BDSM Submissive rules within My Dungeon ( pt.1 )

Mistress Lady Leyla

Submissive should always remove clothing as soon as she / he gets into the Dungeon unless  Mistress has laid out clothing for the submissive or submissive to wear.

Submissive should fold clothes neatly or place them in the laundry whenever he she gets undressed.

The submissive is to kneel in present posture in front of Mistress's Throne whenever the Mistress is due to arrive and wait quietly.

Whenever the Mistress is present in a room, the submissive must ask permission to enter in the following fashion: "Would it please you if your submissive entered the room."

The submissive will kneel in the room until the Mistress gives permission that he or she may move or proceed with any given job.

The submissive will wear and gratefully accept any toys the Mistress chooses to insert or adorn her or him.

The submissive will not speak unless spoken to and may request an opportunity to speak if there is something pressing to discuss during those periods of time when the Mistress commands silence.

The submissive may request an opportunity to serve the Dominant in the following way: "Would it please you to have your submissive serve you?"

The submissive will always thank the Mistress for an opportunity to serve whether it was doing a chore or being flogged.

The submissive will keep their eyes averted unless it is the wish of the  Mistress to have their submissive look them in the eyes.

The submissive will address the Mistress not by their first name, but by the title preferred by that dominant.

The Helen Syndrome: The Curse Of Beauty

Good looks, great brain: an irresistible mixture. Pretty, bright, young things have got lucky. Doors open wide, the job offers come flooding in, relationships are a synch.. Even Aristotle declared: ‘Beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.’

But think of the most sensational trouble-makers of history: all intelligent lookers. Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Boudicaa, Anne Boleyn - these are women we’ve loved to hate. They are too hot to handle, their beauty self-destructs. In poems, plays, paintings and comment pages we celebrate their sticky ends. There’s more prejudice than preference. Deep down, we want the beauteous to be bad: we want them to come a cropper.

It's not that beautiful women aren’t taken seriously, but that they are taken too seriously – their looks arouse suspicion. After fifteen years researching a book about Helen of Troy, famously The Most Beautiful Woman In the World, and exploring centuries-worth of material I realised that Helen would be better labelled The Most Dreadful Woman in The World. For 2,700 years men have been petrified of this clever Bronze Age princess, dubbed across time a stunning man-eater.

But surely the curse of beauty is a phenomenon of the past? We’re sufficiently grown up to realise that external appearance is not an indicator of some kind of malicious trickery or moral turpitude. Aren’t we?

I won a scholarship to Oxford based on a series of essays and fiendishly difficult medieval Latin translations. Years later one of my dons admitted that when I appeared for an interview there was a frisson in the room. Could someone so brainy also be presentable? Was there skulduggery afoot?

Terri Duhon is the founder of B&B Structured Finance, a highly specialised (highly successful) derivatives consultancy in the city. She also happens to be ‘blessed with good genes’. Laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation she tells the story of being recommended as an expert witness in a complicated financial case. It was not to be. The knee-jerk reaction was that having her front of house was a big risk. If you’re female, gravitas comes with grey hair, not with experience.

Gillian Tett, remembers that when she was Bureau Chief for the Financial Times in Tokyo, a Japanese diplomat advised her to keep her gender quiet – to sign herself Dr. Tett. Being an attractive woman in her cut-throat business would have done her no favours. As it was, when this super-bright, blonde journalist turned up to do interviews she was frequently asked if she was the translator. Tett, now Capital Markets Editor says it is malaise discernible throughout the city. ‘Talk to city women and they will tell you it is a liability to be too attractive. I once did a photo-shoot with a striking, uber-financier. Far from revelling in the experience she was very anti the pictures, worried in case they compromised her standing.’

Esther McVey, founder of Winning Women has had similar experiences. Because she stands as a Tory candidate for West Wirral and has great business nous she is often invited in to prestigious events as a guest speaker. Recently, presuming she was someone’s PA – she was asked by the MD of the event to deal with a brolly and briefcase. Again, McVey thinks this is hilarious, but it has reinforced her conviction to advise female business clients continually to emphasise that their ‘content is as important as their packaging’.

Vanessa Collingridge, BAFTA award winning TV presenter remembers being brushed off by a senior commissioning editor at the BBC ‘She’s too young and attractive to have enough credibility as a presenter’ Collingridge, approaching 40, has a first-class degree from Oxbridge and yet, by her own admission, ‘If it is down to two people for a job it’ll be the under-qualified 50 year old guy in the leather jacket who gets the gig.’ Collingridge’s latest book is a new biography of Queen Boudicaa. The one thing we remember about Boudicaa is the fine figure she cuts on the battle-field. Flame-hair streaming, breasts heaving. The red hair appears in just one source – a certain Cassius Dio who was writing 150 years after the event. This single reference created a perfect stereotype. Romans, and storytellers ever since, have wanted to remember her as frightful, ergo beautiful.

This is Helen Syndrome at work. For 3,500 years men have loved to hate women they perceive as beautiful and influential. The history books are scattered with morality tales about Femme Fatales. The suspicion starts early. In the 7th century BC the first ever woman was given no name by the Greek author Hesiod but was called simply the ‘kalon-kakon’, the beautiful-evil thing. In men outward beauty was thought to be a sign of an inward perfection of spirit – the Greeks had a word for it, kalokagatha – joint nobility in appearance and mind. But a woman’s beauty was something different, the deceptive gauze covering a festering wound. A hundred years later Semonides penned a charming little rant that starts:

‘Yes women are the greatest evil Zeus has ever made.’

Semonides’ point was that women tricked men into falling in love with them. In a way he was right. Scientists now realise that in the first flush of a romance the circulation of chemicals dupes us into believing we are in love. The problem of course is that throughout history this biological issue has been laid firmly at the woman’s door. And so, the orthodoxy down the centuries has been that attractive women are schemers, up to no good.

Paris, the Trojan prince stole Helen away from Sparta to Troy but it is Helen who is ‘the bitch-whore’ the ‘nasty scheming little bitch’ the ‘dog-bitch of three husbands’ – ‘Helen of the luscious tresses who brought about the death of the Age of Heroes’. Even Jeffrey Toobin, speaking of more recent events associates scandal with the female philanderer not the male.’ As is demonstrated by the history of scandal from Helen of Troy, to Monica of Beverly Hills, sex has a way of befogging the higher intellectual faculties.’

And so beauty is still considered an inveigling-device. There is a fabulous caricature by the 17th century artist Gaspard Isaac that shows Helen, Lucretia and Cleopatra as they have become in old age. Helen’s nose drips, Lucretia has dangling dugs and orange-peel teeth, and Cleopatra has become jowelly with two tiny breasts like amaretti poking out of her staid, matronly garb. The caption underneath reads;

Rome would not have suffered the scourge of Tarquin

Nor Egypt buried Anthony and his empire

Nor Priam watched the flames reduce Troy to ashes

If, in your youth, you had such ugly mugs.

One might apportion some blame to Mark Anthony and Julius Caesar when they shacked up with Cleopatra but for Roman Authors it is the Egyptian Queen who is the ‘Fury’. A brilliant re-assessment of Cleopatra’s character via unpublished Arabic texts shows she was, in her day, renowned for her philosophy and scientific treatises, not her good looks. But Cleopatra almost brought Rome down – historians needed her to be, not an operator, but a sensational, sex-crazed harridan.

The mediaeval super-potentate Eleanor of Aquitaine was a ‘femina incomparabilis’ a woman without compare - yet in the judgement of the chronicler Matthew Parris ‘ by reason of her excessive beauty she destroyed or injured nations.’ At her most potent she was heaped with opprobrium: ‘a common whore, a woman possessed of the devil’. Anne Boleyn doubtless had less to say in national affairs than her husband Henry and yet in the Judgement of ‘The Great Whore’ by the Abbot of Whitby: ‘The King’s Grace is ruled by one common, stewed whore, Anne Boleyn, who makes all spirituality to be beggared, and the temporality also.’

Rudyard Kipling memorably established that ‘the female of the species is more deadly than the male’. The message reads loud and clear. Good looking women have been put on earth to beguile men, to trick them, to bring them low.

But the plot thickens. Helen of Troy was not in fact famed through the ancient world for her beauty – more for the fact she had the gift of ‘charis’ grace – in Helen’s case ‘a grace which ignites sexual desire’. The ancients didn’t particularly care what she looked like – they were much more interested in how she made people feel, what she made them do. And so she was berated not for her golden locks but for being that dangerous thing, a woman who left her mark on the world. Her beauty was described by Homer as ‘a terrible beauty, beauty like that of a goddess.’ No compliment; look on a goddess’ face and dreadful things happen to you; you are turned to stone, torn to pieces by hunting hounds, or worse. Helen represents something very, very scary.

Now I’m not naïve. We are all interested in what people look like. Consciously and sub-consciously we continually check each other out. Cleopatra bedazzled her hair, Eleanor dressed as a scarlet woman, the Bronze Age Helen wore a dress cut away to her waist and was smothered in perfumed oils. Influential women are, by definition, on show – and in our visually saturated culture they are on show a great deal. TV is a visual medium so it would be perverse if today’s commentators ( like those ancient chroniclers) didn’t write about on-screen appearance. The warped logic comes when a description of someone’s exterior segues seamlessly into suspicion of their intellect.

I’ve had my own share of faceism. On the one hand my latest book has been described by academics and critics as ‘exceptional’, ‘brilliant’, ‘dazzling’. Yet one reviewer unleashed an intemperate rant describing the subsequent TV programme as stupid television for stupid people, ‘gimmicky’ ‘disastrous’ – the starting point for this bile was that Helen was presented by ‘a lady in tight jeans’. I fondly imagine that by translating Bronze Age Hittite Cuneiform tablets, prime-time on Saturday night, I’m striking a blow for brainy TV. The odd, bitter voice rages that with my legs apparent and long dark hair I am single-handedly responsible for the death of thinking television.

The reaction reminds me of those mediaeval monks who used to write over-heated, diatribes about Helen, denouncing her wiley female ways: and loving every minute of it. Some accounts were positively pornographic. One character, Joseph of Exeter, around 1184 devotes an entire epic poem to the description of Helen’s physical attributes – and how evil they were. The poem is explicit to say the least:

‘Lying on him [Paris] with her whole body, she [Helen] opens her legs, presses him with her mouth and robs him of his semen. And as his ardour abates the purple bedlinen that was privy to their sins bears witness to his unseen dew. What evil!’

One can imagine his monkish colleagues sucking in their breath with horror ‘ohhh isn’t that terrible…do tell me more’.

In Euripides’ drama, Helen, the eponymous heroine wails ‘I wish I had been wiped clean like a painting and made plain instead of beautiful’. But no one can clamber out of their own skin – nor should they need to. Come the 21st century I thought we might have passed the point where pebble-specs equalled intellectual rigour. Please tell me we don’t feel the need to perpetuate the millennia long misogyny of faceist attitudes.

So my plea is - move on guys, move on. The fact that a woman has charisma, means she is charismatic, not dangerous. In the past, female beauty was fearful because it was thought to have demonic origins. Speaking to gorgeous and successful women who operate today there is a marked whiff of defiance. Comfortable with – and frankly uninterested in - their god-given gifts they cry ‘blue-stocking us if you dare!’ A combative Helen, from a 1937 poem, can have the last word. Helen Syndrome or no, you’ll find it hard to keep a feisty (good-looking) girl down.

http://www.bettanyhughes.co.uk/site/bettanyhughestest2/the-helen-syndrome-the-curse-of-beauty

Submission - poem

The draw is stronger than alcohol,

Stronger than the next fix,

Stronger than that of the last drag.

It is more than just a phase,

More than a fad,

It's not something you grow out of.

Beauty: A Blessing and a Curse?

You may have looked at the title of this article and gotten a bit confused. For goodness sake, is there a woman in the world who would not give her right arm to be beautiful; to get that extra bit of attention that those radiant women seem to get so easily; those stares that those women who seem to glitter as they walk by seem to get just by being; that extra bit of attention at stores, at work, and certainly from the opposite sex?

Well, let me tell you sisters: Beauty is in fact a blessing and a curse. Yes, you get a lot of male attention from all sorts of sources and it's not always easy to decipher if it's attention that you want or don't want. Yes, your car may get extra attention at the car wash, but maybe you are in a rush and really don't have that extra time. Yep, the guy at the dry cleaner's may get your stuff ready by the next day but at a price, darlings. He expects you to spend a little time interacting with him. And you just might have other things on your mind. And indeed the beautiful women may make poor choices when picking partners because men don't come with signs indicating the quality of their character and just because we have the gift of beauty doesn't mean we also have the gift of good judgment. The guy who you may easily size up as a potential soul-lacking partner may seduce the beautiful women into thinking that only he really understands us. Beauty and good judgment do NOT come as a package.

Next time you find yourself in the cubicle at work next to a visually delightful looking woman or even at a party or any other event or meeting place, I ask that you have a bit of special empathy for the "beauty." Her visual charm does not mean that she is immune from pain and suffering. It doesn't mean that she won't be delighted if you ask her how she is doing or whether or not she, too, might like a cup of coffee. And she may not be feeling so beautiful internally. Please don't make any assumptions about her life. Yep, she may have her share of dates, but she may be very lonely. Your simple bit of attention may just make her day.

Another thing that this group of glittery women would like you to know is that their beauty often comes at a high cost both time wise and financially. That woman does not roll out of bed with glitter on her eyelids and with that totally hip outfit on. She usually works at it. She's likely working hard to maintain those looks that simply required a bar of soap, some jeans and a hooded sweatshirt at age 15. Now, she is likely spending hours getting facials, fighting wrinkles, exercising, eating in a healthy fashion and praying that she has a good set of genes that will see her through the later years of her life with her beauty intact.

I say give this woman a break, look into her eyes, and see if she might need a bit of attention that is not based on her appearance. You will have done a good deed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-greenberg/women-and-beauty_b_2010635.html

ADAM'S CURSE ~ William Butler Yeats.

We sat together at one summer's end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.'

. . . . . . . . . And thereupon

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake

There's many a one shall find out all heartache

On finding that her voice is sweet and low

Replied, 'To be born woman is to know-

Although they do not talk of it at school-

That we must labour to be beautiful.'

I said, 'It's certain there is no fine thing

There have been lovers who thought love should be

So much compounded of high courtesy

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks

Precedents out of beautiful old books;

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.'

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;

We saw the last embers of daylight die,

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell

Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon

15 Things - What's Yours? By Domina Jen.

Add your list below....15 things (or near enough to 15 ) about you most people don't know.

Below is Domina Jen's list and Mine. 

15 Things (Domina Jen) 
 So there’s this fad going around facebook right now, where you list a specific number of things that most people don’t know about you. So I figured, why the hell not do it here, too? I was given the number 15 on facebook, so I figure that’ll work.  

1. Shoving things into a boy’s ass is a requirement of any romantic relationship I will ever have.  

2. My favorite movies are Nightmare Before Christmas, The Princess Bride, the Neverending Story, Mirror Mask, and The Fountain. Pan’s Labyrinth and The Peaceful Warrior are also absolutely phenomenal. So is the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  

3. I was a wedding singer once upon a time, but that was short-lived. I’m an operatic soprano and dream about singing on the stage one day. I’d love to play Abigail in Aida (that role is one of the highest and most challenging ever written, and has actually damaged singers’ voices. I can sing it.) 

The Quiet Power of Service

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Why I am an optimist.....WRITTEN BY FRANKLIN

I found this article on the internet by chance, but having read his other work - loved it....

Why I am an optimist - By Franklin

Recently, while I was driving in my car, I had an epiphany.

You see, I've always joked about having a desire to crush the earth beneath my iron boot, but in the past twoscore years, I've made very little progress toward realizing that goal. And it occurred to me why that is. I'm actually very optimistic about the state of humanity, and unbridled optimism about the human condition doesn't lend itself to the kind of monomaniacial dedication required of a true James Bond-class villain.

There is a reason I am an optimist. That reason emerges directly from the fact that I do not believe in god.

This might seem, at first glance, to be something of a contradiction. Many people cling to a belief in some kind of divine, personally involved caretaker high up in the sky precisely because it's the only way they can find optimism and not despair. There's even a Web site set up by a Fundamentalist Christian organization that is organized around the idea "if you don't matter to God, you don't matter to anyone." The site is advertised by banner ads like this one, showing some gangster wannabe who, without God, presumably has no reason not to blow your punk ass away:

I find this attitude, that without god there is no morality and no meaning or purpose in life, very, very interesting...more for what it says about the people who subscribe to it than for anything else. The Web site that this banner advertises is strongly anti-evolution and pro-creation, and I think that's extremely telling.

There are, I think, two driving forces behind much of religious thought: fear and despair. The despair comes from the idea that human lives and human achievement are without meaning or purpose in a universe without god, a universe where we are the natural result of natural processes on an insignificant and not terribly remarkable part of an insignificant and not terribly remarkable galaxy lost in a universe that is quite literally inconceivably huge. When you look at an image taken from the Hubble Deep Field camera of a teeny, tiny patch of sky, and you see that everywhere in the universe, as far as you can look, you see not hundreds or even thousands but billions of galaxies, and every one of these galaxies is made up of billions of stars, and we occupy such a tiny sliver of this universe that our entire galaxy could vanish or be destroyed in some kind of cataclysm and the universe would scarcely even notice, some people get all freaked out.

But it's true.

Every object you see in this picture with the exception of the bright object in the lower left of center (which is a star in our own galaxy) is an entire galaxy. The scale of the universe beggars comprehension, and we feel insignificant.

So the creationists, who never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge, invent a new universe to satisfy their need to feel special. They imagine a tiny universe, a limited universe, a universe only a few thousand years old, a small place containing a world (which is seventy-five percent water) deliberately created just for man (who has no gills). They post videos on YouTube arguing that the hand of god is clearly visible in the banana, which with its convenient wrapper and hand-pleasing shape was deliberately designed by a benificient creator to fit easily in our hand and be eaten--though they ignore contradictory evidence, like, say, the coconut. Or, they argue, since the evolutionary idea on the origin of life claims life can begin when non-living matter is exposed to radiation, then how come life doesn't spontaneously begin from other non-living matter, like peanut butter?

It's easy to mock creationists; they're just so cute when they pretend to be scientists! But their folly isn't born of stupidity; it's a product of the very human need to feel special and significant. 

When you add the Void to the mix, the problem becomes even greater. Human beings have the cognitive tools to generalize from their experiences and make predictions about future events, and that gives us the capacity to realize that one day we are going to die. Facing the Void is, for many people, the very embodiment of stark raving terror. We are going to die. There will come a day when we will be gone, and there is nothing we can do about it.

So we as a species respond the only way we can: by denying it. We pull the shade down over the Void, and then decorate that shade with an entire bestiary of gods and demons and angels and supernatural forces of all descriptions imaginable who will protect us from the certainty of death. When you look at all the various gods and deities people have worshipped throughout history, all the supernatural beings we've ever believed in--the sun gods worshipped by almost all hunter-gatherer tribes; the god Tezcatlipoca of the Aztecs; the various gods of the Egyptian pantheon; the feuding, spiteful divine teenagers of the Greeks; the vengeful, erratic, emotionally volatile god of the ancient Israelites--one thing becomes very, very clear: these gods are all us. All these divinities are distorted, funhouse mirror caricatures of humanity. We pull the shade down over the Void, then project onto it ourselves. All our fears, desires, petty insecurities, all our need for conformity and control, all these things are reflected in the gods and demons and pixies and faeries we invent. All these dim, distorted projections, created to convince ourselves that the Void is not real.

And it works. The first time I was confronted by the Void, at about thirteen years old, the thought of going to heaven was the only comfort I could find. When I lost that, I lost my only defense against the Void, and that's not easy to do. These crazy funhouse projections serve a purpose.

But there is a price to pay for this comfort, one that I suspect many people aren't even consciously aware of.

Part of that price is truth. If one cares passionately about the truth, one can not help but notice that every time a religious entity has disagreed with empirical about science about some matter of empirical fact about the physical world, the religion has been wrong. Every single time, with not one single exception. The creationists seek meaning and purpose by believing themselves to be the favored of a supernatural entity that created the whole of the universe just for us, yet this belief requires them to imagine a universe much smaller and much younger than it actually is.Their need for meaning, their desperate desire to feel special, causes them to adopt the notion that the whole of creation is only six thousand years old (5,997 years, according to Orthodox Judiasm; Fundamentalist Christians put the figure at about ten years older), in spite of massive, overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

And this notion leads naturally to other notions as well, including the idea that humanity, the favored of the divine architect of the universe, can do no wrong. Environmental responsibility? Social responsibility? Outmoded beliefs of godless liberals; we were given divine sanction to do as we please, and that's exactly what we should do.

God made the universe for us. We are the most important things in all of creation. The world was put here specifically for the purpose of housing us. If we believe this, we will never die; God won't allow it.

If you don't matter to God, you don't matter to anyone.

When people let go of the idea of god, they're left with a sense of despair. If there is no god--if we are simply the result of natural, mindless forces operating in a universe that is incomprehensibly huge and incomprehensibly ancient, a place that is steered by no divine force and a place where an airless rock is just as good as a planet teeming with life, then what meaning can any of us have? What meaning can any of our struggles and triumphs have? What point is there?

And that attitude, tragically, misses the point entirely.

For you see, if we were made a brief time ago in God's image and put here for the sole and express purpose of worshipping and exalting God, then what we are now is what we will always be. There is an upward limit on the things we are capable of. We are born disgraced, pale shadows of the original models who fell from that grace, and our job is to struggle through this brief life of misery and tears hoping we somehow manage to do and say the right things so that god will rescue us. We have no purpose other than that which is given to us by god--and looking around, I gotta say it's not much of a purpose.

But if we are evolved monkeys...

Ah, now things are different. If we are evolved monkeys, if we are the result of natural processes that conspired across a vast sea of time to give rise to sapient, self-directing entities capable of understanding themselves and the physical world, then all bets are off. Now, there is no limit to what we can become. Now, anything within the physical laws of the universe is potentially within our grasp. Now, we have the power we once reserved to our gods; now, we can, through the application of our will, make of ourselves anything we choose to be.

And now we have meaning and purpose far beyond that of crawling around chanting to some insecure creator-god about how great and magnificent he is, and would he please please not strike us dead? Now, we are the part of the universe capable of understanding itself. We are of the universe; we are a part of it, not above it; but we are unique in all the universe we know in that we can understand it. We are aware. We are the universe's way of understanding itself.

And that is a far more magnificent purpose than telling a child-god over and over again that yes, he's great, really, he's great, he's good, he's wonderful, no really, he's great, and we love him, really we do.

There is a saying: "with God, all things are possible." The saying is false. With God, all things are possible save for rising above our station and becoming anything more than what we are right now.

Without god, however, all things not disallowed by the fundamental laws of physics really are possible. Without god, we make our own meaning and purpose; and that power lets us use the gifts granted to us to transform ourselves and the world around us in any way we want.

This power fills some people with fear. Without god, they say, how will we know what is moral? Without god, they say, what punishment can there be for people who do things that are wrong? To this I say: Your morals, given to you by your belief in god, allow for the most appalling atrocities, historically and today. Your morals teach that some human beings, simply as a result of the way they are born, are inherently unequal to others. The notion that there is one and only one right way to live is the cause of more human suffering, more grief, and more evil than any other single idea in all of human history. This is your morals? Your morals, like your gods, are a distorted mirror of your own prejudices and your own evil. You will not find heaven by backing away from hell; the fear of retribution is not the path to enlightenment.

We don't always make good choices, it's true. But we're still a young race. And I am very optimistic about what we can accomplish.