Mainstream – Page 43 – Femdom Resource

An average day on the set

A new Scorsese movie is always a significant cultural event, but wouldn’t normally be relevant to this blog. However his latest, The Wolf of Wall Street, apparently features a scene with a dominatrix (played by Christina Jeffs) and Leonardo DiCaprio. More specifically, it feature a scene where said dominatrix sticks a candle into Leonardo’s asshole. I’ve not seen it yet, but I’m now feeling that popcorn and a movie could be in my near future.

Apparently the original book featured the candle being stuffed where the sun doesn’t shine, but it was toned down for the movie script into a simple hot wax splashing scene. The lead actress, Margot Robbie, thought this was a cop-out and said as much…

“I kind of provoked Leo into doing it, and I can’t believe he did,” Robbie continues. “I said if he was committed to the role, then he would do it properly.” DiCaprio worked up the courage to make the suggestion to Scorsese, who loved the idea. “And then the prop man had to light the candle,” says Schoonmaker, who notes that DiCaprio didn’t use a body double for any of his nude scenes.
From a Variety Magazine article.

I love the fact that the actors wanted to do this and Scorsese went for it. But I really love that comment about the prop man. He must have had an interesting conversation with his wife that evening when she asked him how his day had gone – “Oh, you know, the usual. Shifted some furniture, located a missing costume, lit a candle stuck up Leonardo DiCaprio’s ass. Same old, same old.”

Annoyingly the internet has failed me and I can’t find an image from this particular scene. So instead I’ll have to finish with Margot Robbie and Leonardo DiCaprio in an alternative shot that has some fun fetishistic and femdom overtones.

Flirting with Mary Jane

According to this documentary footage smoking marijuana turns innocent young women into sex crazed dominatrices. I was not aware of this. Given that the state of Washington has recently legalized pot I guess I should prepare to be grabbed and ravished on any street corner. Loose fitting clothes would seem to be in order.

I actually don’t smoke myself. My collection of vices is already large enough without adding this one. I do have female friends who smoke, and thus far they’ve resisted the urge to pull on a catsuit and whip me. It’s probably too much effort when you’re high. Although I guess giggling a lot and telling confused rambling anecdotes can be a kind of torture for those who aren’t partaking in the evil weed.

The movie clip and image are from the 2005 musical version of Reefer Madness (based on the classic 1936 exploitation flick). The innocent/depraved Mary Lane is played by Kristen Bell.

Share the wealth

I’m a fan of Maitresse Madeline. As an independent and a kink.com performer I think she’s produced some interesting material, and I’ve featured some of it here in the past (for example – here, here and here). Apparently I’m not alone in appreciating her work, as somebody just paid $42,000 in an auction for a 1 hour web cam session with her. Assuming it’s not a stunt by the kink.com PR people, I’d guess that’s the most anyone has ever paid for a webcam session.

I’m not somebody who gets upset at rich people spending money. Moving cash from the wealthy to the less wealthy seems a fine thing to do. However, no matter how attractive and talented Maitresse Madeline might be, this didn’t strike me as an entirely optimal use of this gentleman’s kinky dollar. That got me to wondering what kind of alternative experience he could have got for the money.

Let’s stick to the West coast of the US. This guy was from Australia, so a first class round trip ticket will set him back around $6,000. Obviously he’ll need somewhere nice to stop, say a suite at the Beverly Wilshire (setting for the film Pretty Woman) at $1,500 a night. He’ll also need wheels to get around, and a Ferrari 458 runs to around $2,000 a day to hire. If we assume a 5 day trip, and throw in $500 per day for fine dining, that’s $26,000 so far. Now we get to the kinky stuff. I don’t think Maitresse Madeline does private sessions anymore but there are any number of gorgeous and amazingly talented dommes on the West Coast. For example, the famous Isabella Sinclair has recently started offering sessions again. Let’s shoot for an entire weekend of crazy kinky fun. At $300 per hour, that’s $14,400 for 48 hours and grand total of $40,400. That leaves him $1555 to splurge at the Stockroom retail store, with $45 left over to tour the kink.com Armory location.

Or, as a not at all crazy alternative to all this decadence, he could have a 1 hour web cam session. Let’s hope his network connection doesn’t freeze.

The image shows Maitresse Madeline doing a zippering in a shoot for Divine Bitches. I love the look on his face and the puckering of his skin as the zipper pulls away. Having been in that position many time I can definitely empathize.

Letting her hair down (and twisting it around)

This image is a nice take on the Rapunzel fairy tale, with an obvious influence from Tangled, the recent Disney version. It’s by the artist iesnoth.

I have to admit that I’ve got a minor kink for long hair, although it’s a relatively recent interest. A few years ago it wouldn’t have been a blip on my kinky radar, but playing with Lydia changed that. She has beautiful long red hair, and tends to incorporate it in subtle ways into a session. She’ll let the edges just brush my skin, let it fold against me, or drift it gently across my face. When I’m in bondage and in pain, that sensual touch, the subtle scent of it, really creates a strong emotional response. It’s a great example of a developed kink, almost a Pavlovian response.

Book Club: Dominatrix on Trial

Welcome to a new series of occasional posts featuring femdom or kink related literature. The plan is to review and recommend books I think might be interesting to my readers. The reality will probably consist of me blathering about whatever caught my eye recently in the kindle store.

First up is Terri-Jean Bedford’s Dominatrix on Trial : Bedford v’s Canada. She’s the retired pro-domme who was recently in the news for taking on the Canadian prostitution laws. This is her autobiography and it splices the drama of her legal entanglements into her life story and work as a pro-domme. She had a troubled upbringing, and an early life that featured drugs, prostitution and low paid jobs. She eventually found stability and a profitably career working as a pro-domme in a dungeon space she designed and created. That is until the police raided it in a very public fashion and splashed her name across the front pages. Rather than take the easy plea bargain she fought back, and the book describes how and who helped do so.

I’ll get the negative stuff out of the way first. Bedford is a solid writer, and communicates the who/what/why information clearly. However, she doesn’t bring it vividly to life in the way a professional writer might have done. I believe she wrote the book over a number of years as the cases progressed, and it’s a shame it couldn’t have been as a collaboration with someone with more literary experience. She also writes a fair amount about her dungeon and the interests of the people who visited, which might be shocking to vanilla readers, but will probably be old news to regularly visitors to this blog. Finally, in several spots she makes sweeping statements about BDSM and why people, particularly submissive men, are kinky. She may be accurately describing her experiences, but I don’t think they can be extended universally, given how complex and varied the world of kink is.

All that said, I did enjoy the book. Some righteous anger at the broken legal system and those who enforce it can be cathartic. Her life has been a turbulent one, and it was inspiring to hear how she kept fighting and about the people who rallied around to help, contributing time and money to her cause. A lot of the lawyers worked pro bono, but the court expenses still racked up quickly, and she was in no position to pay them. The lawyer Alan Young comes across as particularly heroic, leading her original defense to the charges, and then leading the constitution challenge that was eventually successful. The book itself stops just before the recent Supreme Court announcement, but watching that final chapter play out on the news made for a particularly satisfying conclusion all of its own.

You can pick the book up at a variety of online locations – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Google, etc. Given she’s now retired with health issues I’m sure she’d be very grateful for every copy sold.

Fuel for the creative storyteller

Here’s a picture that’s worth much more than a thousand words. I can imagine many interesting storylines that could be spun from it. Who are they? What’s their relationship? Where are they? Is this post-sex, pre-sex or a no sex situation? Why on earth did she not tell him to take those socks off?

Personally I like to think it’s her bedroom and it’s a bosses wife/employee situation. He’s not measuring up in any department, and she’s going to fix that no matter what the time and cost (to him). I’m sure fans of CFNM and of older women with younger men can conjure up many more fantasies from this particular image.

This is originally from a photoset for V Magazine shot by Donald McPherson. Sadly all the other images in the photoset have a very different vibe to this. I found it on the Her Butler tumblr.

Tis the season

This is the time of year when Christmas themed images start appearing on blogs. It’s also normally the time of year when I start cursing my lack of suitable material. I’m a fairly ad-hoc blogger, tracking down images as and when I need them for a post. The problem is that Christmas themed femdom is rare, and hunting for it on an as needed doesn’t really work. Fortunately, having encountered this problem twice before, I’ve got a bit more organized in advance this year. I at least have 2 or 3 suitable images saved, so brace yourself for a (very) short series of festive posts.

This first one features Ida Lupino, a pioneering female director and star of such classic movies as They Drive by Night and High Sierra. According to this blog post the image was shot at a Warner Brothers holiday party in 1942.

News from north of the border

A professional dominatrix made a little bit of history in Canada yesterday. Terri-Jean Bedford (actually a retired pro-domme), along with Amy Lebovitch and Valerie Scott, won their case in front of the Canadian Supreme Court to strike down the countries anti-prostitution laws. This Tits and Sass post has a round-up of various links on the news. You can see some of the positive reaction from pro-dommes and other sex workers in twitter comments like this, this and this.

Some of you might be wondering why a pro-domme is involved in anti-prostitution laws. After all, don’t pro-dommes abstain from sex with clients? The reality is that when it comes to sexual matters the law is frequently an ass. In this case Terri-Jean Bedford was legally working in her own space as a pro-domme in 1994 when the Toronto police raided and arrested her. The confiscated all her equipment, splashed her name across the papers and ultimately (in 1998) convicted her of keeping a bawdy house. Since then, with the help of a dozen anonymous backers, she’s been fighting the legal system. And, as it turns out, winning.

The confluence of sex, commerce, morality and law is always going to be a complex one. I’ve therefore adopted a simple rule I always start with in these matters – listen to the voices of the people involved. It’s fine to debate with academics* and politicians, but not all opinions are equal. And in this case the opinions of sex workers are both far more important and (as far as I can tell) unequivocally in favor of this ruling. So a big congratulations to Ms Bedford, someone who can certainly rock a leather jacket and riding crop look.

I’m actually in the process of reading her book Dominatrix on Trial. I’ll put a review of it up at some point soon.

* The exception to debating academics would be people like Gail Dines and Melissa Farley. Their twisting of facts and obvious bias disqualifies them instantly from any sensible debate.

Gangs of New York

One look at their footwear tells you these are not people who actually ride motorcycles. Yet I still like this shot. The old school British motorbikes are very stylish, as are the leather outfits. As an image it’s almost a double cliche. It was shot for Vogue by Peter Lindbergh in 1991, and obviously apes the biker iconography of the 50’s. Yet looking at it now, it is also a great example of the kind of supermodel photo shoots that were so common in the 80’s and 90’s.

The models featured are Naomi Campbell, Karen Mulder and Helena Christensen. The photographer was Peter Lindbergh. You can see more images from the shoot here.

Never interview naked

I thought this was an interesting article on how we intellectually react to an image of someone naked. The simplistic view is that we objectify them, treating them as less than human. The article claims that it’s more complicated than that, and that while we do consider them less intelligent, we also think they’re more sensitive.

In one experiment … the photo showed either just the head or also the shirtless torso. When presented shirtless, targets were seen as having less competence. This is just what you might expect from research on objectification: we’re easily induced to see others as mere objects, pieces of meat without thoughts of their own. But it wasn’t that simple. Shirtless targets weren’t seen as devoid of all thought. They were actually seen as being more capable of emotions and sensations than their less exposed selves. They didn’t have less mental life but a different mental life.

They even used Timothy Greenfield-Sanders Porn-Star Portraits book in one experiment and found that varying the sexuality of the pose simply moved people along the lower-competence/higher-sensitivity curve. True objectification never actually occurred.

Given that all the personal images posted on this blog feature a naked me, I can only assume my readers think I’m a delicate and emotional creature, who is thicker than a whale omelette. This also has interesting implications for the CFNM fetish. Often that’s treated as a power dynamic or a humiliation scene. I now wonder if there’s also a degree of subconscious role reversal in it for some men. Cultural cliches categorize women as emotional and men as intellectual. Based on the above finding, CFNM images would reverse that broken stereotype.

I thought this image (found on homer’s blog) was an appropriate one to use for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s obviously a CFNM shot. But it’s also an animal roleplay, and that seems to align with the intellectual/sensitive split. We don’t think of animals as competent. Nobody expects their dog to balance the household accounts or fix that leaky tap in the guest bathroom. But we do assign a lot of emotional attributes to pets. Dogs are seen as particularly dumb but sensitive, which is apparently much like our views on naked humans.