Phyllis and Aristotle

While the word dominatrix may have relatively recent coinage – as covered in yesterday’s post – the concept of femdom and male submission has been around a lot longer. It’s obviously impossible to know its true history, but given that sex, power and control have fascinated humans for thousands of years, I’m guessing kink has been around since we climbed out of the trees and decided to take an extended camping holiday on the plains of Africa.

Sadly those early humans haven’t left us a lot of information about their sex lives, but if you look to more recent recorded history, there’s no shortage of femdom. For example, the 12th century brings us the story of Phyllis and Aristotle. Although it features a famous Greek philosopher, the story is medieval in origin.

Aristotle advised his pupil Alexander to avoid the king’s seductive mistress, Phyllis, but was himself captivated by her. She agreed to ride him, on condition that she could play the role of dominatrix. Phyllis had secretly told Alexander what to expect, and he witnessed Phyllis proving that a woman’s charms could overcome even the greatest philosopher’s male intellect.

That’s a lot of kinks to pack into a short story. You’ve not only got femdom but also pony play, cuckolding, voyeurism and public humiliation.

This artwork of Phyllis and Aristotle, with Alexander looking on, is circa 1485 and is attributed to the German artist known as Master of the Housebook.

If you’re interested in to read more of the background to this story, and see more of the associated artwork, check out this blog post. The author attributes the historical popularity of the story to male anxiety of powerful women. That’s possible, but couldn’t it also be attributed to kinking on powerful women and an excuse to create femdom artwork in a socially acceptable context?

Dominatrix

I don’t use the word dominatrix on this blog very often. In fact, WordPress tells me that this is the first post I’ve ever written with that particular title. Given that this is post number 2,334 on a blog exclusively about female domination, I find that kind of amazing.

While I generally prefer the word ‘domme’, which carries less cultural baggage, it’s undoubtedly true that ‘dominatrix’ is the word the mainstream world most strongly associates with femdom.  But do you know where the modern usage derives from?

The word itself can be traced back to the 16th century. However, the original usage wasn’t sexual or related to kink at all. It simply referred to domination in the broadest possible sense. For example, a book from 1852 referred to France’s Napoleon as having been the dominatrix of Europe. Voltaire described destiny as the dominatrix of the gods, as the gods are of the world. Cassell’s Latin dictionary from 1892 defines a dominatrix as a woman who governs or rules (e.g. a town). 

The first usage in the modern sense is a very surprising and obscure one. According to ‘The History & Arts of the Dominatrix‘ it was in a pulp paperback by Bruce Rogers called ‘The Bizarre Lovermakers’ published in 1967.  Until I came to research this post I’d never heard of either that book or its author. A year later it was used as the title of a Myron Kosloff and Eric Stanton book, and then more broadly popularized in  the 1976 porn film ‘Dominatrix Without Mercy‘. If you look at the usage of the word on Google books, it was very obscure until the late 1970’s, and then suddenly bursts into popularity through the 80’s and 90’s.

I think I’d always subconsciously assumed that dominatrix had a similar etymology as sadism and masochism. i.e. Coined by a well known author in a classic book from the 18th or 19th century.  In actuality it was given its modern twist by an obscure pulp novelist from the 1960’s.

1930’s Domme

This is a companion shot to a well known image that has been floating around on the web for years. I featured the more common shot in a post way back in 2011. I always liked that image, so was very pleasantly surprised to discover this other, less well known one, of the same domme by photographer Charles Guyette.

I think they’re both wonderfully erotic shots, and that’s from someone who has spent a couple of decades experiencing all the kinky imagery an uncensored internet has to offer. I can’t even begin to imagine the effect they’d have had on a submissive male 80 or more years ago. I’m guessing that for anyone lucky enough to have a hard copy of this back in the day, it was a well hidden and highly treasured possession.

I discovered via the mrunderheel’s twitter.

Two Pets

Here’s an image for anyone who prefers their femdom with a dose of sci-fi, fetish and dehumanization. As is often the case, clothing designers of the future will clearly favor hotness and style over practicality and warmth. That’s a trade-off I’m personally OK with, assuming everyone looks as good as this.

This is by the artist HamletMachine, creator of the comic Starfighter. A lot of her work seems to skew towards more yaoi style man on man action than femdom. If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can read about the comic here, buy prints here and there’s an interview with her here.

Curious Cat and Mistress Madeline

I stumbled across the Curious Cat page of Madeline Marlowe (aka Mistress Madeline) today.  It’s one of the better kink related ones I’ve that I’ve found. A couple of interesting snippets stood out.

Back in 2014 an Australian man paid $42,000 in an auction for a 1 hour webcam session with her. I wrote about it at the time. It turns out that he never did the actual webcam session. He got off on the financial transaction, not the personal interaction. That’s definitely a case of YKINMKATGBYKISRE – Your Kink Is Not My Kink And Thank God, Because Your Kink Is Really Expensive.

The other part the stood out was her comments about the dark haired submissive she filmed a lot of her scenes with prior to moving to kink.com (for example this image). If you saw any of her early femdom work, it’s likely you’ve seen the two of them together. I always liked their dynamic in the few images and clips that I saw. Not sure I could say why that was. Maybe because they did a lot of scenes together over time, which implied an ongoing dynamic, and he seemed like a regular dorky guy, which I could relate to. Mistress Madeline has a slightly different theory on that…

I think what made those videos so relatable maybe is because he was one of the most terrible submissives I’ve ever had long term training with. He had many weaknesses and I gladly exploited them, but he was incredibly selfish and as a young domme in training I soon realized that the relationship was not serving me anymore

Apparently she ended the relationship by filming a scene with him bound in a warehouse and walked away, leaving him there, without a backward glance. As dramatic ways to end a relationship go, that’s a pretty good one.

This is obviously a shot of Mistress Madeline taken from her days with kink.com and the Whipped Ass site.

Tea for Two

This is one of those strange fashion shots where I can think of only two explanations. Either the photographer isn’t kinky at all, but wanted to shoot something that was, and so just threw a bunch of random kinky stuff into a scene. Or the photographer is extremely kinky, with a very specialized niche taste, and is therefore shooting on a frequency I just can’t pick up on. Whichever of those it is, I do like the china and her beautiful red corset.

This was shot by Aleksandar Alek Živković for Vice Serbia. I found it on labstrakt’s tumblr.

Table for Two

I’ve eaten at many amazing restaurants, but I’ve sadly never enjoyed a table with this kind of backdrop. I think it’s worth a Michelin star all on its own.

Google translates the text as “I take my male in patience” while Bing translates it as “I’m taking my male patient”. Neither one really sounds right, so if I’ve any French speakers out there who can help with a better translation, please let me know via a comment.

Update: Thanks for the many helpful comments on this. I’ll quote Mlle Sadie who gave this description…

This is a play on words. “Prendre son MAL (instead of MÂLE) en patience” is a French expression meaning to endure, with resignation, some pain (physical or psychological), some uncomfortable circumstance (think “pain in the ass”!).

So, mal (pain) and mâle (gender) are homonyms the artist has interchanged. The Woman thus endures Her male as/with a “pain in the ass”.

I believe the artist is known as Ladamen Rouge and this was created in Saint Etienne.  Thanks to a helpful comment, this may also be be a collaborative piece with an street artist known as Miss Tic or Miss Trick.

 

Face Funnel

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m not a big fan of hoods. I have to make an exception in this case however, because this one is just so fucking hot. There’s something incredibly objectifying and utilitarian about it. I’m not sure I could cope with wearing it in reality, but I do love the idea of it.

This is from Mistress Natsumi’s twitter feed.

More thoughts on privacy

I thought I’d share a few more follow-up notes to my previous post on Protonmail and Gmail.

One discussion I’ve seen pop up multiple times on social media is the need for everyone to use encrypted email. The argument goes that if a client is on gmail, it doesn’t help if a sex worker is on Protonmail. The email thread will still end up stored on an unencrypted server, so what have you gained? And since getting everyone to use Protonmail is unrealistic, why bother using it at all?

I think that viewpoint somewhat misses the mark. Privacy online, much like in the physical world, is rarely about perfection. It’s about minimizing risk and guarding against the most likely routes of attack.

If a zealous prosecutor crawled the web for sex worker web sites, or got hold of the database from a forum site or advertising site for sex workers, it’d be pretty easy to compile a list of email addresses for workers who were based in his part of the world. I’d also assume (although I’m not a legal expert) that, given both the source of the email data and the current political climate, showing probably cause to get a warrant would be straightforward. Just throw around the magic word ‘trafficking’. For anyone on Gmail (or a similar unencrypted service) that’d result in exposing all their correspondence with all of their clients.

In contrast compiling a list of client email addresses is a lot trickier. Most people use entirely separate accounts that are isolated from their public presence. I certainly don’t email pro-dommes from my work email or as paltego. These random email addresses typically aren’t on the web and don’t have a lot of associated information. So it would seem to me that, even if you could find one, showing probably cause is now a lot harder. Finally, even if a prosecutor can jump through all those hoops, all he’d get would be the correspondence of one client. That’s a lot lower level of information leakage than all the emails from a sex worker to all her clients. That reduces the cost/benefit ratio for a prosecutor, and hence makes it a less likely route of attack.

It’s obviously better to push as many people as possible towards secure email. But I don’t think you have to insist that it’s all or nothing. A sex worker who uses Protonmail and communicates with people on a mixed collection of email platforms is, in my view, still better off (from a privacy perspective) than one who just uses Gmail.

Similarly, while a modern smartphone with encryption enabled isn’t perfectly safe, it’s certainly better than one without encryption. And tech companies are constantly working to identify and close security holes.  You can also enable encryption on modern Windows/Mac PCs and laptops. It’s not a magic bullet to give 100% security, but it’s better than not having it. Defense in depth is the key.

Of course, if you want to avoid online risk entirely, then the only way to be sure is to go old school like this office. Not a computer in sight. Just a pen and paper for her office boy. Hopefully she has a crosscut shredder to dispose of his work once it’s done.

This is of course the lovely Mistress Eleise in an old photograph from Femme Fatale Films.

Euphoria – Beauty In Pain

I’ve some follow-up thoughts from yesterdays post on Protonmail vs Gmail to share. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to get them down right now. So consider this an interlude, a little visual intermezzi, before returning to the more boring technical stuff.

The images below are from this Vice article on the photographer Carolin Auer  who is working to capture some of the authentic pain and emotions that go into BDSM play. The ultimate goal is a book entitled Euphoria – Beauty In Pain, which is currently still in the production stages. It looks like it’d be an interesting title for fans of the marks, cuts and bruises that kinky play often leaves behind.