Femdom Resource – Page 229 – The beauty of dominant women

PDS revisited

After my posts earlier this week (here and here) on PDS (Public Display of D/S) I thought I was done with the topic. Then I stumbled on the image below and felt like riffing on it a little more.

Personally I don’t kink on humiliation and I have a very low embarrassment threshold. I can get embarrassed just watching television on my own. Some people hide behind the couch when watching horror movies. I do it when watching comedies like Fraiser or Seinfeld. All this means that I’m not big on being leashed and led through the local shopping mall in a pink tutu.

On a more general philosophical note, I’m also not a fan of dragging innocent bystanders into a scene they’ve not consented to. However, when it comes to public spaces a little bit of my libertarian side does tend to leak out. A shared space means it should be for everyone. The fact I may not appreciate a couple making out, or practicing their fetch/sit/stay commands, doesn’t mean they should automatically be prevented from doing so. It’s their space as much as it is mine. After all, if it was left to me, I’d ban Ugg boots and Cargo pants from public display. Aesthetically I think I’d be right, but it’s hard to argue from a provable harm point of view.

For me the deciding factor for a lot of these ambiguous situation lies in intent. If you’re trying to piss people off and get off on their shock factor, then that’s obnoxious and out of line. But if you’re genuinely immersed in your thing, and trying to do it in the least confrontational way, then you should get a lot of leeway.

All of which brings me to the picture below, which I thought was very sweet. It made me smile. For all my fear of embarrassment, I’d be very happy to be this gentleman. And anybody complaining about it could go and kiss some other part of my anatomy.

I found this on the appropriately named Kiss the Feet tumblr.

The importance of posture

I sessioned with Lydia tonight, so right now I’m feeling very happy and buzzed. Many photographs were snapped, so hopefully I can share in a forthcoming post. Although I still need to publish some of the photographs I grabbed with Ms Troy Orleans last week. As problems go, excessive kinky imagery to sort through is not a bad one to have.

In the meantime, let me highlight a particular porn bugbear of mine: Awkward postures for dommes. The D/s dynamic suggests that a scene should always be focused around what the dominant wants. So anytime I see a dominant looking uncomfortable or in a non-ideal posture for them, it screws with any fantasy I might want to create around an image. It suggests the cameraman or the submissive is in charge and the dominant is subordinate to them.

Take the two images below. I kind of like the head in a box idea. I’ve got to think it’d be a real mindfuck to have you head isolated and immobile in that way. But her position looks so awkward. On tiptoes right at the edge of a table isn’t a great place to be. Not to mention the muscle effort needed to ride him from that kind of posture. In contrast the second image, while less visually dynamic, looks a far more reasonable position. I can enjoy that picture without some annoying bit of my brain niggling me with “That looks uncomfortable. Why would she do it like that? Does she not have a cushion to use?”

I found these images on Lash Kisser and X Ray Ted respectively. I believe the first is from Divine Bitches and the second from Men Are Slaves.

The cutting edge of gender issues (beware of icebergs)

I was amused to read this gawker article on an ironic Fox News snafu. The original Fox article was all about the benefits of traditional marriage and traditional gender models. Unfortunately for them the picture they picked to illustrate it was of the first same-sex couple to get married at the Empire State Building. Sadly they eventually spotted their faux-pas and changed the picture.

Although the picture problem was funny, the article itself is also pretty amusing. My favorite section is …

Prior to the 1970s, people viewed gender roles as as equally valuable. Many would argue women had the better end of the deal! It’s hard to claim women were oppressed in a nation in which men were expected to stand up when a lady enters the room or to lay down their lives to spare women life. When the Titanic went down in 1912, its sinking took 1,450 lives. Only 103 were women. One-hundred three.

Now I’m a man. Far be it from me to dictate when life was best for 50% of the world’s population. But I have to say that as general measure of happiness and liberty, the “chances of dying in a cruise ship disaster” test doesn’t strike me as the most representative one. If I had to pick between early access to lifeboats and say the right to vote (8 years after the Titanic sank), equal pay (<50% in 1912, and still only around 75%) and protection from workplace discrimination (not introduced till the 60’s), then I’m taking my chances in the icy waters. Although if I have to also listen to that God awful Celine Dione song then it might be a trickier decision.

While it’s idiotic to use simple gender based social conventions as markers for oppression, that doesn’t mean the social niceties themselves aren’t worth preserving. I enjoy the opportunity to display some old fashioned manners. Sadly, while standing for a lady is common enough, someone asking me to adjust their garter is a touch rarer. While this shot has an older feel to it, but is actually from 1981. It’s by Helmut Newton for Vogue.

Astride her captive

I’m not sure where I found this image. A reverse image search tells me it’s a character called Fujiko Mine from the manga series Lupin III. I’ve never seen the series, but wikipedia says she’s a professional burglar who uses her attractiveness to fool her prospective targets. In this case it seems to have worked out well for her, although her captive appears to be having second thoughts.

PDS

I was going to follow-up my previous post with some comments on my personal feelings about PDS (Public Displays of Dominance and Submission). However, as I started to write it, I realized I really wasn’t adding much to the debate. The rules on how a shared public space should be used are endlessly debatable and mutable.

So instead let me make a meta-point: Everyone stands on a slope. By which I mean there is no fixed point and stable surface from which to cast other opinions down. If you read the comments on the two articles I previously linked to (here and here) you’ll see a lot of de facto assumptions about what is appropriate behavior in public and what should be reserved for private spaces. The comment writers don’t seem aware that their universal truths are not universal at all. Unfortunately, if you hang out on BDSM forums and blogs, you’ll often see much the same attitude coming from the opposite direction.

This isn’t to say that there’s no right or wrong. Just that whatever position you adopt on any subject, be aware that you’re on a continuum. It’s still possible to draw lines and acceptable limits. Just don’t try and pretend that what you’ve chosen is somehow God given or universally accepted. Anyone arguing from that perspective instantly loses credibility.

After all that pontificating, let me make amends to my readers with some more leash shots. In this case they’re from The Properly Leashed Male tumblr and feature gentlemen being pulled by something a little more sensitive than a neck.

Leash laws

Earlier in the week I came across this story on a public display of D/s. It’s an advice column, and featured the story of a woman taking her leashed partner for walks in a residential area. The letter writer was a concerned neighbor who wanted to know how to handle it. While the ultimate advice given was good (be friendly and don’t worry about it), the tone it was couched in was obnoxious. It seemed to have no understanding of why somebody might do it and attributed it entirely to a juvenile desire to shock.

I was pondering writing about this when, courtesy of a post from Mistress T, I was pointed to a follow-up article. The domme in question, a woman named Kai’enne, had seen the article and contacted the columnist. It’s a much more positive piece and puts across their D/s lifestyle in an understanding manner. It reflects well on all involved, although the reader comments are depressingly full of the usual hateful rubbish you might expect.

Then, just minutes after I’d read that article, I came across this post by Mistress Alex. It features leashes, public exhibitionism, bootblacking and the photograph below. I wonder what the original letter writer would have said to this scene in her neighborhood?

Mistress Alex is a NYC based pro-domme. Her blog is available here and her professional site is here.

The good old days

After mentioning the bad femdom porn of yesteryear in my previous post, it seemed a shame not to share some. This struck me as a particularly brilliant example. It’s so bad I think it actually becomes good again, by virtue of making me laugh.

The lady on the left is brandishing her flogger like it’s a long dead skunk that she wants to keep as far from her as possible. The lady on the right is falling out of her strange outfit, while expressing a strong revulsion to the idea of actually hitting the gentleman’s bottom. And for a man about to be trained by two wicked bitches in leather, he looks remarkably cheerful. He’s no doubt justifiably confident that he’s unlikely to need his safeword in the scene. What I find particularly amazing is that judging by the titling, this was the lead image for the magazine or the photo-spread. They must have looked at all the other shots and gone – “That’s it! That’s the one to lead with! This really sets the scene for the air of powerful dominance and complex sensuality that we’re trying to put across here.”

There’s a lot of justifiable complaining about bad femdom porn. I can’t deny that there’s a lot of it out there. But in an hour on tumblr you can find more good BDSM porn today than you could have found in a month of hunting in the 90’s. And I dread to think what it must have been like for kinksters prior to the spread of the internet.

I found this in a collection of vintage shots at Femdom Times.

Glimpses of the past

I’ve been enjoying dipping and diving around the links on this page. It’s a collection of interviews, articles and photographs from old BDSM publications. To be frank the site itself is a bit of a mess. There’s very little context given and the presentation is horribly jumbled and confusing. However, there’s some interesting stuff there if you’re willing to dig around. For example, this article on Cynthia Slater covers background on the San Francisco SM scene and the formation of the society of Janus in the early 70’s.

The image below, of Empress Kat Prowles, is one that brings back some memories for me. There were several shots of this domme regularly recycled on usenet in the 90’s. I didn’t know anything about her, but the pictures stuck in my mind. It was an era of really bad femdom porn. Typically it consisted of conventional glamor models pulling on a pair of boots and waving a limp flogger towards a camera. It cemented in my mind a sense of unreality around BDSM. That it was all just a fantasy that people didn’t really do. Then I stumbled across the shots of the lady below. She looked real. Like she actually might want to hit me. And that she might even enjoy it. It was one of the first times I imagined myself interacting with a domme, rather than simply jerking off to a leather clad porn model. Those sexy sneering models have all long faded from my mind, but the shot below has stuck with me for well over a decade now.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

I’m safely back in Seattle. Unfortunately I’m feeling pretty wiped out after spending a day in NYC and then around ten hours traveling (door to door time). So it’s time for a short simple post using something from my random grab bag of images that I’ve enjoyed.

I found this one on the devoted sub tumblr. I haven’t determined it’s original source, but I believe that’s the model Xenia Tchoumitcheva. It looks like it could be a candid behind the scenes shot captured while on a fashion shoot. If that’s the case, then the gentleman helping out the beautiful Ms Tchoumitcheva appears to have one of the world’s more interesting jobs.

Escape

Tomorrow I flee the freezing NYC region to return to the warmer and wetter state of Washington. It has been a fun trip, and it ended on a very high note. I spent a good portion of today with the brilliant Miss Troy Orleans. We had a great session and snapped a lot of photographs. Hopefully, when I’ve had chance to sort through them, there will be a detailed session post.

Given I enjoyed some heavy bondage and restraints today, it seems fitting to finish the post with a pointer to an interesting article I read on Harry Houdini. I’m not sure he could be described as a femdom aficionado, but he certainly seemed to have a strong interest in bondage, masochism, exhibitionism and edge play. Given his skill, I’ve no doubt he could have emerged from the ropes in the photograph below in a matter of seconds. For the rest of us submissive types, even if we had the skill, I’m not sure escape would be our first choice…

I found this on the darksehnsucht tumblr. I don’t know the original source, but I’d guess it’s from one of the kink.com sites.