Leather – Page 5 – Femdom Resource

The decade that taste forgot

When it comes to fashion disasters, the 1970’s have a lot to answer for. It’s easy to laugh at strange fashions from other decades, but I don’t think any managed to date quite so quickly and look so ugly as those from the 70’s. Judging by this first photograph, BDSM and fetish fashion was no exception. That is some seriously ugly leather gear.

On the plus side, when they lost the weird clothes, the 70’s era porn did at least boast some very natural looking naked people. The second shot is of the great Sharon Mitchell. She’s a true porn star, meaning someone who stands out and illuminates, rather than simply a paid performer. I’ve no idea whose face she’s sitting on, but I think it’s a pretty good bet that he’s a hairy gentlemen, probably sporting a beard.

To be honest, I actually don’t know for sure the date of these photographs, but that wallpaper and those hairstyles look awfully 70’s to me. The first came courtesy of the At Her Feet tumblr. The second I found via the Femdom Empire tumblr.

Hoods

A short post tonight. I just finished an intense session with Lydia and I’m still feeling pretty buzzed and floaty. All I want to do right now is pour a glass of wine and relax on the couch.

We were playing with hoods, an item I’ve had problems with in the past. I’m typically not claustrophobic, but there’s something about sensory deprivation, bondage and pressure around my face that stresses me. We’ve worked on it over time, and tonight we had a great session with a lot of layered bondage and some really heavy hoods (like this one). As usual Lydia threw in some interesting twists, using a leather body bag to wrap me in, and having me on a wheeled trolley bed that she could twirl around. That kind of spinning motion coupled with heavy sensory deprivation (she even used earplugs under the hood) and the layers of immobilizing leather bondage created a very intense head space.

In celebration of me making it through the session with no panicky moments, here’s a nice hood shot I came across on Mina’s Kinks tumblr.

Function

Yesterday’s post had me talking about gloves, and how I prefer a more functional style. Purely by chance today I came across the shot below, which features simple short black leather gloves. Happily, they’re also combined with breath play and nipple torture, two of my favorite things. I suspect a fetishist would prefer the gloves from the previous post, but as a masochist, this shot is far more pleasing.

I found this on the Thou Shall Love Via Mistress tumblr.

The association game

I often think my posts here are a little like a visual game of word association. The original game is where you say a series of words, letting your subconscious guide the connections, and try to not always end up saying ‘penis’. Although it is possible that this final rule is only a personal (and necessary) addition to the game.

In this blog’s case the image in one post often leads me to another, although the connection might not be at all obvious to my readers. For this image the connection is the expression of the woman on the left, Mistress Sade. The woman on the right, Goddess Brianna, has the look of someone dragged reluctantly into a group photograph at a family gathering (if you’ll excuse the horribly clashing imagery). It’s the “OK. I’m smiling. Hurry up an take the photo. I have stuff to do” look. On the other hand,Mistress Sade looks very relaxed and comfortable to be in the shot. She reminds of the maid from yesterday’s post. There’s a nice blend of amusement and sadistic satisfaction in her expression.

I originally found a version of this image (minus the watermark) on the Rue Montorgueil tumblr. Google’s reverse image search took me to this gallery, which has the original image and the information that it came from the Club Dom site.

Making a play for the femdom vote

I try and avoid party politics on this blog. I’m very happy to share my general comments on stupid laws and their intersection with the sexual realm, but I don’t see a big upside to dragging specific policies and personalities into it. I’ve observed that people who agree with you just think you’re stating the obvious – “Well of course, what idiot would think otherwise?” – and people who disagree are unpleasantly surprised – “You seemed so smart, how can you be so dumb about this?” Over a cocktail or two it can be interesting to debate with that second group, but in the asynchronous and low bandwidth communication channel of an unrelated blog it’s a losing proposition.

All that said, I did have to laugh today over a Washington Post article I saw on the Romney family. It’s a very dull article, but this bit on Ann Romney and her love of horses did fire my imagination up.

Her son Josh told another New York Times reporter in 2007 that he had given his dad a rubber horse mask so that if he wore it, “maybe Mom will pay as much attention to you as she does to the horses.”

Now I’m stuck with an entertaining but not particularly appealing mental picture of Mitt in pony gear while Ann leads him through his dressage steps. Feel free to leave jokes about what his safeword might be via the comments.

Of course they can afford top end equipment, so I hope Josh got him something like the incredible horse mask below. It’s from Bob Basset, whose work seems to exist at the intersection between art, fetish and fashion. I’m personally a big fan of his steampunk style gas masks, although more from a geeky sci-fi perspective than anything kinky. You can see more shots of the horse mask in this gallery. There’s also an equally beautiful feminine version currently on sale on ebay. Ideal for female submissives or, if you want to push all the kinky stops out, for cross dressing pony boys.

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.

This is taken from a set of images created by the femdom town site. I found it originally on the Whip Mistress blog.

The meaning of life

This image made me smile. I don’t find it particularly erotic. It’s a little too surreal and impersonal for that. But it did put me in mind of a Monty Python sketch in the movie the Meaning of Life. It features a man who gets to choose the method of his execution and well, you can see what he picks in this clip. It’s not the funniest sketch in the movie (that would be this musical number), but if you were going to re-shoot it for the male submissive this looks like it’d be a great cast to use.

I found this on the Bits and Pieces tumblr site.

Happy Birthday to Me

Just a couple of days ago this blog turned one year old. It feels like I’ve been writing it for much longer, but the post dates don’t lie. 12 pages, 378 posts and 544 approved comments equals one year of blogging.

Looking back at my statistics for the first month I had around 100 visitors. Twelve months later and I’m serving in excess of 60,000 visitors a month with over half a million page views. I originally purchased a small site web hosting package, I’ve since upgraded through medium to large, and I’m heading towards the super size. All those figures are kind of amazing to me, given this is just a random collection of re-posted images and links accompanied by whatever thoughts are currently floating to the front of my brain.

I have to thank a lot of other established bloggers that linked to me and sent traffic in my direction. This includes (but isn’t limited to) Saratoga, Ms Marie, Suzanne and Her Majesty’s Plaything, who were all important linkers in the very early days. However, I have a special place in my heart for Shohei Yamashiro, who provided me with my very first incoming link from his site Slug on Leather. It therefore seems only fitting to illustrate this anniversary post with one of his fine pieces of artwork.

Haute Cuisine

The images below come to you courtesy of Mistress Troy Orleans, a pro-domme based out of NYC. I’ve never had the pleasure of playing with her, but by all accounts she’s one of the most skillful and talented dommes around. Not to mention very well equipped. The first image shows her bed/cage combo, along with a selection of her leather gear in action. The second image is something I’ve never seen before – a bondage suspension system using springs. I’d imagine heavy bondage combined with that kind of loose floating sensation would create an intense headspace. Particularly when it has been accessorized with the drip feed shown here.

I know in some kinky circles there’s a strong reaction to this kind of expensive custom equipment and leather gear. You don’t need all that stuff to create an intense scene or be a true domme is the cry. And of course they’re right. You don’t need it. In fact on a daily basis it’d no doubt become quickly tiresome. Nobody wants to get home from work each day and immediately jump straight into a suspended leather bodybag. But I look on these kind of images as a child might stare at a poster for Disneyland. I wouldn’t want to live there, but my God, it looks like it’d be fun to try out occasionally. Great femdom doesn’t have to feature expensive equipment and clothes, in the same way great cooking doesn’t have to use expensive ingredients. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun to splurge on an out of this world experience when the mood takes you.

The distillation of sensation

The images in today’s post come courtesy of this serious bondage article, and feature Ms Yin Q, now of Glint studio.

I have to admit that before I gained any experience in the reality of BDSM I used to think heavy bondage aficionados were a little strange. I kind of got it on an intellectual and fantasy level. A lot of kinky activities are about the transfer of control, emphasizing power by removing freedoms we normally take for granted. But all the customized leather and rubber equipment just looked so strange, so alien. The weird forms of people wrapped in it seemed to play into the stereotypes of odd fetishists doing unexplainable things in their own little worlds.

Having now had a chance to explore some aspects of these worlds for myself, I think I have a much better appreciation for what’s going on. Truth be told I still think it all looks a little peculiar, but I now understand that it’s not necessarily about fetishizing a material and simply wanting to be wrapped in it. There may be an element of that for some people, but it’s the bondage subspace and the sensory changes that seem to be the main goals. As Ms Yin says in the article…

I am obsessed with sending sensations to different orifices and body bits through Erostek stmulators, temperature control, catheters, and feeding tubes, sound bites to earphones, and remote control vibrators.
Not to mention the simple, but powerful act of letting the body be—stepping away and allowing the subject to melt into their head/body space.

I was personally amazed at the impact that heavy bondage and sensory deprivation had on the way I experienced stimulation. Pain and pleasure very quickly became magnified. A whip stroke that might normally only produce a murmur suddenly produces a howl. Miss Troy Orleans talked about much the same effect in her recent post on layering. It seems that the brain constantly tries to normalize and balance its sensory input. In a noisy environment it helps to tune out the superfluous signal. And in the signal poor environment of heavy bondage and isolation it grabs onto whatever it can and magnifies it.