Artwork – Page 49 – Femdom Resource

Where dirt meets water

I’m not a big fan of the beach. I tend to subscribe to Bill Hick’s view of it…

What’s the fucking deal with the beach? I don’t get it. It’s where dirt meets water, alright? Is that that fucking amazing to you? I’ve got a bathtub and an imagination, I’m staying indoors this summer. That way I can listen to music that I like. Maybe I’m just jealous man, everyone at the beach is perfect, you know; tanned skin, white teeth, I’ve got white skin, tanned teeth.

Although anyone who has actually been to a beach recently will know that everyone is very much not perfect. There’s a lot of scary skin on display out there. It’s enough to make one thankful for baggy jeans and shapeless shirts.

When I’m not being a curmudgeon about the whole thing, I do enjoy the sound of the surf. And there is something about when dirt meets water that is a touch inspiring. That edge of land touching the apparently limitless ocean does spark a sense of awe. Particularly when viewed from the tiki bar across the street. So in honor of that, here’s a nice beach related image from Old Man Equine.

Lady Merreth

The drawing below is by SYoshiko (free deviant art login required) and is entitled ‘Concept sketch for Lady Merreth the Submission‘ The Lady Merreth character is from an as yet unpublished fantasy fiction tale. You can read more about the fiction here and here, and see more of the associated artwork here.

I’m personally not a big fantasy fiction fan, although the idea of a strong woman in leather who kicks ass is certainly an appealing one. I could even lose the leather and stay happy. I also like this artwork a lot. As the title says, it’s a concept sketch, so it’s not as developed as some of the other drawings of the character, but I love the fluidity and dreamy nature of it.

Higher education

I like the idea of making science more interesting to people. I’d certainly be happy to volunteer to dangle over a lecture hall somewhere in academia. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this is all that practical. And I don’t mean the naked slave part, or the bondage, or the professor with a whip. I’m sure those would all be fine. It’s the timing that’d be an issue. I’ve done suspension scenes and they’re not the fastest things in the world to set-up. Getting everything cinched properly in place and the weight balanced right takes time. Doing it three different ways? All your students would be long gone. You’d be better off studying the mathematics of the whip.

The cartoon comes from the very excellent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Other fine examples from the same source include this, this and my personal favorite this.

Great evening. Great artwork.

Tonight was a happy resumption of a long running tradition – my sessions with Lydia. Thanks to adjacent travel schedules it has been a month or so since we last got together. It was a very pleasurable (in a painful way) evening. Many clamps, clips and canes were deployed, resulting in much moaning and growling.

The image below isn’t really related to the session, other than both feature beautiful red heads. But right now I just want to relax and enjoy my endorphins rather than write posts. So if you’ll excuse me I have a date with my couch and a fine cocktail originally invented for a Mr. Ernest Hemingway.

This great image was created by the artist i-have-a-hunger. I found it via Yumine Guo’s Storyland tumblr.

Annoyingly complicated humans

One of the problems when writing about the origin of kinky preferences is the tendency to treat the personal as the universal. It’s human nature to assume individual experiences are widely shared, or even that they are the default experience. That’s particularly problematic with something as complex and multifaceted as kink is.

An interesting comment from Budman reminded me that not everyone traces their preferences back to early childhood. He feels that his triggers came from early adolescence. That’s something I’ve seen reported by others. I’ve also seen posts from people who came to kink even later, years into their adulthood. It was something that they grew into, not an itch that was always lurking under the surface of their sexuality. Humans are annoyingly complicated.

For me however, my kinky nature was in place long before adolescence. How else can I explain me and Penelope Pitstop? As I’ve posted in the past, I loved watching this show as a child. There was something especially tingly about watching Penelope be tied up and placed in peril. Like the magic act I talked about yesterday, it wasn’t a formative experience. There was no traumatic or exciting event that got associated with cartoon bondage. I just loved the idea of control and how it could be taken away. Reaching adolescence just slotted the next piece of the jigsaw in place for me.

I think the fact that people come to different kinks, in so many different ways, and at so many different times, emphasizes the problem in trying to associate particular interests with only single formative events. After all, how many people experienced similar events, and didn’t become kinky? We never hear from the guy who was dressed up as a girl by his sisters, and didn’t become a cross-dresser. Perhaps there’s an underlying predisposition in just a fraction of the population to having a flexible sexuality. One that casts a wider net for stimulus. Some people are always aware of it, some access it via childhood events, some as their sexuality emerges in adolescence, and some discover it via experimentation in later life.

Having mentioned Penelope Pitstop, it seems fitting to close with this image. It has similar feel, with an extravagantly costumed villain, and a helpless well bound victim. Fortunately for the purposes of this blog, it’s a rare reversal of the damsel in distress trope. It’s entitled Fred Stolen by a Villainess and is by the artist Barry960.

Nature / Nurture / Whatever

The New York Magazine has an article on the well worn subject of nature versus nurture in the context of fetish and kink. It’s a discursive piece, heavy on anecdotes and light on hard data. It comes down firmly on the side of nurture, although it also admits there’s no simple way to divide up such a complex set of influences and interests.

Personally I wonder if, outside of scientific curiosity, the debate is even one worth having. Unless they identify a very clear genetic cause, which seems unlikely given the current research, the discussion isn’t going to result in anything actionable. Nobody is going to be able to come up with a set of guidelines for bringing up a child with “normal” sexual interests. The cause and effect is far too complex and unique for each individual.

It also seems odd that people are so interested in tracking down the basis for kinky sexual preferences, but seem happy to accept all the other preferences people exhibit without question. If somebody says they don’t like carrots, nobody starts wondering if they had a traumatic experience as a child while watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Wine lovers don’t feel the need to tie their interest back to early experiences with a sippy cup and purple grape drink. Even in the sexual and relationship realm we let vanilla preferences slide without comment. A serial dater of blonde women just has a ‘type’. Nobody wonders if it’s because he watched one too many Marilyn Monroe movies while sitting on his mother’s knee. Yet say he likes dominant blonde women, and suddenly there’s an urge to wheel out old Sigmund to try and figure out why the hell he’s so damn weird.

Given this posts focus on the development of sexual preferences, it seems appropriate to finish with this image – ‘School of Bondage’ by zblabla. The classroom can certainly be a powerful influence on sexual development, but it’s not typically this overt.

Lose Control

I was happy to notice the Lunar Black tumblr had recently sprung back into life. That is against the typical sequence of events for tumblrs. They typically either grind to an indefinite halt or vanish into thin air without so much as a by-your-leave. There are not a huge number of artwork themed femdom tumblrs, so I’m glad we didn’t lose this one.

The image below is by the artist sadademort (free deviant art login required) and is called ‘Lose Control’. I discovered it via this post on the aforementioned Lunar Black tumblr. I’m not sure that arm bondage is strictly up to code, but I do like the energy and sense of the D/s dynamic that it captures.

My kind of Goddess

Here’s a third piece of artwork to complete my trilogy of artist themed posts. This is entitled Femdom Goddesses 2 (free deviant art login required) and is by the artist humon.

According to humon’s notes on it, Ishtar was..

…a Babylonian goddess of sex and prostitution, and was know as the concubine of the gods. But though she had many many many lovers she was also quite cruel to them, and the less powerful ones ended up as her slaves or died.

That sounds like my kind of Goddess. The other pair on the left is, according to some Jewish texts, the first man and woman. Lilith apparently wouldn’t do as she was told and tried to rule Adam. Eve was therefore a backup plan for Adam, created with all Lilith’s sass taken out. Obviously the guys (and no doubt it was guys) creating the original version of that story wanted to send a pretty clear message about what they thought correct female behavior was.

In the bedroom

Today’s artwork is a very different style to yesterday’s, but it’s no less striking. It’s entitled ‘In the bedroom‘ and is by the artist zblabla.

I like the ambiguity of the scene. Is this the start of a scene or the end of one? Is she going to leave him there while she sleeps? Is he purely ornamental or a fun toy for her to play with? You also get the impression our uncertainty is shared by the man on the X-frame. Now he’s fastened in place, he’s not quite sure what she’s planning.

I found this on the Femdom Gallery tumblr.

Post M

This is my 1000^th post. I knew it was coming, but I’m still kind of amazed to type that. It has taken exactly 1010 days to get to it. Given that I do actually have a reasonably full non-kinky life featuring work, friends and family (against all the available evidence to the contrary here), I think that’s pretty good going.

I was initially going to make it a retrospective post on the blog itself. I still might write something like that in the next few days, but for today I’ll make it a post that best characterizes my goal here. I’ve always aimed to provide useful links to interesting people, mixed in with some fun and erotic visuals. So here’s an image that I love from the artist and writer Yumine. I only discovered her work in the last day or so, and hopefully it’ll be new to a lot of my readers. She has both a tumblr and a blog called Storyland. Both feature some excellent artwork and writing and are well worth checking out. As her blog introduction says…

If the promise of men bound, abused, and enslaved stirs your senses and whets your appetite, then you have come to the right place.