Artwork – Page 55 – Femdom Resource

You might be a redneck if…

…you don’t enjoy cuckolding. At least that’s according to this article on it over at the Daily Beast (thanks to Suzanne for the link). It’s an interesting article, but based on what seems to be a flawed premise. Its primary contention is that cuckolding is S&M for smart people. A type of psychological torture that is ideal suited to kinky members of Mensa.

In this respect, cuckolding attracts “the very highly educated,” Paul says, adding that it’s “truly intellectual in its enterprise because it replaces sexual touch with humiliation and emotional pain, both of which are psychological. Most of what gives me physical pleasure has to go on in my brain. I’m totally being classist, but this isn’t like people in redneck bars asking each other, ‘You wanna fuck my wife?’ It’s much more complex. It’s pleasure on a different level.”
Dr Paul Pines

Given the focus on intelligence, it’s ironic that the article itself comes across as so dumb. For one thing the conflation of intelligence with emotional masochism seems incredibly simplistic. Yes, they’re both something to do with the brain. But so is pretty much anything we experience, including physical pain. Any kind of D/s is about power dynamics and relationships, which are an intellectual construct. I’m also not a fan of the presumably corollary, that if emotional masochism is for smart people then physical masochism must be better suited for the hairy knuckle crowd. As someone who enjoys a carefully delivered beating, me no happy bout that type of finkin.

I guess one argument they could be making is that you need to be smart to deal with the jealousy and emotional risks of cuckolding. That would presuppose that smart people are more emotionally mature. That supposition doesn’t correspond with anything I’ve observed in reality. I work in the software industry with a lot of scarily smart people. I have friends working in places like Google, Microsoft and Facebook on some of their most complex products. PhD’s are as common as expense cellphones, badly fitting T-shirts and intellectual arrogance. When I think about these people, emotional maturity is not a description that leaps to mind. Nor does it hop, saunter or nervously peer round the door into mind. These are the kind of people who can become emotionally unhinged arguing over indent styles. God knows what they’d make of someone treating their significant other as a shared resource and playing with her ACL’s (sorry, geek humor) *.

For an accompanying image I thought I’d go with something I found on the Felm Cyber tumblr. I like it for the distorted perspective, exaggerated bodies and weird decor. They give it a jangly off-kilter feel, which is a good match for the emotions involved. I’m afraid I couldn’t track down an artist attribution.

* Note that I’m not saying that smart people can’t be emotional mature. Or that computer geeks can’t be into cuckolding. Just that the correlation between PhD smart and the ability to deal with an emotionally fraught situation is very much unproven.

Fashion, Sardax style

I don’t normally post Sardax artwork. Not because I don’t love it, he’s without doubt my favorite femdom artist, but because he earns a living via his paysite. It’s one thing to share a single photograph from a commercial site. They typically make money from videos and any one scene will have dozens of photographs clicked off. It’s quite another to freely share a single piece of artwork that the artist spent hours slaving over.

The Sardax images below are a little different. They were done in collaboration with Afira, a British based contemporary women’s clothing brand. As the designer herself explains in an interview…

I have known and admired Sardax’s work for a long time. Then one evening I found myself sitting next to him at a dinner party! We hit it off immediately, became friends and creative collaboration soon followed.
….
I hope my customers will see images of women experimenting with, enjoying and flaunting their sexual power. I can only imagine Sardax’s fans will see the same, but perhaps from the very particular perspective of men who adore that power in women.

My first thought was: Why don’t I get invited to those kind of dinner parties? My typical dinner party experience is someone explaining how new types of switch routers will change the design of data center network fabrics. I need less geeks and more femdom illustrators to split a bottle of Cabernet with. My second thought was around how brilliant it was to see this kind of crossover. It’s not a freakshow collaboration. The kind where a mainstream brand gets some free publicity by doing some ‘shocking’ S&M images and briefly flirting with controversy. Instead it seems to be the case where artists in two different but related fields saw a chance to work together. The end result is some great art and a message of normality* and acceptance for femdom. That can only be a good thing.

You can see the rest of the images at the Afira site under the Dark Daze collection.

* OK, so the images don’t depict anything close to normal. But neither does a lot of advertising. I mean that it’s normal in the same sense that a brand might choose a sports star or a music start to cast a positive light on their products. It’s halo style advertising, which is very unusual in a BDSM context.

Blogpocalypse

I’m beginning to wonder if my blogroll is going to need some major revisions come July 20th this year. That’s the release date for the new Batman movie – The Dark Knight Rises. This film features a powerful double whammy, in the form of catwoman as played by Anne Hathaway. I know from past posts that there a lot of catwoman fans out there (HMP and lovetosubmit, I’m looking at you) and Anne Hathaway fans aren’t exactly thin on the ground (calling Servitor). I therefore fear that this deadly combination will just be too much for some of my submissive fellow travelers, a peak of perfection that will leave them drained, apathetic and with no reason to keep blogging. We’ll just be left with a lot of puzzled female bloggers wondering what the hell happened and where everyone went.

In an effort to lessen the shock and acclimatize everyone ahead of time, here’s an intriguing new poster from the movie (full resolution version here). I kind of like it. And by ‘kind of like’ I mean ‘Dear God, would you look at that.’ I only hope the movie itself is a little tauter than the previous one. I enjoyed it, but I think it would have benefited from more aggressive editing and a shorter running time.

Popping my cherry

A recent post by Underling posed what I thought was an interesting question for submissives. He was writing about spanking, and in particular that first experience…

…do you remember your first time? What prompted that initial collision of palm and derriere? Was it spontaneous, planned, paid for? Was it all you’d dreamed of and more, or were you left wondering what all the fuss was about?

He follows the question with a nice story describing his own first time, featuring a slightly surreal but ultimately satisfying session with a nice professional dominant lady.

My first adult spanking was also in a professional session, but it was oddly late in my kinky career. During my first few months of BDSM ‘for real’ (as opposed to in my fevered imagination), I did a pretty good impression of a kid in a candy store (apologies for the clashing mental image). I wanted to try everything. Ropes, whips, canes, needles, nipple clamps, gags, cuffs, pegs. You name it, I wanted it attached, inserted or applied at speed. Yet oddly I never got around to a traditional over the knee spanking. Somehow it seemed a little old fashioned.

I ended up having my first spanking almost accidentally. We’d been trying to do a suspension scene, and it just hadn’t worked out. I was having some joint issues, we couldn’t get the balance right, the rope harness was too tight, Libra was on the cusp of Capricorn, the BDSM gods were grumpy, etc. Normally a suspension will take a full session, so when it didn’t pan out we suddenly had extra playtime, and Lydia decided that a spanking was the right way to fill it. So like Underling my first time had a touch of the surreal, but in my case it was because it caught me so unawares. My thought process ran along the lines of “This is weird. Why am I getting over her knee? How is this going to work? It’s almost like…ohhh…we’re spanking! That’s kind of fun!”

Since then I’ve done it a number of times and always enjoyed it. I don’t get the rush from it that I think true spanking aficionados experience, but I like the close physical contact and the intimacy of it. Whipping and caning can be quite isolating. The pain makes me turn inwards and focus on my body. But a spanking is definitely a shared experience.

Image is by Underling from his site Underling’s Humblings.

Schoolgirl fantasies

The comic below is from Nic Buxom’s site. It’s one of those sites that I find and then wonder how I’ve never discovered it before. She’s a professional dominatrix, but also worked as a pro-sub, and has written a large number of amusing and perceptive comics from the inside of the professional BDSM world. I spent a happy couple of hours working forward in time from this, her first comic, to the more recent but equally entertaining examples. Definitely worth checking out her posts, and perhaps also stop by her store or commission pages.

Spanking the monarch

Here’s a nice piece of femdom fan art by SpankingFemFatale. For those of you who don’t recognize the characters (shame on you!) it’s the evil mastermind known as The Monarch and his partner Dr Girlfriend (later known as Dr. Mrs The Monarch). They’re from the show the Venture Brothers, a post-modern cartoon series which packs a huge number of pop cultures references and allusions into every episode. I always found the smart and competent Dr. Girlfriend very sexy despite, or maybe because of, her deep gravelly voice. For those who have never seen the show, here’s a short clip of her in action.

Bringing the fantasy to life

I came this shot on the deviant art site while writing yesterdays post on the artwork entry for Shiniez. It’s by the artist John Walker who goes under the handle HazyCosmicJoe on the deviant site (free account login required). The caption he’d supplied on the picture was…

Marina and Jo best of friends. I’d like to dedicate this one to this guy shiniez who can illustrate what I wanted to achieve in pictures only better.

I think he’s being a little modest, as this is a beautiful picture.

Browsing his gallery was a little weird, as it looked like he’d reposted some ‘famous’ bondage shots from the 90’s. And by famous I mean circulated endlessly on usenet and early web sites. It took me a few minutes to cotton on to the fact he was actually the original photographer. He went under the handle PJW on the sites BDMAX and FDMAX. I always enjoyed his images (for example this one) and it was a nice but odd moment to come across his work again over a decade later via the Shiniez connection.

Added Shiniez to Femdom Artwork

I first mentioned Shiniez in a post a little over a month ago. Since that time I’ve thoroughly enjoyed browsing all his artwork and catching up on the BDSM themed love story (or stories) that he is in the process of spinning. He’s not a femdom artist in the style of a Sardax or a Stanton, instead he’s more of a BDSM artist who features a dominant female character. However, his blend of artistic talent, BDSM understanding and playful storytelling makes him well worth perusing. Plus the F/f couple he primarily features (Allison and Lisa) get involved in some ridiculously hot bondage shenanigans. That alone makes him a great new entry for my femdom artwork pages.

The image below is taken from the start of Allison and Lisa’s relationship. It’s nothing explicit, but it does capture a nice moment of tension and anticipation.

Holy single tail batman!

I know there are a lot of catwoman fans out there, so here’s a couple of enjoyable images of her. They’re stylistically different but both feature a very happy looking catwoman . The first is by BatgirlOfGotham (free deviant login required), and has a nice big single tail with a stoic (as ever) batman. Hopefully she’ll soon whip a smile onto his face. The second image is by Stephanie Buscema and is based on the Julie Newmar catwoman character. It’s not exactly a kinky shot, but it a very cheerful one, which gives it a great deal of appeal to me. If you like it, she has a number of similar images featuring female superheros on her site. And while I’m on the batman topic, just to finish, here’s a link to great batgirl shot by the artist Houston Sharp.

For Science!

The io9 site recently published an article discussing four fascinating papers on the subject of measuring pain. The studies in question were all done back in the 1940’s with the goal of coming up with a reliable and reproducible method for quantifying levels of pain. The scanned versions of papers can be read online: Paper 1 (1940), Paper 2 (1947), Paper 3 (1947) and Paper 4 (1948). They’re fairly readable and easy to understand, assuming you having a grounding in basic maths and science.

Pain in itself is a curious topic, as it’s such a uniquely subjective experience. We normally build understanding by shared references. Yet, if I tell someone my back hurts, how do we establish a common reference point? With external stimulus, like color or sound, we can measure the spectrum or the loudness irrespective of a person. Something like taste or smell is a little more complex, but there’s at least an external object (the food itself) to breakdown and analyze. It’s also possible in those cases to construct a common language from more primitive elements (sweet, bitter, salt, etc.) Just look at wine tasting notes for an example of that approach in action. But with pain? How do you measure something that’s completely internal, and can manifest at any point in the body, to a huge range of stimulus, or sometimes to no apparent stimulus at all?

The scientists behind these papers tackled the problem by proposing a scale for measuring pain, with a unit called the dol. They created it using controlled doses of heat on volunteers, and measuring when they could detect a difference between the heat intensity levels. They discovered that on average people could distinguish 21 levels of different intensity between nothing and maximum pain. This maximum wasn’t some safety limit set by the scientists. It turns out that there’s an upper limit on pain, a maximum beyond which increased intensity isn’t detected as greater pain. Working with this 0 to 21 detectable level changes, they assigned 1 dol =equals 2 levels, and created a 0 to 10.5 pain scale.

There’s all sorts of interesting bits of data in the papers. For example, mood and fatigue made no difference to the perception of pain, but gripping an iron bar tightly or hearing a very loud sound did. That fits the common intuition that being distracted from pain lessens it. They also showed that pain did not sum over an area. In other words, the intensity of the pain was purely related to the intensity of the heat energy applied, not the size of the area it was applied to. Initially that seems a little count-intuitive, but it does fit to the idea that being distracted can help reduce pain. One thing that can distract you is a different pain. That wouldn’t be true if pain was additive.

The most interesting finding is one that I think the io9 article misunderstands, or at least misrepresents. It says…

The study’s authors concluded that 8 dols of pain equaled four successive two dol experiences. This arithmetic aspect of the dol contrasted existing beliefs of the subjective nature of pain.

That seems to suggest some sort of progression in time, where you can reach very high pain levels by repeatedly applying a low pain stimulus. That’s not what the study found. What they discovered was that the scale is linear. So the increase in intensity between 1 and 2 dols, is perceived as the same increase in intensity when moving from 8 to 9 dols. I think most people would think of a pain scale like the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes. That’s a log scale, and so going from a magnitude 4 to 5 earthquake is basically nothing, where going from a magnitude 7 to 8 is huge. Similarly, you might expect that a 1 to 2 change in pain isn’t much, where going from 8 to 9 is very scary, but it’s actually perceived as the same change in intensity. This also means that the standard 0 to 10 scale doctors often use, where 0 is no pain and 10 is worst pain you can imagine, actually makes sense. There is an upper bound to pain and the scale between zero and that maximum value is a simple linear one.

The io9 article has a sense of ‘Wow, look what these crazy scientists used to be able to get away with.’ To me it didn’t seem that bad. As a masochist I may have a distorted view on this, but it’s only temporary pain. I suspect if they’d hired an attractive female doctor with an authoritative attitude to perform the tests, as in this artwork by Waldo, then they’d have been inundated with volunteers. Although that might have thrown their experimental results off. They claimed mood didn’t make a difference, but I doubt they also considered or induced sexual arousal.