Black, white and blonde

I’ve noticed images from Femme Fatale Films popping up on any number of tumblrs and blogs recently. With examples as striking as this shot (which came to me via the Femdom Marriage tumblr) I can’t say I’m all that surprised. I love the calm composed nature of the shot, as well as the color contrasts between the dark clothes and whip, his marked pale skin and her long blonde hair. I can imagine her inflicting a very deliberate controlled whipping, all fury and no sound.

Mistress with whip from Femme Fatale FilmsThis is Mistress Eleise de Lacy, and the session it is taken from is called Dining Service. You can see a short trailer for it in their updates section or join for access to the full video.

Bringing up the rear

Here’s the last of my field of three horse related posts. It’s a little more artwork from Robert Bishop, this time featuring a nicely costumed bucking horse. Unlike the previous animals, this one seems a bit feisty, but she doesn’t look like she’ll have any problems keeping him under control. I suspect she might even enjoy a little intransigence from her mount.

Robert Bishop artwork of woman riding man dressed as horse

More horsing around

Yesterday’s post stimulated some long dormant neurons in my brain. As I was writing about the rarity of real horses in femdom porn, something was niggling me about where I had seen it before.

The answer, after spending some time flipping through my internal femdom filing system, was the old cruella publication Riding Cult. This was a short lived magazine from the early 90’s, featuring lots of boots, jodhpurs and tight tops. Most of their images featured men as horses, as shown in the first shot below. He doesn’t look to be a beast in prime physical condition, but they seem to be enjoying themselves anyway.

Occasionally the magazine also featured real horses, as show in the second shot below. Typically they stuck to fairly traditional riding gear, but in this particular case I think they strayed a little. I’m no riding expert, but those boots don’t look all that practical. High heels and stirrups does not seem like a great combination. On the other hand a haughty stare from horseback does tickle me in hard to reach places, so I’m prepared to overlook the impracticality of the whole thing.

Man as horse

Woman on horseback

Horseplay

Riding gear is a fairly common theme in femdom porn. It’s a natural fit. Leather boots. Tight jodhpurs. Riding crops. There’s also the idea of a woman controlling a big powerful dumb beast with a snapped command or a flick of her wrist. That has a certain resonance.

However, it’s pretty rare to see an actual horse involved in a shot. Normally the man plays that role. In this case the male in question has been forced one step lower in the hierarchy, from beast to inanimate footstool. The horse itself looks fairly bored by the proceedings. I just hope for the footstool’s sake that it doesn’t decide to take a pee at this point. I’m a fan of water sports, but horse piss lapping around the knees is definitely a deal breaker. And there’s a good entry to add to the list of sentences I never imagined myself typing.

Slave acting as foot stool while mistress mounts horseThis is taken from a set of images created by the femdom town site. I found it originally on the Whip Mistress blog.

The joy of sucks

I got to play with a latex vacuum bed a few nights ago. For those of you who have never seen one of these interesting toys, it’s essentially a big sealed latex bag hooked up to a vacuum cleaner. The submissive lies in the bag and as the air is sucked out it seals around him or her, holding them tightly in place. If you’ve never seen one before then I’d suggest browsing this kink engineering page, which gives a pretty good overview.

This was actually my first time in a latex bed, but not my first time in a vacuum bed. Lady Lydia also owns a neoprene model, which is the same material they make wetsuits out of. We tried that late last year and it was a very different experience. The neoprene version is heavy and opaque, very claustrophobic, and the thick material grips tightly around the body. It’s an extremely intense sensation, high on adrenalin and low on relaxation.

In contrast I found the latex model a far more floaty and trippy experience. The latex was thinner and lighter, feeling more like a tight second skin than a sack of imprisonment. It also let some light through, making the world an abstract pale blur, rather than an inky pit. It very quickly put me into subspace, where time seems wonky and my conscious thought processes go on vacation somewhere outside my head. Of course being sealed away in a latex bag wasn’t going to stop Lydia having some fun, and she layered on sensations, using electrical shocks to the genitals and clips on various delicate bits of flesh. I quickly discovered that anything that hurts a little when first applied to my body inside the bag, will soon hurt a hell of a lot once the latex is squeezing tightly down against my skin. Electrical contacts are particularly ‘fun’ in this respect.

I had a hunt around for some good latex vacbed images to illustrate this post, but sadly couldn’t find anything. Everyone just ends up looking like a fetishistic version of Han Solo encased in carbonite. So instead I just decided to riff on the latex theme, and use these two latex heavy images from Jim Weathers bondage cafe (found on the Lipstick & Latex tumblr). The first shot has a little bit of a flirty teasing air to it, which creates a nice contrast to the second. That has much more of a sense of “What the hell!” and “You thought I was joking?” about it.

Latex, femdom and bondage by Jim Weathers

Latex, femdom and bondage by Jim Weathers

The bad old days

Bondage blog pointed me at a long but fascinating interview with John Blakemore. He was one of the very early producers of bondage movies back in the 70’s, shooting stuff for HOM and Cal-Star. The original material was before my time, but various stills and fuzzy video clips have been floating around on usenet for years.

All his movies are M/f and a world away from any kind of female dominant aesthetic. However, for anyone interested in the history of porn and BDSM, it’s an informative glimpse behind the scenes and back in time. As he makes clear, he was operating in isolation, in very murky legal territory and with old fashioned technology.

At the time, the laws in the United States prohibited any form of penetration, or sex with bondage, or actual torture and so I made these films expressly for the European market, to be taken out of the country. They were not even edited here. I had to hand deliver the raw footage. It was never out of my possession. I put it in Barbara’s hands; she in turn put it in the hands of someone from Europe. And even then, it was probably risky, although the film had not yet even been developed. It was raw footage that had not yet been developed. And it went out of the country and it did not come back. I was rather shocked to find out a couple years ago that some of this stuff is available.

While I do find it fascinating, it’s not an interview that makes me warm to the man. His approach and attitude comes across as pretty disturbing. He’s not big on concepts like SSC (Safe, Sane and Consensual) and some of his views are fairly ludicrous.

The simple fact of the matter is that in the Western world for the last 2000 years, if you take a young man that’s full of testosterone…and you put him in a situation where he has the place, the equipment and the ability to do anything to a gorgeous young woman that he wants to, with absolutely no repercussions of any kind, he will torture her and rape her.

Clearly technical issues areas like picture quality and the production values aren’t the only things that have improved since the bad old days of BDSM porn.

Given his work is all male dominant, I’m not going to feature any shots from it here. Fortunately he mentions the artist Bishop in the interview, who also used to do work for HOM. That therefore gives me an excuse to feature some of his wonderful artwork.

Femdom by BishopFemdom by Bishop

Indulgence (revisited)

Originally this post was simply titled ‘indulgence’ and consisted of a short comment stating how I had nothing clever to say, other than how sexy I found this shot. However, the folder name wordpress generated told me that I’d already used the title in an earlier post. So I go back to find my previous post and discover that I’m not only about to repeat a title, but also repeat an entire post. Not only was the title and text almost the same, but it was even a similar image of a gorgeous woman in glasses staring into the camera. I guess that says something for my consistency if not my creativity or my memory. Expect to see another post called “Indulgence (revisited) (revisited)” in a few months time where I surprise myself all over again. I’m going to claim that I’m practicing for old age, where I plan to entertain myself by pretending to be deaf and forgetful in order to annoy people.

Beautiful woman in glasses staring into cameraI found this on the Rue Montorgueil tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t know who the lovely lady is, or where the shot originally comes from.

Mmm, drippy

I tend to see a lot of dripping cocks attached to frustrated males across the femdom tumblr universe. Similarly an upward looking shot of a strap-on isn’t particularly unusual either. But I don’t think I’ve seen a drippy shot combined with a strap-on before. I find it strangely erotic, particularly combined with her fingers playing with the lube. I think it adds a real sensory dimension to the image. I can just image the slipperiness of the cock, the smell of the leather harness and the sticky warmth of her hands.

Incidentally, on a slightly random aside, I sometimes search for my post titles before I publish them. I’m often entertained to see where else the same expression has been used. In this particular case it took me straight to a creampie shot that I thought some of my readers might also enjoy!

Strap-on with dripping lubeThis is from the My Miss In Control tumblr.

What do I owe you?

The Dishevelled Domina put up a post a few days ago that got me thinking about the process of sex blogging and image sharing. The post was entitled ‘Yer not the boss of me!‘ and was a good rant about tumblr’s that accompany their images with very broad sweeping statements about the right way to behave. For example, captions of the form “a real mistress will lock her husband up, throw away the key, and fuck other men” or “inspections are one of the things that a true Mistress knows how to do correctly.” DD was, to put it mildly, not a fan of such things.

To a large extent I’m with her on this one. I find the best image+commentary blogs are the ones that concentrate on their personal reactions to an image. They supply background, point out details or add a little humor. Spanking blog and bondage blog are two good examples of this approach, and it’s one I’ve always tried to follow. I don’t want to reinterpret an image, or interpose myself between it and the viewer, I just want to share my feelings about what I see. As soon as you start adding specific context to an image then you’re no longer sharing the image, but instead you’re sharing your personal modification of it. You create something new, text that imposes its own preferences, which may well clash with your reader’s.

Where I depart ways with DD is in her reaction to this phenomena. I have to ask myself, what does a blogger (or tumblr) owe his audience? Who are they posting for? In her post DD puts an open letter to tumblrs…

…if you try to fucking boss people around or tell us what we ought to like or do I am going to want to stab you in the jimmy, or vajayjay, respectively.
Please stop this deeply annoying shit and try to grow an awareness of something other than your own wank-bank.
Dishevelled Domina

But is there anything wrong with a tumblr being someone’s personal wank-bank? People blog for a lot of different reasons. I don’t write this one to get off, but that approach doesn’t have to be a universal one.

When I see an image and caption like this one, I don’t see it as an instruction for 50% of the planet’s population. Or even for the smaller fraction of dominant females. I see it as someone creating their own new little piece of erotica. It’s a fantasy snippet that, along with the image, tells a story they enjoy. It’s not particularly a story I care for, but the same could be said for a lot of the erotica out there.

I think in many ways the problem is actually a technical one. Tumblr makes it trivially easy to share and reblog images, but it drags all the comments along with it. It really needs better tools to slice, dice and mash the content as it flows between sites.

I’ll leave you with an image from the Superior Femme tumblr (originally by Frank Herholdt). This is a tumblr site whose images I like, but the captions often clash with my personal preferences. In this case the caption was “She’s taken his money, his family, his house. Now she’s working on his dignity.” That really doesn’t do much for me. We could go with “A real mistress will get her cuckold to paint her nails before she heads out for a night of fucking”, but then DD might come and stab me in the jimmy. So I’ll just say I like the coloration of the image, and his look of concentration. I’ll leave further interpretation to the viewer’s preferences.

Women sits on bed while kneeling man paints her toenails

BDSM equipment page now live

The eagle eyed reader may have spotted a new option in the top menu bar – Equipment. This is a new page listing all the interesting sites selling equipment, furniture or clothes that I’ve come across. A few of the links are ones I’ve discovered via my usual random web browsing, a small number are from where I’ve shopped in the past, but the vast majority come from the comments and wish lists of pro-dommes. I figure that they’re probably the best people to listen to when it comes to BDSM hardware and outfits. After all, they buy a lot of it and give it a tougher workout than the average lifestyle player ever will.

If anyone has suggestions for other sites to add to the list then please leave a comment. I’d particularly like to know of smaller sites that offer very specialist craftsmanship. They’re typically the harder ones to track down whilst simultaneously creating the most interesting items.

For illustration I’ve picked two images. The first is from Walsh Metalworks and features Mistress Alex, shot by Natasha Gornik, wearing a metal corset fabricated by Sullivan Walsh. The second is a padded bondage chair from MetalBound. I’m afraid I don’t know the names of the models involved in the second shot.

Update: Both Jim and Lily kindly pointed out via comments that the submissive in the chair in the second shot is Madison Young.

Mistress Alex wearing a metal corset from Walsh MetalworksPadded bondage chair from MetalBound