Ostra Studios

Fans of vintage erotica might want to check out the Ostra Studio site. It features the work of Jacques and Charles Biederer, two brothers from Czechoslovakia, who produced a large number of erotic and fetish photographs in Paris in the 1930’s.

There’s a tendency to think of fetish art and photography beginning in the 1950’s with the likes of John Willie, Irving Klaw, Eric Stanton, etc. The images of bondage, domination and fetish wear on the Ostra Studio site show that the Biederer brothers were in fact ahead of them by 20 years.

The Biederer brothers were killed by the Nazi’s in Auschwitz in 1942. If you want to support sharing their amazing photography with the world, then check out this link.

Gifts with Benefits

I’ve never been into the online panty purchasing scene. In the highly unlikely event you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, then Metro has a decent article on it here. I understand the fetish and, as I wrote yesterday, I enjoy scents as part of play. It’s just a case of YKINMKBYKIOK when it comes to UPS and plastic bags of used underwear.

However, I do appreciate items of feminine clothing being worked into an in person scene. It’s a fun dynamic, with elements of tease and denial, humiliation and intimacy all twisted together. I’ve even occasionally been gifted the odd item at the end of a scene, which is normally a nice memento, but was once the source of some embarrassment.

It was around my birthday and, as a departing gift, the domme gave me the pair of black fishnet stocking she’d been wearing during part of our play. I thanked her for the unexpected birthday present, stuffed them into the pocket of my leather jacket, and went merrily on my way. In my post scene high, I promptly forgot all about them. That is until the next night, when I’m out with friends and hunting for my wallet to pick up a bar tab. Had it been the start of the evening I might have realized what my fingers had encountered, but sadly this was not our first or even second stop. So, with a brain slightly less razor sharp than usual, and assuming my wallet might be under this random unidentified fabric in my pocket, I pulled the stockings out. It turns out to be remarkable hard for a tipsy single guy to quickly come up with a plausible excuse for why he’s carrying black fishnet stockings in his pocket.

I’m not 100% sure, but I this looks awfully like the work of Apollonia Saintclair.

Smelly

Scent and sex make a complicated combination. On one hand, everyone likes a sweetly smelling partner. Sex workers will always put good personal hygiene right up there with polite and punctual in their top requirements for clients. Anyone who has been stuck in a small space with someone with bad body odor will understand how unappealing that can be.

Yet, on the flip side, a scent can be one of the sexiest things in the world. I love to pick up different ones from my play partners. It can be feet, armpits, genitals or even ass. They’ve all got their own fun funky notes. It’s a very intimate and sensual thing.

With looks, or sounds or touch it’s normally easy to say why something appeals or not. I like long hair, I love it when you call me a ‘good boy’, I prefer thuddy to stingy impacts, etc.  When it comes to scents we’ve really got nothing. It’s either hot or it’s not, and I’ve no idea what makes the difference between those two cases.

I think this is a great image with a lovely dynamic. Sadly I don’t know the artist. If anyone can help me attribute it correctly then please leave me a suitable comment.

Captive

Something simple and sexy to start the week. Sadly I’ve no idea who the artist is or where this is from. I get a bit of a deep South jail vibe from it. Maybe a no good country boy bootlegger with the Sheriff’s daughter? She plays the innocent, but has a devilish streak a mile wide.

#IWD

It was International Women’s Day on Friday. I have a good deal of sympathy for Miss Pearl’s point of view, expressed via this tweet…

The next person who tries to particularly make #InternationalWomensDay about #femdom is getting a lecture on fetishism of power not being inherently empowering.

If there’s going to be at least one day that isn’t about what excites men’s dicks, this would seem like a good one to start with.

On the other hand, I did really like this IWD tagged tweet from Lucy SweetKill, featuring her, Dia Dynasty, the image below and the following quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie…

Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.

I’m therefore going to claim for the purposes of this post, I’m like the telephone company, simply a transparent conduit for information. I put this all before you, make of it what you will.

Pascal Campion

I think you’re supposed to get more cynical as you get older. The optimism of youth fades into a jaded middle age, which it turns morphs into grouchy old age. Then death.

Oddly I seem to be going in the opposite direction. I’m way more sentimental than I was a decade or more ago. Presumably by the time I reach retirement, I’ll just be a mushy puddle. I think I’ll be OK with that.

The prompt for all this introspection is the art of Pascal Campion, as featured below. You can see more of it on his instagram and this gallery. There’s not really any femdom involved, but this particular image might give those that way inclined some warm fuzzy feelings. I’ve zero desire to have children, but if anyone wanted to pitch the concept to me, Pascal’s work would be a good place to start.

Failing to Read the Room

Like most bloggers I get my fair share of emails pitching advertising, paid content and guest posts. Normally I junk them as fast as they arrive, but one caught my eye today. Its opening paragraph, designed to prevent me applying my usual whack-a-mole approach, ran as follows:

….before you decide to stop reading, let me assure you that we don’t dabble in pornographic content of any kind, and therefore won’t make any indecent proposals.

Wow. Did they misread the room. I guess it worked, because I did keep reading to find out who’d be stupid enough to send a sexual explicit blog that kind of opening. They even ended up with their own post, albeit without any kind of link or name. Personally I’d love to get a few indecent proposals. I think my life has been sadly lacking in them.

In honor of my new puritanical email friends, I’ll close with an entirely non-pornographic image. This is a simple head shot, with no naughty naked bodies in view. Just a very nice lady whispering sweet nothings into her beau’s ear. Nothing indecent about that.

This is of course from the Divine Bitches site.

An Addendum to the Story

My previous post was a review of Mistress T’s autobiography – There is More to the Story. I had a couple of additional notes that didn’t really fit properly into the main review, so I thought I’d slide them into this follow-up.

Firstly, I was amused to read Mistress T’s view on the look she was given when shooting for kink.com. I wrote about this in 2016, commenting that the excessive makeup they’d used really didn’t play well with her natural beauty. In her book, Mistress T was even more cutting than I was, describing her eyes after the application of dark eyeliner as ‘looking like two piss holes in the snow’. I think that’s harsh but fair. Clearly a failure of imagination on kink.com’s part, and I’m glad I wasn’t alone in that thought.

The other potential crossover that caught my eye was the story behind the painting she used for the cover of the book. It was created by Vancouver artist Drew Young, based on a private commission from Mistress T in 2012. In her book she describes making the connection with Drew Young via a post on a fetish blog that featured one of his images and asked the question “Is this a cuckolding scene?” Similarly Drew Young, in his blog post on the painting in 2012, described her discovery of him as via a ‘prominent Femdom blog’.

Now, I don’t want to blow my own trumped here, but in this post in June of 2012, I featured the exact Drew Young picture Mistress T describes in her book, and I talked about the potential cuckolding slant. Following that in July of 2012, Mistress T talks about commissioning her painting,  and then takes delivery of it in August. Given that timing, the similarity of my post to the one she describes, and the fact that I’m not aware of any other femdom blog featuring that specific image at that time, I’m going to claim credit here for the connection. And therefore also lay claim to a (very) indirect mention for this blog in Mistress T’s excellent book.

I actually emailed Mistress T to ask if this blog was the one in question. She thought my post seemed familiar, and it was very possible, but after 7 years there was no way to be sure. I did enjoy the fact that the artist had absolutely no idea what cuckolding was, and the original painting I’d featured was simply a trio partying and doing blow.

This is the painting created by Drew Young for Mistress T, and then later used as the cover for her book.

There is More to the Story

Regular readers will probably be aware who Mistress T is. A prolific producer of Femdom porn and a kinky blogger, I’ve featured her on this site multiple times in past posts (e.g. here, here, here, etc.) Now she’s added another string to her bow as the author of her autobiography – There is More to the Story. I’ve just finished reading it and thought my readers might appreciate a review. The short version is that it’s an extremely entertaining and fast read that kept me eagerly flipping pages right to the end. If that isn’t enough to get you to hit the “Buy Now” button,  then read on.

It’s probably worth starting with what the book is not about. It’s not an analysis of kink, D/s or why her clients are into the fantasies she creates. Nor is it a guide to repeating her success as a femdom content creator. Anyone looking at the ‘how’ or ‘why’ of professional femdom should look elsewhere. Instead it’s a very revealing and personal reflection on the life of a complex, curious and kinky woman who happens to have ended up as a femdom porn producer.

Mistress T isn’t a professional writer, but she is a talented amateur one, and the anecdotes and stories she has to tell zip past the reader at an astonishing rate. It bounces from dodging white slavers in Thailand to taking ayahuasca in South America. From stripping in Canadian mining towns to shooting BDSM porn for some of the biggest producers in California. There are challenging relationships, a difficult childhood and messy breakups. Not to mention the peep shows, poop scenes and angry monkeys (fortunately not all at the same time). It’s probably fortunate that Mistress T chose to keep the story moving at a rapid pace. With this wealth of material, a writer given to endless scene setting and self-analysis would have produced something of a length to rival Game of Thrones (albeit with less violence and more sex).

For me, while I enjoyed reading about some of the more outlandish situations Mistress T finds herself in, what really stood out was how much she shared about her life. The book’s title is well chosen. I’m sure it would have been easier to string together some entertaining stories and sell another version of her Mistress T persona. Instead she’s honest about the emotional challenges she’s faced and the toll they’ve often taken. I’m sure it took a lot of courage to share those details, and its those sections that really give the book its heart. She also does a great job of closing the circle and pulling everything together in the final chapters.

Criticisms? Just two minor ones. I’d have been tempted to more tightly edit the sections on working vanilla jobs and expand the later sections on her as Mistress T. The problems of crappy low paid jobs and messy love affairs have been tackled by many great writers, but managing a complex personal life whilst also becoming a successful business woman producing kinky porn is a less well trodden path. I also found it slightly odd she chose to pick fake names for some of the production companies she worked with. Anyone vaguely interested in femdom porn will quickly work out who/what she’s talking about, so it doesn’t add much other than momentary confusion. Perhaps that was done under legal advice?

You can pick up a copy of ‘There is More to the Story’ at Amazon in either kindle or paperback form. I absolutely recommend that you do. It’s one of the best autobiographies I’ve read from someone in the adult entertainment business.

You can read more from Mistress T on her blog and purchase her porn here.

My ‘To Do’ List

This image dates from 1941 and was created in protest of the Hays Production Code. It featured ten of the hot button items that films of the day had to avoid. Amusingly, smoking wasn’t one of them, so that dangling cigarette in her lips was just an artistic touch. A glimpse of lacy lingerie on an exposed thigh was apparently much more dangerous.

According to Wikipedia the code ultimately expanded to around 25 different problem areas, which would be tough to fit into a single photographic still. However, looking back at the list now, any random episode of Narco’s probably covers a significant fraction of them.

This image was created by A. L. “Whitey” Schafer. You can read more about him here. I found it via this tweet.