleasure. Stretching out the moment amplified the sensations. Do that often enough and the happy brain chemicals start being associated more with the build-up than the actual event itself. By trying to make the moment last, I trained my brain to link pleasure to the promise rather than the reward. And while a reward can sometimes be disappointing, a promise never can.

D is not an evolution of s

As I was writing yesterday’s post on La Domaine Esemar I had a nagging feeling it was a subject I’d covered before. Searching past posts didn’t find anything, but my bookmark list turned up this article from The Daily Beast. It’s an article I’d intended to post about but never got around to. It’s similar to the Cosmos article, giving background on the people and the Chateau, but provides a lot more detail and context. It’s certainly an interesting article, but there’s one really infuriating part in it.

This deep-seeded dedication to submission, and potential subsequent evolution into dominance, is one of the ways that La Domaine sets itself apart from the commercialized BDSM scene in New York City. People are encouraged to experience both sides, traditionally starting as a submissive and moving into a dominant role, to more fully understand the symbiotic nature of the lifestyle, whereas in other parts of the subculture people will adhere to one or the other for superficial reasons rather than trying, over time, to explore the inner-workings of their sexuality and come to a honest consensus about their true nature as a submissive or a dominant.

Firstly, dominance is not an evolution of submission. The two states are peers and partners. One is not a more advanced lifeform than the other. Secondly, the idea that it’s necessary to explore both sides to fully understand one’s true sexual nature is ludicrous. Are straight people superficial if they don’t first explore same sex relationships? Or have gay people not reached a honest consensus about themselves if they haven’t tried sleeping with someone of the opposite sex? If someone is curious or just uncertain then by all means explore. People’s desires can change and knowledge is a wonderful thing. D/s is not necessarily a binary choice, but some people know deep in their bones what works for them. The above quote smacks of ‘one true path’ bullshit and BDSM hierarchies, and that always drives me nuts.

The above image is Mistress Couple with a slave at La Domaine Esemar.

Mirrors

Mirrors feature heavily in most playspaces. Ask any pro-domme and they’ll typically tell you how important it is to have a lot of mirrors around. Quite frankly, until very recently, I never really understood that. After all, I know what I look like, and don’t have any desire to stare at myself. I might be masochistic, but I’m not narcissistic. The domme normally does look fabulous, but I can see her anyway. So what’s the point of the mirrors?

In recent months I’ve begin to appreciate them a little more. Originally I looked on them in the same way I might look at pornography. Is it hot? Is it visually appealing? Often the answer was no. Seeing me tied up and getting beaten wasn’t hot, because the comparison I always made was with commercial porn. But now I’m beginning to look at them as an alternative view on our dynamic. I’m not simply looking at two bodies, one hot, one not. I’m looking at two people doing some crazy kinky stuff. I’m watching a mutually fulfilling interaction. Seeing that play out from another angle in a mirror can be really interesting. I just had to let go of my pornographically conditioned view on what exciting kinky play looked like.

I found this image on the Femdom Style Counsel tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t have an original source.

Fetlife Fail

Fetlife has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons. Somebody scraped a bunch of user data off it and published it on the open web. This wasn’t a hack. They simply created a normal free account, which just takes a few seconds, and then ran a script to browse the site and download user profiles accessible to all fetlife users. They claimed that this was to demonstrate the lack of security in Fetlife. That position was undermined somewhat by the fact that they only took data from female users under 30 years old and published it in a file called ‘The Fetlife Meatlist’.

Understandably this pissed a lot of people off leading to articles like this and this. While the person who did it is obviously an asshole, I can’t say I was particularly surprised. There have been numerous articles over the years highlighting this potential attack, as well as previous technical demonstrations of the approach. Of course that doesn’t much help the 99% of Fetlife users who are busy getting kinky rather than reading techy sex blog articles.

It’s tempting to say that you should expect anything published online to be public. That’s both true and missing the point. Privacy is not a binary concept. At one extreme you have things like password protected accounts for storing private cellphone photographs. At the other you have sites like reddit and blogs like this one. To access the former you need either a hacker or a security flaw in the storage system. To access the latter you just need a web browser and an internet connection. Neither provides guaranteed privacy, as a lot of celebrities recently found out. Yet expectations of the two are clearly different.

Social media sites like Fetlife and Facebook fall someone between those two extremes. The problem is that their business model of eyeballs and advertisers pulls them towards the openness of a reddit or a blog. The expectation of their users, particularly for a content sensitive site like Fetlife, pulls towards greater privacy and protection. To date it seems that Fetlife has biased towards its advertisers over its users. So yes, you should always work on the assumption that anything stored online may become public. But that doesn’t absolve Fetlife of the responsibility to strike the right balance between its business model and its users privacy.

In the meantime, if you do take kinky selfies, be careful how you share them. Although if anyone wants to send me some, I promise to be careful with them!

This is by the Belgium artist Benoit Feroumont, who posts his erotic work under the handle Gracy Gimp.

Blogocalypse cancelled (for the moment)

Google has thankfully reversed course on their plan to eliminate all blogs featuring sexually explicit material. Bacchus does some detailed parsing of the retraction in posts here and here. I’m happy to see that some of my favorite blogs will be sticking around, but the bottom line remains the same. If you’re an adult blog on Google’s blogger, you’re on borrowed time. Move now or resign yourself to living with a digital Sword of Damocles.

It’s tempting to assign malicious intent in these situations, but I suspect it’s just another example of the the dynamics that exist in big tech companies when it comes to sexual material. To make good decisions you need data and debate. You need people to argue both sides of the discussion and play out scenarios based on the data. It’s no doubt easy for engineers to figure the cost of hosting lots of images, to determine the fraction of adult blogs and to point at sites using blogger as free hosting for advertising commercial porn sites. What’s needed on the other side is for people to dig into adult sites and point out their social value. Unfortunately it’s tough for the average tech person to stand up in a conference room and defend porn and explicit sexual material in front of their coworkers. Who wants to be the person telling their boss that the change might save the company millions of dollars, but it’s really important that Servitor’s femdom captions are shared with the world? I can just imagine the scene – “Yes, I know they’re pretty twisted. I’m sorry that castration one made you uncomfortable. And yes, I know Julie mentioned something about contacting HR after the meeting. And OK, so all the photographs are unlicensed. But dammit, it’s our ethical duty to publish them. It’s what our shareholders would want us to do.”

I’m being deliberately facetious, but I think it highlights the dynamics at play. That said, I think if you choose to work on an open blogging platform, you should be able to engage in these kind of arguments (although probably not in that exact form). If you’re not happy supporting forms of expression about subjects you’re not comfortable with, working with bloggers is not for you. Unfortunately the hiring processes for teams within large companies don’t filter all that well for that kind of criteria.
I had no idea what image I should feature with this post, so here’s something generally femdom-y and hot. It was featured on hmp’s blog, one of those that was in the firing line for closure.

I should add that I’ve absolute zero insider knowledge into Google’s decision making process on blogger. I’m just going by my knowledge of the dynamics of big tech companies. For all I know, they might decide everything by games of pin the tail on the intern. Or by having Sergey Brin throwing lawn darts into an organization chart after doing a dozen shots of Jägermeister. Either of those would at least account for Google+.

Big tech and adult content

The recent decision by Google to ban blogs featuring sexually explicit images/video or graphic nudity continues to reverberate around the blogsphere. While in theory text only explicit blogs are safe, but how long would you like to bet on that lasting? If they can change the rules once, they can do it again and probably will.

Over time Google has clearly got more conservative and less idealistic. Their image search is another good example of that. For example, assuming you have safe search off, compare a search for the lovely Mistress T on Google and Bing. Google barely features her in the results where Bing features a bare her from every angle imaginable. CBT on Google is a lot of powerpoint slides, where on Bing it’s wall to wall penises. My favorite is probably Men in Pain. On Google it’s a lot of stock photos of guys with headaches where on Bing it’s all sorts of good femdom stuff. This kind of conservatism is an expression of Google’s current culture.

They’re not alone in this. Apple has consistently run into bad press for censorship. Facebook recently got into trouble for it’s policy of blocking drag performers from their platform, and has many previous censorship problems. Amazon seems to run into censorship questions every few months.

What I find fascinating (outside my annoyance at the outcome) is how these kind of decisions are taken. The external perception of large tech companies is of corporate monoliths, but the reality is that very few people will be involved with these kind of decisions. I’ll also bet that they’re not taken at a particularly high level. A few product managers get into a room and make a bad call based on very limited information. They end up affected millions of people, but they’re not some grand expression of corporate will taken by cigar smoking board members. They’re a corporate culture filtered through a few people.

I had difficulty picking an image for this post until I stumbled on the shot below. It seemed apt.

Stress and Submission

This is my last post (for a while at least) on the topic of the alpha submissive (previous posts are available here, here and here). I’m afraid I’m finishing with a bit of a rant.

You can guarantee that whenever this topic comes up somebody will start talking about powerful people having stressful jobs. They’ll talk about difficult decisions, the responsibility of power and how BDSM and submission is a way to temporarily escape from that. For example, here’s an Alternet article and a Psychology Today article making exactly that argument. This is, in my not particularly humble opinion, complete bullshit. Not the part about submission as escape, just all the rest of it.

You know what’s stressful? Juggling two minimum wage jobs to try and cover your rent. What’s a difficult decision? Trying to decide if you should wipe out your savings on a hospital visit. Responsibility is bringing up your children in a not so great neighborhood while your deadbeat ex stiffs you on child support payments. Forget the guy investing $100M for Goldman Sachs. Give him $100 in his personal checking account and see how he feels about that.

I’m lucky enough to have a well paid job now, but I grew up in a family with very little money. I remember the stress that any unexpected expense could generate. There was always an underlying anxiety that something would go wrong and we wouldn’t be able to deal with it. Money might not buy happiness, but it sure as hell takes the edge off unhappiness. It turns problems into inconveniences. And nobody needs a good beating to take their mind off an inconvenience.

I think society prefers to think about executive and finance jobs as being particularly stressful and responsible in order to justify their incredible salaries. In some cases they may well be worth those salaries. Steve Jobs probably was. Jeffrey Skilling probably wasn’t. But whatever their worth, when the biggest downside to a decision is that you might have to settle for a new Ferrari rather than that yacht you had your eye on, that’s not a stressful decision. If anyone needs BDSM to take a ‘breather from the growing burden on selfhood’ (to quote the Psychology Today article), it’s the guy trying to cheaply fix the transmission on the 13 year old Ford that he needs to get to work tomorrow.

This is Miss Davenshaw, a London based pro-domme. She specializes in roleplaying corporate scenarios. So if you fancy being taken in hand by a strict female executive, I suggest dropping her a line.