Tag: Artwork

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.

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.

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.

 

Gagging On It

A final concluding post (for the moment) on combining different sexual activities with being a dominant woman. I hadn’t planned this one, but then I saw this tweet from the dominant Miss Pearl and it was too perfect not to feature.

Good: I got more time to gag on his cock, which is a major fetish of mine.

Bad: I gagged on his cock so hard I deposited two tablespoons of throat goop on his dick with a bad plumbing noise and now I am shy.

Hopefully for Miss Pearl and her partner Brick it was only a passing shyness.

As I’ve said many times, there are no dominant or submissive activities. Only dominant or submissive attitudes. You can be a domme who loves gagging on cock or a submissive who enjoys tying someone up. What matters is what you bring to the activity and the dynamic you create.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this artist.

More on Demarcation

This is a follow-up post to my one from yesterday. That tackled the perennial discussion of what sexual activities are acceptable for a domme and why the obvious answer of ‘all of them’ never somehow seems to stick. In that previous post I argued that a large number of pro-dommes are invested in defining domination in a legal safe way, which naturally puts certain activities outside the definition.  While I obviously think that’s true, it’s also only part of the picture. The other part is the out-sized influence that professional domination has on femdom in general.

In any sane world, femdom would be a generally recognized preference, and professional femdom a narrow subset of it that operates within certain legal boundaries. Actually, in any sane world, those legal boundaries wouldn’t exist and sex work would be decriminalized, but lets set that aside for the moment. The general point is that people’s sexual behavior shouldn’t be defined by the professional label. Nobody would take the escort definition of the girlfriend experience (GFE) to be how a man should actually interact with a girlfriend. Yet the pro-domme dynamic is often the lens used to view femdom in general. So any distortion created by the laws around sex work tend to distort how people see the bigger picture and the definition of female domination.

This blog is part of that problem. Over the years I’ve tried to link to and feature the blogs of many lifestyle female dominants. I’m sure I could have done a better job, but I try to share the broadest view of femdom that I can. However, for most femdom bloggers, sharing information is optional and secondary to their kinks. For most pro-dommes, sharing information is a key part of their marketing and essential to how they make money. That creates a public information imbalance. Most femdom blogger avoid sharing photographs for reasons of privacy. Pro-dommes hire professional photographers and take endless snaps of themselves between sessions. My social media feeds are full of them, and I love featuring them here. It makes it easy to create a visually interesting posts. But it’s a distorted view of femdom.

I’ve no idea how to resolve this problem. Pro-dommes have been a hugely important and positive part of my life. I’m happy when I encourage people to visit them. I also think that if I tried to create a blog that featured no professional content at all my readership would plunge. The images they share are undoubtedly striking. At the same time, I don’t think I present a balanced view of femdom. Or a view that leads people towards what I’d like femdom to be. Instead I reflect an information imbalance that’s detrimental to that vision, and I’m not sure what to do about that.

I’ll leave you with a shot that exemplifies my problem. This is of Mistress Iris as captured by Miss May. It’s a lovely image and Mistress Iris is a fabulous domme, but it’s also as relevant to femdom in general as the Noma cookbook is to the average home cook.

You can find Miss May’s professional site here. She offers bespoke web and graphic design services for the global Fetish, BDSM and erotic industry.

Mistress Iris is an LA based pro-domme, who travels extensively. You can find her professional site here.

Demarcation

There’s one topic of discussion in femdom communities that seems to repeat itself with the inevitability of elections, taxes and the return of pumpkin spice lattes. That topic is: What are the appropriate sexual activities for a domme?  The naive reader might assume that the answer is a simple one: Whatever the fuck she wants. After all, the clue is right there in the name ‘dominant’. As in the person in control who gets to make the decisions. Yet somehow that seemingly obvious answer never seems to stick.

This topic recently surfaced once again in a bunch of my social media feeds, and prompted a strong and well written response from Domina Victoria Rage. By coincidence, Mistress T also just published a good post on the topic as well, in that case prompted by a very confused sounding pro-domme client.

I think a big part of the problem here is to do with the laws around sex work in most countries. Pro-domination is typically legal, where any kind of paid sexual act isn’t. Torturing someone for money is A-OK, just don’t make them feel good with an orgasm. Most pro-dommes therefore want to draw very clear lines between their profession and anything that crosses that legal boundary. Hence, in their view, any domme blurring that line isn’t just making a personal choice, she’s challenging their legally safe but entirely arbitrary definition of what domination is. It’s almost seen as an attack on their very identity.

It’s a bit like an old fashion union – “Sorry mate. More than my jobs worth to touch that dick. I’m strictly rope and strap work. Whole different process if you need those pipes cleaning out. I’d love to help, I would, but my governor would be on me like a ton of bricks. Demarcation she’d say. Escort’s a totally different job code and time sheet. We don’t touch the dicks and they stay away from the ropes.”

Here’s someone indulging in all sorts of sexual and kinky acts. However, she’s also filming it, which makes it porn, so that’s legally fine. Presumably the pornographers have a great union, because they get to cross all sorts of lines that show up when no camera is involved.

I believe this is by the artist incase – tumblr here and patreon here.

Erythrophilia

I’d always assumed that pretty much every human behavior was associated with a kink of some sort, along with a fancy sounding -philia label. After all, there are kinks for things like crying (dacryphilia), amputation (acrotomophilia) and noses (nasophilia). Yet apparently, there’s no official name for an attraction to blushing. At least I haven’t managed to find one after an extensive 10 minutes of Googling. The best I came up with was Erythrophilia – which is apparently an attraction to the color red. That amazes me, given that blushing is a sexual response, which would seem to make it prime fodder for kinking on. Embarrassment and humiliation are major kinks, and blushing is very closely associated with those emotions, yet there’s no official label? Maybe it’s too subtle an effect to get people hooked on?

What sent me down this wikipedia rabbit hole was the image below. It’s from The Smutty Rogue, features blushing and is sexy as hell. If you like it then you might want to check out more from his tumblr.

I want to feel you from the inside

Readers of my era may be amused and/or be depressed by this video of teens reacting to music from the 90’s. I personally enjoyed it, particularly their reaction to Closer by Nine Inch Nails. Anyone would think that they’d never heard an artist express the view that he’d like to fuck them like an animal. I particularly appreciated the guy who’d never heard of the band but liked the name for the supposed Freudian suggestion.

NiN is a very domme band. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard them played in sessions. At first I thought it was just because their style and lyrics fitted kinky play, but after hearing a lot of dommes talk about liking them and seeing them in concert, I think it must be more than that. Something about their energy, sound and aesthetics chimes with a disproportionate number of dommes.

This image of someone being felt from the inside, and possibly fucked like an animal, comes from the nsfw zhenya tumblr.

Nice

I like his hands in this image. Hers are the ones doing the grabbing, but his pose is the one that makes this kinky. It’s the vulnerable pose of do what you want, I surrender.

This image has been posted across a lot of different places, but I’m not exactly sure of the original source. I think it’s fan art from a manga series called Tokyo Ghoul.