Better Know a Lamp: Part 4

Welcome to another entry in my intermittent series of posts on submissives as lamps. The series has only had 4 entries in almost 7 years, but that is 3 more than I was expecting. Past examples are here, here and here.

It’s not a fetish I personally get, but it does make me smile. It’s both kinky and surreal. Clearly not widely popular (given that I don’t see many lampshades featured as equipment in play spaces) but it does seem to persistently pop up in kinky imagery. For those that do like it, standby for  another entry in the series sometime in 2019-2021.

This is from the instagram of latex.Jacqueline The-ripper.

Pie

Apparently it was Pi day last week. I’m slightly baffled as to why a mathematical constant gets its own day, but there we are. Can we look forward to the Euler number festival and the feast of the Lapace limit? Meanwhile, in Indiana, they presumably celebrate it on an entirely different day.

It’s tough to find a suitable image to connect femdom with π. Stern yet attractive ‘teachers’ brandishing a pointer in front of a bunch of blackboard equations don’t count. However, it’s a lot easier to connect pie with femdom. That’s a particular specialty of the artist Bakerman.

Bubbles of Intimacy

This Business Insider article describes a photographic project capturing couples in intimate moments. The twist in the tale is that they all feature the photographer Marie Hyld,  and a stranger she’s met for the first time just minutes before (as recorded in the corner of the photographs). Most of the shots are fairly conventional sweet/casual/romantic moments, but there’s one fun fetishistic one I’ve featured below.

Mistress Matisse made an insightful comment on the series via a tweet…

So, this photographer is basically tapping into the dynamic that many sex workers create, only she’s doing it in a performative way, instead of it being for the person she’s with.

I have to admit that when I started playing with pro-dommes I was puzzled by the nature of the dynamic. It felt genuine but was also in a sense artificial. Intimacy between relative strangers. Nobody was pretending, but we were also suspending disbelief. Was it real? Or fake?

In the end I decided that these were the wrong questions to ask. It was what it was. A little bubble in time and space. It was genuine of itself, and incomparable to anything else. I didn’t have to try and sort it into my existing categorizations. I could carve out an entirely new space for it.

The series of photographs is called lifeconstructions and can be seen on the photographers web site.

On the hook

Normally when I find or, as in this case, I’m sent an interesting image, I hang onto it until there’s a suitable article or post topic to associate it with. I’ve got a long backlog of images that I like but I’ve yet to find the perfect post to drop them into.

In this case, I’m just going to put the image out there and let it stand alone. I love it. Their expressions are perfect. I just can’t imagine any kind of kinky rant, sexual politics, scene dynamics or mainstream kink story I’ll be able to fit it into. It’s just a thing all of its own.

This is by the artist Miles Aldridge and was shot for the German Stern Magazine. Thanks to Marga and Titia for pointing me at it.

Making an Entrance

This image, featuring the beautiful Mistress Alice, has a great evil doctor or sexy mad scientist vibe going on. Words like splayed, clamps, insertion and orifice all spring to mind. The submissive should ideally be brought in by a pair of helpful assistants using one of those Hannibal Lecter vertical wheeled trolleys. Unable to either escape or avoid seeing what’s about to happen to him.

I’ve often thought that entrances to scenes are an underdeveloped part of kinky play. There might be some leashing, or pulling by a body part or CFNM dynamic, but that’s about it for most scenes. The problem with doing something dramatic – like being delivered in a dog crate or bound on a hospital trolley – is you need a big space and multiple dommes. To really make it work you’d need a packing scene to happen with one domme – turning the submissive from  a person to an experimental object – and then a delivery to another domme in a different location for the pain and torment. Ideally with a period of waiting and watching in between to heighten the tension and emphasis the sense of objectification.

It’s hard to see how to make that kind of opening act work in most playspaces I’ve seen in the US. Maybe if I get chance to ever play somewhere like Studio Avalon, with its extensive facilities and large team of dommes, it’d be an idea to try.

Give him the finger

Writing about consent apps in yesterday’s post reminded me of a tweet that made me laugh. Unfortunately, age or possibly alcohol is muddying by brain tonight, so I can’t actually remember who wrote it or the exact words. I’ll have to go with just the gist of it here.

It was from an escort rather than a domme and was targeted at those vanilla  guys who think it’s OK to operate in the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish” paradigm.  She suggested sticking a finger in their asshole without prior warning and then seeing how long it took them to grasp the concept of continually negotiated consent and the option to stop and discuss boundaries at any time. Obviously I don’t encourage random anal exploration without discussion, but I do think it’s an amusing picture to paint to help some guys to understand consent a little better.  Pretty certain most of the ‘Oh no, I can’t stop now’ vanilla crowd would quickly turn into the ‘What the hell! Get away from me and lets discuss this’ crowd.

Of course in the kinky world a finger sometimes isn’t enough. With the appropriate prior discussion, some people can even be persuaded to lose a whole hand in there.

I believe this is by the French artist Kevin Herault aka Kiwine.

Dumb and Dumber

I’ve blogged about the stupidity of consent apps previously. The idea that you can swipe right to rubber stamp consent on a sexual encounter is a dangerous one. Firstly, it undermines the idea that consent is ongoing and always open to renegotiation or withdrawal. An agreement at minute one tells you nothing about what happened at minutes two through sixty. Secondly, an incapacitated or unwilling person could always be coerced to use the app, setting up a possible defense for an attacker.  On the flip-side, no jury is going to take the lack of a digitally signed consent as useful piece of evidence. After all, not using an app in the heat of the moment is standard behavior for 99.99% of people. So they clarify nothing, while working against potential victims and for potential attackers.

Of course there is no stupid technical solution that can’t somehow be made more stupid. Software people are inventive like that. In this case some Dutch tech-bro’s have managed to take the broken consent app concept and marry it with the latest tech craze – blockchain. For those that haven’t heard of this before, blockchain is the technical basis for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Personally, I’m a cynic on the current cryptocurrency craze, whilst still admiring the design of some of the underlying technology. However, in this particular case, it makes no sense. A decentralized design is logical when you want to avoid a single point of attack that governments and thieves can target to take control. Not so much when you’re tracking two people ticking a consent box. I can’t see the Russian hackers taking a break from social media and our elections to go after consent apps.

When it comes to negotiating consent, it’s always important to do it before the gag goes in. You can always renegotiate at anytime, but sometimes are definitely easier than others.

I’m afraid I’ve no source for this image.

Updated: Thanks to an eagle eyed reader I can attribute this to the artist xxxx52 who has a patreon site.

High Heels & Fetish

The vast majority of tumblr sites are simply content re-blogged from elsewhere. For sexually explicit tumblrs I suspect that 99.9% of them fall into that category. It’s therefore nice to find (or be pointed at) a site with original content, particularly one featuring photographs. In the femdom realm, that’s even rarer than sites featuring original drawings and illustrations.

The site in question is 5-inch-and-more aka High Heels & Fetish. Stylistically and thematically it has pretty narrow focus – high heels, boots, legs, stockings and kneeling men, all shot from the waist down. It’ll probably only appeal to a subset of readers, but I suspect those that do like it, will like it a lot. It certainly captures a very specific fetishistic view.

This image is from this tumble post. I’m afraid the site doesn’t give any background details on its creator. The imagery might not be entirely my personal kinks, but I have to applaud whoever it is for the time and effort taken to create and share such quality content.

Wedding Bells

Did you hear about the two dommes getting married? It’s sounds like a setup, but there’s no punchline. It’s just a happy positive story to put a smile on your face. As posted on twitter here, Mistress Evilyne (who I’ve posted about in the past) is getting hitched to Goddess Anastaxia. The arrangement was sealed with the presentation of the pearl ring that belonged to Anastaxia’s grandmother. Many congratulations to the happy couple!

There’s so much stupid bullshit in the world these days, one can forget how many other things have changed for the good. Here I am cheering for two dommes getting married after discovering the fact via my kink  centric twitter feed. Twenty years ago that sentence would have blown my tiny brain.

Goddess Anastaxia and Mistress Evilyne are both based in London. The actually offer double dommes sessions together. I’d imagine being topped by a married couple would be a fairly unusual experience.

The Cully Flaug’d

Stumbling across this picture on twitter sent me off hunting for some background details, which led me to this British Museum page. The curator’s lengthy comment on it (click to ‘More’ to expand) are fascinating and also very British. The caption reads….

What Drudgery’s here, what Bridewell-like Correction!
To bring an Old Man, to an Insurrection.
Firk on Fair Lady, Flaug the Fumblers Thighs,
Without such Conjuring th’ Devil will not rise

I think the description of a man having difficulty getting it up as a ‘fumbler’ is a poetic but cutting one. I’m also going to be temped to describe my future erections as the ‘Devil Rising’.

According to the curator, the setting indicates a brothel or ‘flogging school’ and the coins behind indicate a service being paid for. Which I think means that this image, created sometime between 1674 and 1702, is one of the earliest of a pro-domme at work in her playspace. I guess we can be grateful that the fashion for portraying the domme as haughtily staring down at the viewer hadn’t yet caught on in 17th century femdom porn.