Mainstream – Page 46 – Femdom Resource

Sun, sand, surf

Posting may be a bit erratic for the next few days. I’m taking a vacation in Hawaii. Some friends have rented a house on a beach, so I’m looking forward to relaxing with a tall drink and a book. That’s very much not my typical vacation, but that’s probably a good thing. A vacation is supposed to be a break from the usual after all.

I have absolutely no kinky fun planned at all. However, should a lady in a bathing suit require me to kneel down so she can avoid get her feet wet, then I dare say I could be persuaded.

This is Tatjana Patitz, and the photograph was taken by the fashion photographer Herb Ritts. I found it on StellaNova’s Realm.

A uniform done right

Or if not right, at least better than the slightly over the top latex number in yesterday’s post. This is a lot more understated. I like the way their outfits captures the essence of uniforms, without actually being specific uniforms. I think that’s the ideal roleplay attire. You want to capture the idea for the scene, without tying yourself tightly to a facsimile of reality.

This is by the photographer Gui Paganini for ffw magazine. You can see more images from the same shoot here. I originally found the image via the Derekisme tumblr.

Higher education

I like the idea of making science more interesting to people. I’d certainly be happy to volunteer to dangle over a lecture hall somewhere in academia. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this is all that practical. And I don’t mean the naked slave part, or the bondage, or the professor with a whip. I’m sure those would all be fine. It’s the timing that’d be an issue. I’ve done suspension scenes and they’re not the fastest things in the world to set-up. Getting everything cinched properly in place and the weight balanced right takes time. Doing it three different ways? All your students would be long gone. You’d be better off studying the mathematics of the whip.

The cartoon comes from the very excellent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Other fine examples from the same source include this, this and my personal favorite this.

Real Sex

The Vulture site is carrying an interesting article on the old HBO show Real Sex. I was amazed to discover it first aired back in 1990 and ran for almost 20 years. I didn’t encounter it until I moved to the States in 2001 and, based on the frank manner it addressed sex, had always assumed it was of a fairly recent vintage.

It was by no means a great show. Although the article claims they aimed to be sincere and to laugh ‘with’ and not ‘at’ the people involved, I always detected an undercurrent of cynicism. Beneath the veneer of education and illumination there were clearly elements of titillation (ok with me) and mockery (not so good). However, all that said, I think it still was a net positive in helping people talk more frankly about their sexual interests. For example, this post from D. Hubby directly references the effect an episode on spanking had on his life.

One particular part of the interview that caught me eye was this quote…

It was always a challenge for us to find good-looking people. It’s certainly true of nudists, but a lot of people doing weird sex stuff are not necessarily young and attractive.
Katie Smalheer, associate/coordinating/supervising producer, 1996–2005

I think that’s a very telling comment. It could be taken to mean that people doing ‘weird sex stuff’ are unusually unattractive.The reality is that this media filtered view of the world is incredibly biased. Visual attractiveness is a valued commodity, particularly when nakedness is involved. Almost all commercial visual media picks from a tiny pool of conventionally attractive people. People into ‘weird sex stuff’ are simply a normal cross-section of the populace, and that clashes with the narrow selection criteria we normally expect for naked people on film. Our perception of what is acceptable or normal is horribly skewed.

I don’t have a particularly great image to use for this post, so I’ll finish with the kind of scene that I’m sure Real Sex would have loved to feature. That Miss Eve from the Young Dommes site.

A Stoya interlude

This isn’t really a post about femdom. Apologies in advance for that. But I found a fun, sexy and interesting short video that I liked and wanted to share. Fortunately I have a blog that allows me to do exactly that.

The video in question is Stoya sitting at a table and reading aloud from a book by Supervert. What makes it fun is the lady under the table with a Hitachi vibrator. Needless to say this makes it rather tricky for Stoya to maintain focus. You can read her impressions of the event here.

I have to admit to having a bit of a crush on Stoya. She has a rare presence to go along with her striking looks. Not to mention that she writes an excellent and thought provoking blog. Sadly I’m not aware of her doing any femdom material. However, this post does give me an excuse to feature this cute image of her dressed as the character ‘Death’ from the Sandman series. A happy Stoya in black boots as a Neil Gaiman character. What’s not to like?

The image was created by the photographer Lauren Goldberg. You can see more from the same sequence here.

William Saletan on BDSM (again)

Regular readers may remember this previous post critiquing William Saletan’s BDSM articles at Slate. His latest offering is considerably better that his past efforts, but that’s not exactly a high bar to aim over. There’s actually some real data in this new article, although his thinking remains flabby and his reasoning haphazard.

He doesn’t seem to understand common activities like piercing or electrical play, or when tools like safewords might be needed, and therefore makes foolish sweeping statements. He correctly states that BDSM participants are not a single homogeneous group, but finishes with a set of conclusions that implies they are. I also think his concerns about exploitation based on the gender percentages in the top/bottom roles makes no sense in the framework he presents them. However, I’m going to ignore all that, and instead talk about a single issue he raises: Is BDSM an orientation?

This is a hot button topic for some kinky people, who get quite passionate about it. He implies it’s not because some fraction of people only dabble in kink. Personally I think the whole discussion is a red herring.

The people who argue that it is an orientation often seem to draw from, or adopt similar arguments to, some of the recent debates on gay rights. The religious right would argue that being gay was a choice and therefore gay people were choosing to give up their right to marry. Presumably they thought that people were being gay just to spite them. The obvious counter argument was that homosexuality was an intrinsic part of someone’s identity, and it was therefore unfair to penalize someone for something they had no control over.

I think getting dragged into that kind of discussion misses the point on two counts. Firstly, when you’re dealing with prejudice and bigotry, any apparently logical argument offered is really just a smokescreen. If you knock it down they’ll simply move on to another. The color of someone’s skin is clearly intrinsic to a person, but that didn’t stop society withholding civil rights from minority groups for many years. They simply picked a different reason to do so. Secondly, there are plenty of examples of society protecting the rights of groups that are the result of choice. For example, nobody pops out of the womb with a specific religious affiliation, despite what some religions may claim. Yet religious freedom is something society chooses to legally protect.

Rather than arguing that particular groups are special, we should be arguing for a culture that has a strong bias to protect people’s rights to live their lives as they see fit. And if you’re going to claim that their freedom to do so harms you in some way, then that had better be some clearly provable harm that we’re talking about. Not just that you think it’s icky to have a co-worker who might be into BDSM. Or that you think there’s some risky but undefinable moral hazard to having kinky people bring children up.

I wasn’t really sure what photograph was suitable for accompanying this post, so I thought I’d simply continue the medieval theme from yesterday. Mr Saletan seemed particularly concerned about knife play. I wonder what he’d make of bloody big sword play?

The image is by the photographer Jerrell Edwards (also on deviant art). I found it on Thy Queendom Come, Thy Will Be Done tumblr.

Superwoman (the real thing)

I’ve blogged about ridiculous female fantasy outfits in the past. After watching Excalibur last night – one of my favorite movies in the noble knight tradition (with its famous armor sex scene) – I felt like revisiting the topic.

This time I’m featuring some real life armor, as worn by Virginia Hankins. She’s has a fairly amazing resume, which includes being a professional stuntwoman, expert horse rider, archery coach, actress, mounted weapons trainer and the first female jouster for the Southern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire. With all those skills, I’d predict that she could give any would-be-Lancelot’s a good ass kicking with whatever weapon they wanted to pick.

If this particular look appeals, then I’d also point you at this post, which features some more striking ladies in sensible armor. Not a cut away thigh guard or busty chest plate in sight.

A smart person saying smart things

This is a companion post (of sorts) to my one from a week ago entitled ‘Smart People Saying Stupid Things‘. That one concerned smart but non-kinky people being stupid about kink. This one features a smart but non-kinky person being insightful and observant. Like that last post, the linked text is lengthy and non-erotic, so if you’re simply looking for visual stimulation I’d suggest skipping to the picture at the bottom.

The smart person in question is Camille Paglia and the article that caught my eye is called ‘Scholars in Bondage‘. It’s a critique of three recent academic books on kink and BDSM by Margot Weiss, Staci Newmahr and Danielle J. Lindemann. All three generated a fair amount of online discussion, particularly the one by Margot Weiss. I think it’d be fair to say that Paglia is less than impressed with them, and her criticisms really resonated for me.

Primarily she attacks their tendency to bury their subjects under ‘a sludge of opaque theorizing’. They start with a fascinating subject, but rather than use the evidence they’ve gathered to illuminate it, they obfuscate it. They write defensively, for the benefit of their academic peers and the theoretical frameworks they’ve been taught, rather than to push our understanding of the subject forward. This is a common tendency in these kind of studies and it always annoys the hell out of me.

Her other major criticism is that they lack historical background. They’re so caught up in the theories of modern gender studies that the cultural context is entirely omitted. From early religious iconography, through Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, up to Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe, there’s a rich and important cultural background to understand.

Finally, I particularly liked her closing thoughts on what S&M actually is.

My conclusion … was that sadomasochism is an archaic ritual form that descends from prehistoric nature cults and that erupts in sophisticated “late” phases of culture

Sadomasochism’s punitive hierarchical structure is ultimately a religious longing for order, marked by ceremonies of penance and absolution. Its rhythmic abuse of the body … is paradoxically a reinvigoration, a trancelike magical realignment with natural energies

I’m a non-religious person. I don’t ‘get’ religion and it makes no sense to me. But this remark did resonate. On the surface BDSM play seems sexual and hedonistic, a world away from the purity of religious penance and absolution. Yet, I wonder if the underlying psychology is actually quite similar. A great BDSM scene both focuses and energizes the self, but also liberates from a sense of self. The submissive/sinner is both the center of attention but also the least important person. They are reinvigorated through surrender and acquiescence.

This image is by the Italian photographer Alessio Delfino. It’s from a series entitled Tarots and is called La Papesse. I originally found it on the Femdom Style Counsel tumblr.

Amusingly, when doing a reverse image search to track down the source for the image, I came across this modified version of it. I’m all for people exploring their kinks and creating their own porn, but this is a real WTF. I’m not sure what’s the idea behind combining that image with the additional surreal text (apparently she’s a financial adviser who likes baked oatmeal) and profane text (she likes peeing, shitting and spitting on slaves), but I think it sprained my brain.

Werewolf boy

This image is taken from a Korean film called Werewolf Boy. I’ve never seen it but, from what I’ve read, it tells the story of a young woman finding, befriending and taming the boy of the title.

I’m not sure that it’s really a story of female dominance in the conventional sense, but I do like this image. There’s a beautiful sense of stillness and control in it. Their respective positions speak to the idea of knight and queen as well as beast and owner.

The art of marketing

Someone dropped me a link to this video advertising Wodka Vodka. It’s an amusing commercial, featuring a woman getting jobs done thanks to a quick internet ad and a succession of helpful horny slaves.

However, it particularly caught my eye because of a post I recently stumbled across from San Francisco’s Vinyl Queen. In it she lists the efforts she goes to in order to get a client to actually show up at her play space. The vodka commercial is entertainingly unrealistic, but it wasn’t until I read her post that I realized the extent of the gulf that exists in professional BDSM between advertising and closing the deal. For a lot of her new clients…

These men ultimately hate the fact they can’t rid themselves of this part of their psyche, so it comes out sideways in their dealings with the ONE person who can offer them a brief respite from their desire to submit/serve/be tortured—you get the picture. So instead of my calendar booking up like a medical office, it fills up in a manner unique to this profession. Enter: The Hand Holdee

Despite my website being very detailed and clear about my interests and limits, the Hand Holdee loses all semblance of reading comprehension and memory. It’s like he WANTS me repeat what he KNOWS is on the computer screen in front of him. He is so conflicted internally that he has to hear the words he wants come out of my mouth so he will feel more secure in the days/weeks/or months leading up to our time together.

So for a pro-domme advertising and marketing is only a starting point. Ironically enough, and to tie it all back to the starting point of the post, for vodka marketing is pretty much the first, last and only point that matters. The basic product is interchangeable, varying only slightly depending what filtering is done and what water is added. So, as this fascinating article describes, how you market it is key. The Wodka of the kinky commercial is actually trying a new approach in that respect.