DomConLA 2016 -- Thoughts and Tidbits
So another DomConLA has come and gone, and of course I have a slew of thoughts on what I did and saw at the event.
I'd been looking forward to this for months. My friends and family know that I've been running myself ragged with stuff at the college -- classes coming to an end, grading, chair work, upcoming accreditation visit in September, curriculum update due in September, the list goes on. I had all my grades in by Thursday morning (5/19) and attended graduation that evening. I went home and passed out for the busy day on the 20th.
Friday, May 20th
Friday the 20th dawned and I showered and then went to get my hair recolored a bright, cherry red for the Con. Got home, packed, dealt with some idiot students protesting their grade, set the "don't bother me til Monday" flag on my college email, and then took off. It only took about an hour to get down to the LAX Hilton where DomCon is held each year, so that wasn't too bad of a drive. I was able to check in, get to my room, and get down to register in really fast time.
It was only about then that I realized "I'm done, I'm free, I don't have to worry about anything work related this weekend." It was a dream come true. I went to the hotel bar and ordered a big martini and some food and just started relaxing. As I sat there, I met a nice fellow around my age (near 50) named Brad, wearing a metal collar with a ring and dog tag on it. I found out that he was from New Hampshire and had come out with his Mistress, Mistress Molly, to vend at the Con. He was a really pleasent guy, we had a great talk and he assured me I'd love his Mistress who just happend to come from Ireland.
After that it was time to go to my first class of the Con: Suction Pumping with one of my favorite members of the kink community, Danarama. (Link NOT Safe for Work!) Danarama has been in the scene for more than 20 years and is a professional comedian, does DJ work, photography, and is the director of Kink University for Kink.Com (Links NOT Safe for Work!)
Danarama always does a great class and this was no exception. The class was pretty much exactly what it sounds like: using suction cups and devices to cause parts of the body to erect and become expanded. Danarama started off with going over the basics of what suction is, how it works, and the kind of toys one would need to do this. He came armed with a plethora of cups, pumps, expanders and other things, only about half of which he needed.
After expositing on the basics, he brought up this ultra cute submissive he's connected to and had her get butt naked. He said that the door had to remain closed (with a con person inside at all times), no one would be allowed in, and anyone leaving would not be readmitted after she removed her clohtes. He then started using pumps on her, starting with smaller nipple suction devices that brought out her nipples really strongly. He then tried a couple of the breast pumps on her, but as she was not exactly well endowed in the boobage department, only one would work fairly well, but it did suck her teat up and make it a nice shade of red after being left there for a short time.
Something that I did not know about suction pumping: you really want to use a lube on the base of the cup to get a good, tight seal. Each time that he tried a new device on her, he would lightly coat the rim with a bit of suction lube. He said that any good water based lube would work, but whoever sells the suction devices should sell suction lube.
After working on his girl's boobs for a while, he had her get on the table and started working on her mound. He put a cup around her vulva and was able to do some suctioning of it, which she seemed to enjoy. He then put a small inflatible into her vagina and expanded that, and then tried doing suctioning: the first time it failed and just pulled the inflatible out, but the second time he got the desired effect and she was twitching on the table in glee.
The final part was how it works on a man, and sure enough he whipped out his own Quarter Pounder and did a couple examples of suction on himself, and I will say that the suction device did get him very well engorged. I liked the class as I'd not seen this done -- no one to my knowledge is into suction at any of the parties we have at our home community, so this was the first time I'd seen a whole class on the activity.
The only downside to this class had nothing to do with Danarama or his girl, it was the idiot that was a non-stop talker. Ever see one of those people at a meeting or a class that thinks they know it all, and will go on and on and on, upstaging the presenter? That was this idiot. I will say that Danarama handled it with grace, I would have told this guy to cool down were he in my class.
Jenny from the college came down right before the class and sat in it with me. She really enjoyed it, but as her husband is totally vanilla, she won't get to do any pumping on him, heh heh heh.
After that, Jenny and I went to the bar and had a drink and talked about the class, the college and a few other things, then Judy arrived from work and we all went to dinner. Then we went up to our rooms to change for the Friday Night Play Party at Sanctuary Studios, near LAX and the Hilton. I wore a black dress that's made of rayon but looks like it's made of latex.
Sanctuary is owned by Mistress Cyan, the Domme who is the founder and hostess for DomConLA. and is a professional dungeon. The Friday Night play party is the smaller and somewhat tamer of the two main parties that Sanctuary hosts for DomCon (there is a small Sunday Night after party, but I've never gone to that, so I can't comment on what it's like).
Definitely compared to the Fetish Balls on Saturdays, this was a much more relaxed party, and I never have the claustrophobic feel that the Fetish Ball will give. Like every year, the large room in the center of the place had various exhibitions going on on the stage, but we didn't watch most of those as we wanted to watch the play in the rooms.
Going into the large back room (complete with a smaller stage and various riggings) we got to watch a male Top working over a male Bottom with some spanking and electrical play. A funny thing happened -- as it was almost over, a large guy wearing what looked like a fetish police uniform and tons of eyeliner walked in, looked at the scene in progress, and stood there with his hands on his hips and his eyes fuming. The Top looked over at him and said "do you want your boy back?" The fetish cop yelled in a totally stereotypical homosexual tone of voice "Only when YOU'RE done and HE'S ready to go!" and then stomped out. Everyone in the room looked at each other and chuckled, but the Top guy did finish up the scene pretty quickly, gave the other guy a big hug and sent him packing to Officer D00D.
The other interesting scene that night was done by a very attractive Asian Domme on her subby boy. She tied his wrists to a rigging atop a wood panel affixed to the wall at a 15 degree or so angle, hoisted his arms up and started to go to town on him with a flogger, a spanker, and a single tail whip similar to the one in the picture to the right. She was really working him over something good, and several times he tried to scale the wall, just to get pulled down by the rope she had affixed to his penis and scrotum. She would madly giggle and say "where are you going?" as she pulled him down. This scene went on for about 40 minutes, with her checking in periodically and him nodding his head, I'm assuming saying he wanted more. It was great, and when they were done she sat in a chair in the room to watch other scenes, and he laid on the ground at her feet while she stroked him gently. It was really touching.
We then went into another room to watch a few more scenes, and saw Danarama working a female bottom over with the help of another female Top. The bottom was really gorgeous with long black hair and mocha skin. Danarama was pretty much just holding her back while the female Top was using various toys on her. But I noticed that Danarama wasn't quite into the scene, he kept looking over at a throne in the corner of the room. Looking over there I saw his subby girl from the suction class sitting in the throne, wearing this long corset dress and looking gorgeous. As she sat there, a rather large, loud Domme came and sat nearly on top of her saying "You don't mind if we share do you, doll?" She then had her two large male subs kneel next to her, and the poor subby girl got pushed out of the seat. She went over whispered something to Danarama, who looked over at the Domme in the chair with a look that could sent Godzilla packing in a wicker basket, but the bitch wouldn't move. Danarama then tied the girl he was working on to a post and went over to talk to his girl. We decided it was time to go and didn't want to see a Dom/me Fight anyway, ha ha.
So back to the hotel, change, wash face, brush teeth and go to sleep. And that was just day one!
Saturday, May 21
I got to sleep somewhere about 1am, and woke up at 9:30am. It's very rare for me to sleep past 7am, never mind to half past nine. I guess that I was just exhausted.
We met Jenny around 11:30 and had brunch, and then went to look around the dealer room. The first person we met was Mistress Molly, who is really super gorgeous and could tell me to do almost anything she wished with that Irish brogue of hers. She really was as nice and exuding of a powerful aura as her subby boy Brad told me.
We then walked around and I saw tons of things I wanted, some of which I bought. I did buy a set of toys, so I'd say that now my toybag is pretty full and is getting ready for full time use! :P I'll post my toys on Wednesday after I get some good photos of them. Mistress already saw the "light sabre" and wants one in Purple! *grins* I also bought a cute steampunk hat and set of goggles at a Steampunk/BDSM dealer, and a cute skirt with bats and a belt with pouches from Hilary's Vanity (I'll also post a pic of all those on Wednesday).
We then mosied over to the PetPlay show like we did the last couple years and watched some of it. My friend Lauren from my community met up with us there and we watched some of the PetPlay, but she wasn't really into it (and honestly I can appreciate it but it's not my thing either) so we ended up heading out with her vanilla boyfriend in tow and went around the dealer room again. Then we went to a class titled Chemical Warfare -- Weaponized Affection.
This class was taught by Paul from Paraphilia Toys, a great guy in our local community and a fantatic maker of leather toys and collars. This was on how to use capsaicin (the active component in peppers that makes them hot) and menthol for various forms of play. Paul makes various salves and sprays using both of these, and he passed around two of his concoctions for us to smell and try on our own skin while he demoed on his girl Tiffany (who is incredibly cute!) He put a salve with capsaicin on one of her cheeks and one with menthol on the other and waited a bit while they took effect, then spanked each of her cheeks a bit to show what it could do. She yelped like crazy when he hit the capsaicin treated cheek, but with the menthol she made a moaning sound, then said "oh god, it's still stinging." It seems that the capsaicin gives a better short term effect for a smack, while the menthol treatment made it at first less painful but then it hit and kept going for a longer period of time. Good info!
He then had Tiffany kneel in front of him and take a drop of pure but diluted capsaicin right in her mouth. I have to stress diluted because at 16 million Scoville Units, pure capsaicin would probably put her in a coma -- take into account that a jalapeno pepper is around 10,000 Scoville Units and a habenero on the high end goes to 350,000 Scoville Units. I'm not sure how much heat that was, but she was jumping around, coughing and making some rather horrid Exorcist sounding noises -- and loving it all. He then talked about how you can rub chilis on the skin for a burning sensation, and even rub a jalapeno over a welt. He didn't suggest habeneros for that as the heat units are too high, but said "whatever floats your boat." He then talked about how he had a scene once with Tiffany that involved him tying her to a cross, feeding her a cup of Pepto Bismol, and then putting a spoon of cayenne pepper in her mouth and just standing back and watching. He said "no crop, no whip, no spanker, just pure chemical warfare and she loved it." Good thing he mentioned he had a plastic tarp on the floor around her.
Sitting next to Lauren was this guy we had met in the dealer room and had followed her into the class. After the class was over, her boyfriend suddenly said "well I'm heading out for a while" and got up and left. I looked at her to ask what was going on, but she just smiled and said "see you later!" I got the idea -- she wanted to be with this guy she met. I felt a little put off by that, but no big deal. They walked out together and I didn't see them again the rest of the day.
Jenny had to leave early to do something with her daughter, so Judy met me for the next class, Cell Popping. Cell popping involves taking a heated metal needle or something similar and making a very small burn with it on the skin. The idea is to "pop" a series of dots on the skin to make a design. It's called cell popping because it causes the small piece of skin to "pop" and scar. Essentially, popping is a lesser form of scarification or branding, and the woman that taught the class showed some intricate work she's done on her skin and others with this. She did some pops on people that wanted it (I didn't) and then allowed people to pop her on the thigh with the needle that wanted to do it (I didn't). It was interesting, but as I'm not into either scars or branding, it was just for knowledge and not much else.
The final class for Saturday was a cool one on Basic Flogging with three guys well known in our community: Entropy, Sir Nik and Master Eragon. Entropy claims to be the guy that invented the Florentine Flogging style (who knows?) but the three of them are really funny and teach a class well. They went over what to look for in a flogger, suggested that a longer set of lashes are better than shorter, and demoed various ways to flog before breaking the class up into groups to learn flogging. I didn't participate because 1) I'm really not all that interested in flogging at this time and 2) there were far too many people that were eager to learn how to do it. After watching this entertaining class we went upstairs (it was nearly 7PM), ordered a pizza, drank a good bottle of Isosceles Wine from Justin, and then decided to go to the Fetish Ball.
As we didn't plan to stay long due to the large crowd and my claustrophobia, we didn't get all dolled up for this. I went in a pair of black Vera Wang stretch pants, black top, black leather jacket and minimal makeup -- just some face powder and mascara. I did bring my leather spanker just in case...best to be prepared, right?
We made it inside to Sanctuary and sure enough it wasn't as crowded as it would get later as it was just around 9:30. We found Mistress Molly in the room with the throne where Danarama had been with his girl the night before. Mistress Molly was working over a girl tied to a bench, saying such quaint things like "Have ye had enough yet, ye wee girl?" and barking orders at her boy Brad, demanding one toy or another. The throne was empty so I sat in it while Judy stood to a side. My hair as I said is a bright cherry red now, and even in just basic black and almost no makeup I seemed to be getting a lot of attention, with several subbies looking in the room at me. I'd look at them and then look back at Mistress Molly and they headed out, but one guy, six foot four and about 350 lbs came up to me with his head down and asked "do you like to do these things, Mistress?" I looked up at him, said "I'm watching this scene at the moment, boy," and went back to watching the scene. He ambled off saying "Just watching, just watching, ok..." Hee hee...maybe I do have what it takes! ;)
We watched another scene in the big back room, with two female Tops working over this boy together. One of them, a young lade with long,dark hair was apparently not very acquainted with how to swing a flogger -- she was spinning it by its handle and it was going all over the place. The room was fairly crowded, and Judy and I were sitting on the stage watching this, and when she let the flogger fly it eventually hit my leg. I was wearing pants and she wasn't swinging it that fast, so I said nothing the first time. The second time, however, I said "Watch what you're doing." She looked at me with big eyes and said "OMG, I'm so sorry!" I just nodded and tilted my head for her to continue, which she did, fairly carefully. ;)
After watching that scene we were getting tired and the rooms were really filling up. We got out of there before my claustrophobia really set in, and got into bed well before midnight.
Sunday, May 22
Our last day at DomCon, we got up, dressed, packed up and headed out after muffins and coffee. This day was fairly quiet, most of the attendees seemed rather subdued (probably from the fetish ball the night before) so we walked around the dealer room, I bought my toys that I'll photograph and show tomorrow, and then we went to two panels.
The first one was one by Mistress Molly. which was one called "OWNED -- Order of Women Nuturing Enforced Domination." It was basically a seminar on female empowerment, and Mistress Molly kept emphasizing that a woman can't be a good Dominant if she's just giving and giving all the time, and needs to take time for herself. She also said she's tired of seeing women make catty comments about each other and tearing each other down, and she picked one woman and had us all pay her a compliment. She also had us each say the last time before that we had paid a compliment. She pointed out that it's hard to remember when we're kind to people, and that being Dominant does not equate to being unkind, which some rather unexperienced people (especially in SL as I've pointed out over and over) seem to think.
Mistress Molly is not the greatest public speaker, but she speaks from the heart, and again, that Irish accent is just totally enchanting, even with all the "fucks" in it! LOL
Our final class was Collars and Protocols, taught by Sir Nik from the previous day's flogging demo, along with Master Orpheus Black. I found out that Sir Nik is into ceremonial magick and pretty much the kind of stuff I'm into, and he talked about the difference between Protocols and Rituals -- protocols are how we do things, and rituals are the assembly of the protocols into the ritual. For example, he talked about how he would give a collar to a submissive, and there were a set of poses she would get into and words she would say, those were the protocols. Putting all those together was the ritual, and he kept stressing that BDSM is a sacred art, not just a set of wierd things we do. It was really poignant and touched me deeply.
Then Master Orpheus Black brought his girl up and spoke, saying as he is a Buddhist, he had devised a set of poses and mantras for his girls to do as part of ritual. He then started counting off numbers, one, two, three, and each time he spoke a number, she would get into a pose and say part of her mantra, which spoke of her submission to him. As she got into pose four she couldn't remember the mantra, and just looked at her and said "Breathe, breathe, you're doing fine." She started to cry but he kept encouraging her and finally she said it, which I remember clearly: "I give my life, my body, and my soul to you, for I am yours." I looked at Judy and saw that she was in the same state of pouring out tears that I was -- it was so beautiful to see. After the class I went up to her, kissed her hand and told her how beautiful her presentation was and just got us all crying again.
One last thing in this class, Sir Nik talked about how he lost a girl. He had brought her in and she agreed to do all the housework in exchange for his Domination of her. She also liked to kneel and take his boots off every day, not that she had a foot fetish, but she enjoyed the service of kneeling, removing the boots and rubbing his feet while they chatted about the day. He then said that he had bought a new game on his X-Box and was deep into it for a couple of weeks. She would come home from work and find him on the floor playing the game, with the boots off. After a few days of this she stopped doing the housework but he still didn't get it. Finally, she walked in one day, pulled the cords out of the TV and looked at him. He yelled "What are you doing?" and she replied "No,what are you doing?" She then went to her room, packed, tossed the collar at his feet and walked out. He never made it right with her, and genuinely said how he had f**ked up, and it was all his fault. It was both a learning moment, and touching to see how even a strong Dominant can learn from mistakes.
After that we headed out, and got home in good time.
Final Thoughts
Each year that I go to DomCon I really enjoy it, but this year, as I have really immersed myself in my local community and clubhouse, it was extra special., The wide eyed wonder of my first DomCon was gone, and now I could really settle in, enjoy all the spectacle and learn a lot. All the classes were great, the dealer room was top notch, and meeting lots of kinky people was fantastic.
After a rather difficult spring semester at the college, this was exactly what I needed. While still a bit physically tired from last week's final push at the college and then the wild weekend, I also feel emotionally and spiritually better, and now that I have a slew of new toys I have devious plans to try them out. I can't wait til next year!