F – Page 39 – Femdom Resource

Powerpoint pornography

After the yahoo/tumblr news I thought it might be interesting to share some of my thoughts on mainstreams internet companies and how they handle adult material. I have an insiders perspective on this, having helped develop several mainstream consumer internet products inside large software companies. I’ve also many friends in companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook that I’ve swapped war stories with.

From an outsiders perspective it’s often tempting to see these kind of companies as either incompetent, prudish, evil or mercenary. Sometimes all at the same time. In reality, while there are no doubt a few employees who meet that description, most of the developers are smart people trying to build the best product they can. When it comes to adult material there’s typically no broad censorious urge to remove it. These companies do huge amounts of data mining and certainly know just how popular it is. You can bet that Google continually tracks the number of queries with adult intent and has dozens of metrics tracking just which sites and images porn surfers prefer. No sane company leader wants to screw over a big percentage of their users if they can avoid it.

The problem comes from the general corporate culture around building software. It doesn’t mesh well with our social culture around adult material. Specific problems I’ve seen include…

A lack of champions.
Product features often get added because someone says – ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if it did X?’ They get people excited in the idea and the feature gets added. But it’s tough to stand up in a meeting and effectively announce your sexual preference by saying something like – ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had fetlife integration and I could track all my kinky friends and BDSM events?’
No dogfooding.
Dogfooding is an industry term meaning to use your own product internally and find bugs before your customers do. But who wants to file bugs based on their sexual habits? It’d take a brave man to file a bug entitled – “Our new shopping application didn’t return the butt plug I was looking for in its results. All returned plugs were too small in girth. Please fix.”
No bragging rights.
It’s fun to show off what you’ve built. Both formal and informal presentations on new features are a good way to get noticed and promoted. But if your new feature is pornography related, then those screenshots get a little trickier to compile. Nobody wants to spend an hour writing a presentation and then 4 hours carefully drawing black bars over all the genitalia in it.
No pressure to prevent regression.
People who don’t like adult content are often very vocal about it. The same is not true about people who do. So when someone complains to Google that his daughter has been traumatized while doing a school project on hairless cats, there might be pressure to fix the results returned for “bald pussy“. It’d be tough to be the person in the meeting speaking up on behalf of all the one handed porn surfers spanking it to bare pudenda.

Almost all modern software development is collaborative and iterative. Creating features and improving a product involves suggesting usage scenarios and brainstorming what would make a more compelling user experience. Yet sharing our sexual thoughts and preferences is very much frowned on socially. The Yahoo VP who loves browsing tumblr porn is probably not going to mention that fact. The Yahoo VP who hates the risk of being associated with tumblr porn is probably going to be very vocal about that fact. So the debate is unbalanced and lots of small decisions gradually add up to a deteriorating service to users wanting adult content.

Given the post topic, an office type shot seemed appropriate. This is of course the lovely Mistress Eleise de Lacy from Femme Fatale films.

A modern day Aegis

Today’s post brings you a scene that I did with Mistress Cynthia Stone a couple of months ago. Sadly I’m not the most efficient person when it comes to a timely documentation of my activities, and these photographs have been lurking on my computer for weeks. Hopefully the much delayed end result is both interesting and informative for anyone looking for session ideas beyond the standard bondage and beating format.

I should issue the standard warning that the activities depicted may be considered edge play. There is a small amount of blood shown in the images. If you’re OK with that then click through to a page I’ve entitled ‘Casting with Cynthia Stone;.

The image is of Mistress Cynthia Stone taken from her web site.

Contemplating the situation

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.

Marking her property

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.

The iron lady

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.

Ruthless people

I was amused to read this article in GQ on a company that offers a kidnapping service. For a thousand dollars or so they’ll kidnap you, hold you hostage and do a bit of sadistic roleplaying. You even get your choice of kidnappers – either standard male goons or a team of ‘Elite Girls’ in microskirts and stripper heels.

What made me smile was how the writer seemed unaware of the very strong BDSM components. It makes absolutely no mention of that angle, whilst describing things like scene negotiation, safewords, bondage, etc. Pro-dommes have been fulfilling these kind of fantasies for years. Lydia even has an isolation cell she can store her victims in prior to an interrogation. Pretty much any major city will have a pro-domme who’ll be able to offer a kidnap and torture session, so I’m not sure why the writer felt he had to fly to Detroit to experience it.

Of course if you want a really exciting scene, you need a heartless family member on the phone refusing to pay the ransom. Hearing your wife opt for a new kitchen over freeing you would add an interesting frisson to the experience. I always enjoyed Danny Devito playing the heartless husband in Ruthless People.

The image comes courtesy of the Uniform Beauties site and the creative captioning from Servitor over at Contemplating the Divine.

Long live the new flesh

The image below is of Debbie Harry, singer in one of the greatest New Wave bands, and star of one of my favorite movies – Videodrome. Directed by David Cronenberg, it’s a strange hallucinatory film, blending horror and science fiction with BDSM and media culture.

This shot is taken from it but, unfortunately for femdom fans, it’s not indicative of her character as she doesn’t play a domme role. Instead she’s a masochistic pleasure seeker, mixed up with a sleazy TV executive (James Woods) and a weird pirate S&M TV channel. It’s a movie very much ahead of its time as this video review makes clear. It’s also very much a love/hate kind of movie, and if you like clear plots and unambiguous characters I’d steer clear. On the other hand, fans of weirdness, stylish cult movies and strange thought provoking scenes will probably love it. Plus, it features a very sexy piercing play scene between the two stars, which must be unique in Hollywood movies.

I found this on the he stoops to worship (aka Devoted Sub) tumblr.

All the latest celebrity gossip

I don’t typically read tabloid showbiz stories or celebrity news. However, maybe it’s the influence of LA rubbing off on me, but this gossipy story about Olivia Wilde caught my eye today. She took her fiance Jason Sudeikis to a strip club and…

There, a witness told us, “Olivia booked the private champagne room with two dancers. She took Jason inside, and while he wasn’t allowed to touch the dancers, she could touch them.”

That sounds like a particularly entertaining form of tease and denial. Two dancers and Olivia Wilde, and he can’t touch? That’s deliciously evil.

Normally I’d accompany this post with a nice tease and denial femdom image. Unfortunately my hotel internet connection is following the standard law of hotel bandwidth – the nicer the hotel the crappier the internet connection. Surfing sites for a good image to use is therefore far too painful, and I’ll simply settle for a shot of the beautiful Ms Wilde herself.

The safeword is lawyer

I’m taking a few days vacation in LA. Posting may therefore suffer due to this. I have got some kinky fun lined up, so hopefully there will be some interesting session photographs to share at some point.

In the meantime I’ll leave you with this thought provoking story featuring a financial domme who got jailed for blackmail. Essentially the scene was pushed to a point that the submissive preferred to contact the police rather than pay the 6000 euros necessary to escape it. Given the limited details available it’s hard to know who exactly was at fault. Was this the equivalent of a client negotiating a light spanking and then alleging assault when he received a heavy beating? Or the equivalent of negotiating a heavy beating and then alleging assault when he was given exactly that?

I’m on record as not being a fan of financial domination, and my concerns about a ‘duty of care’ do seem to be born out with this case. If someone was willing to risk the shame and humiliation of exposing their kink to the world, they must have been pushed well beyond their limits, and that suggests the dommes really weren’t paying attention to their clients well-being. But as I said, it’s hard to know what really happened without seeing more details. Given the lack of standing BDSM has within the law, the fact two people were jailed doesn’t necessarily mean they were entirely at fault.

The image comes courtesy of Femdom Times and this gallery. The site referenced in the watermark no longer seems to be active.

Book porn

Strictly speaking this isn’t femdom. I just thought/hoped that there would be a pretty good overlap between my usual readers and fans of this image. That’s the extremely attractive Felicia Day (who featured in Buffy and Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog) standing in front of a whole bunch of books. As combinations go, that’s a pretty good one. Feel free to imagine she’s reading a guide to testicle trampling if you need a little added BDSM in your daily post. Alternatively, for a larger version of the image, check out the original post on the he stoops to worship tumblr.