Femdom Resource – Page 167 – The beauty of dominant women

Blogocalypse

Users of Google’s Blogger service just received a rather nasty surprise. From March 23rd they’re going to eliminate all adult blogs. If you purely have text content you might escape the purge, but almost all blogs I know and enjoy feature the occasional photograph or video clip (hmp, servitor, Victoria Vista, RedRump, etc.). That puts them directly in Google’s firing line. As Bacchus has written in the past the pornocalypse comes for us all.

It’s a horrible act of vandalism. There’s millions of pages of pages out there that people have poured millions of hours of work and thought into. Some fraction of them might get relocated, but huge chunks will be lost and all the links that have been established between sites will be trashed. In the past I’ve written sympathetically about how adult content gets treated in large technology companies. I often think it’s a lot of small bad decisions and subtle social pressures that leads to adult content getting treated as a second class citizen of the web. However, in this case it seems to be a single and deliberate decision. A particularly poor, thoughtless and cruel decision.

Of course the important thing to remember when you’re using a service like blogspot (or facebook, or gmail, or yahoo or any ‘free’ offering) is that you’re not the customer. You’re the product. And companies kill product lines all the time.

I’m sure many bloggers will be cursing the person responsible for this over the coming months. Perhaps it’ll help to imagine it’s the gentleman in the image below and he gets a stripe for every blog killed. This image is particularly suitable to feature here as I found it on the Femdom Times site, which has now been suspended for violating the WordPress TOS. Originally it’s from the Femme Fatale Films site.

Faun-Songs Artwork

No lengthy post today. Just some sexy and beautiful artwork. The artist is Faun-Songs who manages this tumblr. The original posting for this is here, and the comments lead me to believe the male character is Bucky Barnes from the Winter Soldier. I featured some of her artwork before in this prior post.

Marie Claire talk to Ms Mona Rogers

If I was ever thinking of introducing a regular weekly feature, it’d probably be an interview with a dominatrix. These wouldn’t be interviews given by me I hasten to add. Just random interviews I find in the press. I could easily dig one out a week. They seem to be a common way for a mainstream publication to combine a human interest story with some salacious sex talk.

Since a certain movie came out I’ve seen dozens of examples, most of which I’ve ignored. However, I did like this one in (all of places) Marie Claire with the NYC domme Ms Mona Rogers. It’s informative, interesting and approaches the subject in a very positive way. I can imagine somebody reading it and wanting to learn more. It also features some excellent photographs by Kathryn Wirsing.

The image below is Ms Rogers taking her ease on a suitably positioned male. I don’t believe it was taken by Kathryn Wirsing, but unfortunately I don’t have an attribution for the photographer. If you’d like to see more of Ms Roger her professional website is here.

Home Street Home

If you live in the Bay Area and are a fan of punk, you might want to check out a new musical entitled Home Street Home. As described in this SFWeekly article, it has been written by Fat Mike (of NOFX fame), Soma Snakeoil (his partner / domme) and Jeff Marx (compose of Avenue Q). As you might expect from a punk musical it features some challenging themes, including drug use, self-harm, prostitution and BDSM. On the musical side it’s blessed with members from punk bands like the Descendents, Lagwagon, No Use for a Name, Alkaline Trio, Dropkick Murphys, etc.

I’ve posted on Fat Mike previously, and commented positively on the refreshing and frank way he discusses his kinks. This article and the musical continue that trend. The chain that you can see Soma gripping in the image below is his collar, locked around his neck with a key that she carries.

The show runs at Z space in San Francisco from now until March 7th. I really hope it get’s an extended run so I can make it down there to see it myself.

Should your tastes not run to punk musicals but you’d like to see more of Soma Snakeoil, her professional site is here.

Stress and Submission

This is my last post (for a while at least) on the topic of the alpha submissive (previous posts are available here, here and here). I’m afraid I’m finishing with a bit of a rant.

You can guarantee that whenever this topic comes up somebody will start talking about powerful people having stressful jobs. They’ll talk about difficult decisions, the responsibility of power and how BDSM and submission is a way to temporarily escape from that. For example, here’s an Alternet article and a Psychology Today article making exactly that argument. This is, in my not particularly humble opinion, complete bullshit. Not the part about submission as escape, just all the rest of it.

You know what’s stressful? Juggling two minimum wage jobs to try and cover your rent. What’s a difficult decision? Trying to decide if you should wipe out your savings on a hospital visit. Responsibility is bringing up your children in a not so great neighborhood while your deadbeat ex stiffs you on child support payments. Forget the guy investing $100M for Goldman Sachs. Give him $100 in his personal checking account and see how he feels about that.

I’m lucky enough to have a well paid job now, but I grew up in a family with very little money. I remember the stress that any unexpected expense could generate. There was always an underlying anxiety that something would go wrong and we wouldn’t be able to deal with it. Money might not buy happiness, but it sure as hell takes the edge off unhappiness. It turns problems into inconveniences. And nobody needs a good beating to take their mind off an inconvenience.

I think society prefers to think about executive and finance jobs as being particularly stressful and responsible in order to justify their incredible salaries. In some cases they may well be worth those salaries. Steve Jobs probably was. Jeffrey Skilling probably wasn’t. But whatever their worth, when the biggest downside to a decision is that you might have to settle for a new Ferrari rather than that yacht you had your eye on, that’s not a stressful decision. If anyone needs BDSM to take a ‘breather from the growing burden on selfhood’ (to quote the Psychology Today article), it’s the guy trying to cheaply fix the transmission on the 13 year old Ford that he needs to get to work tomorrow.

This is Miss Davenshaw, a London based pro-domme. She specializes in roleplaying corporate scenarios. So if you fancy being taken in hand by a strict female executive, I suggest dropping her a line.

The alpha female submissive?

More ruminations follow on the often espoused theory that submissives are frequently thrusting, successful alpha types in daily life. I hadn’t intended to write quite so much about this, but the more I ponder it, the more flaws I see in it.

In my original post I used the expression ‘submissive people’, but that’s not really accurate. I almost never hear of female submissives described in this way. The powerful controlling person who needs to let go in the bedroom is always a man in a ‘stressful’ job. He needs to take a timeout and not be himself for a while. When it comes to female submissives the more common descriptions center around secret yearnings, a desire to be controlled and tapping into fantasies. It’s about giving in to her deep desire, rather than stepping outside of the self.

In other words male submission is being positioned as taking a break from the normal state of affairs, where female submission is about a desire to return to a more natural order. To me that says much more about the way society perceives gender and power dynamics than it does about the nature of submission. It’s fundamentally an inconsistent view motivated by the need to fit it into conventional structures.

The cute slave in this image is doubtless getting in touch with her inner desire for submission. Of course if she was a man then this would have been shot in between power lunches and organizing leveraged buy-outs on Wall Street.

The original source for this is the Everyday Slave site. I found it via the Alternative Femdom tumblr.

A theory revisited

I had a lot of interesting comments to my post from a few days ago entitled ‘The Alpha Submissive‘. Sadly nobody had any hard data on the dubious theory that male submissives tends to be successful alpha types in daily life so, as usual, I’m going to be forced to make stuff up as I go along. With that proviso in mind, I thought I’d revisit the topic over the next few posts.

One point I should have made clear is that I’m not suggesting the contrary theory of submissives being particularly unsuccessful. I just suspect that the two factors are uncorrelated with career success, in much the same way that other sexual preferences appear to be.

Most comments agreed with me that the clients of pro-dommes are a skewed and unrepresentative sample set. However, I think it’s a mistake to assume that they’re an entirely uniform crowd of overpaid middle aged guys. When writing the original post I was put in mind of this article on two NYC pro-dommes. One of the dommes comes across as a scammer, and a great advertisement for doing your research before meeting anyone. The other is a real professional with a variety of clients.

Jesse, a 58-year-old transit worker, is probably her favorite; they often meet and chat about school and work before sessions. He even gets a discount from Georgia, who knows he’s strapped financially. “Every paycheck, I take a little bit of money out and put it in an envelope,” he says.

From the article Jesse sounds like a nice guy, but I doubt he’s the kind of person most people think of when they think of a pro-domme client.

I’m once again slightly stumped on what image I should feature for this post, so I’ll just go with something visually appealing from Men in Pain. I found this via the Classy Femdom tumblr.

Ask an expert

When it comes to talking to adolescents about kink I tend to steer a wide course. I don’t have any children – a state of affairs I’m quite content with – and assume that parenting skills are above my pay grade. Nobody wants to hear from the happily unattached single guy exactly how they’re screwing up their kids. However, I do think I can spot good and bad advice when I see it, and I happened to run across great examples of both in the last few days.

On the positive side we have this from the excellent Dan Savage. Personally I find it astonishing what the son in question shares with his mother. I’d rather do CBT with used rusty fishhooks that share a sexual fantasy with my parents, but I admire his mother for being smart enough to not freak out and to contact Dan for advice.

On the negative side we have a sequence of blog posts from Miriam Grossman MD – here, here, here and here. I would say her arguments are laughable, but she’s a qualified doctor who is making money from advising the parents and children that come to her. So not really a laughing matter. She automatically conflates BDSM with abuse and sets up ludicrous strawman arguments around the idea of consent. Apparently psychologically healthy women dream about wedding gowns rather than handcuffs. Does that mean I should be dreaming about tuxedos and cummerbunds?

Of course the really annoying thing is that she’s not wrong in describing Christian Grey as abusive. He absolutely is. Just not for any of the reasons she gives. So thanks E L James. You’ve got me agreeing with the crazy crowd.

I’ve no idea what image would be suitable for this post. So I’ll finish with a shot of a lady biting a man on the ass. Enjoy!

The publicity machine

The 50 Shades movie is hitting screens (to some less than flattering reviews), and that means the publicity machine is cranking into high gear. There’s articles on everything from the spin-off products, through the people protesting it to the douchebags trying to cash in.

Fortunately, amongst all the dross, there are a few reasonable articles that have emerged. This one has some good background on why someone might enjoyed BDSM. This one by Lady Velvet Steel covers why real kinky play is so different from what the movie portrays. Finally, this gives the view from the submissive perspective on the good and the bad in the movie.

The alpha submissive

Is there any hard data to backup the oft cited theory that most submissive people are powerful and successful alpha types in their public lives? This recent article by Susan Wright is the latest to trot this idea out, and it often gets referenced in mainstream discussions of D/s. Personally I’m skeptical.

The only data I usually see is anecdotal from pro-dommes, and that doesn’t strike me as a great source. Firstly, their sample set is massively skewed towards middle aged guys with jobs that provide them with hundreds of dollars of discretionary income. Secondly, they have a vested interest to portray their clients in a positive light. No smart business person says bad things about their product or customers. Even outside the professional realm I think there’s a tendency to react to the perceived mainstream perception of submission. Kinksters assume people will think submissives are weak, weird or wimpy, so emphasize the opposite.

So I ask the question: Does anyone know of an actual study on this? Or is it just one of those sex myths (like supposed sex trafficking at the World Cup or Super Bowl) that gets endlessly repeated despite a lack of actual evidence?