O BDSM Scene

Your friendly local BDSM scene, or scenes around the world…

Real Life Femdom Party: Wildcard’s Birthday Spanking

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Balloons!Last Saturday I helped hold a celebration for my Gentleman Nemesis’s birthday. It was a simple, casual six person dinner-and-company-affair, with two other femdom couples. That’s right guys, a real life femdom party- but maybe not completely like the kinds you see in porn. Also, we had tacos. :9

The founding kernel for this event was organizing a proper, mean birthday spanking for Wildcard. The first misconception to throw out, if you’re trying to imagine this, is something ultra high protocol in a classy mansion or high end loft. Although Wildcard’s residence is plenty homey and tasteful, the reality of secret BDSM is how well we blend in. The subs did not arrive on leashes, and the only fetish-y thing was that I decided to wear my corset, which is a steel bone and satin number in severe black, but this was as much because I don’t have many occasions to have my waist cranked down by 3.5 inches. Everyone else, on the other hand, came in comfortable, casual clothing, the sort of stuff where you won’t feel silly or awkward. None of the female doms or male subs have a thing for cross dressing, so there were no submissive sissy maids simpering over tea. Sorry, I know, trés disappointing for a certain hopeful number of you.

The guest list was some familiar faces: LadyCobra, Vosko, Ballbuster and Mr. Sub, which meant two other couples with solid dynamics. Once again, I really have to say they emphasizes how you can all be technically on the same page but have radically different ways to do things. It’s also possibly one of the best parts of playing with other people because you get such a wide range of dynamics and outcomes.

Powerhouse couple Ballbuster and Mr. Sub have had years to build their dynamic together. They’re real proof that some of the meanest, hardest play is built on a strong foundation of love and mutual support. Their style is also something that developed together, with definite switch tendencies in Mr. Sub that mean that when he’s not otherwise occupied in the sub role he’s eager to give input. With two minds put to the task, a lot of predicaments and pure wanton sadism pops up, and he’s as eager to share it with any and everyone else as his dom. On the flip side, with that sort of regular play partner, in scene Ballbuster runs things hard and fast, with intense cruelty and no warm ups- then again Mr. Sub takes a lot to get him down, and his idea of after care if bouncing around all pumped up, while the dom flops, exhausted in a corner. If you need to imagine them: Think huge toys, heavy pain and hard humiliation. With a sub like Mr. Sub it’s quite clear where Ballbuster learned her confidence- she doesn’t seem to worry about pulling out all the stops and the effect is spectacular. Also she went as a pink pixie fairy last halloween- take that how you will.

Meanwhile, LadyCobra and Vosko’s dynamic is a lot more characterized by LadyCobra’s attentive preciseness to detail. Vosko is a lot more vulnerable in play, and while he’s got a great sense of humour and strong public persona- in kink he’s got a softness there (and incidentally is the baby of our little group of libertines), which is not to say he is a wimp, but rather that there’s much more of an impression of fragility there while he’s being given fierce looking bruises. Paradoxically, by appearance, he’s also the sort of massive Scotsman that gave the ancient Romans second thoughts, and would not be out of place among a line up of metal fans. He’s well matched by LadyCobra who is, as I described before, incredibly technically precise and proper, with impeccable scene control. If anyone’s going to make “traditional” kink look good it’s her. She’s also very, very good at bringing just the right level of pain or strictness the moment needs, and making her approach to a submissive or bottom fit with just what the sub can take, all without making her subtle adjustments obvious.

Organizing an event is mostly complicated by the shyness that’s inherent in trying to get other people up in your sexuality without creeping them out or getting creeped out. Everyone’s needs and desires are intensely personal, so I’m always careful about presuming too much. Suffice to say, these things never happen with any sort of script or expectations beyond good taste and common sense. We agreed to a round robin, each of the guys in the sub role would get beat, birthday style, with each dom, and the implement of her choice, one whack for each year.

Wildcard was perfectly happy to share his day, because he’s one of the least selfish people I know. (Well, perhaps he’s nursing secret grumbles, but I don’t think he’d ever dream of vocalizing them if he did.) He also provided the homemade pork tacos, which sounds dirty, but actually was more that he’s an amazing cook- food which the guest inhaled, and I made a white cake with chocolate ganache and a caramel middle. I mention this because having fun is key, and if you want to organize your own party, keep in mind that you will have more fun if want to spend time with the people you play with outside of being kinky with, and at them. But, back to the beating and the humiliation!

I had Wildcard strip in front of us, piece by piece, folding as he went. He blushed really cutely as I made him remove every single item, except for his socks. Wildcard is ultra-slim in a trim bodied sort of way, and by affect, naturally very reserved and non-demonstrative about his feelings. He generally puts a lot of effort into his appearance- you won’t see him with his hair unseen to, or his beard untrimmed and even his casual clothing is well fitted and flattering. There’s a certain sort of pleasure I get just from mussing that perfect control in how he can present himself.

And it seems like my “take it off and fold it!” approach encouraged the others, because they soon followed suit, and Vosko was all vulnerable and stripped under much the same script, and then in his turn, Mr. Sub shucked clothes with the casualness that belays his long experience. There are not, to be frank, many chances to objectify men properly. I enjoyed it.

The best parts, for me, are always the reactions. Watching the way they take the hits, in this case posed just so, kneeling in an arm chair, with ass raised. My friends had brought their toys: paddles, bamboo canes a rubber baton and other entertaining means to smack flesh into submission. Wildcard had, for the second half of the evening, lost the right to speak unless spoken to or unless given permission. The effort was a practical one- with so many interesting people it was hard for him not to get distracted and interject into what people were saying. Charming conversationalist or not, he has an extremely hard time getting into anything approaching a submissive head state and his play collar was undergoing repairs.

I’m going to be honest and say that getting him in role or close to in role calls upon pretty much every shred of latent telepathic talent I might have in regards to reading subs (or in his case switches)- if his current job fails the guy should take up poker as a career. It’s also somewhat compounded by the sexual etiquette. I knew that he was incredibly excited to get a birthday spanking from multiple people because he told me as much, but the flirting that tends to be involved in BDSM encourages br’er rabbiting, ie other words pretending to be emphatically not into the act that you’re very much craving so the dom can feel like a meany with power over you, which means cultivating an air of reluctance. Since there’s an extra onus on dudes to be reserved in their sexual approach to avoid coming across as pushy, this can lead to kinksters behaving as shyly as a bunch of debutants.

Letting other women beat Wildcard is interesting for me, because it lets me watch how he responds. I gave him a warm up first, a bare skin, bare handed spanking to help him get ready for what was going to happen and passed him off, to go first in the chair. His fate involved his own belt laid hard against his skin, swung by Ballbuster’s hand. Then each man had his own turn following him.

The fact that Vosko was the youngest (and least spanked) did not, in any way, mean people went easy on him. Although he took less hits, it’s Wildcard who has the gentlest limits. Mr Sub, of course, needed a vicious thrashing to even make him do more than go “that’s niiiice” and go to sleep. All three men ended up with deep purple bruises, eagerly photographed and watched over as they faded over the past week.

I liked the fact that Wildcard was gently shaking a little bit, after his first third of his use. I liked that he melted into quiet vulnerability, rolling into a curled up naked ball, and that he would occasionally whisper to me. I liked that LadyCobra caught the vibe I was trying to build and worked well with it, and that Ballbuster, while she didn’t seem as into it, was patient enough to play along.

In any case, the guests seemed happy enough I can be sure there will be a repeat. Hurrah!

BDSM Play Party Fun Times & Flogging Practice

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Three dominant women on one bottom, flogging lessons, a really slutty outfit, public sex. How was your weekend?

Whip, whip, whoops!So, last weekend I went to one of Montreal’s classier dungeons for a BDSM play party- that’s coming from a part of the quadrant of the scene that I participate in, although the means by which you get an invite to this particular party make it a semi-private event. The dress code, happily in a sea of fetishwear obligations, is to wear what makes you feel sexy. You’ll see an artist rendition of roughly what I choose, albeit from the back, which shows the cute bow but not the sparkly pasties.

And I brought Wildcard.  Dear reader, that’s the man who is being recently inducted into my wicked life of hedonism. New and yet not new to BDSM, this party was his first spot of public fun.

He also had his first munch that week, which for reasons I won’t get into, had its own hilarity attached. A polite summary is that we are Trying To Do Things Right, including the Going Slow bit, with a sideline in Avoiding Gossip. The result on that front is mixed, given my habits, and overlapping acquaintances, but it’s The Principle Of The Thing.

But, shocking scandals of my lovelife aside, what about the party?

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Topping From All Angles (And A Bit Of How I Dom)

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Let’s talk about topping from the bottom.

Recently I did tentative discussions about stuff with someone about kinky fun times- the usual things about what happens to whom, and how. and, over the course of very gentle exploration, we discussed that there were things he liked, yes, but he didn’t want me to think he was topping from the bottom.

A bunch of people are weighing in on this particular dispute topic right now- the danger on emphasizing the negatives of that term. Snarksy blogged about it, where as over on Twitter @MsCrosswords from Beyond the Valley of the Femdoms was talking about the challenge of a partner who thought he wasn’t allowed to ask for stuff. At all. I’m old enough, in terms of participating in the online kink stuff, to remember when the term was not out of favour in the circles I run in. To be precise, “Topping from the bottom”, when I first encountered it, meant the phenomena in which the one who is receiving the topping (the bottom) or the person who is ostensibly submissive, is calling the shots in some format.

Back in the day, it was often a term used for a punishment dynamic gone wrong, where the rigidity of the rules meant that a masochist was getting rewarded for doing stuff the dom really didn’t want. It’s also was expanded to refer to the phenomena of the laundry list, something that seems mostly particular to F/m more than M/f.  In that case, it was a  series of demands based on the sub’s perception of D/s in exclusion to what the dom wanted, often with poor desire to respect boundaries. It’s good to have a term to talk about this problem, right?

So how can this go wrong?

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Why Feminism and BDSM Go Together Well

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Oh Noes, Feminisms! Red Alert!

Bra go poof!Say feminism, and 95% of your audience battens down their hatches like you said “hurricane”, or finds something else suddenly very, very interesting. Like the carpet, or their own shoes, or that urgent appointment they just remembered to alphabetically file all the food in their pantry. At least, as a femdom, I can be openly feminist and nobody bats an eye. Of course a significant number of people will confuse this with female supremacy, which is an entirely different thing. The relationship BDSM, as a whole, has with this philosophical approach is a bit more dubious.

Much of this is because BDSM is made up of people, and people have problems with feminism. In my mind part of the problem with feminism, is that it’s a really big tent with a couple of centuries of activism and writing under its belt. There is no central board of feminism, so pretty much anyone can do it, and say whatever they like. And like any big movement, it’s  going to be in a state of constant internal argument. It’s also part of the left, which means that like all forms of left-y ism, it occasionally shades into woo (the Goddess!) or becomes way too self flogging for popular consumption (freegan-vegan!), or the lingo of the current generation of activism  makes it impenetrable to the novice (check your cis-privilege!).

Before I launch into talking about the subject, it’s necessary to address a number of things- first of all Straw Feminists. If you’re not familiar with the philosophical ideas, it’s quite possible that you imagine a feminist to be an angry, ugly woman who seeks to do horrible things to men. This is one of the reasons why as a femdom nobody assumes I shouldn’t be feminist (at least the angry and sadistic part) which is depressing for other reasons. If your idea of feminism is about doing mean things to men, you are doing it wrong. 

Of course, some, if not most of the shit that feminism gets flung its way is the same old tired misogyny that makes women expressing themselves be subject to attacks so vile that they functionally justify feminism.  If you think feminists are all angry scolds, you are part of a proud tradition that dates to before women were permitted to own property or vote. And you don’t know what a feminist is.

Another thing you need to take into consideration is that feminism only exists within the bounds of the same culture that everything else does. Thus there are feminists that are porn hating prudes and feminist porn stars. There are feminists who are sexist, or transphobic, and feminists who love everyone equally. Any idea within feminism can be taken to extremes just like any other idea could.

On the other hand, I’m taking it for granted that if you are this many paragraphs into this blog post you are probably sex positive, probably pretty diversity friendly and you like lots of different kinds of people. If you don’t identify as a feminist you at least think equality is a good thing (unless you are secretly or not so secretly under the impression women should rule). If you’re not, please feel free to get nice and foamy in the comments. Additionally, I’m not going to address the “Not a feminist but…” thing in this post, but save that for another time.

But, onto how feminism gets treated in kink discourse!

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The ProDom Problem Thing

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Or: In which Miss Pearl opines on what she knows not.

Disclaimer: I am not a sex worker. I do not speak for sex workers. I really hope this is not patronizing and this is me trying to think about what I’m bombarded with. Tell me why I am wrong in the comments if you would like.

Professional female dominants are such an integral part of BDSM communities it’s functionally impossible to imagine the scene without them, but they are also one of the groups people get pissed off at most. Amateurs hate the fact that it turns sex into a job (especially non-pro femdom, where there is a decided difference between beating men because it makes you horny and beating men because you get paid, so the fact that news outlets generally are obligated to quote one pro per article on kink-in-real-life really colours things) or encourages judgment on performance standards. Male subs complain about getting spammed with business solicitations, or hand wring about the vulnerable and the naive being preyed on by wicked fraudsters. All these things suck.

But, in their defence, prodoms generally own the dungeons we play in, they make a reasonable deal of the porn we enjoy, and they tend to end up as sex educators and active contributing community members.

There’s more reasons…

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Why Are There So Many Nerds In Kink?

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The reality is that I think kinks are as evenly distributed through the population as anything else, but when you enter the BDSM scene, you can be reasonably confident that all the markers of nerdery will be present in a good percent of the people at you average play party or munch.

I can go to a munch and be more than confident that I won’t be the only one who enjoys RPGs. While genre classics are transitory and I can easily find people who enjoyed Starship Troopers or girls who grew up with Anne Mccaffrey and Mercedes Lackey, the overlap between the poly, the pagan, the terminally nerdy gamers, the historical re-creationists and so forth has been long remarked upon to the point that it’s practically a cliche. If you tel me “she volunteers at the Rennefaire” I’m not going to think it’s at all unusual if you tell me “she is also extremely interested in table top, is a practising Norse priestess and is one third of a poly triad in which she is the alpha submissive”. And don’t tell me you didn’t notice either!

I’ve seen it remarked on negatively, as nerdery is not for everyone- nerd culture also has its problems, which can make a barrier to entry for people who are incidentally kinky but not really nerdy. But I don’t accept the premise that kinky people are inherently *Smarter*. I actually know plenty of dumb nerds. Ability to enjoy specific intellectual property is no marker of a high IQ.

So why so many damn nerds?

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F*cking Organizing

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So I’m the host to the 18-35 munch in Montreal at the moment, and we’ve been wildly successful and got very big. There’s some problems though. See this as a release of steam, I’m not mad at the munch guests.

1) The age thing- people trying to squeak under in their late 30s or older, or bringing an older partner. This is not making other people happy. I have to make a blanket ruling about this for the munches now.

2) Hosting issues- We’re too big for most venue’s reserved spaces. Everyone wants the cheapest possible drinks, a semi-private area, food and good mingling, but is opposed to space rentals. People are complaining it’s too crowded.

3) People behaving badly- I need to wrangle a harassment case, though the person making the complaint is stubbornly refusing to be specific. We’re getting big enough we attract creepers. There’s enough people that I’m now getting “too cliquey!”

4) I think it’s big enough to need to be a committee effort, but organizing that, alone, is also a headache.

18-35 Munch

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Last Thursday was the 18-35 munch, an event that has exploded in size at this point, and now is pulling in quite the large group. We’re meeting in a larger bar now, and with our general scale I’m having to discourage older persons from attending.

We had a few old people slip in this time, and older gentleman get turned away, accusing me of being hostile when it’s his first munch ever- though there were a lot of folk of that age group so I’m not sure who of the older folk that was or even if the poor bastard was actually 34 and well weathered. The thing is, I don’t set out to make old people feel bad- the age limit is in place because gatherings of mostly 40+ aged people scare the 19 and 20 year olds away. And there are not so many options for the latter group. I’m not going to throw the 36 year olds out, but neither do I want this to turn into an all ages thing.

Especially sad, a lot of the older folk who sent me courtesy emails missed the point. Telling me that they liked younger people or looked young wasn’t really the subject for the limits- it’s not intended to be face control.

It’s an organization challenge. For one thing we’re pretty top heavy, with a big crowd, and everyone wanting something as cheap as possible, but with food and good mingling. A part of my fantasizes about saying screw it and not holding the event anymore, passing it onto someone else. And yet I might as well stick with it- it won’t organize itself.