Month: June 2026

“Lady Venom Takes A Mistress” by Kat Blackthorne [Femdom Review]

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Lady Venom Takes A Mistress

What in heaven’s name did I just read? This is a gothic lesbian sex farce. In the large part it is amusing, but brute force style, and full of awkward inconsistencies amidst the self indulgence. I would best describe  it as having class clown energy, cracking jokes at any cost to itself. When it is working, the vibes are a contemporary Ruddigore, when it isn’t it hits moments you aren’t sure it was trying to be humorous and may have just unintentionally fallen on its face. 

Thus while it gave me more than a few chuckles on purpose, you also get moments like the scene when the evil villian (Lord Harkness) pats his horse and announces after a few bearings and fuckings and the protagonist (Posey) will be just like his mare. And one is left pondering if this is intended to imply he has had sex with his horse? It’s very hard to tell. Tongue might be very firmly in cheek here, but then the book is chomping about so wildly it still manages to bite it off. 

Which is probably strike 1 of the book, but not a problem that’s entirely unredeeming. Accidental pratfalls can still be funny. Where it does drag the most is major problem 2. For a Lesbian romance, characters are inordinately preoccupied with men. In the titular Lady Venom’s case, murdering them and in Poesy’s case, describing in detail their immense ugliness. If I wanted to complain about awful men there’s perfectly good heterosexuality for that. I think they were trying for the fantasy of being able to reject the idea that only M/f could be happily ever after, instead it ended up delivering political lesbianism.

This is made more so bewildering by a cast of ghostly servants that include several jovial male phantoms who nod along with the endless dialogue about how nice killing men is. And that the 11th hour reveal that the domme character in the romance might be responsible for the misogyny the protagonist grew up with through some sort of series of whimsical misunderstandings. Which happens so fast and randomly that it’s almost incoherent.

Of course there’s certainly ways you can do a splatterpunk rejection of having anything to do with straightness, but the tone here is just so unstable that it gets in the way of the good pastoral cottagecore escape bits. 

Consistency is something the book struggles with in the sex parts, too, going from lots of gentle femdom/pleasure from scenes with nothing more dramatic to fingering to the lead suddenly being consensually fucked with a novelty dildo described as being as thick as her bicep and able to make her bleed enough to coat the dildo. Again tonally unclear if this was severe vaginal tearing as one might expect from a more or less unprepped large insertion, or ham handed cherry popping drama? Probably the latter given the book layers things with the literal presence of that fruit as a symbol for the thing Posey had that Lady Venom wanted, but not skillfully done enough to make that clear. Especially not since everything else in this book was tell, so an interlude trying to lean on show will just be awkward. 

Asides from that, my more essential problem is not a flaw. It’s a feature the author intended, that I am not the target audience. 

This is submissive wish fulfillment, the fantasy that a literal magic dominant will immediately treat you like the most beloved, sexy thing ever and indulgently orally service you to as many orgasms as possible (or guide you through masturbation for their enjoyment) while lavishing you with praise and gifts. All you need to do is tell the dominant you like them and presto! Suddenly you are the most special subbie that ever subbed and the dominant lavishes you with more praise for appreciating them. That’s just not going to be my thing. 

Of course self indulgent sub fantasies are perfectly valid, but in finding fiction for me instead of for a sub, this is a perennial problem. Dominants are, by and large, the fetish *object* when we are featured, not the audience. As a result Lady Venom (aka Alabaster Beaudelaire) is endlessly giving and inexplicably into a protagonist who offers nothing more compelling than wanting to stay in a palace where she is cosseted and every need is catered to. 

If I am to imagine myself in Lady Venom’s shoes, what is in it for me, here?

I mean, sure. The little hide-away palace with delicious food and infinite hobby dress making, training in ninja like combat skills and hot people who care about you in the most reassuring way possible would be nice. And who wouldn’t want magically intelligent animals who protect and serve you and ghosts that make you gourmet food, but also enjoy having you hobby bake in their kitchen? The ghosts even act like wise best friends when you are needing a pick me up but have no personal needs beyond housing! It’s a fantasy story and it’s good to daydream. No criticism if this is your dream.

But when I am going to self indulge, I want to be the fussed over one. My silliest, most selfish fantasies where everyone either loves me or falls in a hole and I am so comfy and secure and rewarded do not require my submission as the price of admission. And so many books about BDSM do focus on that theme: Surrender yourself and then get everything handed to you by the dominant. 

Which is counter to the core of this project’s purpose, finding writing that constructively gives dominants what they want. Whether guide books for practical exploration in the real world or romance for comfort, titillation or inspiration it’s a difficult needle to thread that needs more than just that a dominant happens to be female in this particular context or story. Lady Venom Takes A Mistress isn’t pretending to be anything but a goofy, campy frolic, but in recommendations the only endorsement I could give would it might be a good birthday gift for the sapphic sub in your life.

Where to Buy (for a deserving sub :P)

Author Website

Liked this review? Check out more titles in my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project!

“Kiss of Seduction” by Rawnie Sabor [Femdom Book Review]

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Kiss of Seduction Rawnie Sabor A steamy Sapphic Succubus Romance A Court of Chains Story

After deciding that my original pick for this week was so terribly bad that reviewing it would be a simple unkindness to myself as much as the author, my plea for some more sapphic or queer suggestions turned up a much better replacement, Kiss of Seduction, as well as a few other books I can add to my review backlog. 

This one’s a contemporary paranormal romance, a succubus and a half angel, set in the author’s version of the kinky decadent court of BDSM obsessed supernaturals trope. Demons, vampires, werewolves, fae and whatnot live in harmony with the humans they have claimed, but must fight off enemy courts at their borders. Sabor is hardly the first writer to dream up that kind of zoo, but having a not particularly unique premise doesn’t mean something can’t be executed well.  Sure, the setting is somewhat of a conceit to justify the aesthetics of the various relationships (and an elaborate magic collating rite), but it’s the quality of writing that can make it break a book more than the degree of novelty it tries to have. 

Of course that’s particularly true in Romance. You already expect a HEA, and usually a pretty tight formula following the kind of Romance it is, Historical, Inspirational, Amish, Cowboy, etc… Being sapphic doesn’t change any of the other expected, familiar beats either: the initially helpless character in the pair coming to recognize her power; the brooding dominant softened by true love and finally confident they can let go and be their full selves with the beloved; and of course that any side characters either become insta-family obsessed with helping the main pair come together or obstacles to be vanquished. 

Predictable or not, I was still interested enough to see precisely how this horny haunted commune would resolve their challenges to be entertained by it. 

I was also happy Sabor avoids some of the bad habits authors can fall into when they write linked-but-stand-alone books.  Past and future series characters were very present, but neither intrusive enough to hog the spotlight, nor pointless if you hadn’t read previous books. While it was true that if the characters had already gotten their own happily ever after there would be some time to show this couple still living their best life, the Court of Chains series seems to have aimed for enough variation there’s none of the more obnoxious hive mind of happiness that late in series books can fall into. 

Furthermore, as inherently silly as the concept of a friendly vampire is (and in these books every supernatural but the werewolf characters are some variation of an erotic lifeforce drainer), I also find there’s a lot more honesty in starting with the concept that your (fantasy) dominants are inherently predators and figuring out how they try to mitigate that. All too often an otherwise contemporary or more grounded in the real world setting can backfire and leave the intentionally flagged BDSM elements an awkward effort to wallpaper over actual consent issues. 

This can be a particular problem in any romance series, more so when a major power imbalance is an important part of each story. One dominant billionaire/Duke/BDSM club owner is a person with a fetish, four or five, all buddies with nobody else unlike them and start feeling like a conspiracy. Sabor’s Court of Chains setting has made its characters self aware, a group of monsters agreeing that their biology makes having a thrall unavoidable and trying to figure about how to put some sort of brakes on. 

Nonetheless, the ensemble setting still requires certain tolerances from the reader. While this is strictly speaking sapphic, the peril of the story, told as much for titillation (though perhaps not in as much detail), is the constant threat of enslavement by bad guys. Our sub character, Evie, is a former vampire thrall, and our dom, Natalya, is stuck on earth after killing her cruel master, and has to fear being returned to service again. It seems like all the other major female characters are capable of finding Evie attractive, but they are all in straight, male dominated relationships or headed for one.  

If that’s a deal breaker, it would be understandable. Lots of people looking for femdom don’t want to be bothered with male dominance, and if you are looking for sapphic *only*, a series that is majority hetero M/f and uses those couples as the side characters is not going to fill that need. 

I think it’s most accurate to say the book is bisexual, so much so that the character being set up as the male lead of the next book is causally described as doing BDSM play with a man. Evie, the literally angelic sub, is exclusively attracted to women, but her brutalization is largely in the hands of men. Natalya’s past partners were chosen in a gender blind fashion, but largely due to a choice in writing she also lives in a world where she has to fear being possessed and used by men more so than women.

There are Vampire Queens, of course, to rival the settings Vampire Kings, and nothing mechanically than makes magic women weaker than magic men, but overall the tone also gives women a bit of a sympathetic buff, that you can be shitty exes or minions of the bad guys, but your heart will ultimately be in the right place.  Likewise, male characters can end up enslaved in the story, but I do think there’s a bit of tilt to treating M/f like the overall setting default.

For me, I also found myself in an interesting position because I responded more to the book’s steady stream of whump than I did to the gooey, happy consenting kink parts between the leads. People are forever being shot, stabbed or otherwise maimed and in need of rescue and concern by other characters. I think that’s hot. 

As a reader this is perhaps another finer point not properly talked about in the search for good femdom stories. As a dominant I am not personally attracted to dominants. I am somewhat omnisexually attracted to certain kinds of suffering and submission, but as much as I care about books with dommes, I want characters I can self insert into as a dominant that do not insult, annoy or disappoint me. 

The actual on page consensual kink between our leads is mostly mild and cozy, using clear stated confirmations of consent at the bulk of its dirty talk, and showing Evie slowly warming up across the many sex scenes between the leads as a sort of mental health progress marker in her trauma recovery. Natalya is (by and large) acting as a wish fulfillment top, that creature of typically submissive fantasy that uses kink to heal and do exactly what the sub secretly wants, but behaves with a combination of shame and gratitude that she lets things go too far with the filthy things she is “making” the sub do. It’s not Sabor’s fault, I can find that romantic or interesting, but I am probably only going to find the more non-diagetic parts of the book erotic.

Likewise, Natalya’s day to day role is to run a BDSM club that provides all the heightened emotions that Fae and Fiend seem to require to eat. There, she plays a stereotypical house dominatrix-as-mentor role, coaching monsters to regulate themselves in a motherly fashion. This often gives me some reservations on the wish fulfillment front that I expect from romance, as a dominant reader.

What redeems things for me are twofold, the classic domme pedestal is framed not as the “proper” way dominants should be, but a disassociation from strong emotional connections Natalya uses because she is wary of love, and that her big pathos is around a world that tends to treat opening up and revealing your true self as submission and undermines those who do. That’s focused on a literal unwillingness to be naked before others, which is given plot reasons, but stands with its symbolism too. 

As far as the power fantasy I know many readers say they want, Natalya is second in command in the collective, but perceives that more as a function of overlapping magical biology than real deference to their official leader. The blood sucking variation of Vampire functions on an ability to pool power and it is more pragmatic to leave another character with the fancy hat. Another character might be King, but the decisions are clearly determined collectively, through a fairly consensus tilted alliance. 

And as much as the character is fixated on protecting and repairing Evie, the character is given lots of moments to be badass that don’t feel forced. All characters get injured a lot, but even when Natalya is most vulnerable she’s either doing the lion with a thorn in its paw thing or successfully undermining her captors. 

So, Kiss of Seduction was fun. I delivers an entertaining ride, I found the characters cute, and it suggests that you can make a working book by writing a female character into a typically male role without having to change much about the characters. Now if only writers would have that kind of courage in the other direction, when they write male sub characters. Still, until there’s more options I think it’s safe to say that sapphic femdom romances do a good job of showing what’s possible.

Where to Read:

Author’s Website:

Liked this review? Check out more titles in my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project!

“Mercy” by Sara Cate [Femdom Book Review]

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Mercy by Sara Cate "Only She Can Bring Him To His Knees"

This is book 4 in a series (Salcious Players Club), a contemporary age gap romance about an F/m relationship between a 34 year old and the 22 year old son of her business partner. Despite the relationship being a bad idea for numerous reasons even outside of a 12 year age difference, Maggie and Beau just can’t seem to ignore their shared attraction. 

I really wish they had. The book is terrible. The couple is never convincingly able to sell themselves as functional together or even having much in the way of plausible chemistry, and the plot twists and sex scenes are not only about as erotic as a yeast infection, they are as mundane as one too. Its biggest achievement is to simultaneously be as generic as possible about the sex, yet the characters behave like no human being I have ever met. 

We know we are off to a great start when we meet our female lead. Despite being the co-owner of a sex club focused on BDSM/dating app, she is not into overt sexuality, or to the best of her knowledge, kink. But, in the spirit of eating her own dog food, she’s finally wheedled into taking a sex quiz, that helpfully tells her she’s dominant. Sorry, specifically a Mistress and a Brat Tamer.

Following this infallible sorting process, our heroine, faced with all the men on this kinky dating app, chooses the one who filled out his profile huffly saying he thought this was all stupid. This interest is pretty inexplicable, but it doesn’t stop the male lead from sending rapidly escalating, cringe sexts, which she turns down, but then invites him to a date at the club she owns. Sure, it’s her workplace and she is super insecure about all of this or anyone finding out she’s even exploring things, but what better place to kick things off?

It’s only after a first hookup does she realize who Beau actually is, tried to break up, but since Beau gives minimal resistance to the idea, she goes along with it anyway. She also immediately offers to let him stay at her house whenever he needs.

Which follows one of the major writing silliness. Maggie is supposed to be a type A over achiever with some relatable body insecurities. Instead she’s a doormat the male lead of the previous book orders around while she quietly resents him. Rather than any capacity to take charge, she repeatedly shows she can neither set boundaries at work or with the male lead. She’s also written as a mewling insecure mess in a ham handed effort to make her a relatable audience insert, but this of course doesn’t stop the narrative descriptions from such cliches as mentioning her “heels clinic on the floor”. They were going for an uptight, ball busting career bitch, instead she has vibes of bag holding patsy.

Beau, on the other hand, is a serial tantrum thrower (yikes) who can’t hold down a job. He is also several times over a creep, which is supposed to be him being a brat, but instead is a constant rather tedious tendency to grab Maggie by the throat or boss her around. Again, I think the author thinks that this is supposed to be affirming and self sure masculine desire that Maggie is supposed to take comfort in, but the heroine’s perception of her own precarity are not a good match for what was supposed to be taking a fuckboy in hand and taming him. The only thing I can credit is that he is plausibly pretty childish.

Nevertheless, much effort is made to establish that Beau isn’t as violent and dangerous as he is frightened of being (just starting constant needless verbal fights), but the behavior he exhibits codes more as mentally unwell, and the solution being spanking not therapy ends up more codependent than power exchange.

Choosing to write that Maggie has zero experience only further undermines her. Most of her exploration is directed by her coworkers and on top of the non-consensual neck grabbing I flagged, the book finds two different occasions in the story for her to sub outright. Something tells me the proceeding book, also age gap but with an M/f couple, did not feel the need to have the dominant switch. 

I just don’t think Cate trusts readers can identify with a dominant, which is frank self sabotage. After a while it also becomes pretty clear they don’t know the difference between D/s and topping/bottoming either, when sensory exploration has to be done in a sub role and the negotiations scenes not doing a good job of setting the distinction between rules for fun and limits. This is particularly flaggable because it repeats that terrible problem that the sub gets magic inviolable limits, but the dominant is subject to whatever and it’s on them to dominate the sub not to behave poorly.

There’s a lot of books with this setting premise, a group of rich people go in together on owning a BDSM club, and rather than being a somewhat fraught investment in a marginalized community, it is a smashing, high class success. All while the kink within is almost always incredibly mild and introduced in each book with lavish attention to check lists and safewords. Readers always get a little BDSM 101 lesson whether they need it or not, and backs are patted by how liberating and above board all this is. 

This lecturing almost always is wildly at odds with the behavior of the characters, who are always excessively enmeshed in each other’s personal lives, and more often than not, making rookie mistakes. The casual wealth, rather than being wish fulfillment, are just another layer of ick. Here it’s particularly egregious. For extra drama, the female lead from the prior book (22 year old, marrying the male lead’s 40 something dad after having dated the male lead) comes to scold the male lead he needs to be nicer to his dad.  This is played as her maybe having a point. Ditto the female lead has a conversation with the male lead of the last book where she drops, casually that she actually initially hated Beau for not wanting as much contact with his dad initially 

Of course, being scrupulously fair, age gap is already not my kink, so I was hoping to try to give it the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, among many other dubious achievements, it falls into my belief that when there’s a significant gulf in age it’s not that the younger party is ever mature for their age, it’s always that the older person isn’t. Maggie is a mess and no amount of interminable epilogues makes things better. About the only comfort is that we hear Maggie flat out refuses to marry the male lead when he asks so you can head canon their eventual break up.

Nevertheless, Mercy also fails as a bad book, in that there’s never any moment it’s particularly amusing in it’s terribleness. It is the literary equivalent of buying one of those craft kits from Walmart that are prompting to teach you to crochet a penguin or cross stitch a teapot. All the parts are technically there, but the materials and provided pieces are such poor quality the promise on the box will never deliver that outcome. 

Where to Buy:

Author’s Website

Liked this review? Check out more titles in my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project!

“Discipline: Adding Rules & Discipline To Your BDSM Relationship” by Lily Lloyd [Femdom Book Review]

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DISCIPLINE Adding Rules & Discipline to Your BDSM Relationship Lily Llyod

This book, taking a neutral approach that attempts to be equally applicable regardless of your preference of D/s role, sets out to tell you how to take a bedroom only kink relationship and shift it into a one where the experience of that extends outside of time boundaried and limited scenes and into one where kink can be enjoyed on a more ongoing basis. The author is a switch, speaking from their experience with both roles, but in practice I find things tend to put a lot more emphasis on struggles from the dominant side.

I also think the title poorly gets across what it is actually doing, because it leaves the impression of a preoccupation on punishments and prescriptive (and very strict) high protocol. It’s actually about communication, negotiation and a much more organic approach to adding additional structure to your life. Lloyd’s philosophy is a matter of romantic intentionality, with the belief that all relationships are already built on (often unspoken) rules and agreements. What she is concerned with is helping you work with what you already have to make your changes sustainable.

She’s also very sensitive that this can be emotionally fraught and load bearing to the long term survival of a relationship. And, as much as it sets out not to be a BDSM 101 book, it still spends a lot of time on the foundations of how you and the other person work as a couple. It’s assumed you know what a dominant or a sub is, and the basics like safewords, but she does not suppose you are starting with more than that. This is not to say at any point the advice is tedious or obvious, rather she assumes that because most vanilla relationships got that way with a lot of help from external scripts that are treated as the human default, your relationship’s seriousness and pre-existing momentum do not preclude you having never seriously talked about what you wanted outside of very basic things.

What I otherwise think makes Llyod’s manual distinct is the emphasis on rules and discipline as romance and reassurance for both parties. Otherwise, I believe this book benefits from its assumption that you have to meet people where they are at and not over emphasizing living up to a fantasy ideal. Inversely, I believe the title and opening premise of the book fail to capture that you will also be thinking about the psychology and intentionality of what you are doing in a long term relationship and how it will bleed back into those so called “bedroom” scenes. 

 When she does talk about the rules part, she breaks them into three categories: rituals and protocols; standing orders; and things that are actually supposed to cause behaviour modification.  Lloyd classifies the former as a matter of aesthetics and mood setting, serving to help hold a head space. For example, you might be familiar with the idea of starting a scene by formally putting on a collar. Standing orders, on the other hand, are the realm of goals that are important to one or both parties in the relationship, but which generally leave it up to the submissive to figure out finer points of execution. Lastly, she makes behaviour modification distinct because this is probably the only place where real change is being expected, with an emphasis in her examples on an almost unilateral benefit for the submissive.

Where I think the book over reaches is that it also tries to define dominants by these three rule types. That much, I think, is a hammer looking for nails problem. It’s good to know that some people care primarily about lots of precise little aesthetic/immersion things while others might get their enjoyment from what is being prioritized by the submissive as a holistic matter, but I don’t think it’s very helpful to try to type yourself as some sort of quiz. The problem of overreach also pops out most broadly when she talks about “behaviour modification” dominants being unusual. 

That’s not to say Lloyd is not self aware of aspects of why. She cites a long gone (alas) blogger Dishevelled Domina (formerly of DischevelledDomina.wordpress.com) when going over a major issue of the sub displacing inappropriate levels of helplessness onto the dominant. Still, Lloyd muses about dominants who do behaviour modification as mysterious unicorns as much as they are lavishes with praise of being sweet “geeky” or “a bit nerdy” in the level they will invest in their sub’s psychology. But, ultimately she concludes correctly that over weighting benefit to the sub is what makes these sort of dynamics fail to survive the long haul.

The other book’s weakness, I think, is a common one. That’s that you can still see a ghost of the over valuing of the ”inherently more responsible dominant” mindset where she talks in terms of needing to consider the sub’s well being by default to “deserve” the submission of the sub. While “do no harm” is a good watchword that any reasonable BDSM guide emphasizes, I find it a bit incongruent that Lloyd can notice that hey, unilateral dynamics seem to burn dominants out and give lots of useful insight about subs needing to work on their end… but somehow along the way I find that a lot of writing about BDSM forgets about the equal partnership part underlying things. Lloyd is better than most, but it’s not surprising that the second quarter of the book focuses on the problem of unacknowledged dominant vulnerability without, per say, realizing what it was is doing. Similarly it is telling that at no point does it take subs aside and tell them to really think about what they actually want, but there’s a whole subsection for dominants that assumes it is likely they forgot to do that.

And where she starts talking about the practicals of rules again, I believe Lloyd does a much better job of implicitly centering the work involved. While we opened with an introduction to the writer that mentioned, almost casually, her first marriage failed because the dominant was bad at follow through, in practice she strongly emphasizes rules as being a gift with strings, effort and weighted meaning for both parties. What Lloyd wants always boils down to moving from the pure fantasies of either the benevolent task assigner dominant or the selfishie meanie and victim and figuring out workable, smaller scale compromises.

And in aggregate, that’s probably the best platform to embark on the rest of the book, which gives a lot of granular, easy to follow advice on choosing, testing and sustaining rules that will actually work for you. Lloyd consistently keeps things flexible, but whether your end goal is 24/7 TPE or honestly even just improving the bedroom side of things and never going any further you will still find something useful.

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Where to Buy:

  • Shockingly hard to find, may have been delisted recently from online retailers

Author Website:

  • Unfortunately Lily Lloyd appears to have scaled down or stopped their online presence. 

Liked this review? Check out more titles in my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project!

(More) Adventures With Hush Buttplugs

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(More) Adventures With Hush Butt Plugs

Blogging (for the most part) is enough of a dead medium that when I talk about this project with those in their 20s sometimes they hear. “I self host a site” to mean that I run a discord.  I’m still at this largely because I can avoid a lot of the problems of censorship one gets in someone else’s site more than I expect to be wildly successful. That’s fine.

Likewise, the heyday of when the demands of SEO made sex toy review blogs a reasonable side hustle or even a full time gig has largely passed, and though I tried it same as many people in the space at the time, it was never a good fit for me. Most toys on the market didn’t do anything for me, and l lack the ability to be pleasantly neutral in reviews. Therefore  this is going to be a rare departure to the before times, where I talk about getting something for free.

I have actually been a little shameless. This is my second time at it, with Lovense sending me something to review, no strings attached except the request that maybe I send them a link of my review when I am done. Since I wasn’t a big fan of the Solace (good concept, needs more time to bake), I assumed that this would probably be the last I heard from them. Such is the trade off of the nature of reviews. You have to be some sort of big deal that just the attention you paid to say you didn’t like something was worth it, or the brand needs to be functioning on such a need to be noticed that the product is unlikely to be something you would want to try in the first place.

Then, fortuitously two things happened. Our several year old Hush finally stopped holding a charge and we were vaguely considering buying a replacement, since we’ve been pretty happy with them for the duration of our relationship. Then Lovense reached out again to ask if I would like to try one of their products. 

There’s an affiliate link here as a result, but it’s kind of a lukewarm commitment to that. I won’t blandish you with claims of my incorruptible nature, but honestly I think there’s still something interesting to say about the topic (and product) beyond that I got one. 

I like the Hush, and think it remains the gold standard for accessible, ready to go remote control buttplugs. Over the course of Silver and I’s time together, this would actually be the fourth one we have had. It was particularly helpful when we were long distance, but it’s still good at what it does in person. Lovense knows that, their cheerful reach out email even mentions how lots of D/s couples use their stuff.

The technology has been through many iterations at this point, mostly improving the quality of the signal strength of the toy. I will grant that Lovense had most of what it needed down pat from first conception, a silicone outer housing and waterproof charging port, plus the standard teardrop egg with flared base anything meant for a butthole needs to be. It’s the signal part that was a work in progress. Silver’s first model was actually pretty terrible, even if it beat out any other wireless options, with the vibrations and whatnot perfectly fine but the fatal flaw that if you sat down there was a strong chance that your body plus the chair would cause it to drop connection. Purchase #2 had a much better connection ability. Purchase #3, their largest size, connects fine, but is too big for the user, an entirely a user side thing.

Silver is very bad at pacing himself, and the rather saw tooth approach we take to play versus other real world distractions mean that the slower stretching part. Furthermore, Freud was not entirely speaking from the depths of his cocaine habit when he described people with high anxiety as “anal retentive”, which is to say that stress and butt stuff are not compatible. Prod a person enough, metaphorically or literally and they will tense up. 

It is a remarkable (and probably coincidental) phenomenon that butts operate much like genitals in the sense that getting into them becomes remarkably easier when someone is aroused. While I shall leave self lubricating anuses to the realm of boylove comics and the omegaverse, it is still true that as arousal causes blood flow to the rest of your pelvic floor, the anus typically goes from curled like an angry pangolin to ruddy pink and soft feeling, almost spongey in its give. You probably have a baseline, variable bit of ability to open up sans arousal, but it just works so much better when everything between your navel and your thighs is at full steam, all flood gates open.

The trouble is that the order of operations of buttplugs tends to be that you put them in near the start of the recreation activity you are going to do, solo and by yourself. In function they are a stationary additive, a little extra pressure on a nerve rich area. For those with prostates the right shape pokes that, but for everyone else the anal ring is one of the human universals. Matching timing to when your bottom is aroused enough to get the damn thing in, but not near enough at the end of an encounter to be anticlimactic is an art in itself. 

And the difficulty extends further: If you own the butthole and your brain is already raring to get going it can be very tempting to push past that moderate discomfort. But banging up the rectum is going to cause cumulative irritation. If this is a precursor activity to larger things, or some variation of thrusting penetration (regular anal, pegging) racing is going to actually run contrary to what you were intending. 

I think that’s also something to think about on a paired activity versus solo. All by yourself it is much easier to make those micro-calibrations for an easy slip in. Someone else being in control of the push and angle is just more likely to make you encounter physiological resistance. 

In a D/s dynamic I find this is its own fraught territory, because the goal is to make it seem like action and response are seamless. Starting encounters with the bad kind of ow is opposite of this, and liable to have one of you internalize you are failing, which is hardly the experience you want to have. And since a lot of subs internalize being pleasing over being comfortable as the goal or even a value add, you end up with a situation that encourages long term bad habits. They assume you want it to hurt because why wouldn’t you?

One solution is to make it part of the pre-scene prep, instructing the sub to show up dressed or stripped to your preference and plugged. This means that there’s less pressure against pacing themselves. Still, sometimes you want to go hands on together or you may want to make your habits encourage better odds of an outcome every time. For that we have settled on a bunch of edging, until there’s a much higher probability that everything will fit together smoothly.  The other step we decided was to go a bit smaller than we might typically. Specifically the “1.5” is a step down from the usual. That’s not to say that it’s precluding using other larger toys in our collection, but

The Hush’s main value is using it for prolonged wear, so it’s better to think in terms of comfort over immediate impact. Which brings me to another point of interest, the app. You are going to need to sign up for an account with the company and then download an app to your phone. All the sex toys they make require this for the other major functionality of the toy, a Bluetooth enabled slider dial remote. What has changed is the sensitivity of the Bluetooth part.

I remember the original ones we had were actually sort of frustrating in that they had very poor reception or the connection could easily time out mid play. Sitting on a bed could also block a connection, a pretty unfortunate issue. That seems to have been the focus of most of their improvements.

Lovense the company seems to have figured out the trick for passing the two app stores’ draconian hatred of anything sexual. Nevertheless as a point in their favour, in the event of some calamity they have left some “dumb” features into their design. Can’t connect for some reason? You still can push the single on button to cycle through it’s pattern of intensity and pulsing. Still, I am curious if they have any worst case solution to offer a side loading program or if calamity pushes them out of the app store eliminates the remote control feature.

Still, that’s probably a case of having worse problems if it does happen. And in the end this one will likely have the same route as the ones that went before it. Used intermittently until battery failure.

Additional Notes & Follow Up:

If you are new to pegging, Ruby Rider runs regular free online classes for both the basics and the next steps after that.