The beauty of dominant women
I’ve never really got the writing on the body thing. I do know that it’s a hot scenario for a lot of people, but up to this point it hasn’t really pushed my buttons (with some exceptions). I should probably try it, as I often find that kinks can rapidly progress from “Well OK, I guess we can try that” into “Oh my God! Why have we not done this years ago?”
I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution for this. I found it on the Classy Femdom tumblr.
The past week has seen the tabloid news sites posting numerous articles on Alissa Afonina. She’s a young woman who was recently awarded $1.5M in damages after being badly injured in a car accident in 2008. The reason for all the tabloid interest was that the accident resulted in a brain injury that led to changes in her social and sexual behavior, and in recent years she has earned a living working as a dominatrix. Or, to put it in the most tabloid way possible, courtesy of the Daily Mail – “Star student, 23, wins $1.5m after car crash brain trauma turned her into an impulsive sex-mad dominatrix”.
I wasn’t planning to feature the story at all. All the articles seemed like sensationalist nonsense, designed to sell page views, titillate readers and ignore the serious elements of the story. However, Jezebel put together an interview that I think is worth linking to. I can’t say I like the headline for it, but it’s a well done interview that actually digs into the pertinent issues and treats Alissa as a person rather than a story to be packaged and sold. She comes across as an intelligent and impressive person who has dealt well with a very difficult situation.
She works under the name Sasha Mizaree. You can visit her professional site, her clip store, her twitter feed or her tumblr. If you’re in the Vancouver area you can arrange in person sessions via her main site.
I was very sad to read today about the death of author Terry Pratchett. He’d been suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s for some years, so it wasn’t particularly surprising, but that didn’t make it any less upsetting.
I’ve probably never mentioned it here, but his books are a regular part of my self-aftercare when playing and traveling. My vacations to various cities have a regular pattern. I meet and play with an interesting domme on an afternoon. I go for a beautiful meal in the evening. And, while enjoying a glass of wine and spacey on post scene endorphins, I read Terry Pratchett over diner. His gentle blend of humor, parody and witty references can make the end of a great day close to perfect.
His books have a great number of strong female characters (Esme Weatherwax, Gytha Ogg, Angua, Tiffany Aching, Susan Sto Helit, etc), but not a lot of kinky references. The most obvious one I could remember comes from The Light Fantastic. He’s just introduced a female warrior into the storyline…
“Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one’s shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, tightboots and naked blades.
Words like ‘full’, ‘round’ and even ‘pert’ creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down.
Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn’t about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialized buyer.
Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure, and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling’s Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a short sword.
All right, maybe the boots were leather. But not black.”
I’ll leave you an image of another of Sir Terry’s memorable female characters – Adora Belle Dearheart. She’s forceful, opinionated, sarcastic, dresses severely and has been known to put men in hospital with her spiked heels. Just the kind of woman I think my readers would appreciate.
This image is by the artist Rubendevela. Her character is a support and aid to Golems, which explains the large hand holding the ashtray behind her.
Theater fans in the Miami area might be interested in a play called ‘Trust’ showing at the Adrienne Arsht Center. The Miami Hurricane has coverage of it here and here.
The show follows Harry (Nicholas Richberg), a shy nerd turned internet billionaire after he sells his website for a fortune….
However, with nothing left to strive for, he feels dissatisfied with his life and goes seeking excitement at an S&M club. He meets a dominatrix whom he knows as Prudence (Niki Fridh) from high school. Prudence enjoys her work in BDSM, but must deal with an unhealthy relationship with Morton (Alex Alvarez.)
When Harry asks Prudence out for coffee, he begins a complex chain of events. From there, the show’s four characters grapple with their relationships and identities as they explore power, love and control.
I’ve not seen it, but the reviews for it seem pretty positive. Feel free to leave a comment if you’ve got some first hand knowledge of the show. The shot below certainly shows commitment from the actors.
After all these vintage art posts, let’s do something a bit more modern. I’m not sure where the image below is from originally, but I’d guess it’s a kink.com scene.
There’s a lot of valid criticism that can be directed towards today’s kinky pornography. However, no matter what its problems, I think it’s safe to say that it’s significantly better than what came before. Most vintage photographs look like they’re shot in someone’s front room with a model who has no idea what kink is. For example, I give you this or this. In contrast the shot below has an interesting setting, nice lighting, competent bondage and a sense that the lady concerned might actually know what to do with her new accessory. One can almost believe that the people arranging the shot might have a kinky bone or two in their body.
I’ll finish the sequence of posts on comic book artists and 50’s fetish with one of my favorite artists of that or any time – Eric Stanton. The image below is from a sequence called ‘Bruised and Battered‘. It’s not often you see a chamber pot and sock suspenders in fetish artwork. If the text is a little hard to read then let me reproduce his speech bubble – “Karin! Honestly! I don’t know how to boogie! I’m doing the very best that I can do!”
Stanton of course wasn’t a mainstream comic book artist, but in the late 50’s and early 60’s he shared a studio with Steve Ditko, the creator of Spiderman. It’ll never be known how much of a role Eric Stanton played in the creation of the famous wisecracking webslinger, but as this blogpost makes clear, he was definitely involved to some extent.
While I’m on the subject of 50’s erotic art (as I was), I recently stumbled across this fascinating article on Joe Shuster. If that name’s not familiar to you then you’re probably not a comic books fan. Along with Jerry Siegel he was the co-creator of Superman. The story of how DC comics paid them $130 for the character and made millions of dollars while leaving the creators destitute is a well known one. What I hadn’t realized was the Joe Shuster went on to do fetish illustrations for a series called Nights of Horror.
The article is a lengthy one but well worth reading if you’re interested in modern American pop culture. It touches on comics, censorship, pornography, murder and the moral culture panics that seem to regularly spasm across the US. There’s also a book which covers the topic in more depth. The illustration below is both Shuster’s work and the cover from this book.
I have an odd fondness for the old 1950’s fetish artists and illustrators. The quality of their work is often pretty variable, the sexual politics archaic and the subjects tame by today’s standards. Compared to modern artists like Sardax and Shiniez the work doesn’t do much for more erotically and yet, despite that, I enjoy looking at it. There’s a sense of fun and quirkiness that’s missing in the more explicit work of today. I suspect that’s down to the legal constraints that they had to operate under and the limited fetish material available at the time. There weren’t well defined niches and ready made markets for them. They had to make it up as they went along.
If you share my interest in this period then I’d direct you to this article by Jim Linderman. It describes how he stumbled across artists like Gene Bilbrew and the colorful cast of characters that hung out around 42nd Street in NYC. There’s also a gallery of artwork and a book that he’s put together on the topic.
My absolute favorite drawing of those in the gallery is probably this one. It’s got sci-fi, bondage, fetishism and vintage fashion all mixed into a very bizarre scene. However, it’s not really femdom, so to illustrate the post I’ve gone with a different drawing from the gallery. I’m not really sure what’s going on, but that’s part of the appeal of these one off book covers.
I was amused to spot in the comments to the Guardian article somebody complaining that the paper never featured modern artists like Sardax. I’m not going to hold my breath for that to happen but I do agree. Not sure if robbo100 is a reader of this blog but it made me smile to see another femdom artist aficionado pop-up in an unexpected place.
I believe the two images below are from a regular porn film, without a specific femdom slant. I found them via The New Superior Sex tumblr, and reverse image searching led me to this movie (warning youporn link that plays video with annoying music). I can’t say I’m a fan of the other tropes displayed on the youporn page (teen, thin, cutie, etc.) but I do like that it’s normalizing kinky play across regular porn. Blindfolds and bondage can be fun. It doesn’t have to be crazy cattleprods and whips on one side and random orifice stuffing on the other. Sex and sensuality works well with kink, and kink adds a nice edge to them in return.
Google has thankfully reversed course on their plan to eliminate all blogs featuring sexually explicit material. Bacchus does some detailed parsing of the retraction in posts here and here. I’m happy to see that some of my favorite blogs will be sticking around, but the bottom line remains the same. If you’re an adult blog on Google’s blogger, you’re on borrowed time. Move now or resign yourself to living with a digital Sword of Damocles.
It’s tempting to assign malicious intent in these situations, but I suspect it’s just another example of the the dynamics that exist in big tech companies when it comes to sexual material. To make good decisions you need data and debate. You need people to argue both sides of the discussion and play out scenarios based on the data. It’s no doubt easy for engineers to figure the cost of hosting lots of images, to determine the fraction of adult blogs and to point at sites using blogger as free hosting for advertising commercial porn sites. What’s needed on the other side is for people to dig into adult sites and point out their social value. Unfortunately it’s tough for the average tech person to stand up in a conference room and defend porn and explicit sexual material in front of their coworkers. Who wants to be the person telling their boss that the change might save the company millions of dollars, but it’s really important that Servitor’s femdom captions are shared with the world? I can just imagine the scene – “Yes, I know they’re pretty twisted. I’m sorry that castration one made you uncomfortable. And yes, I know Julie mentioned something about contacting HR after the meeting. And OK, so all the photographs are unlicensed. But dammit, it’s our ethical duty to publish them. It’s what our shareholders would want us to do.”
I’m being deliberately facetious, but I think it highlights the dynamics at play. That said, I think if you choose to work on an open blogging platform, you should be able to engage in these kind of arguments (although probably not in that exact form). If you’re not happy supporting forms of expression about subjects you’re not comfortable with, working with bloggers is not for you. Unfortunately the hiring processes for teams within large companies don’t filter all that well for that kind of criteria. 
I had no idea what image I should feature with this post, so here’s something generally femdom-y and hot. It was featured on hmp’s blog, one of those that was in the firing line for closure.
I should add that I’ve absolute zero insider knowledge into Google’s decision making process on blogger. I’m just going by my knowledge of the dynamics of big tech companies. For all I know, they might decide everything by games of pin the tail on the intern. Or by having Sergey Brin throwing lawn darts into an organization chart after doing a dozen shots of Jägermeister. Either of those would at least account for Google+.
