As regular readers might guess, I spend a fair amount of time hanging around tumblrs. I only feature femdom material here, but I can find material that pushes my buttons across a wide range of kinky activities and gender combinations. Hence my tumblr browsing is broad. One thing I found fascinating is looking at how different kinky groups typically skew their selection of material. Obviously my observations are entirely anecdotal and completely unscientific but what the hell. This is a blog, not a peer reviewed paper for Nature (although somebody should write one of those).
As you’d expect, lots of straight male submissives feature dominant women in exotic undergarment, with the occasional naked man as just a prop in the scene. They also have a smattering of what I’d call action shots. i.e. Images that catch a more complex D/s interaction. Essentially they post what they desire (the dominant woman) and, to a lesser extent, the interaction they wish to experience.
Straight female dominants also tend to post what they desire, buff naked submissive men, together with action shots. But the ratio is different to what submissive guys post. As a SWAG (Stupid Wild Ass Guess) I’d say it’s more like 50/50 compared to 80/20. There’s a clear preference towards more complex interactions and connections over eye candy.
Straight male dominants are heavily focused on their object of desire – naked bound women. The vast majority of shots are either of sole females or of disembodied males interacting with females. There might be an appendage in the shot, or a hand, or a whip, but almost all of the material is designed to let the viewer imagine himself as the dominant. It’s rare to see intense emotional connection in the images.
The most interesting one I find is the straight female submissive. Following the pattern above you’d expect them to post a mixture of Mf action shots and images of hot male dominants. And yet from my observation there’s a very heavy skew to posting shots of female submission. They might post more action shots than male dominants, but they rarely seem to post images of buff male dominants. Uniquely amongst these four groups they seem to post what they’d like to experience or who they’d like to be, rather than what the type of person they desire.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that male dominants are the least visible group in BDSM pornography. That’s a conclusion that should raise a few hackles given the ubiquity of the Mf dynamic in culture and porn.
The image is of Claire Adams from Men In Pain. I found it on the ‘my Wife, my Goddess‘ tumblr. It represents the kind of shot I personally enjoy the most.
Interesting observation. The whole tumblr phenomenon makes for interesting discussion and study. Pictures that capture intense emotional connection would seem to be the most difficult to come by and I take your word for it. That’s often hard to capture even when it’s there, and I suspect that more often than not, it isn’t.
I hope your readers are appreciative of all the research you do!
Suzanne
Research is perhaps too strong a word for what this is :). Random observation based on purely personal experience is perhaps close to the truth.
But I do think tumblr would be a rich source for sex and culture research. It seems to be a fairly unique view into what images different people find sexually appealing.
-paltego
There’s one more way to look at it: porn is overwhelmingly produced for and consumed by men.
So porn caters to what producers believe men want to look at.
There are far more straight men than gay men, so it’s not too surprising that what appears in the frame is…women. Submissive women, dominant women, doesn’t matter: women.
If you take a look at gay BDSM porn there are plenty of male dominants.
But there’s a simple reason why there aren’t many men in the frame: it’s because porn producers assume that straight men don’t want to look at erotic images of other men.
I don’t disagree with your statement about what most porn is produced for, but the beauty of a tumblr is that it’s a personally curated stream of images. People might not be able to control the general preferences and direction of the entire porn industry but they can very much control exactly what appears on their tumblr. And the fact most of them are images (rather than video) allows people to cherry pick galleries and then edit, crop and annotate as they wish.
Just look at some of the tumblr’s managed by dominant women. They have a lot less material to choose from than guys and they have to cherry pick a lot more carefully, but they still produce image streams that appeal to their tastes. e.g. Attractive naked submissive guys, interesting poses and action scenes. They produce these tumblrs despite the porn industry, not because of it. Check out http://workneverover.tumblr.com/ as a good example.
Yet the tumblrs curated by submissive women seem to break the pattern of the others that I listed. Obviously I’m generalizing a lot, with much hand waving, and I’m sure there are many counter-examples, but I still stand by the overall description I had.
-paltego
I love workneverover too. But even folks (like me) who enjoy the horizontal company of men have the same market of images to pick from. So anyone who wants to feature beautiful and/or sexy men is going to have to work a lot harder to feed the Tumblr beast!
It’s absolutely true that folks like yourself have to work harder to feed the tumblr beast. I think that’s one very good reason why there are so few good male focused tumblr’s (outside the gay genre). I wish I could find more and hence my appeal a couple of days ago for pointers to suitable male submissive tumblr sites. There’s clearly a dearth of material, but not a dearth of opinions!
-paltego