I recently stumbled across the Girls with Slingshots comic and have been enjoying catching up with it. And by ‘catching up’ I mean reading from first to last in consecutive evenings over several glasses of wine. It’s funny, smart and beautifully drawn. It also manages to treat sex as a normal part of life, rather than ignoring it or using it purely for shock value.
It helps that one of the characters, Clarice, is a dominant woman. In fact a geeky, smart, dominant librarian, which is a combination I wouldn’t describe myself as averse to. I also like the fact that her sexuality is treated seriously, in that it’s the basis for jokes but not the butt of them. However, it is a bit unfortunate that the artist chose to make her work as a part time pro-domme. As regularly readers of this blog are no doubt aware, I’m a big fan of pro-dommes, but the stereotype that dominant woman equals pro-domme does get a little old. It’d be nice to see a woman portrayed who can simply enjoy her dominant nature without feeling the need to turn it into a money spinner.
The BDSM lingo and protocols are pretty accurately depicted, but I do have to quibble with the first comic below. Either he’s a bad submissive and using his safeword incorrectly, or he’s wrong about her skills. Being a good dominant is not about how quickly you can get the submissive to cry uncle!
These three comics come from a short sequence featuring Clarice starting here. You can see the sequence where her friends discover her secret life starting here. There’s a few comics on her dating life starting here, and a storyline here where she deals with a very unsuitable suitor. However, I highly recommend browsing the entire comic. It’s a very well executed piece of art.
I stumbled across this comic last year, and had forgotten about it. Thanks for the re-introduction to some smart and funny entertainment.
Hey Tom. Happy to point you back in the direction of some smart entertainment!
-paltego
I also found GWS last year, and have followed it daily ever since.
As for the safeword thing… I know at least one submissive who sees ProDommes, and doesn’t feel he got this money’s worth if he doesn’t safeword. He wants to be pushed that far. So… it depends? I guess? I’d certainly rather not push someone that far unless we negotiated that safewording was the goal of the scene; a “when” and not an “if.”
That’s interesting. I’d never really thought about using a safeword like that. I always feel it ‘breaks’ the scene to use one. Hmmm. I feel a weekend post coming on about this comment 🙂 Thanks Femi.
-paltego