Mainstream – Page 37 – Femdom Resource

Stupidity in the UK (cont)

If you’re interested in reading more about the UK’s recent lurch into censorship stupidity, then Pandora Blake has put together an excellent list of links here. If you want to make your voice heard there are a couple of petitions here and here, or you could donate to Backlash which is lobbying against the legislation.

After writing my previous post on the topic, it struck me that the law is even more stupid than I initially realized (if that’s possible). If you’re concerned about the pornography industry and its general effects on society then this does nothing. Regular fucking and sucking porn is entirely unaffected. If you’re concerned about people watching kink and fetish porn then this does nothing. Anyone in the UK can still access whatever they want from producers based outside the UK. The only people this damages are the niche producers of kinky material in the UK. So the goverment has taken away people’s livelihoods, spent taxpayers money on policing it, and achieved absolutely nothing else.

While I’m never going to be in favor of censorship, I do think it’s reasonable to have legitimate concerns about the business of making porn. It’s a topic I’ve touched on before. Yet one area that has a huge number of independent women creating material is kink and particularly femdom. Lots of UK pro-dommes and fetish models have created their own media businesses and, as this vice article makes clear, they’re now going to have to censor their material and deal with even more bureaucracy.

I’ll leave you with another scene that would now be illegal for a UK producer to show. The mans airways are clearly blocked and this is therefore just a few seconds away from being snuff porn (at least in the eyes of those idiots in parliament).

Stupidity in the UK

I no longer live in England, but I am still fond of my country of birth. It can be a great place to live and work. Unfortunately it does do some bloody stupid things at times. This is sadly one of those times.

The goverment there has just changed the law to significantly limit the type of sexual content that can be sold online. Pandora Blake (of the Dreams of Spanking site) has put up an excellent post on the subject. As she rightly observes, not only is it a huge blow for freedom of expression, it is also unequal in its rules. As this blog post by stavvers points out, something like facefucking is allowed where facesitting isn’t. So forcefully fucking a woman’s mouth with a penis is fine, but God help you if the woman wants to gently rest her derrière on his face in return. With a similar line of ‘logic’, swallowing semen is allowed, but swallowing female ejaculate isn’t.

If you want to see the full list of banned practices then the ObscenityLawyer has put together an informative post. The mental image of a bunch of goverment bureaucrats sitting around a meeting room debating where to draw the line on enemas and buttplugs would be amusing if the end results weren’t so goddam infuriating.

Under the new rules anything that creates welts, blood or bruising is not allowed. So presumably this kind of heavy paddling would be illegal to show. Ironic that a country known for its love of kinky corporal punishment – the English Vice – would be one of the only ones in the Western world to outlaw showing it.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image. If anyone can help me with that then please leave a comment with the details.

Virtual Spanking

Fans of spanking and videogames might want to take a look at this article. It describes a game called Hurt Me Plenty which allows the player to spank (via a Leap Motion device) a half naked virtual dude.

This isn’t the first virtual spanking simulator. There was a strange arcade game that used the idea (in an ethically dubious way) and no doubt there are any number of wacky (whacky?) spanking flash games on the web. However, this is a little different, as the creator obviously tried to do more than simply bolt a physics simulator onto some gratuitous ass shots.

This a short game where you spank the heck out of a dude and learn about how BDSM communities attempt to formalize consent / caring. I was really interested in how we can make games about intimacy without a “kindness coins = sex cutscene” trope, and how we can use expressive gestures to roleplay / think about pain and intimacy.
Robert Yang on his game Hurt Me Plenty

I’ve not tried it, so can’t comment on the consent / caring aspect. From the video in the Kotaku piece, I’d say that the physical simulation needs a little work. The guy looks pretty hefty, but the character model bends way too fast and too far when he’s spanked. I’m not a big guy and I’ve never moved like that from a hand spanking. If any of my readers have given it a go, I’d love to hear via a comment what they thought.

The artwork is by the ever creative Red Rump. If the game creator needs a talented artistic collaborator with a deep understanding of spanking, he couldn’t go far wrong giving Red Rump a call!

Not always an act

Introducing a dominatrix guest character is a well known television trope. It’s an excuse to put an attractive actress into a slinky outfit, titillate with some kinky sex, and have the lead characters frown meaningfully while brooding on the dangers of sex and power. The latest instance comes from the series ‘Forever’. I’ve not watched it, but I will admit Hilarie Burton does make an appealing domme. Sadly the script sounds like the usual rubbish. The victim is killed by being electrocuted with a cattle prod to the point where he can’t breath. I’ve been zapped with a cattle prod, and while it gave me a hell of a kick, breathing was never an issue.

Oddly enough, just a day after reading about the Forever episode, I came across this story on the South African actress Yvonne van den Bergh who outed herself as the domme Mistress Baton. It was sadly forced on her by some creepy stalker, but the subsequent article seems relatively straightforward and non-judgmental. They even included a lengthy post from her facebook page explaining how she got into BDSM. The circumstances are unfortunate, but seeing this kind of story handled in a relatively positive fashion makes a refreshing change.

The image shows Yvonne van den Berg. I don’t believe she has a professional website but she does have a fetlife presence (under her domme nom de plume) if you’d like to read more of her thoughts.

Screening out the schmucks

Jezebel has a story about a new dating app that’s designed to detect idiotic or unsavory users and boot them out. If you ignore messages, type incoherently or send inappropriate content (which I assume means dick shots), then you get expelled. I like the idea, although I question how accurately they’ll be able to automatically classify users based on the signals they mention. It’s very hard with these kind of systems to not open yourself to be gamed by bad users or unintentionally create perverse incentives. And I don’t mean the kind of perverse incentive that involves fucking someone with a strap-on if they help you out.

I’ve long thought that there was a gap in the market for a femdom focused dating site. It would present asymmetric information, giving women far more control than men, and kinky interests would be a sub-category, rather than the primary category. Women would also have the power to vote men off it if they acted like assholes. It wouldn’t be a popularity contest or hotness score. Just a vote to indicate if a man treats potential partners like human beings or fetish delivery systems. Potentially there could also be an endorsement system which would indicate that although someone wasn’t a romantic match for the endorser, they are socially well adjusted and potentially interesting to talk to. Add in a billing model that excludes timewasters but is cheap enough for a wide variety of people, and I think you’d have a winner.

This vintage artwork fits nicely into both a dating theme and my recent kissing theme. I’m afraid I don’t know where it’s from originally. I found it on the Femdom Artists site.

It’s educational, honest

Fans of odd bits of internet culture may enjoy this article on a chap called Seedfeeder. If you don’t recognize the name, you might recognize his work. He’s the artist responsible for a lot of the sexually explicit illustrations on Wikipedia. For example, this article on Sexual Positions features several of his drawings.

As a child growing up pre-internet, I remember sniggering at ‘rude’ words in the dictionary and hunting through encyclopedias with school friends for sexual topics. I think that’s a phase that lasts from about age 7 through to around age 74. Even now, with literally millions upon millions of pornographic images freely available, these drawings still make me smile and prompt classic Wikipedia browsing syndrome. There’s just something about the juxtaposition of titillating topics, straight laced writing and educational drawings that catches the eye and gives my inner schoolboy an elbow in the ribs.

The image is by Seedfeeder and is used to illustrate the topic of Pegging on Wikipedia.

A cappuccino with a kick

Getting charged a ridiculous amount for a poorly made coffee in one of the major American coffee chains can sometimes feel like a metaphorical kick in the nuts. A Japanese coffee house has taken that a step further with the option of a literal kick in the ass. On top of that they’ll throw in some publication humiliation and verbal abuse, all for the bargain price of $15. That’s expensive for coffee, but an absolute steal compared to what a pro-domme will charge.

I have to admit that the idea of young women dressing as maids is kind of creepy to me, but that’s very much a function of my cultural background. There’s no shortage of different fetishized outfits used in America to sell products (including coffee and chicken wings). Japan even has an option for those men desiring to wear the skirt rather than admire it, as there’s a cross-dressing equivalent of the maid cafe. It can only be a matter of time before someone combines the two and caters to the niche who’d like to get kicked in the ass by a cross dressing maid.

Running the numbers

The study of sexual fantasies that I talked about in yesterday’s post contained some interesting percentages for D/s scenarios. It was simultaneously predictable and surprising.

The predictable bit was the breakdown across the genders. More men fantasize about dominating than being dominated (60% vs 53%). More women fantasize about being dominated than dominating someone else (65% vs 47%). One can argue about the reasons for that split, but it doesn’t surprise me. What did was the absolute value of the percentages. I wouldn’t have guessed that over 50% of men had fantasized about submitting and that almost 50% of women had fantasized about dominating. I’d have predicted much lower numbers.

Of course, as is always the case with these surveys, the devil is in the detail. There’s a big difference between a question framed as ‘Have you ever…” versus ‘Do you sometimes…’ The term dominated is also a very broad one. I suspect if I surveyed my male readers and asked them what being dominated meant, their minds would turn to leather, whips, chains, thigh high boots and Amazonian goddesses wielding enormous strap-ons. You know – all the usual everyday stuff. I don’t know what was in the minds of the 47% of women in this study who fantasized about dominating, but it probably didn’t match up too closely with that. Some of them might simply have meant cunnilingus that lasts as long as they want and great sex with them on top.

Image is from the Classy Femdom tumblr. I don’t have an original source.

What’s in a number?

There’s a new sex study popping up on a variety of news sites. It contains an analysis of sexual fantasies divided by gender, detailing what percentages fantasize about what activities. It’s always hard to know just how reliable or well researched these kind of surveys are, but given this one was by the University of Montreal and appeared in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s vaguely meaningful.

The Daily Dot article on it gets the underling message of it right. There’s really no such thing as ‘normal’ and no matter what you like, there’s doubtless a bunch of other people out there that share your fantasy. The Business Insider article is a little more judgmental and focuses more on the normal/unusual/rare categorizing. Those seem like unfortunate and inaccurate labels to me.

Let’s take for example the fantasy of being urinated on. I know that’s one that has appeal to at least some of my readers. It’s classed as unusual in the survey, with 10% of men and 3.5% of women claiming it. With around 300M people in the US, a naive extrapolation and some basic maths tells me that around 20M people in the US have fantasized about being peed on. That doesn’t sound all that rare or unusual to me.

Let’s put that number in context. That 20M is more than the population of New York, LA and Chicago combined (15M). It’s more than the average of 14M people who watched the 2014 World Series – the cliffhanging finale to America’s national pastime. It’s more than the highest rated sporting event last week (Monday night football at 18.8M) and the highest rate scripted show on cable (the Walking Dead at 14.5M). The biggest selling track of last year was Robin Thicke’s blurred Lines at 6.5M. So more people would rather get pissed on than buy a track from Robin Thicke. Remind me what’s unusual here again?

Some sexual activities are a little less common that others. Fucking automobiles for example. But if a fantasy is shared by the same number of people that attend Disneyland every year, I’m going to go ahead and say it can’t be called uncommon.

After using the example of watersports I really have to follow-up with a suitable image. This isn’t actually the act itself, but it’s pretty clearly a build up to a liquid lunch.

I believe this is another image from the Rinryu site (warning strong content including some scat).

Bayonetta

Having touched on gaming in my previous post, that does give me an excuse to segue onto a game related topic. Specifically the game Bayonetta, which features a tall, aggressive leather clad female protagonist. It clearly draws on BDSM culture (as alluded to here by one of the designers), but I’d always dismissed it as an example of the typical adolescent dominatrix fantasy that crops up fairly often in video games. Maddy Myers, writing in Paste magazine, thinks otherwise. It’s an interesting article, and she clearly identifies with both the dominant role and the leading character.

We don’t just get invited to watch Bayonetta, we also inhabit her. When I play, Bayonetta is me, and the camera’s glances are just the “sub gaze”—the male submissive’s gaze. Bayonetta holds all the cards.
Maddy Myers in Paste

It’s rare to read such a thoughtful commentary on a video game. It’s even rarer to have a woman come out as a dominant in a non-professional BDSM setting. Pro-domme tell-all articles are a dime a dozen, but I can’t remember the last time I encountered a woman identifying that way in the context of her professional non-kinky life. You can read more from her at her site.

While I head off to Amazon to order a copy of the first version of the game, I’ll leave you with some Bayonetta cosplay by TraumaticCandy. The original character design is deliberately freakishly long-limbed, and this costume does an amazing job of capturing that.