The beauty of dominant women
This young lady appears to be taking a moment to pause and reflect on the situation in front of her. I’m not sure if it’s intended to represent a moment before, during or after the use of that whip. Whichever it is, I like her air of calm contemplation, with just a hint of what could be amusement.
This lovely watercolor is by the Italian artist Leone Frollo. The Femdom Artist site has a selection of his other works available.
I’m never a big fan of award shows. Too much scope for smug congratulation and boring speeches for my taste (except when they feature me). However, I might make an exception for the Feminist Porn Awards. It sounds like the kind of show that would have a lot of interesting material along with some varied and controversial viewpoints.
I’m potentially biased as I have a minor crush on one of the organizers – Tristan Taormino. She’s written and produced a bunch of great material, and this year took home the Smutty Schoolteacher award for The Expert Guide To Pegging. And, just to be shallow for a moment, that super-smart woman in glasses thing she has going on doesn’t hurt.
I sadly couldn’t find a great image from The Expert Guide To Pegging film, so instead let me leave you with these two images. They comes courtesy of this helpful article on pegging for beginners.
I’m going to use this post as a shout out to Peroxide and his quest for information on male submissives. He’s planning to write a how-to guide on finding and dating male-subs. He’s working off of the assumption that good ones are as rare as unicorns *.
I’m not sure about the unicorn bit. I’m pretty certain I’d have remembered frolicking with fairies in mythical forests. Or the acquisition of an enormous horn. That would have come in handy. I’ve also blogged and commented in the past on that 20:1 ratio thing. Personally I suspect the issue isn’t one of rarity, it’s one of filtering. There’s no lack of signal, but there is a hell of a lot of noise. I’ve no idea what the overall female dominant to submissive male ratio is, but I do know the noise produced by badly socialized and self-serving male ‘submissives’ is high.
Anyway, regardless of the mythical and technical analogies, I do applaud the idea. So if you’ve got any interesting thoughts or information for Peroxide then send it his way. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an image of a particularly feisty unicorn. I can’t say I recommend this attitude when someone is swinging a flogger in your direction, but the image did make me smile. It’s by the photographer Vlad Gansovsky, and I found it on Mistress Lilyana’s tumblr.
* Interesting aside: Unicorn is also slang in poly circles for hot-bi-babes willing to date couples. They are apparently highly sought after and equally rare. Being a unicorn hunter is not necessarily seen as a good thing.
A few days ago Suzanne, over at All Mine, put up a post about femdom symbols and marks of ownership. She mentioned tattoos and that put me in mind of the image below. This was posted on Lexi Sindel’s tumblr with the caption ‘Devotional tattoo on my slave’.
A tattoo is undoubtedly a major commitment. A tattooed collar, dominant’s initials or basic geometric mark of ownership is a serious step. On average relationships do not have the same longevity as tattoos. Going for the full-on portrait, featuring a Mistress in head to toe fetish gear swinging a whip, well that’s a pretty ballsy move. It’s not my personal style, but I do hope it works out for its owner. If nothing else it’s probably a great conversation starter.
You can see more of Lexi Sindel in non-tattoo form over at her professional site or at the Femdom Empire site.
Just for your information, while I love getting comments and emails, I’m not the fastest in the world at responding to them. I try and respond to comments within a couple of days, but detailed emails can take a week or so. Job + Blog + Friends + Sleep = 24 hours. That doesn’t leave me much time to write emails, so I apologize in advance if your response is delayed. If I ever manage to fit dating or a relationship into that equation it might involve some fundamental rewriting of the laws of physics. Possibly that could lead to a new form of interstellar travel, but more likely it’ll just mean the end of the universe. So I also apologize in advance if that happens just when you’re finally getting to a good bit. I’ll try not to do it right before a weekend.
Perhaps an alternative solution to this equation would be for me to multitask better. For example, this gentleman appears to be combining cleaning the floor with washing his face. That has got to cut down on wasted washroom time.
The lady helping the gentleman with his ablutions is Mistress Lauren.
Margaret Thatcher’s funeral was earlier this week. She was Britain’s first female Prime Minister and is widely considered to be its most influential leader since the Second World War. Regardless of what you think of her politics, she was undoubtedly hugely successful in her chosen field and a major world figure.
As soon as the obituaries started rolling in I knew there was one word that would inevitably turn up – dominatrix. Sure enough, like many articles written about her during her life, up it popped (for example in Der Spiegel, Slate, The Guardian, etc.). It’s a description that has always annoyed me. It has a very specific sexual connotation. Men can achieve positions of great authority and power without it being tied to their sexuality. A man reaching for authority is treated as normal. Yet if a woman proves to be the best political campaigner, her motives and reasoning are assessed differently. She’s defined not in her own terms, but in reference to the men she’s beaten politically and their feelings. She’s in charge either to satisfy her base sexual instincts for control or because others let her win to satisfy their desire for punishment.
In Margaret Thatcher’s case it strikes me as particularly inappropriate. I was only a young boy when she was in charge, but my kinky personality was already forming, and she never struck me as someone who sexualized power. A dominatrix works within a D/s dynamic that’s created in partnership with a submissive. They are interested in the reaction from their submissive and the interplay of power between them. That might fit some politicians, but Thatcher always came across to me as someone interested only in results. She cared nothing for the journey. She wanted the world a certain way and either you agreed (making you irrelevant) or you disagreed (making you an obstacle to be destroyed). Authoritarianism is not the same as domination.
As this blog shows, I’m a big fan of women who choose to express themselves via domination. But I hate to see women pushed into that group simply because they’re successful and natural leaders.
I originally picked the image for this post as the cricket bat struck me as quintessentially English. It turns out to be a shot from an Austrian fashion designer – Lena Hoshek. So not so English, but still a fun shot with a great 40’s retro feel to it.
It’s odd how often derelict and abandoned buildings show up in the more artistic BDSM shots. I really can’t imagine a worse place for a scene. Damp and decaying wood. Cold breezes. Rusty nails and broken glass. Vermin. Dangerous footing and no sturdy anchor points. It’s pretty much the definition of a bad place to get naked and tie people up. But it does look cool, which is no doubt the motivating factor.
This is my third and, for the moment, final Femdom/Femsub post. While the backdrop might be interesting but impractical, I do like the top’s outfit. It’s not exactly standard domme wear, but it is sexy and does fit the scene. This is also a nice image to spin a story around. Is she in the process of rescuing the tied up woman? Or is she about to kiss her and abandon her?
You can find out more about the image here. It was shot by Joseph W Carey. The domme is Sister Dee from Top Grl and the submissive is Luna Vary. I originally encountered it on the Beauty of Submission tumblr.
F/f imagery doesn’t get featured here that often, but after yesterday’s example, I thought a couple more posts on the theme wouldn’t be too out of place.
I have to admit to a bit of kink for military uniforms. It’s not something I actively pursue, but should they happen to come my way, I’m never unhappy. Like a lot of uniforms they carry the suggestion of authority. On top of that they add a dash of danger and style that a police or nurse outfit just doesn’t have. Officer outfits in particular are designed to impress socially rather than be utilitarian. As a fan of history, elegant tailoring and authority figures, they’re a win all around for me.
I believe this one is based on a Prussian cavalry outfit from Napoleonic times. German military uniforms tend to present unique problems of their own thanks to certain historical events. Fortunately in this period the bad guy was a short Corsican with a flair for military command. Or at least that’s what my British history books taught me. So thanks to Blücher, and the fact Germany didn’t even exist as a unified entity at the time, we can enjoy this one with no moral qualms.
I like the subtle D/s vibe in this image. It’s not completely clear whose in charge, but there’s definitely a suggestion of power dynamics at work. It’s by the photographer Yuri Iluhin. I found it on the Selina Minx tumblr.
While I was writing yesterday’s post on the brain’s response to pain I stumbled across another related article. It addresses the hoary old argument of pain tolerance in men versus women. It’s commonly said that women have a higher tolerance and this article claimed to have found a reason for that – estrogen.
One way estrogen helps women to cope with pain, he says, is by increasing the availability of endorphins — brain chemicals that help dampen the pain response.
When estrogen levels are high, there’s an increased number of areas in the brain where endorphins can “park.” The more “parking places” available, Zubieta says, the more endorphins there are on call, waiting to flood the body with “feel good” chemicals capable of overriding pain signals.
According to the article in yesterday’s post, brains all react to pain in a similar way. How individuals respond is down to social conditioning and secondary factors like the production of endorphins. And based on this article, women have a natural advantage on the endorphin front. When it comes to bragging rights, I’m not sure this really helps. It implies that it’s not down to simple mental toughness or fortitude. Women (in general) just have more natural opiates floating around their brain.
More pertinently, for the purposes of this blog, it makes more wonder if women tend to experience a more intense subspace. The rush associated with endorphins is a big part of subspace, and having more on tap would suggest a potential for a deeper experience. The fight or flight reaction is also part of getting into subspace, and that’s another thing men and women experience differently. Both sexes produce cortisol from the adrenal gland under stress, but women produce more oxytocin which counters the effect of cortisol and creates more relaxing and nurturing feelings. I know from personal experience that my subspace contains elements of all these things, from the rush of endorphins through the edginess of adrenaline to the calmness of oxytocin. But if men and women typically produce different proportions of these it would suggest the subspace they experience might typically be different as well.
Whatever the science of all it – and I’m most definitely not an expert – it does give me an excuse to feature some hot F/f artwork.
This artwork is by Shiniez and you can find a lot more on his Deviant Art pages.
I’ve written about the science of pain in a previous post. That discussed some interesting findings from studies in the 1940’s and highlighted the difficulty in measuring pain in an objective manner. According to this article on brain imaging, that last part may be about to change. Researchers have managed to train a computer model (via machine learning) to analyze MRI scans and predict the level of pain experienced.
The part I found particularly interesting was that the responses across different patients brains was very uniform. They didn’t have to sample a patients pain at say levels 1 and 2 to be able to predict what that patients brain would look like at level 5 or 6. The same predictive model could be used across all patients. Meaning that they could take an MRI scan in from any patient and accurately estimate the level of pain experienced.
That seems counter-intuitive because we have a concept we call pain tolerance. Some people are as tough as nails and others are delicate daisies. Yet the underlying brain mechanism seems to be fairly uniform. Everyone’s brain fires up in similar ways to similar degrees of stimulus. That suggests to me that people’s baseline tolerance to pain, before endorphins and adrenalin kicks in to modulate the signal, is a learned response. You’re not pre-programmed to have a specific tolerance and presumably it could be modified over time.
I’ll leave you with an image of somebody doing a pain experiment of her own. She seems to have neglected the MRI scanner to measure the exact effects but perhaps this is just a practice run. Judging by his expression she should have no problem getting a reading from him.
I found the image on the Some Husbands Need Discipline tumblr. The original commercial site is sadly now extinct.