New Blog Links

I’ve added three new blogs to my blogroll.

Cricketed’s Blog is written from the perspective of a man exploring what submission and enforced chastity brings to his life and his marriage. As well as his thoughts, it also contains a really interesting collection of photographs. He has an excellent eye for offbeat and subtle femdom imagery, avoiding the typical cliches of whips, heels and leather.

Woman In Control is by Lady Grey, a lifestyle dominant in a wife led relationship with her husband Karl. She’s written extensively about the evolution of their relationship, and some of her recent posts (onward from Dec 2010) about his re-training under her very strict regime are particularly fascinating.

Mistress Lisa’s Femdom Diary is written by a lifestyle dominant woman. It’s got a nice blend of her thoughts on femdom, pointers to articles, fun images and the occasional video clip.

Romance by Ruslan LobanovI found this image on Cricketed’s Blog. Originally it’s by Ruslan Lobanov (as the watermark shows). You can find more of his work on the photodom site (if you click on one of the blanked off nude images it’ll give you an age confirmation option and then let you see all his work). He also has an account on the deviantart site.

Thinking with the little head

It’s an old joke that a man’s penis has a mind all of its own. I think this image plays nicely into that idea. He’s a humble supplicant in front of his mistress. On his knees, head bowed, legs spread, arms carefully held behind his back. And yet there it is, the upturned and erect penis, staring up at her, bobbing away, happy in its own little world.

She looks fairly relaxed and calm about the situation however. I can just imagine her pondering – “Hmmm, I wonder what we can do about that little fellow. Something painful seems to be in order.”

Supplicant on his kneesI stumbled across this on bdsm.erochic.fr site.

Classic Femdom

From the vintage femdom in the last post, we jump forward 70 or so years to some classic femdom, with the late great Bettie Page. I was never personally a great fan of her bondage shots, as they always tend to the ‘loose clothesline draped vaguely over limbs’ school of bondage. But occasionally I’ll come across an image like this one which reminds me why she become such an iconic fetish figure.

Bettie PageFound on the Suicide Blonde tumblr site.

Kink in the 19th Century

There’s an interesting article in salon on kink and sexuality in the Victorian era. I always knew that there was a fair amount of hypocrisy around sex in Victorian times, but didn’t realize it was quite as extreme as the article describes. The huge number of prostitutes in Victorian London is well documented, but I hadn’t realized it was actually legal. Or that there were even gay male brothels.

However, some alarm bells did go off for me when I read this section of the article…

…..these gentlemen who went to private schools like Eton were whipped for punishment as kids. If they did something wrong they would be publicly birched — a collection of birch branches tied together would be used. The boy’s pants would be taken down and he’d be bent over this special block and it would be public. Any schoolboys who wanted to could come and watch. For many of these boys, of course, it was traumatic, but for other boys it’s an erotic experience. It developed into this masochistic eroticism.

This is a common line of reasoning for the origin of kinky desires, and it always strikes me as facile and simplistic. I don’t remember having needles shoved into me on a regular basis as a child. Or being electocuted, or tied up, or screwed in the ass, or suffocated, or whipped, or pissed on. But I enjoy all those things as an adult.

It’s no doubt possible that some Victorian gentlemen were hooked on flagellation from their early experiences. But it seems much more likely to me that they were simply kinky people utilizing one of the common and well understood ways of the era to inflict pain. If you enjoy power exchange and D/s play, you’ll reach out for convenient tools to create the dynamic. In an era before places like the stockroom existed then a collection of birch branches is a natural pervertible. Nobody is going to be playing with an ErosTek unit when Edison and Tesla are still fighting over the correct way to build an electrical grid. And in a time before widespread use of antiseptics, and when Lister’s pioneering work was still considered a fad, sticking needles in someone or cutting them was never going to be a popular style of play.

The psychology of BDSM and kink is both fascinating and complex. I think it does it a disservice to reduce it to a form of very basic imprinting.

Victorian FemdomThe vintage femdom image is taken from this post on the ‘call me Miss’ tumblr site.

Enthusiastic Sounding

It’s hard to tell from this picture if she’s using the sound to try and prevent the semen coming out, or just vigorously fucking him with it. Either way, judging by her expression, she’s having a lot of fun. She makes me think of a young girl trying to stuff a bendy straw though a lid and into the top of a milkshake.

Enthusiastic SoundingFound in this post on lunar black tumblr site.

A Convenient Handle

Ms Brutal Gemini had an entertaining post over on the hang forums the other day. She was shopping with a potential new submissive in tow, and becoming increasingly annoyed with his tendency to wander off in front of her. So she dragged him across to a sales clerk, borrowed a pair of scissors, and….

I ordered him to pull his pocket lining out of his pocket for me, he didn’t understand my command so i said it again. I looked over my shoulder and the clerk now had one eye brow lifted up also wondering what i was doing, I just smiled at her too. He slowly pulled the lining from his pocket out and i grabbed a hold of it and cut as much of it off as i could, and said “THERE!”

I turned to give the clerk back here sissors, winked at her told her “Thank you very much” and without a second thought I reached into his cut open pocket , grabbed his dick and pulled him along behind me.

Ms Brutal Gemini posting in the hang.

Clearly the old expression: “If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow” needs a little revising. A dick is easier to hold and seems to work just as well.

A Convenient HandleI’m afraid I don’t know the original source for the image. I found it on the cricketed’s blog.

Hairbrush

I’m sure this is old news to most of my readers, but human sexuality is a strange and curious beast. What turns us on and why is a constant puzzle to me.

Take the image below. I was never spanked as a child, and certainly not with any kind of implement. Corporal punishment in school was long gone by the time I was getting into fights in the playground, and my parents didn’t believe in beating children. I’m also fairly certain I didn’t interact with any strict women in short skirts and high heels. Everyone was far too sensible and boring for that. So how come the image below gives such a strong twist of excitement deep inside of me? And in fact has done since I first saw it many years ago? There’s something very attractive about the nonchalant but confident way she’s sitting, just waiting, casually holding the hairbrush. It’s a pose that manages to be very appealing despite not being grounded in any ‘normal’ experience (excluding BDSM play).

Hairbrush and lap shot, from Ma'am magazineThis is an old shot from Ma’am magazine, a short lived publication from Leda back in the 90’s.

http://www.nu-westleda.com/new/home.html

Comments Enabled

Up until now I’ve had comments turned off by default, mostly because I didn’t want to spend the time moderating and cleaning spam. But since I’m always interested in reader feedback and suggestions, I figure it may be worth seeing just how good the wordpress tools are at keeping things spam free. So from this point on feel free to chime in on posts if the mood takes you….

Crediting Content Creators

I sometimes feel a little guilty about the parasitical nature of this site. I try to add what little value I can to the content I post via my random thoughts and opinions. But at the end of the day, the only reason people are going to keep coming back is for the photographs, artwork, articles and links I provide. I edit and I collate, but I don’t typically create.

Hence, I make every effort I can to credit the original creators of the work I post. If I feature a pro-domme I always try to link to her web site and session scheduling information. If it’s an artist or fetish site I try and direct people to where they can see and possibly purchase more content. I also make every effort to identify the content I’m posting, even it’s not obviously watermarked. TinEye is very useful for that, as is many years of looking at far too much femdom porn. In general I like to think that anything I post here is a net positive for the original owner, even if only by a small amount.

I therefore find it incredibly annoying when I spot sites re-posting a lot of the images I’ve published here, but dropping any mention of where it’s originally from or who it features. Obviously with so many blog and tumblr sites posting and re-posting the same images, it’s often hard to be sure of exactly who lifted what from where. But sometimes based on timing or the sequence of images posted, it’s a fairly obvious trail of evidence to follow.

If you’re going to re-post images from here, and I have managed to give some attribution, then please carry it along in the re-post. A link here would be nice, but given I’m in no position to be claiming ownership of anything, far from essential. The content creators on the other hand, really do deserve to be credited properly. And your readers will thank you for the extra background information.

Fun Furniture

I’m a big fan of original and fun BDSM furniture. There’s a lot of scope available for creating items that facilitate interesting physical and mental torments whilst also being cool pieces of design in themselves. The chance to plan and build a dedicated play space, with this kind of furniture in it, is one thing that might eventually get me out of a downtown condo and into a real house.

There’s a good couple of examples below. The first has been all over various tumblr sites, but I believe it originally came from Sir’s Little One. Obviously custom built for the space, I like the idea, but think it’d be better with more of the cage exposed. It looks just a little too cosy a place to be.

Cage BedIn contrast the next example definitely does not have a warm cosy feel to it. I guess you’d call it a floating board and it can be found in Mistress Annabel’s dungeon. She’s a London based pro-domme, with a fine selection of furniture. I love the heavy industrial look of the buckles and the metal frame. Very utilitarian and no doubt very easy to wipe clean of blood! There’s also a St. George’s chair on the right and a St. Andrew’s cross at the back.

Floating board from Mistress Annabel's dungeonAbove photograph was taken by Peter Felix Kurtz from www.fetishfoto.co.uk. I found it in the gallery page on Mistress Annabel’s site.