The beauty of dominant women
I normally steer clear of the snarling and glaring BDSM shots and bias towards more happy positive scenes. I’m going to make an exception for the image below because, while nobody looks happy, it did make me laugh. They just look so damn grumpy about the whole situation. I haven’t tracked down a source for the image, so I’ve sadly got no context for it. I’ve long been a fan of the Happy BDSM tumblr. If anyone wants to start an Unhappy BDSM tumblr this would be a great opening post.
A picture of me with my primary school class popped up on my faceboook feed the other day. It was kind of a shock. Social media and facebook has anesthetized people to old friends and old images suddenly reappearing, but this reached back further than I’m used to. There was only 7 of us in the class, and it was a tiny school in the middle of the English countryside. Me in college or high school was still a variation on me today, but this little boy seemed a world away.
It put me in mind of the classic scene in Annie Hall featuring Alvey’s classmates telling the camera where they are today. Unlike the girl at the end of that clip, while I like leather, I can’t say I’m into it. I am into cock and ball torture, bondage, corporal punishment and piercing. And mummification, sounding, electrical play and golden showers. Not to mention breathplay, zippering, trampling and anal play. I guess the equivalent Annie Hall scene with the younger me wouldn’t have been quite so pithy.
I’m not unhappy about how I ended up. I’d much rather be mature and complex than old, dry and boring. But I do envy the innocence and simplicity of the young me, even if some of the early signs of kinks to come were already in place.
Talking of cock and ball torture, here’s someone indulging in at least 50% of that particular kink.
I couldn’t really wrap up a sequence of posts on clothing without featuring a uniform of some kind. Although if anyone is arriving at this post after searching for ‘femdom uniform’ they’re probably feeling a bit disappointed.
The lovely lady in the boots is Cordelia Kuznetsova. I don’t know the gentleman, but I believe he’s wearing a French uniform from the First World War. In fact I should say from the start of the war, as the French military quickly figured out that wearing bright red pantalon was not the best plan when facing men armed with modern rifles and machine guns.
I found this on the he stoops to worship (aka Devoted Sub) tumblr.
This seems an appropriate progression from yesterday’s film noir post whilst still maintaining the clothing theme. Black and white, with a stylish suit, but this time it’s the woman’s turn to wear it. This was a shoot for Marie Claire Magazine in 2012. The model is Bruna Tenorio.
It would be remiss of me to do clothing themed posts and omit the era of classic film noir. I love the movies themselves and the fashions of the time. The dames are all elegantly dressed, silver tongued seductresses, with pistols in the purses and hearts like a lump of coal.
The first image below is from the 1950 movie D.O.A (poorly remade in 1988). The second is from the classic Out of the Past – widely regarded as one of the finest of the genre – staring Jane Greer as the deadly femme fatale.
For anyone wondering about the post title, it’s a partial quote from Out of the Past.
Ann Miller: She can’t be all bad. No one is.
Jeff Bailey: Well, she comes the closest.
Continuing my clothing themed post sequence with this striking shot. It’s posted all over the web under the title ‘conceptual photograph’ but the attribution isn’t particularly clear. I think it’s by Polish photographer Michal Pedziwiatr, but I’m not 100% sure.
When it comes to clothes and female dominants there are millions of images I could feature. Not so much on the male submission side. The options there seem to be nudity, odd leather gimp attire or frilly cross-dressing. Personally I don’t have an issue with any of those, but they don’t fit into a stylish clothing themed post. I’d guess that the original photographer had a different concept in mind than femdom and male submission, but I’m happy to repurpose the shot.
After a series of text heavy posts I think something lighter and more visual is called for. So standby for a sequence of clothing themed images. This one is just a regular mainstream fashion shot, but she sports a nice combination of elegance and hauteur. Plus the boots and umbrella put me in mind of the Avengers.
The concept of heroism has been much debased in popular culture. Pretty much anyone who has survived a stressful or dangerous situation is described as heroic. The popular media really only has two categories – hero and villain, so hyperbole is inevitable.
To my mind heroism isn’t only about courage and fortitude, it’s also about personal sacrifice. It’s about making a choice, and doing something for others despite the cost. It’s about taking a risk for a worthy cause. With that in mind I give you the heroic lawyer – Myles Jackman.
As this long article makes clear he’s fighting for the idea that “people’s private sexuality should not be held against them in any way, whether it’s criminal, civil, for intelligence purposes, or whatever”. As an obviously highly intelligent and well qualified man he could choose to make a bunch of money in more conventional legal cases and practice his kink in private. As a wealthy white educated male it’s unlikely he’d ever face problems doing that. Yet at significant personal and financial cost he chooses to defend people caught up in Britain’s ridiculous and outdated obscenity laws. That seems pretty heroic to me.
I’ve actually previously posted on a number of the cases mentioned in the article itself. There was the crazy tiger porn story, the Michael Peacock case, the Simon Walsh case, and the impact of the new UK censorship laws (here and here). Since those posts were written the new laws have forced Pandora Blake to close her Dreams of Spanking site, thereby putting a successful female producer out of business while reducing the total amount of porn on the Internet by 0.00%. It’s clear from the article that even those that win their cases often end up with their lives in pieces, and I sadly suspect that Myles Jackman is going to be a busy man for a long while yet.
The image is from the Urban Chick Supremacy Cell – a femdom site with a little more attitude than most. It’s run by by Itzi Urrutia. She’s quoted in the article and has already successfully battled the UK government. You can access her clips store here.
A few additional thoughts struck me while I was publishing yesterday’s post. Nothing new or contradictory here. Just extensions of the previous ideas.
Firstly, as a piece of advice, I’d suggest that it’s important to avoid leading questions when negotiating consent in scenes. If the submissive is already awash in endorphins and mentally predisposed to agree with the domme, then leading questions are problematic. Saying something like “Is it OK if we do X?” doesn’t help the submissive make the necessary mental gear shifts. The subtext is the domme would like to do X. Instead say something like “Is it OK if I do X or would you rather we avoid it?” That gives a nice simple binary choice (important when someone might be endorphin clouded) and suggests that yes or no or equally valid answers.
Secondly, I’d like to be clear that the onus isn’t always on the domme to negotiate every single activity every single time. I’ve actually been in the situation Miss Margo described in her post – anal penetration when tied up and we hadn’t discussed it – and it wasn’t an issue at all for me. That was because I was playing with someone I was very familiar with and we’d already done bondage and anal play multiple times in past sessions. In those cases I think it’s down to the submissive to take things off the table that a reasonable person might assume were still on the table. If anal play is usually OK but I have an iffy stomach one day, it’s down to me to mention it either beforehand or when the strap-on comes out. I shouldn’t expect the domme to mind read that something previously fine is now an issue.
One final point I wanted to make was actually touched on by Miss Margo in a comment she left to the post. Namely that it’s easier to achieve a great headspace when you trust the domme to negotiate clearly. If I constantly have to parse her questions and try and determine are we negotiating or playing then it’s hard to relax. Similarly if I know she’s liable to try new things and the onus is on me to stop them, then I’ll always be asking myself if I’m OK with the progression of the scene. Conversely if I know she’ll step out of character as necessary and ask simple questions then it makes it much easier to zone out when she’s in character. I wrote last week about taking a ‘holiday from yourself‘ during intense scenes. I think that’s only possible when you can fully relax and trust the person you’re with.
Given anal play got mentioned several times it seems appropriate to finish with this image. I’m afraid I don’t have a source for it. I found it via the Pegging with a Smile tumblr.
Miss Margo recently put up a post that got me thinking about scene negotiation. The original post was about a complete absence of negotiation and a bad domme acting non-consensually. I’m not going to talk about that particular angle, as I’ve nothing really to add. If you’re destroying trust and traumatizing your play partners, as seemed to be the case Miss Margo describes, then clearly things are pretty fucked up. Instead I want to look at it from a more positive point of view: How do people negotiate consent effectively within a scene?
Obviously it’s always good to establish limits and boundaries before clothes come off and the whips come out. But it’s not always possible to cover every possible option. A scene is a fluid thing, with an energy of its own. Most people don’t want to script out exactly what will happen. So how do deal with the unknowns and getting consent when rope is flying? I’ve personally experienced 3 general approaches from dommes…
I’m sure a lot of people would frown on (1), but I do understand the thinking behind it. In fact it’s the same thinking as (2). It’s trying to maintain the dynamic of the scene. Dommes want to walk the line between negotiation and maintaining the submissive headspace they’ve spent time creating. Sadly, while I understand the desire to do this, I think it’s a big mistake. The right way to go for me is always (3).
In a scene the submissive is typically predisposed to try and obey instructions and help the dominant. That makes it hard to respond to genuine questions that may require a negative response. Whatever happens somebody has to change their mental headspace to deal with the question. It might seem that options (1) and (2) maintain the scene dynamic, but actually they force the submissive to mentally change gears without any help. And that’s hard. At least for me it is.
With approach (3) the domme takes the responsibility to temporarily change the dynamic, as befits her role. It’s easy for her to pull the dynamic back to a discussion of equals before plunging back into the play. I’ve never had a problem getting my headspace back in those situations. I’ve had real problems with negotiations that caught me unawares and left me second guessing my responses.
Since I mentioned using sounds as a situation where I’ve encountered this kind of on the fly negotiation, it seems appropriate to finish with this image. Given he can’t see what’s coming, I’m hope they discussed it ahead of time. I’m afraid I don’t have a source for this image.