Femdom Resource – Page 208 – The beauty of dominant women

The San Francisco sessions

On my recent visit to the Bay Area I was lucky enough to do a couple of different sessions. One with Mistress Ai-Li and one with Mistress Yuki. They were kind enough to snap a few pictures during the sessions, and I thought I’d share the result here. The usual warning applies – these images are of my scrawny ass. Just for a change, the attractive women in lingerie are the ones behind the camera.

The first session was with Mistress Ai-Li and across the bridge in Oakland. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I planned badly and got a touch too drunk the night before. That meant a session that was slightly scaled back in intensity. Fortunately BDSM isn’t a competitive sport and success isn’t measured by who can go further or faster. We had a very enjoyable couple of hours featuring bondage, mild corporal, and CBT, finishing it all off with some nipple piercing. Mistress Ai-Li came up with a fun arrangement of needles and string that gave her a handy handle to yank. You can see what I mean in this side shot and this downward shot. For a small gauge the needles were pretty painful going in, but pleasantly erotic when gently tugged via the cord.

The second session with Mistress Yuki followed two days after. My scratch marks had faded, but my nipples were still tender to the touch. I’ve discovered over the years that mentioning this kind of fact to a domme acts more of an incentive than a reason for caution, and Mistress Yuki didn’t buck that trend! The session featured some heavier bondage and corporal, along with a lot of clips attached to very delicate places. The ones Mistress Yuki had the most fun with were small butterfly hairclips that looked better suited to a young girl’s bedroom than a BDSM playspace. You can see them in place on my nipples here and around the cock and balls here. They hurt going on. They really hurt coming off. But they were absolute agony when Mistress Yuki say on my lap and slowly moved them with her body. The combination of the pain of the clips, the closeness of her and the over-the-shoulder glance that she gave me as she pushed downwards will be a memory that stays with me for a long time.

The image below is Mistress Yuki in a photoshoot from a few years back. Although that’s not my hand with her, it seemed an appropriate image to pick to finish this post. I love blending intimacy and sensuality with intense sensations in a session. I always want to play with a positive energy and both Mistress Yuki and Mistress Ai-Li are great at doing that. This shot captures an aspect of that kind of play that is often missing in kinky imagery.

R100

Fans of quirky and obscure Japanese movies (that would be me) may enjoy a new one called R100. It apparently tells the story of a bored and lonely guy who signs up for a club that promises him kinky scenes with a bevy of beautiful dominatrices. The only catch is he’ll never know when they’ll appear in his daily life and what they’ll do. Oh, and no matter what happens, his contract with the club is unbreakable. You can read a review here and see a fairly mysterious trailer here.

As a real life set-up it sounds like it’d be an absolute nightmare. No matter how skilful the domme, or how tight her leather outfit is, nobody wants to get attacked while dealing with their boss or entertaining an elderly family member. As a movie set-up it sounds like an intriguing one. I personally find it very hard to resist a movie that can be described as…

…a thoroughly fucked and perverse little film that only gets away with its most outlandish moments if you’re willing to disregard concepts like rationality and find nasty fetishism funny.

Sadism revisited

I feel the need to return to the topic of sadism and sadists. Some of the comments left on my post from a few days ago were thought provoking. In particular I was struck by how overloaded the term ‘sadist’ is.

Most labels we apply to people also carry a judgement about their behavior. Consent (or the lack of it) is seen as so important it’s often baked right into the label itself. For example, if I have consensual sex with a partner them I’m a lover, but non-consensual sex with anyone makes me a rapist. I can be a consensual flirt, but never a non-consensual one. That’s sexual harassment. I can be an employer of consenting workers, but only a slaver or trafficker of non-consensual ones. Actions themselves can be neutral, but the labels we use on people rarely are. A punch is neutral, but a boxer is not the same as a mugger.

Sadism is fairly unusual in that respect. It carries no information on consent. It’s accurate to describe a domme who enjoys S&M as a sadist. It’s also accurate to describe a horror movie psychopath in the same way. This strikes me as problematic when talking about kink in a mainstream context. As hmp accurately pointed out, non-kinky people really don’t get the idea of consensual sadism at a gut level. Having the same label used for very different behaviors is therefore particularly confusing. People are used to labels implying judgement about behavior, and given their gut feel about the infliction of pain, their default view of sadism will always be a bad one.

Masochism doesn’t have this problem. It’s a more passive label and consent is naturally implied. We really need another word for sadist that pairs more tightly with masochist. That way we could leave sadism as the general label for non-consent and save the new word for only when masochists are consensually on the receiving end. I’ve no idea what that word should be however. Any suggestions? Maybe I should get Dan Savage on the case. He’s done a pretty good job so far coining pegging, GGG and Santorum.

Given the subject matter it seems only fitting to finish with an image of a sadist in action. This is from the Divine Bitches site.

Madame in a world of fantasy

I always enjoy stumbling across old BDSM pornography, although not typically for erotic reasons. Some of it does still carry a sexual charge – Bettie Page shots or Ed Lee’s work spring to mind – but a lot of it is pretty terrible. What I actually enjoy is the time capsule nature of it. Most of it was made in murky legal circumstances, with minimal distribution channels, using a small pool of performers and very little community support. I often get the impression it was being created by people who didn’t really have a clear plan and were forced to make it up as they went along. When I see a modern commercial BDSM porn I tend to focus on the image itself. When I see a vintage BDSM image I wonder who was involved in creating it and what the story behind it was.

The internet changed all that, but it has also made it easier to share this old material. Anyone else who enjoys traveling back in time to the days of mail order magazines in extremely plain envelopes might appreciate this fan site on the ‘Madame in a world of fantasy’ magazine. It’s very well put together and features a lot of scanned covers and snippets from articles and artwork.

I’ve featured two of the covers below. The artwork one is particularly strange. I’m not sure if the men are trying to hold her back or simply prostrating themselves at her feet. Her pose suggests she’s about to wrestle with another enormous woman in a strange underwear/cape combo. In contrast the photograph is far more traditional, with an upward shot of a vaguely stern/condescending lady.

Back in Seattle

As the title says, I’m back home. I’m also tired and dying to crawl into my own bed. As usual I come back from vacation feeling like I need another vacation.

I did get to indulge in some more kinky fun today. Hopefully I’ll have a couple of shots from the session to share in the near future. I was actually down around the Folsom Street area, which is the home to the eponymous street fair. So while I go throw my dirty laundry in the wash, I’ll offer up this image from last years event. This features Mistress Liliane Hunt as the carriage rider and is taken from her blog post on the topic. Should you wish to attend this year’s event then next Sunday is the magic date.

You can see Mistress Hunt’s professional web site here, although she’s sadly no longer accepting new clients for private sessions.

A nice neat package

Apologies to anyone who has recently left a comment I haven’t responded to. My blogging time on this particular vacation is proving to be even more limited than I expected. I will get back to all the comments in the next day or so.

In the meantime here’s a fun bondage shot featuring Princess Kali and a neatly packaged male. I really like the little extra touches like the big toe ropes and the wrap around his balls. I imagine that’s a pretty stressful position to be in.

The image has been messed with as so often happens on tumblr (I found it via Continuous State of Desire). I believe it’s originally from a Men in Pain shoot with Princess Kali.

A lack of forethought

Today I learned that drinking a lot of rum cocktails is not a wise way to prepare for a scene the next day, no matter how delicious said drinks are. Being hungover and feeling extra delicate really adds an edge to nipple piercing and ball spanking. On the plus side, the rush of endorphins those activities provoke do help ease the symptoms of over indulgence. I can’t sell them as a hangover cure, but they certainly helped take my mind off my aching head.

Fortunately I was playing with Mistress Ai-Li who, expert that she is, worked well around my planning failure. She managed to push me, without provoking any unpleasant reactions, which I’m sure was a result we both desired.

The image is from Mistress Ai-Li’s website. She’s based in the Bay area should you wish to experience her session skills for yourself.

My favorite kind of people

The New York Times has an interesting but annoying article on the subject of sadists. Interesting because, well, it’s about sadists, my favorite kind of people. They’re the Yin to my masochistic Yang. Annoying because it suffers from all the usual problems these kind of pseudo-scientific articles often suffer from. It simplifies, conflates and doesn’t define terms clearly. I’m left with way more questions that I started with. Not to mention a desire to quit my job and do a doctorate on the topic.

The basic point of the article is that sadism is far commoner than people traditionally assume. You don’t have to be a Hannibal Lecter to be classed as a sadist. However, it seems to tangle a lot of things together in strange ways. I’m left wondering…

What’s the correlation between sexual sadists who get off on the reactions of their consensual partners and everyday sadists who get off on hurting whoever they come across? My experience is that the former don’t strongly overlap with the latter.
What’s the split between people who enjoy power, those who enjoy destruction and those who enjoy the suffering of others? The article conflates them all, but for the first two the sadism is incidental to the main goal. Someone watching a clip of a race car crash is typically watching it for the awe and the spectacle of the crash, not because they’re hoping the driver got hurt. Similarly I don’t think shooting a collection of pixels in a videogame necessarily identifies someone as a sadist.
How many people identified as sadists are conscious of their sadism? And of those that are, how many seek out opportunities to act sadistically? Does being aware of the trait cause people to act on it or attempt to control and diminish it?
How many people act sadistically in groups but not in one on one situations? It would seem to me that the dynamics of social bullying are very different, although this article conflates them.
Are sadists typically selective in how they inflict pain? Is it the reaction of the victim that matters? Or the way in which the sadist provokes the reaction?

It’s a fascinating area, and sadly this article doesn’t get to the heart of it. I’m surprised the scientists haven’t paid more attention to people who self-identify as sadists and masochists. They can’t use them to decipher the broader story, but they’d at least be a good starting point. And it’d be way easier to set-up ethical experiments with a pool of subjects who will happily zap and whack each other for fun!

I’m not entirely sure where this shot of two sadists indulging in a little nipple torture comes from. I’d guess it’s one of the Kink sites, but my search foo is failing me.

Pink, black and gold

I’m going to be taking a few days vacation down in San Francisco. That’s usually my cue to say that posting will therefore be a bit erratic. Unfortunately I’ve been so busy in Seattle recently, this might actually improve my chances of blogging more. Flying is usually a good chance to catch up with any writing I need to do, but given the subject matter, this site might cause a few raised eyebrows in nearby seats if anyone is peering over.

I do have some kinky fun planned for my trip. Any SF visit that missed out on that would seem like a wasted opportunity. Although scheduling it around my friends plans is proving tricky, particularly given that only a few know of my kinky interests. One thing I’m confident of is that I will not be doing is any public humiliation scenes, despite how much fun Mistress Alice and her submissive look like they’re having on the Golden Gate bridge with this one. I’d love to know how many tourists went home with a snap of them and their striking outfits to share with friends and family. No doubt it confirmed a few preconceptions about the typical inhabitant of the Bay area!

You can see other shots of this scene at her tumblr post. Her main site is available here.

Understated uniform

Apologies for the lack of posts this weekend. Once again I had plans for stuff to write and, once again, life got in the way. I hate it when that happens.

To start the new week, here’s a nicely composed example of a well worked theme – a dominant lady in a military uniform. This is Lady Stella of Studio Avalon. There are a million shots in this genre floating around, but I like this particular example because it’s quite understated. It’s not a crazy over the top uniform. The camera isn’t shooting from the worms eye viewpoint. And she’s standing on what appears to be a military parade ground. It looks like a great starting point for a serious and intense roleplay.