Zippering – Femdom Resource

More on Paying the Talent

My last post linked to a thread on paying (or not) male submissives performing in femdom porn. In digging through the replies I’ve been bemused by some of the responses from dommes. A non-trivial number have a vehement reaction against it. An almost visceral level of disgust to the very idea. For example, I give you this thread or this one or replies to it like this one.

To be clear, I think it’s fine to use whatever business model works for you, provided it’s legal and consensual. Not all forms of compensation are monetary. If there are submissives who want to film for free, or even pay for the privilege, and customers willing to buy the resulting content, then have had it! The output might not be what I want to buy, for reasons I outlined in the previous post, but there are plenty of other potential customers out there.

What I think is weird is professionals getting upset at the idea of other professionals. Twitter is full of content producers posting about what hard work it is to make great kinky content. There’s a lot of emphasis on the fact that it takes much time and effort to get right, significant skills are involved and that it’s not sexy fun times for those involved. So why not a professional submissive? Everyone knows that male talent in regular porn gets paid. Same story for female talent in all forms of porn. So why the reaction to the very idea of paying male talent in kinky porn? There might be plenty of volunteers for the sub role, but that fact often shows in the final content. You get what you pay for. Or, in this case, don’t pay for.

This is two professionals – Beretta James and Dominic Pacifico – shooting for Divine Bitches. The kink.com company definitely had their problems, but they did at least pay their talent.

How will I explain this?

There’s one thought I regularly have when doing a particularly unusual or extreme activity. It’s not about how much it’ll hurt or if I’ll be able to handle the pain or not. The thought is – ‘If this goes wrong, how am I going to explain it to an ER nurse?’

It’s not stuff like bondage or whipping that triggers this thought. I figure BDSM has penetrated mainstream culture to the point where regular kinky activities will be par for the course in ER. It’s when things like electrified urethral sounds and needles through the scrotum come into the picture that I envision nurses reaching for the emergency straitjacket and number of the hospital psychiatrist.

When I was last down in LA I did a scene with Cynthia Stone where she sutured the inside of my mouth and ran surgical thread between the insides of my cheeks. There was even a shot of it on her twitter feed. Should the worst have happened, I wonder how an ER nurse would have reacted ? She spends all day stitching up people who have injured themselves in accidents, and then gets stuck with this muppet who has injured himself purposefully stitching up a healthy body part.

There’s no watermark on this, but I’d guess it’s from one of the kink.com sites.

End of an era in SF

By strange coincidence, just after my previous post on Kink.com and their famous San Francisco studios, this article popped up in my news feed – End Of An Era: Kink.com To Stop Filming In Its Famous Porn Dungeon.

It seems that this change was triggered, in part at least, by a combination of falling revenue and the difficulty in maximizing use of the Armory building. Less people are buying porn and mainstream companies don’t like to share space with famous kinky porn studios. The new approach will be to keep just the kink.com offices in the Armory, making it easier to lease/repurpose the remaining space, and then spread the filming to other sets and studios. Given the high cost of San Francisco rent, that may mean directors building their own facilities in LA or Vegas.

I certainly wouldn’t hold kink.com up as an exemplar for femdom porn. Their shoots tend to play to a lot of the classic femdom stereotypes. High in leather, snarling and sneering. Low in emotional connection, sensuality and fun. They’ve also had allegations of workplace mistreatment. However, all that said, I am sad to hear they’re no longer going to be shooting at the armory. It always seemed amazing that a kink dedicated company could buy a run such a big and impressive property in one of the most expensive cities in America. I can remember when kinky material was obscure, hard to find and (frequently) cheaply shot. Now we have dedicated riggers and set designers putting together complex scenes and fiendish equipment in a huge army building in the middle of SF. For me that building was a physical embodiment of kinks transition from obscurity to mainstream success.

I hope their new approach will allow them to stay viable. If you like their stuff, then now would obviously be a good time to subscribe. Femdom is a lot lot more than humiliation, pain and fancy bondage, but there’s no reason those elements can’t also be some part of it, and kink.com often did a pretty good job on them

These two shots are of Claire Adams and EuroSex from the old Men in Pain channel.

Zippering and Whipping

My San Francisco trip is coming to a close. Courtesy of Mistress Yuki I got to enjoy an intense clothespin zipper. Courtesy of Mistress Ai-Li I gained some vivid red whip marks across my torso. This image – featuring both those things – therefore seems like a good one to feature. I believe the lady is Aiden Starr and it was obviously shot for the Divine Bitches site.

Finally day of fun

I’m back in Seattle at the end of a pleasant holiday. On the last day I was fortunate enough to get to play with Domina Yuki, which resulted in a very fun session. At one point she played ‘whack-a-mole’ with a leather strap for a hammer and a very nervous mole. Or, as Captain Hammer might less subtly put it, the mole was my penis. I actually have a short video of that which, if I can deal with the conversion issues, I’ll try and post to tumblr.

We also did some zippering. That’s always an interesting but intense activity. The placement of the zipper, the length of time it’s left on for and the type of clips used can vary the sensations quite dramatically. These clips were particularly evil, especially when placed across the tight skin at the top of the chest.

The image below is a zipper from the Dudes in Distress site. For anyone wishing to see a zipper in action there’s a couple of scenes from kink.com in animated gif form here and here.

More fun for less dollars

This is the last in my trio of equipment related posts. Two days ago it was a bed costing thousands of dollars. Yesterday it was whips costing hundreds of dollars. Today it’s clothespins, costing less than ten dollars. That’s one of the great things about kinky play. If you want to spend thousands of dollars outfitting a dedicated play space (image from here), then it’s easy to do so. Alternatively, you can have a great time just spending a few bucks down your local hardware store. Or slapping, scratching, biting and kissing for exactly zero dollars.

The image is from the Cruelty Party site.

PDP

I’ve written fairly often on what I term PDS – Public Displays of D/S. Generally I come down on the side of letting shared public spaces be truly shared, rather than giving the majority veto power on their use. Kinky people are tax paying members of the public after all (or as Louis C.K. might put it).

However, this New Zealand man seems to have drifted into PDP – Public Display of Perversity. He was in his home standing at a window, when…

Burley placed a balaclava over his head before committing an indecent act using a sex toy, clothes pegs and a leather whip.
…
“The victim and her two friends look out the kitchen window several times as they could not believe what they were seeing,” it said.

I don’t want to make light of it, as clearly this was an asshole thing to do. But that bit about having to look several times (along with her friends) did make me smile. Apparently he was excited at the idea of getting caught. Given he’s now looking at jail time, I imagine that excitement might have diminished slightly.

His choice of implements no doubt added some extra weirdness to the story for most people, but I’ve had a lot of (consensual) fun over the years with those toys. Clothe pegs as zippers can be particularly interesting, as Aiden Starr shows below. I particularly like the red marks running down his legs from where they have just been ripped away.

This image is from this shoot for Divine Bitches. You can see another image of her putting the zipper in place here.

Altered states

This article has been popping up all over the web in the last few days, both on mainstream and kinky blogs. It describes research done on BDSM participants, testing their cognitive response to something called a Stroop task both before and after playing.

The results showed that people playing the pain-receiving role showed poorer Stroop task scores, which are seen with short-term reductions of functions in a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortexAmbler said. This region is linked to executive control, working memory and other higher-level functions.

The pain that comes with sadomasochistic sex may cause the brain to shunt blood flow away from this region, causing a subjectively altered state of consciousness — and the appeal of SM, Ambler said.

My initial response on reading this was on the lines of “Well duh!” Anyone who has experienced subspace and the discombobulation that comes along with that will attest to the altered states that kinky play can produce. I’m incredibly spacey and buzzy after my sessions, and can barely talk during them. I’d probably have difficult spelling my name during an intense play experience, let alone doing a Stroop test. However, I do like the fact that somebody is doing real clinical studies in this area. There’s lot of anecdotal commentary flying around about subspace (see this blog for one), but precious little that is grounded in quantifiable data. Even if those quantifiable measurements only involve 14 people in this particular case.

I’ll finish with a shot of a very kind and helpful lady guiding a gentleman towards his own particular altered state. I like the fact they’ve both sticking out their tongues, but for very different reasons.

I believe this is a kink.com shot, but I’ve no actual proof of that. I found it on the Superioridad Femenina tumblr.

Share the wealth

I’m a fan of Maitresse Madeline. As an independent and a kink.com performer I think she’s produced some interesting material, and I’ve featured some of it here in the past (for example – here, here and here). Apparently I’m not alone in appreciating her work, as somebody just paid $42,000 in an auction for a 1 hour web cam session with her. Assuming it’s not a stunt by the kink.com PR people, I’d guess that’s the most anyone has ever paid for a webcam session.

I’m not somebody who gets upset at rich people spending money. Moving cash from the wealthy to the less wealthy seems a fine thing to do. However, no matter how attractive and talented Maitresse Madeline might be, this didn’t strike me as an entirely optimal use of this gentleman’s kinky dollar. That got me to wondering what kind of alternative experience he could have got for the money.

Let’s stick to the West coast of the US. This guy was from Australia, so a first class round trip ticket will set him back around $6,000. Obviously he’ll need somewhere nice to stop, say a suite at the Beverly Wilshire (setting for the film Pretty Woman) at $1,500 a night. He’ll also need wheels to get around, and a Ferrari 458 runs to around $2,000 a day to hire. If we assume a 5 day trip, and throw in $500 per day for fine dining, that’s $26,000 so far. Now we get to the kinky stuff. I don’t think Maitresse Madeline does private sessions anymore but there are any number of gorgeous and amazingly talented dommes on the West Coast. For example, the famous Isabella Sinclair has recently started offering sessions again. Let’s shoot for an entire weekend of crazy kinky fun. At $300 per hour, that’s $14,400 for 48 hours and grand total of $40,400. That leaves him $1555 to splurge at the Stockroom retail store, with $45 left over to tour the kink.com Armory location.

Or, as a not at all crazy alternative to all this decadence, he could have a 1 hour web cam session. Let’s hope his network connection doesn’t freeze.

The image shows Maitresse Madeline doing a zippering in a shoot for Divine Bitches. I love the look on his face and the puckering of his skin as the zipper pulls away. Having been in that position many time I can definitely empathize.

Perfect predicament

There’s no image for this post, because what I want to share is an M/f scene. Typically I shy away from posting M/f material, even when I think the techniques displayed are really cool. This is after all a femdom blog. However, this particular zipper scene is so fun I can’t help but link to it. I love the idea of tormenting someone to the point where they ‘voluntarily’ hurt themselves. Lydia is a genius at combining pleasure with pain, and this reminds me of the kind of tricks she likes to pull.