Face-sitting explained

The recent British face-sitting protests (covered in my previous post) gave Salon a chance to publish an article explaining exactly what face-sitting is. Hopefully for most of my readers that’s a fairly superfluous explanation. What caught my eye was the comments. The article described face-sitting as being typically about domination and a lot of the comments were along the lines of ‘I never realized I was being dominant/submissive doing this’.

As I’ve argued before, there’s no such thing as an inherently dominant or submissive act. Intent and context is key. The act of sitting on someone’s face can be dominant, submissive or just squishy moist sexy fun times. The same holds true of pretty much any sexual act, yet this kind of simplistic labeling often crops up. People will claim a domme can’t give a blowjob, or have PIV sex with a submissive, or that anal sex is inherently homosexual.

It’s weird because that kind of simple labeling doesn’t crop up elsewhere. A hug can be a greeting, a sign of affection, a consolation or a celebration of success. An arm around the shoulders can be aggressive when trying to convince someone of something or a protective shielding act. Everyone understands these actions in terms of their context and intent. Yet that’s not the case with sexual acts. I wonder if it’s down to inherent insecurity about sex. When people are unsure of themselves they like to simplify and follow simple rules. They don’t want to be caught out by hidden social conventions and therefore reduce everything to context free labels.

Woman On TopImage is from the Brutal Face-Sitting site.

Face sitting protest

Regular readers will know that I like to seek out and post mainstream articles with a link (occasionally of a tenuous nature) to femdom. Typically I’ll spend time explaining why I think it’s femdom related, and then even more time hunting through tumblrs looking for a suitable sexy image to accompany the posts.

I was therefore very happy to spot a Guardian article titled ‘Face-sitting protest outside parliament against new porn rules’. Even better was the fact that it came with some great face sitting photographs. This kind of thing makes a bloggers life very easy. I particularly liked the protestor chanting described in the article…

“What do we want? Face-sitting! When do we want it? Now!”

That’s the kind of civil disobedience I could really get behind. Or under.

Face sitting protest outside parliamentI’ve covered the new UK laws in previous posts here and here. You can read more articles on the protest (along with more photographs) here, here and here.

Putting the boot on

Here’s a third and final post on my recent shoe theme. It’s another fashion one, but this time showing a little love to practical footwear rather than fancy heels. Short boots like this are a very different kind of aesthetic, almost the exact flip side to fancy heels. Their aggressive, utilitarian, with a possible hint of punk. As is so often in kink and fetish, the big visual appeal exists on the extreme ends of the spectrum of choices.

Meghan Collison and Yuri PleskunThe models are Meghan Collison and Yuri Pleskun, in a shoot by Michael Donovan for Vision China magazine. This was from a series of outtakes. You can see more here.

High fashion and high heels

One of many things that advertising, high fashion and pornography have in common is a love of putting women in high heels in completely inappropriate settings. Femdom porn is particularly bad for this, with cliched domme wear popping up in all sorts of odd places (for example).

The inappropriate setting below is of the high fashion variety, featuring Michael Fassbender with Mia Wasikowska and taken from W Magazine. Apparently both the dress and heels are by Alexander McQueen. They don’t seem ideal for fencing, but Mia does appear to be winning.

Fencing I found the image on the Submissive Proud tumblr.

Most men appreciate a few more inches

The French have apparently scientifically proven that men are attracted to women in high heels. This study wasn’t done by the Institute of the Incredibly Bleeding Obvious, but by the Universite de Bretagne-Sud for the journal “Archives of Sexual Behaviour”. They used female volunteers with a variety of heel heights to see how ‘helpful’ male strangers were in different situations.

One situation involved a woman asking passers-by: “Excuse me, sir. We are currently conducting a survey on gender equality. Would you agree to answer our questionnaire?” Flat heels got a 46.7% answer rate, medium heels a 63% rate and the highest heels a whopping 83% success rate from the men.

The overall results don’t surprise me at all, although I hope the experimental set-up was more thoughtful than that simply description suggests. The aspect of high heels that does always surprise me is how many men complain about their women wearing them. Specifically, how many complain about having to drive or take cabs because their partners don’t feel like walking miles through dark badly maintained urban streets on them. I think if you’re heading out for drinks and dinner, the least you can do is spring for a few dollars cab fare.

The most amusing example of this I saw was waiting in the taxi line at the Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas. The couple in front of me were heading to the MGM Grand, which is a 10-15 minute walk in flats, and the man was complaining to the valet about the fact he had to take a cab because of his wife. She ripped off what looked like a very expensive high heeled shoe and brandished it in his face. Then, speaking loudly enough for the entire line to here, told him if he wanted to swap shoes with her she’d be happy to walk. Sadly she didn’t force him to take her heels, but he was quiet for the next few minutes until their cab arrived.

Lady in high heels with a naked bound manI found this on the Domination on My Terms tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution.

Stupidity in the UK (cont)

If you’re interested in reading more about the UK’s recent lurch into censorship stupidity, then Pandora Blake has put together an excellent list of links here. If you want to make your voice heard there are a couple of petitions here and here, or you could donate to Backlash which is lobbying against the legislation.

After writing my previous post on the topic, it struck me that the law is even more stupid than I initially realized (if that’s possible). If you’re concerned about the pornography industry and its general effects on society then this does nothing. Regular fucking and sucking porn is entirely unaffected. If you’re concerned about people watching kink and fetish porn then this does nothing. Anyone in the UK can still access whatever they want from producers based outside the UK. The only people this damages are the niche producers of kinky material in the UK. So the goverment has taken away people’s livelihoods, spent taxpayers money on policing it, and achieved absolutely nothing else.

While I’m never going to be in favor of censorship, I do think it’s reasonable to have legitimate concerns about the business of making porn. It’s a topic I’ve touched on before. Yet one area that has a huge number of independent women creating material is kink and particularly femdom. Lots of UK pro-dommes and fetish models have created their own media businesses and, as this vice article makes clear, they’re now going to have to censor their material and deal with even more bureaucracy.

I’ll leave you with another scene that would now be illegal for a UK producer to show. The mans airways are clearly blocked and this is therefore just a few seconds away from being snuff porn (at least in the eyes of those idiots in parliament).

Face Sitting

Stupidity in the UK

I no longer live in England, but I am still fond of my country of birth. It can be a great place to live and work. Unfortunately it does do some bloody stupid things at times. This is sadly one of those times.

The goverment there has just changed the law to significantly limit the type of sexual content that can be sold online. Pandora Blake (of the Dreams of Spanking site) has put up an excellent post on the subject. As she rightly observes, not only is it a huge blow for freedom of expression, it is also unequal in its rules. As this blog post by stavvers points out, something like facefucking is allowed where facesitting isn’t. So forcefully fucking a woman’s mouth with a penis is fine, but God help you if the woman wants to gently rest her derrière on his face in return. With a similar line of ‘logic’, swallowing semen is allowed, but swallowing female ejaculate isn’t.

If you want to see the full list of banned practices then the ObscenityLawyer has put together an informative post. The mental image of a bunch of goverment bureaucrats sitting around a meeting room debating where to draw the line on enemas and buttplugs would be amusing if the end results weren’t so goddam infuriating.

Under the new rules anything that creates welts, blood or bruising is not allowed. So presumably this kind of heavy paddling would be illegal to show. Ironic that a country known for its love of kinky corporal punishment – the English Vice – would be one of the only ones in the Western world to outlaw showing it.

Heavy PaddlingI’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image. If anyone can help me with that then please leave a comment with the details.

Virtual Spanking

Fans of spanking and videogames might want to take a look at this article. It describes a game called Hurt Me Plenty which allows the player to spank (via a Leap Motion device) a half naked virtual dude.

This isn’t the first virtual spanking simulator. There was a strange arcade game that used the idea (in an ethically dubious way) and no doubt there are any number of wacky (whacky?) spanking flash games on the web. However, this is a little different, as the creator obviously tried to do more than simply bolt a physics simulator onto some gratuitous ass shots.

This a short game where you spank the heck out of a dude and learn about how BDSM communities attempt to formalize consent / caring. I was really interested in how we can make games about intimacy without a “kindness coins = sex cutscene” trope, and how we can use expressive gestures to roleplay / think about pain and intimacy.
Robert Yang on his game Hurt Me Plenty

I’ve not tried it, so can’t comment on the consent / caring aspect. From the video in the Kotaku piece, I’d say that the physical simulation needs a little work. The guy looks pretty hefty, but the character model bends way too fast and too far when he’s spanked. I’m not a big guy and I’ve never moved like that from a hand spanking. If any of my readers have given it a go, I’d love to hear via a comment what they thought.

Bullseye by Red Rump

The artwork is by the ever creative Red Rump. If the game creator needs a talented artistic collaborator with a deep understanding of spanking, he couldn’t go far wrong giving Red Rump a call!

Rope and Cane

While I’m on the subject of caning, here’s an interesting shot featuring said implement. It’s kind of abstract and hot all at the same time. The heavy bondage combined with the cane stripes is pretty sexy. I think I’d enjoy being in that position. At the same time the simple geometric nature of the image, with segments of white flesh against the dark background, create a sense of disconnection from a real human scene. If you stare at it long enough it almost becomes an abstract piece of art.

Rope and Cane

I’m afraid I haven’t tracked down an original attribution for this. If anyone can help me with that then please let me know via the comments.

Brandishing the implement

Mistress Scarlet recently published a post musing on the classic shot of a domme demonstrating that her cane is indeed bendy. I’m sure you’ve all seen the shot – she’s typically glaring into the camera and flexing the cane with both hands. Something like this or this. In her opinion it’s an odd pose that’s not typically seen in actual kinky play.

I have to admit that as a neophyte kinkster, that pose did push my buttons. I have no idea why. I’ve never been caned outside of consensual play, so I’ve got no particular framework for it. There was just something about the visual tension of the shot and the sense of purpose that made it work. I think I mentally categorized it as the standard warm-up position before taking a swing, much as a tennis player positions themselves to serve or a runner limbers up in front of the blocks.

Now I’ve had few cane stripes quite literally under my belt, I tend to agree with Mistress Scarlet. It’s not a pose that I really see people ever do. The most common resting position is with the cane straight down parallel to the domme’s leg, possible accompanied by a gentle tapping against ankle or her boot. Now what pushes my buttons is to see a domme purposely move into position behind me, cane pointing down but just swishing sideways oh so slightly. It’s like a conductor loosening her wrist before launching the orchestra into the symphony.

Yumine Guo Artwork

YumineGuo_Inspiration
The artwork above is by the artist Yumine Guo. She has a wonderful collection of her artwork available on her tumblr. She also has a deviant art site and a blog worth visiting. The photograph was the original inspiration for the artwork as mentioned in her tumblr post. I’m afraid I haven’t managed to track down an original attribution for the photograph.