Sleek Maid

This photograph breaks a couple of my soft rules for picking images for posts. Firstly, it’s a headless shot. I typically shy away from close shots of random limbs and appendages. Secondly, it features cross-dressing and a French maid outfit. I very occasionally feature those two ideas together, but they normally lean on themes of humiliation and ridicule, which really doesn’t push my buttons.

However, I like this shot, because the submissive’s look is so sleek. There’s a cool looking leather corset, a short skirt and a well packaged package. It doesn’t suggest humiliation or a submissive embarrassed by the outfit. It puts in mind a stylish maid, who’ll deliver afternoon tea on time, get the cucumber sandwiches just right, and look damn good while doing it.

Eve’s Glory

I hadn’t intended to continue the WWI theme beyond yesterday’s post. It’s not exactly a great femdom or feelgood topic. However, then I remembered an exhibition of photographs I’d stumbled across called Eve’s Glory. It was by the photographer A. Tamboly and featured women wearing classic military uniforms from the 19th and early 20th century. While at first it seems a bit gimmicky, I actually think it’s a really interesting way to look back at that era. They reminded me of cosplay, or a videogame, which speaks to the impossibility of the images. It’s inconceivable to imagine a woman in a senior military role of the time, and these images really make that resonate.

I believe this uniform is that of a German Field Marshall from pre-WWI.

Hurrah Germania!

It’s not often that femdom artwork intersects with momentous world events, but I believe this cartoon is one such case. I couldn’t find any background information for it but, given I’m an enormous history nerd, I can take an educated guess. Apologies if this ends up being a lot of history and very little femdom, but I think the cartoon has a fascinating connection to a historical turning point that shaped the entire 20th century.

The man being beaten by Lady Germania is Joseph Chamberlain, a key figure in the British government before the First World War and father of the infamous (to be) Neville. In Joseph’s era, Britain was the dominant world and naval power, and Germany was rapidly becoming the dominant European land power. Some elements of the two governments thought they should form an Anglo-German alliance, each concentrating on their respective strengths on land and at sea. Together with America, they believed this would allow them to divide up and dominate the world. This was opposed by those on the British side who thought it would just give Germany a chance consolidate their power in Europe before turning on Britain. In the German camp there was opposition from those who thought they could never be a world power without building a challenge to the Royal Navy, which Britain would never stand for.

Ironically, despite this cartoon, Joseph Chamberlain was actually one of the key British figures pushing for friendship and alliance with Germany in the late 1890’s. This cartoon was probably published around 1901 when his third attempt at negotiating an alliance had fallen through over a dispute on the conduct of British soldiers in the Boer war. Chamberlain in turn attacked the conduct of German troops, their press castigated him and Britain ultimately ended up allied with France and Russia against Germany.

It’s intriguing to think what would have happened if he’d succeeded. WWI clearly would have not happened or would have unfolded very differently. And WWI was the defining event of the 20th century. From it flowed the Russian revolution and communism, America’s transition to a world power, the collapse of European states in fascism and and ultimately WWII. From that flowed the Cold War, the collapse of the colonial empires, the rebuilding of Japan and the growth of China.

Of course it’s impossible to know what the world would have been like if Chamberlain hadn’t end up under the lash of progress by Lady Germania. I think it’s safe to say it would have been a very different place. I wonder what the artist would have thought if he’d known what was to come?

Google Translate doesn’t a good job of the top text, so if anyone can help with a translation there I’d be interested to know what it says. The bottom appears to be “A striking answer by the German people to the attacks of Chamberlain.”

Cool Britannia

Despite the British theme, this is actually by an Italian artist, the great Milo Manara (featured previously here). At first and even second glance, I thought it was a watersports image, but she’s actually pouring from a bottle. From other images I’ve found – for example this one – it seems to have been used in a Strongbow Cider advertising campaign. Which I find quite extraordinary. If you’re selling a bright yellow liquid as a mass market beverage, why on earth would you want to make a urine connection? Or associate your product with toilet artwork like this?

I think it’s a great image, but even for those like me, who love femdom and watersports, it’s not the kind of thing I want in my head when I’m ordering a pint of something cool and refreshing at a bar. I guess if the bartender was hot and served it in this fashion, then maybe, but most British pubs don’t offer that kind of customer service. If they did, I might never have left the old country.

I found this on the Female Dominance in Mainstream Media tumblr.

Returning to life

Talking about tumblr sites (as I just was), I was happy to see Maria of Girls Rule, Subs Drool had started posting again. When tumblrs, or any kind of blog for that matter, goes dormant for a long period, 99% of the time they never come back. I always enjoyed Maria’s content choices and personal posts, so I was very happy to see this fall into that rare 1% of exceptions.

I found this on the Girls Rule, Subs Drool tumblr, but I’m afraid I couldn’t track down an original source.

The proliferation of animated gifs

It used to be easy to find appropriate images to illustrate my posts. I’d jump onto tumblr with a theme in mind and typically find something suitable within a few minutes. Now I try that and I’m faced with wall to wall animated gifs. They’ve gone from old fashioned and annoying web page gimmick to what feels like 90% of tumblr contents in a couple of years.

Ironically, like the Oatmeal, I’m actually a fan of animated gifs. They work particularly well for sex and kink shots. I just wish tumblr had an option to filter them out. Sadly, given the number of sites only producing movies these days, and the shift away from commercial image sets, I suspect it’s a trend that’s not about to reverse itself. With movies as source material, animated clips is the natural way to feature them.

In the meantime I’ll have to look further afield for good image sources. For example, the shot below is from twitter, specifically Mistress Amiko’s feed. So far twitter does not seem to have succumbed  to the animation craze in quite the same way as tumblr.

Scary Crusher

I’ve played with plenty of ball crushers in the past, and I’ve always been amazed by how my tolerances can change during the progression of a play session. As adrenaline surges and the body adapts, what can seem incredibly intense at the start can end up as background noise to whatever else is happening. However, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a ball crusher designed quite like this. Those are some fearsome spikes. I’m not sure this would ever fade into background noise, no matter how many endorphins were pumping.

This looks like the kind of thing you might find in an exhibit on the Spanish Inquisition, but I stumbled across it via Mistress Lucy Sweet Kill’s twitter feed.

The good and the bad

A few posts ago I was ripping the Metro site for silly advice on CBT for beginners. Fortunately, the good news is that there are better sources of advice out there. Kink Weekly has some good suggestions for anyone wanting to torture a cock or two. Lucy Khan (whose CBT skills I can personally attest to) has the right idea…

restrain him, blindfold him, and simply tickle, lick, bite, and poke at his junk!

The bad news is that Metro is still publishing idiotic writing on kink. The latest is this article, which lists the following fetishes beginning with ‘F’: Face slapping, fear play, female masking, femdom, feminisation, …wait, what was that previous one? Femdom? One of these things is not like the others. What an incredibly obnoxious and male-centric categorization. It reinforces the idea of male dominance as the default BDSM configuration, and turns dominant women into objects for men with a particular femdom fetish. It’s like listing career choices beginning with F as: Farmer, Farrier, Female, Fire Fighter, etc. I’m betting that maledom isn’t going to be listed under ‘M’ when they get around to it.

Anyway, rant over, and I’ll finish with someone following Mistress Lucy’s advice on mixing biting and CBT.

Don’t fight it

I’ve been a fan of Dan Savage ever since moving to Seattle and discovering his column in The Stranger. A recent interview with him in Refinery29 caught my eye for this quote…

Sex always wins. Sex is more powerful than you are. Sex is 500 million years old. It built us and it will build whatever comes after us. People like to pretend that they’re in charge of their desires or their sexuality, and they’re not. You’re in charge of how you act on them, but you can’t dam it up.

One has to be a little careful with this kind of statement. I’m glad he added that part about ‘how you act on them’, because there’s a danger that people can use the idea of sex being in charge as an excuse for all sorts of shitty behavior. However, that said, I do like the underlying message he’s trying to get across here. We may control our actions, but our desires and sexuality flow from deep and complex forces that nobody fully understands. Trying to stop them or ignore them is pointless. Our goal should be to channel them into responsible and healthy actions that enable us to fully explore them.

I’m afraid I don’t know the artist who created this. I believe it’s fan art of a couple of anime characters – Nagisa Hazuki and Gou Matsuoka.

Old School Tenderness

This image has a very old school vibe to it. There’s the all black outfits, the leather studded collar, the peaked cap and the grainy black and white photograph. Yet there’s a tenderness and playfulness to it that’s rare in vintage BDSM shots.

I’ve no idea where it’s from. Google tells me that its best guess for the image is ‘February’, which isn’t exactly helpful. If AI ever does take over the world, I think it’s unlikely to get its start as Google’s image search algorithms. They may be ‘A’ but they’re rarely ‘I’. My best guess for it would be a shot from an old pro-domme advertisement in something like DDI, but that’s based on nothing other than my instinct. If anyone does recognize it, I’d love to the who the domme is.