Mr. and Mrs. Stokes

This 1897 portrait, by the famous American artist John Sargent, is of a Mr. and Mrs. Stokes. It’s unusual for the era, with Edith Stokes front and center in casual street clothes, while her husband Newton takes a more passive background position.

I love the dynamic, with the wife full of life and confidence in the center, while he adopts a neutral, almost servant like position. The same dynamic and energy captured in a modern photograph wouldn’t look out of place on my femdom social media feed.

According to this article it was originally supposed to be a more traditional painting, featuring her in an evening gown standing alone near a small table.  It was Sargent’s idea to switch to street clothes and pose her petting a Great Dane.

But when the dog became unavailable the day Sargent went to fetch it, it was Newton himself who, as he writes, “had a sudden inspiration, and offered to assume the role of the Great Dane in the picture”

Given the dynamic of the picture, and the fact the husband was inspired to take the role of a dog / supporting accessory in the picture, one can’t help but wonder if there was a hint of femdom in their relationship. This article on the pictures expresses the view…

Newton was ahead of his time, confident and secure enough to be relegated to the literal shadow of his wife.

Which may well be true, but it might also be true that he actively enjoyed that role.

Moderation Madness

Tumblr continues to stumble along, a shadow of it’s former self. I just got an email out of the blue telling me that some of my tumblr content was flagged as adult. This is for a dormant femdom tumblr site I haven’t touched in 5+ years. I mean they weren’t wrong, it was adult content, but that’s a hell of a moderation lag time.

Amazingly people are still curating and maintain adult blogs on there. They seem to get blown up fairly regularly, but I have to admire their persistence. Some examples viewed via tumbex are here, here, here, here and here. Hopefully my recent email isn’t a sign that a new purge is starting and they’re all about to vanish.

This beautiful image was sourced from one of my favorite surviving tumblrs – madam is all. Its curator has a good eye for content and their site has been my source for a number of posts here. This particular example is watermarked, but unfortunately I’ve no idea how to go about translating that text into a web search for a proper attribution.

Update: Thanks to a helpful comment – I think this is by this photographer.

Lady and the Tramp

Lady Harper Chase clearly has a talent for creating interesting kinky predicaments. Last month I featured her novel approach to musical performance. This month we have the image below, combining nipple clamps, an apple gag and an unusual way to hurt someone with a bite. I assume he’s been told to hold it while Lady Harper takes a bite or two out of the apple. Seems like a lovely way to create tension, fear and intimacy all at the same time.

Lady Harper Chase is a NYC based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here and her Twitter feed here.

Celebrity Indulgence

You’ll have to excuse this post. I’m going to be e a little self-indulgent and feature a celebrity crush. Specifically, Padma Lakshmi, who just announced she was leaving Top Chef. I’m a fan of the show and a fan of Padma. She’s smart, empathetic, loves food and looks amazing while sporting some killer outfits. What’s not to love?

If you like food shows, then I’d suggest checking out her Taste the Nation series. I’ll miss her telling chefs to pack their knives and go, but it’s a fine show in its own right.

This is Top Chef shot of Padma sourced from a Bravo TV Slideshow.

Concentrated Kink

Here’s an image with a very high density of kinks. There’s all sorts of fun stuff going on – bondage, leashes, feet, heels, whips and crushing. It’s extreme, yet somehow it captures the sense of a real life play session.

Sadly, I’ve no idea where it’s from or who the creator is. I found it lurking in a obscure folder on my hard drive. I suspect I got it from a tumblr years ago. Reverse image search didn’t turn up any useful leads.

Final AI Thought

This is a third and final post (for now) on the AI topic. I’m bullish on the possibilities – more so than some commenters – because it seems to be entering one of those positive spirals that happens occasionally with tech. A tipping point is reached and what was only interesting to specialists becomes usable and consumable in the mainstream. That triggers interest, publicity and funding. That drives rapid improvement, which opens up more markets, which triggers more revenue streams, etc. etc.

The same kind of thing happened with 3D graphics in the 90s. Until then it had been kind of a niche technology. Readers of my generation may remember playing things like Battlezone or Elite. They seemed amazing at the time, but were never going to be a mainstream consumer product. Then in the mid 90’s the tech reached a quality tipping point and consumer interest in it exploded. The resulting positive spiral took it mainstream, made billions of dollars for the companies involved and ultimately led to the powerful computing clusters that are now driving AI.

Of course, there are also plenty of cases where we hit a tipping point, but that positive spiral never quite takes off. VR is another spin off from the graphical revolution, but despite a lot of money and hype from the likes of Meta and Apple, it never seems to quite get the feedback loop going. Hard to know which pattern AI will follow right now. The only thing that is predictable is that people will be making porn with it.

Above is an AI image created with midjourney by Helena Manzanita. It’s part of a series using the same seed through different points in time. You can see the complete series in this twitter thread.

Attentive Table

I was planning to write a final post in my series on AI. Unfortunately, the weekend got away from me and now I don’t have the time. Instead, here is some lovely femdom eye-candy to start the week. I found it via a tumblr post but the discerning reader will recognize the source as the unmistakable Mistress Sybil Fury. She’s obviously a fan of the Scott Paul Humilator Gag.

Mistress Sybil Fury is an NYC based pro-domme. You can find her links to her online sites here.

More on AI

There’s one type of AI image that seems particular common – older women with enormous flawless breasts. I’d guess it’s a single person with a very specific kink churning them out, but maybe there’s a whole art collective involved. I would say it’s one for Dr. Freud, but even he might think it’s a little too on the nose.

The image below – with a caption added by Tom Allen – is an example of what I mean. You can find other examples on his twitter here and here.

Tom left a comment on my previous post that made an excellent point: AI imagery is likely to be a great source for caption creators. It avoids the issues of copyright and unwanted repurposing while giving a lot more control to the caption writer. Right now the image prompt writers and caption writers are likely different people. But once the tools get mature and widespread I can image a lot of new content from people writing image prompts for the particular scene they want to then caption.

You can see more captions from Tom on his tumblr and twitter.

A Kinky Advantage

AI generated images are showing up with increasing frequency in my media feeds. They still have a slightly fake soulless feel to them, as if they were created by ad agencies for marketing campaigns, but the quality has undeniably taken a big jump forward. For example, this thread has some interesting examples of how it can simulate different camera lenses.

This inevitably means people are going to try to create pornography with it. Which, equally inevitably, is going to lead to an evolving battle with the tech companies and government over what’s allowed and what gets censored. It’s a cycle that has played out with every technical evolution since the dawn of time.

Fortunately, kink might actually have an advantage here, because our take on what constitutes erotic material tends to be a lot wider than most peoples. For example, consider the image below. I doubt an image classifier would ever tag it as pornography but I’m betting a significant fraction of my readers will find it very erotic. I predict that a lot of kinky creative types are going to have fun creating non-explicit imagery that pushes their own personal buttons. The results might not be great art, but AI will probably do a better job than amateurs with basic photoshop tools.

Unfortunately I don’t have a source for this. Guessing it’s a mainstream fashion shot that I stumbled on via a femdom tumblr.

Summertime

My last couple of posts have been a little grouchy, so here’s a happy one full of color and summertime sun, courtesy of a tweet by Lady Lola. I’m always a fan of the classic black leather look (which Lady Lola also wears magnificently), but it makes a nice change to see a domme leave those outfits in the wardrobe and dress in something so colorful and beautiful.

Lady Lola is a London based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here and her twitter feed here.