Femdom Resource – Page 211 – The beauty of dominant women

Emergency procedures

I just had a really wonderful scene with Lydia. Many needles and much moaning on my part was involved. However, I don’t want to talk about that tonight. Instead I want to talk about a bad scene. A scene with an abusive asshole of a dominant. Specifically, this scene described by Little Dorky Cyclops. I’m not going to try and summarize it, so feel free to go read it if you want the rest of this post to make sense.

I have to admit that a few years ago, when I was not particularly young and still stupid, I would have been sympathetic but bemused by that scene description. I would have been the idiot saying “Why not just safeword? That’s what it’s for.” Now that I’m definitely older and possibly wiser, I get it. I don’t play in public and I’ve been lucky enough to encounter very few bad dominants. I’ve only really had one session go seriously sour on me (described here and here), but I still completely understand LDC’s reaction in the scene. It’s tough to switch gears and take control back from a dominant. You’re fighting the natural dynamic of the scene and a desire to do your bit to make it work. It’s always tempting to think it’ll get better, that that you just need to hang on till the endorphins kick in. It’s easy to safeword on cramping or going numb, but this scene was a far more complex dynamic, with social pressure added into the mix as well.

Obviously the dominant here – Jefferson is his fetlife handle (aged 50, in NYC) – behaved abusively and there are serious questions the people who attended the event should be asking themselves. Hopefully making this public reduces his chances of going to other events and repeating the process, although given he’s done it before I’m not optimistic. From a submissive (and possibly selfish) perspective it makes me wonder what I can do to avoid getting caught in a similar situation. Even assuming the BDSM community can do a better job of policing itself (big assumption), bad dominants will continue to be a fact of life. So what are good self-defense techniques for a submissive to practice?

In a weird way this problem puts me in mind of a common problem in computer systems, namely handling backup and recovery when disaster strikes. I know that sounds like a bizarre connection, but stick with me on this. The problem computer users often have isn’t defining the recovery process or setting up the emergency systems, it’s making sure they work when needed. They’re hard to test properly and are rarely used. Unfortunately when you need them, you need them to work flawlessly, the first time of asking and in the most difficult circumstances. That’s a really bad combination. Typically people find out their recovery system isn’t working the first time they try and use it.

I wonder if submissives face a similar problem? They have a theoretical mechanism for safety, but the only time they use it is when they’re already in a bad situation. That’s exactly when you want to fall back to a frequently used and easily deployed mechanism, not step further into the unknown.

I’ll continue this post tomorrow with a few more thoughts. Feel free to leave comments until then. I’ll finish with what seems like an appropriate image. Thanks to Little Dorky Cyclops we’ve found out about some of that lurking evil in one particular man.

This image is by the artist Ybar. I found it on the Velvet Underground tumblr.

Cry uncle

I was planning to write a serious and substantive post today. But the lateness of the hour and earliness of my meetings tomorrow has caught up with me. So instead, he’s a picture of a couple wrestling. That’s normally a euphemism for having sex, but in this case I think they really are grappling. My money’s on the lady. She might be fighting above her weight division, but she seems to have a good grip on the situation. If I were him I’d be thinking of crying uncle before her smile gets any wider and her grip any tighter.

For all you fight fans out there, I believe this is originally from the Dirty Wrestling Pit site. I found it on the Girls Rule, Subs Drool tumblr.

A pig led relationship (plr)

I found these images via this Eros Blog post, which led me to this article and finally to the gallery page of the artist Emily Rangel. These kind of parodies always work best when they have a natural fit with the characters conventional personalities, and I think the artist chose wisely here. It’s easy to picture Miss Piggy as a top, and they’d make for a well matched D/s couple. Or should that be P/f couple?

The article claims these sculptures will ‘haunt your dreams’. That doesn’t worry me at all. I have weirder dreams than this all the time. My problem is that since I first saw these, several hours ago now, I’ve had that damn Mahna Mahna muppets song stuck in my head (original version here). All together now: Do doo be-do-do, Mahna Mahna, Do do-do do, Mahna Mahna, Do doo de-do-do de-do-do de-do-do de-do-do-doodle do do do-doo do!

Looning

I always find it strange the way unusual talents, interests and kinks are treated so differently. An odd talent, say the ability to play the bagpipes or cultivate bonsai, make someone quirky and interesting. People might consider you eccentric if you spend hours restoring antique typewriters or learning to bind books, but only in a friendly and harmless way. Yet admit to rare fetishes, perhaps sploshing with custard pies, or pretending to be a dog, and suddenly we’re into weird and strange territory. We’ve redrawn the lines of sexual acceptability over the years. Things like bondage or anal sex have become conventional if not common, yet we’ve not yet got away from that judgmental attitude for less common sexual interests.

Personally I think that’s a great pity. I love learning about new kinks, even if they do nothing for me sexually. For example, I find balloon fetishes fascinating. Apparently, according to this very informative site, they’re known as looners and come in two varieties, the self-explanatory poppers and non-poppers. There are even semi-poppers, who I guess would be the switches of the balloon fetish world. I think it’s great that something so fun and cheerful as a balloon can also be sexual exciting to people.

The image below could be catering to a number of kinky interests – S&M, CFNM, humiliation, etc. In my heart I’m really hoping she’s a popper and he’s a non-popper. Then they’d be simultaneously combining two different type of balloon fetish into a tortuous D/s and S&M scene. That’d be some advanced grade, Ph.D level kinkyness right there.

This image was originally from the Young Dommes UK site. Unfortunately, as this tweet makes clear, the site closed when the owner didn’t want to deal with UK regulation. Nice to see my home country heading backwards towards the 1950’s.

A cliché subverted

On the face of it this image follows the standard format for foot fetish porn. There are high heels, a naked slave and feet being shoved in his face. Yet, it’s so much more interesting than that overworked fetish shot. There’s a really sense of danger and vulnerability about it. I love his bared throat and the dimple she’s creating in it with that sharp spiked heel. He doesn’t look like he’s lost in his own fetish fantasy, he looks like he’s submitting himself to hers.

This is Thrash and Mistress Trish as photographed by Aeric Meredith-Goujon photography. She’s a pro-domme and sexuality educator based in NYC. I’ve featured this same pair in a previous post. Mistress Trish has some of the most interesting and creative images that I’ve seen from any pro-domme, and her site is well worth exploring.

Snowpocalypse

It snowed tonight in Seattle. Not much, just an inch or two. Just enough to freak the entire city out. Public transport stopped. Cars slid though red lights like they were mere suggestions. People treated the streets as if they were one big pedestrianized area. Just the usual way Seattle folk react to a regular and predictable winter event.

I like a wintery atmosphere, but can’t imagine making it part of a scene. My list of hard limits is relatively short, but having seen this image I might have to add ‘making naked snow angels’ onto the end of it. Doing it face down seems particularly evil. Let’s hope he can make an angel quicker than frostbite can set in.

Saint Clamps of the Nipple

This puts me in mind of religious imagery. Not the woman obviously. Religions have never been big on women in corsets wielding canes. Or women of any description really. But his posture has a touch of the martyred Saint about it. The supplicant pose, the straining muscles and the rictus of agony are all very familiar from religious paintings. Sadly, while the renaissance artists got up to all sorts of sexual shenanigans, I don’t recall nipple clamps featuring anywhere in their work.

It’s originally from a Men in Pain series. I found it on the I Own his Key tumblr.

Tumblr technicalities

Apologies in advance to my regular readers. I intend to use this post for selfish ends. Specifically to pick the brains of tumblr owners. Anyone looking purely for femdom related material should probably skip to the picture at the end.

For anyone with a tumblr still reading, here’s my issue: As I’ve mentioned in the past, I maintain a tumblr for animated femdom material. Today I noticed that the front page was throwing up spammy pop-up windows and trying to get readers to download something that looked like malware. I spent sometime hunting around the tumblr dashboard and the settings, but couldn’t find anything that looked like suitable for debugging the issue. Eventually I used Firebug to poke around the page and found that one of the reblogged posts had smuggled in some suspicious looking javascript. It was trying to look like a Google analytics script, but when I deleted the post all the issues went away. I don’t think this was happening when I did the original reblog, so I’m guessing it got enabled once the initial post had spread around.

This seems like a horrible tumblr security hole. I would have assumed that any reblogs would be filtered and scrubbed for scripts. Or at the very least there would be a warning that the reblog contained a script. I can’t see any options in tumblr to block this kind of behavior. I also can’t see any good tools on the dashboard to debug this kind of issue. Am I missing something? Has anyone else observed similar behavior? Is tumblr reblogging this badly broken or am I just stupid?

Great as the tumblr idea is, I think its dashboard programmers need a good talking to. The functionality is very limited. Perhaps a good beating by the lady below would help focus their minds?

I found this image on the Domination on My terms tumblr. I should also add that’s not the tumblr where I reblogged the problematic post from.

What a feeling

A couple of weeks ago I was ragging on guys wearing socks in femdom shots. Today it’s the women’s turn. Or rather a particular woman’s turn, as this is (hopefully) a singular example rather than a trend.

I like this image. I like her feet on his arms, that’s a powerful position. But what’s the deal with her legwear? The 80’s style leg warmers are odd enough (although I’ve been told by fashionable friends they’re coming back), but what’s with the chrome studded leather things? Has she got leather ankle warmers? They don’t look like standard bondage cuffs, so I can only assume it’s flashdance style interpreted as fetishwear. I can’t see it catching on.

Tracking down an attribution for this image was a little strange. It’s all over tumblr, and I originally found it on the Slave Of Elena tumblr. However, doing a Google reverse image search just returned dozens of blogs, but no original source. That is until I noticed that Google claimed to have edited their results based on the DMCA, and pointed me at this copyright complaint. So based on that, I’m guessing the image is from the X-Art site. I’m not sure if it’s ironic, amusing or depressing that it was the copyright take down notice that allowed me to work that out. Hopefully I will not end up as one of the sites added to that DMCA notice.

Oh, and for anyone wondering about the post title, I give you a little taste of the 80’s. It was the kind of movie that I hated as a child, but it seems like a quaint period piece now.

The serious end of the flogger

Mentioning Dan Savage in yesterday’s post prompted me to go and catch up with the latest entries in his advice column – ‘Savage Love’. It’s an entertaining column and his answers are frequently funny and insightful. Even the comments, normally garbage on any popular mainstream public forum, can be thoughtful.

For kink lovers his column from a couple of weeks back, entitled Working the Kinks Out, was particular relevant. Of the three kinky folk featured, the letter that caught me eye was the third one on the page, sent by a woman married to a submissive man. She didn’t fancy ‘squeezing into an uncomfortable corset and using a flogger on him’ so allowed him to see a pro-domme. Now she’s upset that he’s going too often and spending too much money. Dan’s answer is a fair one, but I think it’s impossible to judge the situation without a hell of a lot more context than the letter gives. What really piqued my interest was the comments that followed the column.

As you’d expect the comments covered a lot of viewpoints, but a common one was that she should stop complaining and start hitting him. The reasons given ranged from being GGG, being financially smart, learning to like it, not being selfish and it’s easy once you try it. I’m all for more women topping and playing the dominant role, but I can’t help feeling that these comments overlook the complexity of D/s play. I wonder if they’d say the same kind of thing if the husband were dominant and wanted to tie her up and beat her? Would they suggest a non-submissive should just suck it up, stop being selfish and take the punishment? I doubt it.

Submission is often treated as something fixed, an in-built need that must be satisfied. Conversely dominance is treated as an act or activity, an option that can be turned on or off. I understand that coming from a vanilla perspective (nobody wants pain, but anyone can choose to inflict it), but it doesn’t make sense from a kinky background. Dominating someone is a very complex dynamic, and scenes can create a lot of powerful emotions. Nobody should feel they have to tap into that kind of energy if they don’t want to. I don’t know where the wife in question chose to draw the kinky line in the sand, but I do think she can’t choose to be dominant anymore than he can choose to not be submissive.

Given the letter writer seemed unhappy about using a flogger, this seemed a particularly apt picture to use. This lady certainly doesn’t seem unhappy about her flogging options. This is from a 2012 Divine Bitches shoot with Phoenix Marie and Parker London.