Bondage and BDSM Economy Style

One of our most read posts turns out to be from early last year, about the top ten toys for bdsm play. Velvet thought she’d add to that by suggesting, in these rather austere times, some cheap options for bdsm toys.

***

It occurred to me after a visit to the Birmingham Bizarre Bazaar that playing at these games can end up being an expensive pastime. And these are not times in which to be extravagant. So I’ve spent a little time being creative. All in the name of research, of course. There is no real need to spend lots of money to have fun. Though it’s nice to have some quality leather restraints etc, it’s not necessary, and can wait until funds allow. The good news is there’s plenty to play with in (or around) your home. Here are some free toys and ideas on how to use them.

Feathers. Look around next time you’re in the garden or out for a walk. Collect a few feathers, large and small, stiff ones and fluffy ones. Once you have your sub tied up and blindfolded, she/he won’t know what you’re using on them. And of course it’s not all about pain. Much BDSM is about mind-fucks or surprises, the contrast of sensation, and pleasure as well as pain.

Use the fluffy end or soft end of a feather on the skin or tender bits. Then try using the quill end. It pricks and scratches gently. Use your imagination!

Kitchen spatula. Useful as a spanking tool. Use a nylon or wooden one, not metal, of course! Blindfold the sub so they won’t know. The handle could be dragged over the skin or used to give a sharper twang on the skin. Just remember the usual safety rules that we’ve been over before. You don’t want to break the skin accidentally. Other kitchen implements such as wooden spoons can be used in the same way.

Credit/debit card, preferably out of date! The date doesn’t matter, of course, to the skin, but after it’s been in the freezer it might not work at the ATM. You put it in the freezer because when it’s so cold and the edge is dragged over the skin it will FEEL like a knife with none of the dangers (and any water frozen onto it will melt on the skin, giving the suggestion of wetness and the mind-fuck that there’s blood). I told you mind-fuck was important! Some sources argue that the card must be current and that the quality of the experience is directly related to its credit limit, but since Fulani tends to use freely-issued store loyalty cards we couldn’t possibly comment.

Ice cubes. Toys don’t come any cheaper. We once played at a club, and afterwards Fulani was asked just WHAT was making me squirm so beautifully. All they could see was Fulani’s hand waving above me. He was allowing an ice cube from my brandy glass to drip onto my by then hot body while I was bound, spread-eagled to a bench.

Be careful, though, about inserting ice into orifices other than a mouth. Sudden shocks of cold, if prolonged, can cause damage to more intimate membranes. Drag ice over the skin, drip icy water, then change it up and surprise your sub with…

Candle wax. Candles are cheap, and the best ones for BDSM are paraffin ones (technical note: you need to balance the melting point, the length of time the liquid wax retains heat, and skin sensitivity, which can vary greatly: there’s a short article about this on Wikipedia). Plain white ones are the cheapest, but you can buy coloured ones that Fulani thinks look great once dripped all over me. He likes red, the colour of blood! Suppliers such as Lovehoney sell specially formulated candles; many supermarket ones are only coloured on the outside. If you are unsure about candles you’ve bought, as some burn much hotter than others, test them on your own arm and gauge the distance they need to be from your sub’s skin when dripping wax onto them. You don’t want serious burns, just heat and squirms (OK and maybe some yelps) from your victim. [Edited to add: Bondara.co.uk also do specially formulated bondage candles.]

Scarf. Or scarves. Very handy little items, often available for pennies from charity shops/thrift shops. Blindfold or wrist restraint, just ensure any tie is NOT going to slip and tighten therefore cutting off your victim’s blood supply. If you have enough scarves, once your sub is restrained and blindfolded, tease with one, wafting over the skin, dragging it over their breasts, tender bits etc.

Velvet glove. The first toy I made for myself. Draw a mitten shape around your hand, cut out the shape twice on a piece of paper, cut that out) and use to cut two pieces of velvet (old cushion cover or top, or a velvet shirt from a charity shop) and stitch together round the edges, inside out. Turn the right way in, and use resulting glove to tease the living daylights out of your sub. Or soothe her/him between flogging or spanking strokes. Try a spank/flog followed by a stroke with the glove. Your victim won’t know whether they’re coming… or not.

Your mind. Fulani once gave me a great session. He knows I like to be scared sometimes. He’s a great writer, as you know. So he wrote a script, a scene. He then got his computer to read out the story in one of those weird  computer voices. The story alluded to what was going to happen to me next. When I heard this story, I was hogtied and blindfolded, so no escape! Hot wasn’t in it. Boiling more like! A very steamy session followed, including the things promised in the story, and I Ioved it. Cost? Nothing. Just an investment of time on Fulani’s part, and an active imagination on mine.

So there we are. No need for big expense. Just get creative. I’m sure now you’ve had a few ideas you could think of more. We’d love to hear your ideas to add to our own. Leave YOUR favourite home-made toy ideas in our comments and share the pain!

– Velvet Tripp

We Tweet

We’ve finally joined the Twitterati. It’s one of those building-social-networks type things everyone seems to have to do these days. We haven’t tweeted a lot at the moment, but in future, expect occasional missives from us over on Twitter – about posts on here, other stuff that catches our eye, and general randomness.

Novella finished

Fulani finished writing a novella yesterday: something set against a vodou background, a contemporary setting, a questioning attitude to what we really mean by the supernatural. And a fair bit of sex, bondage and bdsm. And he was looking at stock photo websites for ideas about a cover to suggest to the publishers.

The weird thing is, despite the huge number of images out there on stock sites, it’s almost impossible to find images of women who are (a) Caucasian-ish (b) in a vodou or at least vaguely paranormal setting, (c) have some suggestion of being tied up and (d) look nonetheless as though they’re involved in bondage willingly and making their own choices about their fetishistic proclivities. The closest you get are probably old photos of witchcraft initiation ceremonies (i.e. wrong culture) and they’re quasi-documentary pics that are unlikely to be available for use on a book cover. And there’s not a lot of mileage, unfortunately, in trying to set up a photoshoot to capture the right combination of elements.

On the other hand, repeated google searches did turn up something completely unexpected: a series of sound recordings of bdsm play – thwaps, moans, shrieks and so on, with apparently both female and male recipients of the thwacks, originally put out under the name ‘Tortura’ (volumes 1 and 2) by Bondage Records in 1965. If you want to listen, there’s a link over at Theendofbeing.com – which is incidentally a fine site with all kinds of obscure and weirdly interesting stuff on it.

Meanwhile if anyone has any cool suggestions for a cover on the lines described, Fulani would be interested to know!

 

A pagan camp

It’s been a bit quiet on this blog recently because we’ve been away. To a small pagan camp, with people we’ve mostly known for several years and to a place Velvet’s known for well over a decade.

For the uninitiated, ‘pagan’ doesn’t mean ‘wiccan’. Sure, a few of the people there were and are wiccans, but others have a range of beliefs that essentially revolve around the idea of ‘do as you will and harm none’, a respect for the earth and the environment, and a sense that imagination is a useful tool.

Also for the uninitiated, if you want to be initiated we can probably sort you out with an appropriate fetish themed initiation ceremony. Alternatively you could read Raven Kaldera’s book Dark Moon Rising: Pagan BDSM and the Ordeal Path (also on Amazon.co.uk), which sets out ideas for how such things could be done and is still the best source for such material we’ve come across.

That’s ‘come across’ as in ‘discovered’. If you didn’t get the double entrendre, you don’t have a filthy enough mind.

So what happened on the ‘pagan’ camp included the following: discussions of runes, drinking, making flutes, drinking, standing around bonfires drinking, and playing the odd drum or two. Oh yeah, and some drinking. Apart from that there was the naked orgy on the last night in the middle of the stone circle that’s on the site. Oh, wait, that was just in my imagination…

So seeing as this was a camp and most people were in tents (we have a campervan, though), this is what the camp looked like. In microcosm, and taken on Fulani’s mobile.

Pagan camp, decorations outside a tent

And here’s a shot of something that really did happen on the last night of the camp: Fulani playing with fire.

Fulani playing with fire: cracking a fire whip

The pic may over-dramatise the amount of flame: the shot was a 2-second exposure at f4, ISO400. It was still pretty hot though.

So now we’re back, Fulani’s hammering away at a paranormal novella and Velvet’s doing some practical magic (aka planting vegetables in the back garden). We’ll give you updates on both in due course.

Meanwhile: pagan/supernatural stuff we’ve written and that you might like to look at includes:

– Fulani’s story ‘The Incubus Candle’, in the Xcite Spirit Lovers collection (the first Spirit Lovers volume, not the second; also at Amazon.co.uk and direct from Xcite).

– Velvet Tripp’s story ‘Go Find Yourself’ (with a lesbian theme) in two Xcite collections, Wanton Women and Submission in Silk (also available via Amazon).

Naked Delirium – coming soon

Naked Delirium cover (Sweetmeats Press)

Out soon, expected mid-August: Naked Delirium, a collection of five novellas from Sweetmeats Press. An illustrated anthology of sex in altered states. Did you get that word illustrated? Stories by Kristina Wright, Sommer Marsden, Vanessa de Sade – also by Fulani and Velvet Tripp.

Fulani’s story ‘Smoking Hot’ deals with the unintended consequences of hypnosis to stop smoking, via the unlocking of repressed desires. Velvet Tripp’s novella deals with events at a pagan camp in which someone becomes literally possessed. We’ll maybe throw up some teasers closer to publication date, and there may be teasers of the illustrations as well.

It’s not the first time we’ve had ‘his and hers’ stories in the same collection, but it’s the first time we’ve had novellas published together (if you’re interested, it happened previously in Xcite’s Lust Bites collection, available direct from the publisher or on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk).

Heads-up on similar stories:

– Velvet Tripp’s ‘Go Find Yourself’ also has a pagan theme (but is lesbian-based) and is in Xcite’s 20-story collection Wanton Women and also the five-story collection Submission in Silk (these are Amazon.com links, it’s on the UK site as well and available direct from the publisher – see the ‘Our Publications’ page on this blog).

– Fulani’s Secret Circus of Pain and Degradation starts, more or less, with the heroine being hypnotized (or, in keeping with the period it’s set in, mesmerized) while attending a circus and sort-of abducted to become a circus performer. That’s an Amazon.com link, and a bunch of others are over on the ‘Our Publications’ page.

Sometimes you can tell

This is a teaser. It’s the beginning of a story that will ultimately be quite a bit longer, though I hope it stands up on its own as a bit of flash fiction. However, if anyone has any desire to see it take off in any particular direction please feel free to make suggestions.

If I’m lucky it will be part of a story cycle based around the sexual adventures and misadventures of a bunch of deadbeat characters, small-time criminals, their friends and enemies.

***

Sometimes you can tell, can’t you?
I got this job, stacking shelves and working the till in a hardware store. It’s not part of a chain. It’s owned by my half-brother’s uncle’s boyfriend, which is how I got the gig I guess. He looked at me and says he don’t go for girls himself, but it’d be nice for the customers to see a pair of tits around the place. Plus, he says, we won’t need to close for lunch.
Arnie, that’s the owner, comes in each day about eleven. Smelling of aftershave. Wanders around a bit like he’s in charge, wafts his man-scent around the place. Goes to the tiny upstairs office and does a line of coke around midday, which I know because his dealer comes by the shop. Ten minutes after that, Gideon goes up there. Gideon’s same age as me, nineteen, fit guy with a sloppy grin and razorcut hair and a six-pack. What he says is he needs to go over the accounts with Arnie. Something like that. Different excuse for each day of the week. And I know what they’re doing because the shop’s part of a street of old terraced houses that’ve been converted, and the floorboards up there creak like fuck.
So: yeah, sometimes you can tell. You can tell what’s going on in the customers’ minds. Because for some people – and I’m not ashamed to say I’m one of them – a hardware store isn’t just a place that sells hardware. It’s a place that sells sex. It sells toys and possibilities and fantasies.
This guy comes to the till, and he’s buying:
– thirty metres of 7mm diameter polypropylene rope
– four mouse traps
– a pack of huge cable ties, the kind you’d use to hold plants to a garden trellis, or secure someone’s wrists and ankles
– some D-shackles and snaphooks
So where does your imagination go with that? The same place mine does?
The guy smiles at me as he hands me money. He’s maybe in his thirties. Not old enough to be my dad. No, wait, he probably is old enough because my dad was seventeen when I was born. And my mum was fifteen. From where I’ve come from, not having had a kid by the age I am now is more fucking miraculous than a virgin birth. My dad’s thirty-five this year, which is about what this guy is.
“Hope you have a good time with this stuff,” I say. My voice has got an I-know-what-you’re-doing kind of tone to it.
And he eyeballs me, long and slow, pupil to pupil. Maybe more like teacher to pupil. Hangs it out, like the fantasy he’s going to make with all this stuff is just hanging in the air between us in a little bubble and we’re both watching it. Hangs it out so I get the taste of sex in my mouth. And he says: “I’m planning on having a very good time with you.”
Hear that? That’s no Freudian slip, is it?
“With me?” My voice has gone all squeaky.
He looks at me, at my face. “I said I’m planning on having a very good time, thank you. But I could have it with you, if you like.”

***

I don’t have much out in this kind of style at the moment. There’s First Day at Work, which has a work-based theme (obviously) but doesn’t have such a grungy feel. It’s one of my earlier stories but it has the advantage of being sold as a long short story in its own right. Or there’s a free story, Transference, on my other blog. It does aim at a similar kind of feel. Or for something a little stranger albeit not in quite the same vein, try ‘Filthy White Dress’, in the Making Her Pay five-story collection and also the 20-story Tricks For Kicks collection, both published by Xcite.

-F

Government denies existence of mermaids

We thought Old Palfrey had finally lost it. Came into the bar that night calling for drink and raving about having seen a mermaid. I asked him how much he’d already had. “Half a bottle of rum,” he said. “Needed it to steady my nerves. Wouldn’t you, if a mermaid came up caught in one of your lines?”

The older guys, seasoned hands, just chuckled and shook their heads. The younger ones shrugged their shoulders. “Whatever you caught, just send it to the canning factory with the rest of the catch. No one’ll know the difference.”

But he wouldn’t have it. Half woman, half fish. Nice face. Tits on it. Long blonde hair. And the clincher was this: “She’s still in the hold. I tied her hands to a stanchion there.”

“You mean you haven’t offloaded your catch?” No one keeps their catch after they’ve docked, the factory wants it fresh. “Well, in that case,” I said, “there’s one way to settle it. Let’s go see what it was you did catch.”

So we went back down to the docks. Old Palfrey, me, Jack, Jules, Ty and Brad. With torches. Made him open up the hatch.

And right there, hands tied, was a mermaid. Resting on a pile of lobster pots.

She looked at us with venom in her eyes. Slapped away questing hands with her tail. But she was weak, and we got a rope around her just above the tailfin.

“See?” Old Palfrey said triumphantly. “Told you I got myself one. Came right up with the pots, unconscious. Like she was exhausted and fouled herself on a line.”

“You gonna call the coastguard?” I asked. “This is going to make the news.”

“What’cha do with a mermaid?” Jack asked. It was a rhetorical question. “Cos I don’t see a cunt. Gotta be in the mouth, then.”

And while the rest of us were standing around he’d got his cock out, grabbed her by the hair to pull her face up and started pumping between her lips. She made gkk-gkk sounds. Her eyes were big, round, startled. She might feel venom but wasn’t exactly in a position to express it.

“If you don’t want her,” Brad said slyly, “I’ll buy her off you. She can live in my bath and soap me down when I get in with her.” Yeah. Like he ever bothered to even take a bath.

Jules fucked her, then Ty.

By the end of it her face was a slimy mess. She didn’t even seem conscious.

“You should have her, too,” Jack told me.

“Nope. You don’t just fuck a strange new species. That’s asking for trouble. And you don’t, like, fuck the other stuff that comes up in your catch, do you?”

Brad just grinned. He’s a slimy bastard but I’d never have expected that of him. That’s so perverted it’s surreal.

“Listen, you don’t know anything about her. Germs, parasites, weird stuff. And you’re lucky her tongue doesn’t have fucking spikes on it.”

Then a little voice from the darkness. “Motherfuckers.”

What?

“Hey,” I called out. “Did you just speak English?”

Her breath came in irregular gulps. “Of course I… speak fucking English. Stop me… Drying out. Water.”

Old Palfrey sloshed a bucket of slop from the bilges over her. It seemed to help. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

“What are you?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know.” Quiet voice. Dreamy. “But if you want to stay and keep me company…?”

Old Palfrey, too old and alcohol-soaked to contemplate a mermaid blowjob, had already fallen asleep. Jack, Jules, Ty and Brad were too young and alcohol-soaked to even think it was a strange idea. Or be put off by the bilge slops. For all I know Brad actually found it a turn-on. And I was too sober to know what the hell I thought. Or felt.

So I left them to it.

***

Around seven the next morning I went back to the docks to see what the score was. The dock gates were blocked, though, by a couple of black SUVs. No insignia on them. And there were plenty of guys in suits I didn’t recognize, plus a few marines in uniform. And armed.

Lunchtime, the talk in the bar was about how Old Palfrey’s boat had been seized. No one know who by, or where it had been taken. Neither Old Palfrey nor the other guys were anywhere. I’d left them on the boat, screwing the mermaid. Far as anyone knew, they were still there when the SUVs pulled up a couple of hours later.

And there was a report on the TV in the corner of the bar. The government were strenuously denying the existence of mermaids. No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. That’s what they said.

We never saw Old Palfrey, or the other guys, again. Not ever.

***

This story’s inspired by a BBC report, ‘No evidence of mermaids, says US Government‘. Apparently there was  TV show on the Discovery Channel about mythical creatures that a lot of people thought was a documentary about real ones. The US government took the unusual step of making the statement that ‘no evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found’.

Related stories: Fulani has a story ‘Andi in Chains’, in the Lucy Felthouse collection ‘Seducing the Myth‘, a selection of retellings of old myths from various cultures. ‘Andi in Chains’ is an urban punk version of the Andromeda myth, one he especially likes since it involves a nude maiden chained to a rock waiting to be eaten by a monster – very damsel-in-distress style…