Advice again, at last!

It’s a long time since I’ve answered any advice questions here, which makes the name of the blog somewhat incoherent. But I’ve had one sitting on the back burner for some time, and I figured I’d come back and answer it.

Please, any advice questions, comment, or send me email!

Some friends of mine are considering embarking on a power exchange relationship (probably more the Master/slave kind than the dom/sub kind). They have very little experience so far. Can you recommend any websites that would be good educational resources for them?

-A Nonymous

Part of the reason it took me so long to get back to you on this, A Nonymous, is because I honestly don’t know a lot of educational resources on the web for this sort of thing. The resources that tend to be available are 1) porn, and 2) erotica. Both of these, generally speaking, present a distorted view of how these kinds of relationships work, but they tend to be where people go when they’re looking for how to structure a BDSM relationship. This, for obvious reasons, is problematic.

There is a marvelous little book, entitled Miss Abernathy’s Concise Slave Training Manual, which details a particular way to train a slave, including real-world advice on contracts and other generalities.

The best resources I know of on the web tend to be thoughtful blogs by people who are in relationships like this; I especially love Orlando’s blog, which details his incredibly loving relationship with his partner, Murre; Little Girl’s blog is also a beautiful detailing of a relationship that has evolved over time; and I think Maymay’s blog is essential reading for anyone who is interested in kink and how it is evolving.

But the best resource of all for people just starting out in this is each other. They need to do a lot of talking: about what each of them might want, what they’re afraid of, what they currently believe their hard limits to be. About what being a slave, or a master, means to each of them; about what each of them expects from such a relationship; about how the arrangement can be changed or ended once it begins. What their responsibilities are to each other. What “punishment” means.

I hope that helps.

Read Full Post »

TransformativeKink.com is now live!

Friends, kinksters, countrypeople,

Tuesday Advice has been on hiatus for a bit, mainly owing to nobody sending me questions of late. It is my hope that the launch of my new site will begin to remedy that, as well as bring me new opportunities to see people who would benefit from the kind of help I can provide.

To all of those ends, I present to you: Transformative Kink!

I advise you all to go check it out. 🙂

Seriously – it’s mostly worksafe in terms of pictures, though your office’s servers may record you visiting a domain with the word “kink” in it.

But I hope you will take a look and let me know what you think.

(Also: send me your questions. 🙂

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Read Full Post »

This week in WTF: Fevered Egos

I’ve been behind on my current events, in particular reading the sex blogs I generally frequent, since my move. But I’m starting to catch up, so let the outrage begin.

Exactly one month ago, Maymay posted about a This Week in Kink podcast in which the following statement appeared:

I firmly and strongly believe that it is a woman’s role to be submissive to a man. I believe that submission in men is taught at conception because as soon as women realize that they’re pregnant, they start planning that child’s fucking future and quite often that the mother is definitely the beginning of the emasculation. That said, I think that women in the past couple of hundred years have gotten entirely too high on their own power and eventually need to be slapped in the fucking head and put in their place.

I’ve been sitting on this for a while because it’s hard for me to think of much else to say besides “Wow. Just fucking wow. Like, seriously?”

Being blinded by rage makes rational argument difficult. Must be the estrogen.

What troubles me most is not that someone said something like this; there will always be assholes and idiots who espouse this kind of garbage, whether it is about women, African-Americans, queers, or submissive men. But it disturbs me greatly that in the BDSM world, where we’re meant to be playing with power, subverting some traditional norms and amplifying others to erotic effect, there are people who still truly believe this kind of outright nonsense. Even worse, that someone with such opinions is such a strong voice in the community.

I love some male tops very much, and as I’ve made quite clear on this blog, I’m a switch. (And this kind of shit is one of the reasons why switches are some of my favorite people to play with.) But I’m disgusted by the tendency in a certain type of male dom to believe that they are simply bringing back the good old days by making women subservient the way God intended. Aren’t we supposed to be progressive? Isn’t the point of alternative sexuality to explore, well, alternatives??

And get a load of the comments over there. Don’t get my started on the whole “I have a right to my opinion and you have the right to yours” crap. Free speech is free speech, and this fuckwad has the right to say whatever he likes, just as I do. But to hide behind free speech, to say that you will “fight to the death” next to me to defend my right to have an opinion, too, when in the same breath you’re saying that I’m a second-class human being, is completely disingenuous. It wasn’t so long ago that women didn’t have the right to an opinion – whether in matters of state or in the home. You can’t have it both ways, asshole.

Does this homunculus mongoloid even understand what he is saying? “That’s cute that you have opinions – here, let me help you have them, even though they’re so clearly wrong – you’ll need me to help enforce your rights, since you’re less than human.” What fun.

It burns my ass, too, that this guy started Fetlife. I was just starting to enjoy myself over there a little bit.

EDIT: It actually wasn’t John, who runs the podcast, who made the comments, it was Rob, who is a DJ on some adult radio thing called The Oh Team. (From the page, I gather that he has “twelve years’ experience as a full-time Master.” Ooooohh, my panties are moist.)

Much more of this, and I’ll be as bitter and angry as people seem to think darling Maymay is. Nice job, kink community.

Huh. Guess I still can’t say much more than “what the fuck.”

:: :: :: :: :: ::

Read Full Post »

WTF of the day

So, I’m looking for places to post news of my clips going up (like ya do), and my videographer points me to Mistress Destiny’s Femdom forums.

I’m reading along in the rules of the forum, which all seem relatively reasonable, until I come across this little gem:

Do not dispute the sex of another member on an open Forum. If you are transgendered you are expected to ensure that the membership knows this [emphasis mine]. If you believe a member is misrepresenting his or her sex then bring it to the attention of a moderator in a private message or e-mail.

Wait, what? So, we all know that 47-year-old guys who live in their mother’s basements along with a stockpile of weapons go around on the Internet all the time pretending to be nubile 18-year-old girls. I can understand where this might be a problem if folks on the forums are trying to get together with members of their preferred gender group, and I admire the moderator for suggesting that such disputes be handled privately outside of the boards. I’m sure there’s some great story for why this rule became necessary, though it still irks me in some weird way.

But did I just read that right that transgendered people are expected to disclose their transgenderedness to the members of the forums? What kind of damnfool asshattery is that supposed to be? So, your gender identity is protected from public discussion/dispute so long as you are a cisgendered male or female, but if not you’re expected to tell everyone about it up front?

Um. Okay, this is supposed to be a community about alternative sexuality, yes? Specifically femdom? Right. So…maybe you could be just a tad bit more open-minded than that? And maybe, oh, I don’t know, stop discriminating against people who are a vital part of your community?? You of all people should know that gender is a sticky subject at best, and while I understand your desire to keep the subject of the boards mainly in a femdom context (i.e., no posting male dom videos or whathaveyou), what reason do you have for “expecting” that any of your membership reveal his, her, zir or hir gender to anyone?

I don’t think I’ll be spending much time over there. Or at the least, I’ll be writing an angry letter to the moderator.

Read Full Post »

Bitchy made me do it

I was reading back in Bitchy Jones’ Diary last night and was again stirred and moved and amused and made curious by it. I have to be careful over there, as her blog never fails to draw me in to several hours of reading.

When I first picked up on her blog nearly a year ago, it made me start to think hard about the image I put forth as a pro domme – and, frankly, about whether I wanted to continue being a pro domme at all. So much about the culture of pro domming has always been ugly and alien to me, and I spent a lot of time trying to put my finger on why. Is it the exploitation of men? Of women? Is it the obvious fact that most of the men who see me are, in essence, cheating on their wives and partners? I spent a lot of time in my first couple of years of domming figuring out what things made me feel icky and what things don’t, and how to minimize the former and capitalize on the latter.

But Bitchy – looking from the outside of the industry as she is – was able to outline the problem for me perfectly. She writes well on many topics and at length, but her central thesis, if her blog can be said to have one, is something like this:

The image of the dominant woman and the submissive man are broken. The prevailing submissive male culture dictates that said men are worthless, less than men, unworthy to be touched by Women who are Superior, and deserve punishment, enforced chastity, and feminization at the hands of Dominas, whom they should worship as Goddesses. This image, rather than empowering women, pedestalizes them and robs them of their sexuality, locates their power in their appearances rather than in their total persons, and suggests implicitly that femininity is actually inferior, seeing as 1) “forced” feminization is reserved for submissive “sissies,” and 2) dominant women are only allowed to have sex with submissive men if they use a strap-on cock and fuck them up the ass.

Add to this the prevailing notion that certain things germane to being female (getting penetrated being the biggest example) are by their nature submissive, and you’ve got one fucked-up image system going on.

The major problem, that Bitchy goes over and over against the protests of many (especially pro dommes), is that the image of the Big Bad Dominatrix is the only mainstream image of dominant female sexuality there is. As such, it robs women like her of any recognition of their sexuality.

Essentially, the idea of dominant female sexuality – that a woman could actually be in control during fucking, or that she could come from taking a burly, masculine man and causing him pain – is so scary that it needs to be desexualized, dehumanized, the sweat and blood and come taken out of it, and turned into a high-heeled, latex-sheathed, small-penis-humiliating freakfest where a woman’s stilettos are a more powerful seat of sexuality than her cunt.

As she so trenchantly points out, Sometimes I think femdom is like a horrible warning. This is what can happen if you replace actual women being turned on with women’s whose job it is to pretend to be turned on.

Or, as an excellently smart commenter puts it,

Inside kink we have a sexist, distorting, repressive culture which tries to make people like me believe the norm of my sexuality is play for pay, tries to make men believe their submission is shameful and unattractive, tries to make dominance appear unsexy to women.

If you are working as a pro dom, how is it in your interest that this distortion gets changed? It creates a great deal of your demand.

And this:

[T]his is not about deriding sex workers for being sex workers.

Example. If a prodom said “I can’t have sex with clients because it would be illegal where I live” or just “I prefer not to have sex with clients”, this would be from a perspective of sex work. Nothing to make fun of.

But: “A female dominant can’t have sex with a male submissive, because it would upset the power dynamic / they’re unworthy of our sacred shrines / these wimps can’t satisfy a woman anyway”… Are these lies? Do they sound familiar? Are they ridiculous? Do they have harmful effects?

…This is about prodoms knowingly telling lies about sexuality with harmful consequences, and profiting from these consequences….This is about people who claim that their pompous facade, i.e. their sex worker persona, represents female dominance as a personal kinky sexuality. And that is not okay.

As should by now be obvious, all of this is making me think like crazy. I have long been repulsed by the trend in prodommery toward the apparently sexless ice princess who treats her feminized, submissive wiener-men like shit. And it’s taken me a while to figure out exactly why, but I think I know now.

I want to continue to be a pro domme in addition to continuing to live out my personal kinky sexuality. But 1. I want to be more open about who I am as a total person – partly because it makes my life better to do so, but partly to contribute to dismantling this horrid pro-domme stereotype. And 2. I want to restructure how I market myself to reflect the things I love to do in sessions, not the things I’m expected to do as part of this culture.

This is a long time in coming, and I’ve written about it elsewhere in great angsty detail. But Bitchy, as usual, you’ve caught me out. It’s time to stop perpetuating false images that define female dominance as sterile and male submission as shameful. And it’s time to start putting out there what I truly find hot.

And for the record: me? Totally a sex worker. Let me say it here and now: what I do is sex work, it is a sexual service, and I don’t have manual, oral, vaginal or anal intercourse with my clients because it’s illegal and I don’t want to. A post is brewing about strap-on sex, which Bitchy tends to write about as part of the problem, but which I count as a sex act for the reason that it totally turns my crank. One day soon I’ll write about the one time I broke my no-strap-on-sex-in-sessions rule…one of the hottest sessions I’ve ever known. But that’s for another day.

For now, picture this: a new site by me that highlights my friendliness, my viciousness as a sadist, my sensuality with touch and voice, my wrestling fetish, my work as a healer and therapist, my human connection with my clients, and yes, my sexual desire.

It’s very likely that I’ll never have the guts to do videos where I play the submissive. That part of my sexuality is too private, too precious to me to share with the world in that way. Probably this is also the result of the sickness in our sexual culture: while I experience submission as powerful, I have the fear that others won’t see it that way, and am still haunted by the notion that taking my clothes off and going into that space strips part of my power. (Is it any wonder, when most of the images we have in porn of female submission are all about humiliation and conquest? Again – another post for another day.)

But I think you can safely stay tuned for more vulnerability from me as a domme. More clear expression of my desire. More scenes with models I care about, or am at least hot for.

And more stories here about the kinds of scenes that actually make me wet.

Read Full Post »

Building content

I’ll be doing a video shoot tomorrow, after rather a long hiatus. It can be difficult, since my videographer lives in New York, but we get him up here to Boston whenever we can to shoot.

The last video work I did was actually with the inestimable Trigger in Minnesota.

He’s one of the best-known human horses in the business, and great to work with. His stuff is over here at The Human Equine, and I’m hoping to do more with him later this year. I also did some work on The Face Seat Cushion site while I was out there, and that was surprisingly fun as well.

Tomorrow, though, I’m going to hook up with my gorgeous amazon girlfriend and a male model I like and trust and do some down and dirty stuff Amazon-style.

More full-weight trampling, some barefoot, some in the new metal-heeled shoes the model tells me he’s bringing for me; more foot worship; more cigarette torture and ball humiliation…ah, yay. I’m also hoping to get some hot, simple footage of me and Madeline going at it – she’s such a beautiful fuck. I can’t quite pass for butch, but I sure can slam her against the wall and have my way with her.

I’ll post here when more clips are up.

Read Full Post »

New directions…

So I’m planning a total rebuild of my professional website, and I’m starting the process a couple of weeks from now. I’m excited about it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I feel that my practice, as I’ve come to call it, is moving in new directions.

When I launched my site back in 2005, I was just a baby domme. I was figuring out who I was to clients, who I wanted to be to them, what image I wanted to project – and for a while, I really wasn’t sure. My process was as follows: I obtained a copy of Dreamweaver. I had a bunch of people take really amazing pictures of me. I wrote some over-the-top, forbidding-sounding copy. I put the whole thing together with some help from some fantastic friends who have greater patience and website-building knowledge than I have. And then I linked it everywhere.

At the time, I was very proud of it – after all, I’d pretty much made it myself! But now when I look at it, it seems slightly childish. While I still dig and believe in the woman in those pictures – she’s still me, or parts of me – I don’t buy the copy anymore. I wrote it, and conceived of the entire feel of the site, when I didn’t really know what kind of domme I wanted to be. I figured so long as I presented a figure of class, and put forth an image that was similar to other dommes, I’d be in business.

And I was, and am. People still love the website. But for a while I wondered why everyone was approaching me with this over-the-top Goddessing attitude. Well, duh. I’d fostered it myself.

My new site, hopefully, will attract more of the people that I like to play with, and also help me diversify the types of sessions I do. I want to educate more people, see more couples and women, help people learn how to do kinky stuff in their own bedrooms. I want more letters asking for advice! I want my site to be listed in places other than free domination directories. I want it to reflect the way I see myself in this work: as a skilled but down-to-earth domina, and as an educator and healer.

I’ll write more about this as things develop, of course. But keep an eye out for my new site in the next few months.

Read Full Post »