A dangerous game (and woof!)

This image contains many staples of femdom erotica. There’s bondage, breathplay, a naked man and a lady in stockings. The text is a little more poetic than the usual captions, but it’s hard to argue with the spirit of it given the noose around his neck. But what’s with the dog? Which artist thought that the perfect addition to an edgy bondage and breathplay scenario was a cute and fuzzy little dog? I kind of feel the image is part of a larger sequence that would explain what’s going on, but I’m afraid I’ve failed to track down any other context for this.

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Painted Ladies

Miss Pearl has a thoughtful post on the way kink.com treats femdom as a separate thing from BDSM in general. It raises an interesting point that potentially reflects a lot of underlying assumptions people hold about femdom.

Now with the thoughtfulness for the day contracted out to Miss Pearl, allow me to take conversation down several notches and tackle a silly pet peeve of mine on kink.com – makeup. Specifically, the makeup used on the dommes. It’s like they’ve borrowed Homer’s makeup shotgun. I realize this is probably not the biggest problem facing femdom erotica, but what the hell, I feel the urge to vent.

For example, consider Mistress Madeline, who looks stunning in shots like this and this. So what would possess Divine Bitches to go with this look? Mistress T is another great example. She has an amazing classical natural beauty, as demonstrated in this kind of shot. So why the harsh makeup of the shots below? I want my domme to be severe when waving her whip, not when brandishing her lippy.

MistressT_1
MistressT_2

Fetishizing race

The Refinery29 site has a thought provoking article on the fetishizing of race – specifically in the case of Asian pro-dommes. It’s written by an Asian women who works in that field, and discusses her conflicted feelings about being able to command a premium price for a fetish she finds damaging.

Anyone who has looked for a pro-domme in a major city will almost have certainly encountered this particular fetishization. Emphasizing physical desirability and attractiveness is a common part of a pro-domme website, and those descriptions can obviously span a huge range of body types and domme styles. However, in my experience there’s only one time race gets featured prominently, and that’s for Asian dommes.

Typically I see three different approaches. Some Asian dommes don’t mention it at all. Some use it as a keyword in a few page titles and descriptions, just enough to trigger a search engine match. Some make it the main selling point and repeatedly emphasize the associated cliches – exotic, cold, cruel and beautiful. From a personal perspective, the more I see race emphasized in a site, the less likely I am to book a session. It’s certainly not down to me to say how a pro-domme should conduct or market her business. I just dislike the idea of being thought of as the kind of guy that would be attracted to that type of racial fetishization. Even if the domme seemed like an interesting person to play with, I really don’t want to be perceived as the middle aged, middle class white guy who got pulled in by a racial stereotype.

The two images below are taken from the Fetish Fortress – a NYC house that specializes in Asian dommes and markets themselves as such. They feature Mistresses Jung, Choi, & Ree fooling around and having fun with feet.

FetishFortress
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Blades

Apologies for the lack of posts in the last few days. I’m going to attribute blame on my crappy knife skills. Not an obvious connection I’ll grant you, but there is some validity to it. I like food and I like cooking. Unfortunately I’m the worlds slowest cook and take forever to do prep work. So combine ambitious recipe ideas with slow prep work and you get limited time for anything else. Probably I should do a knife skills course in order to create some more blogging time.

I’ll leave you with an image of a lady with a particularly big knife. Hopefully she’s better at wielding it than I am with my German blades.

Sword

Dick questions

The latest Dan Savage article has three questions all about dicks. I found the final one particularly interesting. The gentleman in question had decided to wear two condoms (probably not the smartest decision he ever made) and as a result had triggered a blowback on orgasm. It turns out that pinching closed the end of your dick while pumping up the pressure is not a good plan.

“We sometimes see a similar phenomenon occur with people who wear constriction bands or cock rings that are too tight and try to either urinate or ejaculate with the ring on,” said Dr. Newman. “The result is a traumatic stretch of the urethra and microscopic tears in the lining of the urethra (mucosa). This disruption in the lining allows for electrolytes in the urine (particularly potassium) to stimulate the nerves in the layer beneath the lining (submucosa), thereby creating a chronic dull ache, such as PPP describes.”

I mention this because playing with orgasms and ruining them in inventive ways is definitely a part of femdom play. I’ve had orgasms with sounds in the urethra, or electrical probes in the opening, or simply when the domme has palmed the head at the critical moment. I think it’s worth knowing what the potential side effects to that can be. In theory the urethra will heal fine, but if you want to avoid taking any chances, don’t block it during ejaculation.

ViceThis image is from the Divine Bitches site.

Mental Dental

It’s a rule of kink that no matter how unsexy you may find something, to someone else it’ll be the single hottest thing conceivable. Just after writing yesterday’s post on how unpopular dentist scenes are, I remembered this story on a guy nicknamed Mental Dental. He’s so enamored with dental play that it’s all he ever does. I’ve actually heard about him from several different sources and I think a lot of NYC pro-dommes have encountered him at some point. I know Miss Margo has (read down after ant guy). It’s good to understand and be in touch with your kinks, but I’m personally pretty happy mine that mine aren’t so narrowly focused.

The image below is from American Mary, a horror film featuring body modification and illegal surgeries. I like the vibe of the picture, but I doubt I’ll ever see the movie. I’m good with the more old fashioned horror movies of the 20th century, but the push to ever more extreme sadism and graphic horror in the last decade or so leaves me cold. Kind of ironic that I don’t like the special effects in movies tagged as ‘torture porn’, but do like porn featuring real life torture.

Dental-Femdom-17

I definitely need a long, slow root canal.

Here’s an unusual scene – dental torture. Mouths and gags show up all the time in BDSM imagery and play, but it’s rare to see an explicit dental scene. Even Whitehead gags, which crop up fairly often and were originally designed for dental work, are rarely used in their original context. In contrast, regular non-dental medical scenes are a fixture of both play and BDSM porn. It’s interesting to speculate why that difference exists.

One answer might be simple practicality. It’s fairly easy to learn to do basic medical play and not risk significant damage. Things like needle play, enemas, plaster casts and suturing can be done for real, provided the domme has done the relevant training. With dental work it’s hard to imagine what basic stuff could be done, outside of straight play acting. Nobody should be drilling teeth or poking gums without serious certificates on their wall.

The other answer might be a more psychological one. In hospitals we feel more out of control, where in dental surgeries we just feel uncomfortable. If we’re sick or even just being tested for something, the work of doctors and nurses seems somewhat unfathomable. They tell us they need to do some thing and we have to accept it and lie back. Where with dentists, we’re typically very aware of what they’re doing. Drilling and scraping teeth seems necessary, but boring. From a psychological perspective a dental procedure doesn’t feel like giving up control to me, despite the obviously vulnerable position, it just feels like a unpleasant chore.

Dental-Femdom-11aThe watermark (assuming there was one) has annoyingly been cut off this image. I found it on the Femdom Times, but I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution.

What big medals

I’m normally a bit wary of posting military uniform pictures. I like them, particularly vintage ones (like this or this), but there’s often a strong hint of Nazi about some of the domme military outfits. While it’s true that the bad guys always have the best outfits, I’m not sure we’re quite far enough away from WWII to hijack its imagery for sexual pleasure. Or at least I’m personally not comfortable with that.

Fortunately, this shot of an American actress pretending to be a communist jet fighter pilot from the cold war has no such moral issues. The lady in question is Janet Leigh (most famous for her role in Psycho) and the movie is Jet Pilot. By all accounts it was a terrible movie, but I do think Ms Leigh looks great as the Russian pilot, particular with the Princess Leia hair (20 years before Star Wars).

Janet Leigh in the movie Jet Pilot

Real estate woes

I was sad to read – via this post – that Vinyl Queen was closing her San Francisco studio. I’ve never played with Vinyl Queen herself (a failure on my part), but I have played in her space with Domina Yuki on several occasions. For example, this session took place there. It was a well equipped and well designed studio, located in walking distance of SF’s Union Square / SOMA / Financial district. There aren’t many (any?) of those left, so losing it is a great shame. Strangely, in the last couple of years, I was actually barred from playing there during business hours. Apparently the tech start-up next door didn’t appreciated the screams of noisy masochists. No doubt it interrupted them slapping together the latest random open source software in between foosball sessions.

On the plus side, I was happy to read this part of VQ’s post:

I also want to publicly thank Mistress Yuki for being the best renter a dungeon proprietor could ever ask for.

I’ve always found Mistress Yuki to be an amazing professional to deal with, and I’m happy to see I wasn’t the only one. If you’re in SF then you really can’t go wrong with Vinyl Queen (now playing out of the Black Thorn space) or Domina Yuki.

VQThis is Vinyl Queen with some of the tools of her trade.

Material considerations

I was chatting about black leather with a young lady this weekend. She was a fan of it, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. She also wanted to charge me a little more for it, which I suppose is understandable. The issue of spilled fluids might have cropped up, which I was definitely concerned about. Sadly, this was an entirely non-kinky conversation about what to upholster some new dining room chairs in. Kinky shenanigans, even of the professional variety, would probably have been cheaper.  Pro-dommes might charge a few hundred dollars per hour, but that’s nothing compared to what interior designers, architects and contemporary furniture can do to your wallet (cue the worlds smallest violin).

The lady in black leather below is of Candice Swanepoel, photographed by Hans Feurer for Vogue Australia. The sequence it’s taken from is really quite amazing. Astonishing even. They managed to take a stunning supermodel, dress her in very expensive black leather, with clothes created by top designers, and end up with some terrible shots. It takes really talent to do that. The image below is OK, but the rest, particularly examples like this, are awful. I think the shots of her walking her dog dressed in an Iron Maiden t-shirt are more flattering than some of these shots.

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