Tag: vibrator

The Tiger and the Pilgrim – Friends. (2016)

This photo was made using Kodak’s 800 ISO Portra emulsion.

The higher the speed of a film, the better it is at producing photographs in low-light settings; however, the higher the speed the more visible the grain.

It’s also a film that is optimized for tungsten light sources, i.e. the color temperature of light emitted by most incandescent light bulbs.

It’s also low contrast—as a result of which this image suffers. It also doesn’t help that it was made using at the minimum a ceiling mounted overhead lighting fixture. (In other words: some of the most aesthetically unappealing light imaginable.)

But I’m here for what this depicts more than how it’s depicted.

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I’ve been aware of the Folsom Street Fair since well before I started this blog. However, my conception of it has been off.

Basically, I had understood it as Pride only for leather and BDSM folks. It seems it’s quite a bit more than a celebratory parade. I’m not entirely clear on the rules governing it but it does seem to be closer to an open air sex party.

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A while back adult content creator and performer Chelsea Poe (of whom and of whose work I am a tremendous fan) posted several images of her being dominated by Eden Alexander publicly at the Folsom Street Fair.

As kids these days are fond of saying: #AllTheFeels

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The images of Ms. Poe tied to a tree reminded me of the above photo. In both cases a woman is physically restrained in a public space and she has consented to having her boundaries tested.

I’ll admit that it’s a tenuous connection. But it’s something I keep coming back to and I think I’ve finally figured out how to articulate something about it but it’s going to involve rather a good bit of TMI.

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Give or take: I began masturbating when I was eight.

It wasn’t like I was horny. In fact—it was only vaguely tied up with anything sexual. It was more curiosity.

With hindsight, I realize that this curiosity was informed as a result of being molested when I was six. I didn’t understand the contradiction of the extreme interest on the part of my abuser with the parts of my body that I was otherwise told over and over and again and again were sinfully unclean.

Quite by accident, I discovered that by touching myself in very particular ways (read: humping my pillow), I could trigger this warm and fuzzy tingling sensation. I’d hump, feel myself start to climax, pause, ride the wave of the sensation and as it ebbed I’d go right back to humping my pillow, chasing the next endorphin rush. Sessions usual involved 4 to 7 orgasms.

I knew instinctively that because what I was doing involved the parts between my thighs, that it was something about which I shouldn’t ever tell anyone.

I think I figured out what I was doing was termed masturbation when I was eleven. My instinct not to tell anyone about it made a lot more sense…

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Two things happened more or less simultaneously. Puberty struck and the way I masturbated shifted. Whereas previously, I would have spent an hour or so more or less continually stimulating myself with intermittent pauses; I started to experience more forceful orgasms. Like before I would feel the sense of release building, I would feel myself pass the rubicon and then my body would lock up. I would orgasm and then my intimate parts would be painfully sensitive.

I still needed the same endorphin rush but it took me sometimes as long as a half an hour before I could begin again.

The second thing that happened was that my peers and I were informed that masturbation was a mortal sin. It was presented in the following fashion. Girls were generally not interested in it and those who were didn’t because they weren’t gross floozies. Boys who were good Xtians didn’t and boys who weren’t strong Xtians might but they should repent and sin no more.

We were told that if we were freaks who experienced urges that we should pray that God removes the impure thoughts and desires from our hearts.

For the better part of a year, every time I felt the need to get myself off. I would pray. But unlike masturbation—which always felt like a prayer and an answer to that prayer; my actual prayers to God, never went any higher than the ceiling.

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I feel it’s also important to note that although I conceptualized masturbation as sexual behavior, it was all but devoid of causal connection. It was something I did for the dopamine hit to my system.

It didn’t shift to being sexual until I was in my late teens.

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There was this episode the reboot of The Outer Limits in the mid-90s staring Alyssa Milano. I remember being so aroused that it physically hurt.

The next day while I was in the shower—the only place I had any privacy—I masturbated but as I passed the point of no return, I kept seeing flashbacks to the show from the previous night and instead of stopping I climaxed once and without any pause came again after roughly three minutes.

It was a game changer.

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I have no idea what prerequisites have to be satisfied for me to have multiple orgasms while masturbating. I’ve managed it roughly a dozen times—each time seemingly isolated from the rest.

I have substantially better luck with partners.

I think part of it is comparable to solving a chess problem vs figuring out how to get out of check without fucking yourself when you are playing against an actual opponent. In the first case, you control both the moves and countermoves in advance; in the second, you only have a vantage to the moves you make. Someone can make a move that surprises or confounds you.

A better analogy may be found contained within the observation that it is impossible to tickle yourself.

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What I’ve discovered with a partner is that my experience of sexual pleasure is analogous to a river—the water level rises and falls depending upon other factors.

If the water overflows, there’s a levee to safely channel the excess. However, any overflow into the levee gets processed by my body as a pain sensation.

Even when it’s happening to me, I wouldn’t label it pain. It’s merely an amplification of sensitivity to a point that although I crave the sensation, my body actively revolts and recoils from continued stimulation.

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The act of refusing to cater to this instinctive recoil from continued stimulation in the face of heightened sensitivity is called post-orgasm torture.

There are an increasing number of videos out there for it. As a lesbian, I’m very put off by anything I’ve ever seen involving femme folk subjected to post-orgasm torture. (Another reason I am into the above photo—it seems post-orgasm torture-y but in a way that is an intense as it is consensual.)

I end up watching a fair amount of content featuring post-orgasm torture involving masc. folks. (For example: this one—although vertically oriented video is never acceptable—is pretty run of the mill; this one is over-long, poorly edited and the technique is a little galling in it’s heteronormativity—also, I think the boy, contrary to the on-screen count, only orgasms twice, I think the rest are just leaks despite his concerted efforts at avoiding ejaculation. His response when he does actually finish and the way he responds to continued stimulation is one of the best documents of a body’s response to post-orgasm torture that I have ever seen.)

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What does all this have to do with the initial photo? Well, given the way her back is arched and the way the vibrator is pressed vacuum seal tight against her genitalia—it’s probably understandable how I’d make the leap to this as a depiction of post orgasm torture.

The fact that she also appears to be the singular focus of a group of people is also appealing. (As someone who is over-stimulated any time there are more than four people in a room at a time, the social over-stimulation combined with physical over-stimulation is also something I would like to explore.)

The Chelsea Poe images make me curious as to whether a scenario like the image above might be possible at the Folsom Street Fair. The thought of being publicly subjected to post-orgasm torture while very publicly restrained is a prospect that I’m into. As long as I was blindfolded and trusted my dom to not let obviously creepy people touch me, I would be into a modicum of crowd participation.

And I think that’s the ultimately realization that engaging with this photo over the span of several years has made me realize that it’s not that I’m not into BDSM/kink, it’s that my relationship with it is very specific. I don’t want to be humiliated. Being humiliated is a massive turn off for me. I also don’t get the pain as pleasure exchange; mine has more to do with pushing the limits of pleasure so they pass through pain and back into pleasure again.

Source: tigerandpilgrim

The Monochrome Id – attempting wonder, being watched (2016)

There are a host of problematic aspects with this:

The light is flat/dead, akin to the sort of light you get from a side table lamp where you have the hot hour glass spot pattern caused by the way the lampshade shapes the light but also as the diffuse spill the shade itself transmits.

The dynamic range is noticeably compressed–the darkest area being the shadow cast by the young woman’s chin; the brightest area is the triangular reflection (a skylight, would be my guess) in the mirror behind her right shoulder.

It’s some EGREGIOUS #skinnyframebullshit, too; further, the problems are compounded by the fact that– as I’ve talked about before: a frame’s functions is either restrictive or indicative (and really it’s at it’s best when it is a bit of both.)

The trouble here is that this frame is restrictive–with the exception of what I’m calling the reflection from the sky light–there is no sense of space beyond the frame being relevant to the information in the frame. This being the case, the frame lines are amputating the young woman’s legs rendering her immobile and unable to get up and leave the frame if she chose to do so.

I do have to give the image maker some props, though.  Despite the awkwardness of the angle of the young woman’s head there is a sense conveyed that she wants to be here and seen like this–the shadow cast by her eyelashes against her cheek, and the way her mouth (whether or not you can clearly see it) suggest her lips are ever so slightly parted and that she’s trying to tune into the sensations of the vibrator pressed against her subtly glistening clitoral hood.

Despite the numerous technical flaws, this does deserve some praise due to the fact that it manages to capture the vulnerability that comes from letting go of any sense of self to grab onto the visceral experience of pleasure with both hands. That aspect of it is crystalline in it’s clarity here.

Source: the-monochrome-id