Artwork – Page 56 – Femdom Resource

Higher education

I like the idea of making science more interesting to people. I’d certainly be happy to volunteer to dangle over a lecture hall somewhere in academia. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this is all that practical. And I don’t mean the naked slave part, or the bondage, or the professor with a whip. I’m sure those would all be fine. It’s the timing that’d be an issue. I’ve done suspension scenes and they’re not the fastest things in the world to set-up. Getting everything cinched properly in place and the weight balanced right takes time. Doing it three different ways? All your students would be long gone. You’d be better off studying the mathematics of the whip.

The cartoon comes from the very excellent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Other fine examples from the same source include this, this and my personal favorite this.

Great evening. Great artwork.

Tonight was a happy resumption of a long running tradition – my sessions with Lydia. Thanks to adjacent travel schedules it has been a month or so since we last got together. It was a very pleasurable (in a painful way) evening. Many clamps, clips and canes were deployed, resulting in much moaning and growling.

The image below isn’t really related to the session, other than both feature beautiful red heads. But right now I just want to relax and enjoy my endorphins rather than write posts. So if you’ll excuse me I have a date with my couch and a fine cocktail originally invented for a Mr. Ernest Hemingway.

This great image was created by the artist i-have-a-hunger. I found it via Yumine Guo’s Storyland tumblr.

Annoyingly complicated humans

One of the problems when writing about the origin of kinky preferences is the tendency to treat the personal as the universal. It’s human nature to assume individual experiences are widely shared, or even that they are the default experience. That’s particularly problematic with something as complex and multifaceted as kink is.

An interesting comment from Budman reminded me that not everyone traces their preferences back to early childhood. He feels that his triggers came from early adolescence. That’s something I’ve seen reported by others. I’ve also seen posts from people who came to kink even later, years into their adulthood. It was something that they grew into, not an itch that was always lurking under the surface of their sexuality. Humans are annoyingly complicated.

For me however, my kinky nature was in place long before adolescence. How else can I explain me and Penelope Pitstop? As I’ve posted in the past, I loved watching this show as a child. There was something especially tingly about watching Penelope be tied up and placed in peril. Like the magic act I talked about yesterday, it wasn’t a formative experience. There was no traumatic or exciting event that got associated with cartoon bondage. I just loved the idea of control and how it could be taken away. Reaching adolescence just slotted the next piece of the jigsaw in place for me.

I think the fact that people come to different kinks, in so many different ways, and at so many different times, emphasizes the problem in trying to associate particular interests with only single formative events. After all, how many people experienced similar events, and didn’t become kinky? We never hear from the guy who was dressed up as a girl by his sisters, and didn’t become a cross-dresser. Perhaps there’s an underlying predisposition in just a fraction of the population to having a flexible sexuality. One that casts a wider net for stimulus. Some people are always aware of it, some access it via childhood events, some as their sexuality emerges in adolescence, and some discover it via experimentation in later life.

Having mentioned Penelope Pitstop, it seems fitting to close with this image. It has similar feel, with an extravagantly costumed villain, and a helpless well bound victim. Fortunately for the purposes of this blog, it’s a rare reversal of the damsel in distress trope. It’s entitled Fred Stolen by a Villainess and is by the artist Barry960.

Nature / Nurture / Whatever

The New York Magazine has an article on the well worn subject of nature versus nurture in the context of fetish and kink. It’s a discursive piece, heavy on anecdotes and light on hard data. It comes down firmly on the side of nurture, although it also admits there’s no simple way to divide up such a complex set of influences and interests.

Personally I wonder if, outside of scientific curiosity, the debate is even one worth having. Unless they identify a very clear genetic cause, which seems unlikely given the current research, the discussion isn’t going to result in anything actionable. Nobody is going to be able to come up with a set of guidelines for bringing up a child with “normal” sexual interests. The cause and effect is far too complex and unique for each individual.

It also seems odd that people are so interested in tracking down the basis for kinky sexual preferences, but seem happy to accept all the other preferences people exhibit without question. If somebody says they don’t like carrots, nobody starts wondering if they had a traumatic experience as a child while watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Wine lovers don’t feel the need to tie their interest back to early experiences with a sippy cup and purple grape drink. Even in the sexual and relationship realm we let vanilla preferences slide without comment. A serial dater of blonde women just has a ‘type’. Nobody wonders if it’s because he watched one too many Marilyn Monroe movies while sitting on his mother’s knee. Yet say he likes dominant blonde women, and suddenly there’s an urge to wheel out old Sigmund to try and figure out why the hell he’s so damn weird.

Given this posts focus on the development of sexual preferences, it seems appropriate to finish with this image – ‘School of Bondage’ by zblabla. The classroom can certainly be a powerful influence on sexual development, but it’s not typically this overt.

Lose Control

I was happy to notice the Lunar Black tumblr had recently sprung back into life. That is against the typical sequence of events for tumblrs. They typically either grind to an indefinite halt or vanish into thin air without so much as a by-your-leave. There are not a huge number of artwork themed femdom tumblrs, so I’m glad we didn’t lose this one.

The image below is by the artist sadademort (free deviant art login required) and is called ‘Lose Control’. I discovered it via this post on the aforementioned Lunar Black tumblr. I’m not sure that arm bondage is strictly up to code, but I do like the energy and sense of the D/s dynamic that it captures.

My kind of Goddess

Here’s a third piece of artwork to complete my trilogy of artist themed posts. This is entitled Femdom Goddesses 2 (free deviant art login required) and is by the artist humon.

According to humon’s notes on it, Ishtar was..

…a Babylonian goddess of sex and prostitution, and was know as the concubine of the gods. But though she had many many many lovers she was also quite cruel to them, and the less powerful ones ended up as her slaves or died.

That sounds like my kind of Goddess. The other pair on the left is, according to some Jewish texts, the first man and woman. Lilith apparently wouldn’t do as she was told and tried to rule Adam. Eve was therefore a backup plan for Adam, created with all Lilith’s sass taken out. Obviously the guys (and no doubt it was guys) creating the original version of that story wanted to send a pretty clear message about what they thought correct female behavior was.

In the bedroom

Today’s artwork is a very different style to yesterday’s, but it’s no less striking. It’s entitled ‘In the bedroom‘ and is by the artist zblabla.

I like the ambiguity of the scene. Is this the start of a scene or the end of one? Is she going to leave him there while she sleeps? Is he purely ornamental or a fun toy for her to play with? You also get the impression our uncertainty is shared by the man on the X-frame. Now he’s fastened in place, he’s not quite sure what she’s planning.

I found this on the Femdom Gallery tumblr.

Post M

This is my 1000^th post. I knew it was coming, but I’m still kind of amazed to type that. It has taken exactly 1010 days to get to it. Given that I do actually have a reasonably full non-kinky life featuring work, friends and family (against all the available evidence to the contrary here), I think that’s pretty good going.

I was initially going to make it a retrospective post on the blog itself. I still might write something like that in the next few days, but for today I’ll make it a post that best characterizes my goal here. I’ve always aimed to provide useful links to interesting people, mixed in with some fun and erotic visuals. So here’s an image that I love from the artist and writer Yumine. I only discovered her work in the last day or so, and hopefully it’ll be new to a lot of my readers. She has both a tumblr and a blog called Storyland. Both feature some excellent artwork and writing and are well worth checking out. As her blog introduction says…

If the promise of men bound, abused, and enslaved stirs your senses and whets your appetite, then you have come to the right place.

A thesis worth reading

After yesterday’s lengthy post, here’s something short and sweet courtesy of the artist Caroline O’Grady.

The two images below are taken from her thesis series entitled Dom & Sub. The first is Instigation (part 1) and the second is Post-Play (part 4). You can see the others 3 parts over at on her blog. There’s also Negotiation, Play and Aftercare.

I love the fact she’s using these as part of her academic thesis at her College of Art. It’d certainly make for a more interesting Viva Voce than the dry and boring discussions that typically result.

Uh huh huh huh

A few posts ago I was writing about domination for dummies. This post is the double converse of that – submissive who are dumb. It was sparked by the tumblr of Mistress Ouch and her series of posts on some of the dumb things wannabe clients say to her. I found them highly entertaining. A few of my favorites were…

“Hi Mistress, I want a really simple easy session and since all that other stuff you do is gross and weird you’re probably really glad to have such a simple easy boring session. Can I have a discount?”

“I disagree with your boundaries. I am very logical and your boundaries are very illogical. Let me use my awesome logic skills to show you how stupid and crazy your boundaries are. Why aren’t you agreeing with me? You’re stupid and crazy.”

“Wait, you’re letting me choose when I get to come in? You mean you don’t dominate me during the booking process?”

She has plenty more amusing example of obtuseness from the little s brigade. They’re well worth a read as examples of the kind of idiocy that pro-dommes have to regularly sort through.

I thought picking a picture for this post might be tricky until I stumbled on the one below. Butthead would make the stupidest submissive possible. I don’t think they ever did a Beavis and Butthead episode featuring a pro-domme, which feels like they missed a trick. The dialog just writes itself. It starts with “Uh huh huh huh. We’re totally going to do it. Come to Butthead”. Swiftly followed “Owww! Get off me you asswipe! That hurts”.

This image was never part of the TV show. It’s taken from a 1997 book called The Butt Files.