The beauty of dominant women
Augustine’s artwork featured in my very first post to this site, and he was the first artist I added to the Femdom Artwork page. He closed the original site for his work some time ago, so I was very happy to hear (via a comment he left) that he’d started a new tumblr featuring both his old work and any new pieces. There are only a handful of drawings there currently, but I’m looking forward to seeing it grow in the future.
It’s always important to be able to give clear and unambiguous feedback on the quality of someone’s work. How else can they expect to improve? It would appear that the young lady below has certainly mastered the art. I doubt that he’ll forget to mop behind the kitchen waste bin next time.
The drawing is by Bakerman (free deviant art login required). He has created a big collection of fun femdom drawings, a lot of which feature pies to the face. They’re a little too slapstick for my personal erotic taste, but they do make me smile. For those that do savor the idea the idea of getting pied by a dominant female, then his work could be just your cup of tea (and slice of cake).
The original title for the piece is ‘Teacher’s Brow Gets Mopped‘ and the artists description of it reads “Two young women felt this instructor wasn’t being professional, so one shoved a mop in his face while the other waited to dump muddy water over his head.”
I’m not sure I can strictly count this as femdom, but it was such an amusing book cover and title that I just had to feature it. In my defense, the lady on the left with the boots, riding crop and oh so tight top, is definitely looking with dominant and predatory intent towards the demure lady on the right.
I found it via this article on some of the worst book covers of all time. Obviously in this particular case when they said ‘worst’, they actually meant ‘most awesome’. It’s available from amazon, should pulp fiction featuring sisters of sapphos and glossy coated fillies be your thing.
I was also tempted to feature this book cover, which might have appealed to all the castration fantasists out there. Unfortunately, I think it’s a photoshopped version of this book, so doesn’t really count.
I don’t feature a lot of sissy style feminization shots. This is not because I have anything against them. They’re certainly one of the more controversial kinks, but I don’t have an issue with them on political grounds. My problem is typically the aesthetics of the situation. Middle age guys dressed up as serving maids often look a little ridiculous. I think it’s great when someone really nails the look and can pull it off, but since humiliation is often one of the goals, that’s the exception rather than rule.
Fortunately, when it comes to artwork, anything is possible. As a result we get very cute maids like this one, featuring a sexy outfit, a collar plus cuff combo and a big stiffy. The bondage is particularly effective when you think about the physics of the situation. To place the tray down and pour the drinks she’ll need to get down on her knees, or at least get good at bending over. Both of which seem like useful positions for such a delightful young lady.
This image has been floating around the web for years. I found it most recently on the Eros Art tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t know the original artist, so if you can help out with the attribution, feel free to leave a comment.
Today’s post brings you some classic Eric Stanton. I came across it on the Adore Femdom tumblr, but the style is instantly recognizable as Stanton’s. What I particularly like about this piece is the twist in the text. The art is vintage 50’s, full of floaty undergarments, large breasts and well groomed gentlemen. It wouldn’t look out of place in a Playboy of the era. The text even plays into that, with her ‘ample hips’, ‘full mellons’ and ‘soft breathy, heavy sexual whisper’. But then, right at the end, it twists the dynamic by suggesting he’s due for the spanking. If I didn’t know the artist, I might almost think it was an early example of caption porn, where the original art is subverted by a later caption writer.
I believe this is by the artist Luca Tarlazzi. He’s not specifically a femdom artist, but I think this kiss, along with her guiding hand, is an image that captures a sense of that D/s dynamic.
I found it on the Eros Art tumblr.
A few days ago I was waffling about image context, and how it can make a difference in how I respond to an image. Surround an image with other femdom material and I’ll suddenly see D/s elements that weren’t there originally. Well this is the post where I provide a counter-example to that theory.
I first came across the image below on the Alternative Femdom tumblr. Given that source my immediate thought was “Cuckold shot.” There’s a couple making out and a solo male looking unhappy. In femdom porn that combination always equals cuckold. Yet the more I looked at it, the less right that felt. It doesn’t seem to depict jealousy, tension or arousal. The overriding feeling I get is of loneliness and depression. I don’t think it’s his partner with her bra strap showing. I think it’s his roommates, and there lies the pain. If anything it’s thoughtless sadism and self-inflicted masochism.
The painting is called ‘The usual lengthy visit‘ and is by the Vancouver artist Andrew Young. I love his work, and this piece in particular. You can see some of the ‘in progress’ shots for it here, here and here. It’s not femdom, but I think it beautiful captures an experience and emotions many of us have felt at some stage in our lives.
…you don’t enjoy cuckolding. At least that’s according to this article on it over at the Daily Beast (thanks to Suzanne for the link). It’s an interesting article, but based on what seems to be a flawed premise. Its primary contention is that cuckolding is S&M for smart people. A type of psychological torture that is ideal suited to kinky members of Mensa.
In this respect, cuckolding attracts “the very highly educated,” Paul says, adding that it’s “truly intellectual in its enterprise because it replaces sexual touch with humiliation and emotional pain, both of which are psychological. Most of what gives me physical pleasure has to go on in my brain. I’m totally being classist, but this isn’t like people in redneck bars asking each other, ‘You wanna fuck my wife?’ It’s much more complex. It’s pleasure on a different level.”
Dr Paul Pines
Given the focus on intelligence, it’s ironic that the article itself comes across as so dumb. For one thing the conflation of intelligence with emotional masochism seems incredibly simplistic. Yes, they’re both something to do with the brain. But so is pretty much anything we experience, including physical pain. Any kind of D/s is about power dynamics and relationships, which are an intellectual construct. I’m also not a fan of the presumably corollary, that if emotional masochism is for smart people then physical masochism must be better suited for the hairy knuckle crowd. As someone who enjoys a carefully delivered beating, me no happy bout that type of finkin.
I guess one argument they could be making is that you need to be smart to deal with the jealousy and emotional risks of cuckolding. That would presuppose that smart people are more emotionally mature. That supposition doesn’t correspond with anything I’ve observed in reality. I work in the software industry with a lot of scarily smart people. I have friends working in places like Google, Microsoft and Facebook on some of their most complex products. PhD’s are as common as expense cellphones, badly fitting T-shirts and intellectual arrogance. When I think about these people, emotional maturity is not a description that leaps to mind. Nor does it hop, saunter or nervously peer round the door into mind. These are the kind of people who can become emotionally unhinged arguing over indent styles. God knows what they’d make of someone treating their significant other as a shared resource and playing with her ACL’s (sorry, geek humor) *.
For an accompanying image I thought I’d go with something I found on the Felm Cyber tumblr. I like it for the distorted perspective, exaggerated bodies and weird decor. They give it a jangly off-kilter feel, which is a good match for the emotions involved. I’m afraid I couldn’t track down an artist attribution.
* Note that I’m not saying that smart people can’t be emotional mature. Or that computer geeks can’t be into cuckolding. Just that the correlation between PhD smart and the ability to deal with an emotionally fraught situation is very much unproven.
I don’t normally post Sardax artwork. Not because I don’t love it, he’s without doubt my favorite femdom artist, but because he earns a living via his paysite. It’s one thing to share a single photograph from a commercial site. They typically make money from videos and any one scene will have dozens of photographs clicked off. It’s quite another to freely share a single piece of artwork that the artist spent hours slaving over.
The Sardax images below are a little different. They were done in collaboration with Afira, a British based contemporary women’s clothing brand. As the designer herself explains in an interview…
I have known and admired Sardax’s work for a long time. Then one evening I found myself sitting next to him at a dinner party! We hit it off immediately, became friends and creative collaboration soon followed.
….
I hope my customers will see images of women experimenting with, enjoying and flaunting their sexual power. I can only imagine Sardax’s fans will see the same, but perhaps from the very particular perspective of men who adore that power in women.
My first thought was: Why don’t I get invited to those kind of dinner parties? My typical dinner party experience is someone explaining how new types of switch routers will change the design of data center network fabrics. I need less geeks and more femdom illustrators to split a bottle of Cabernet with. My second thought was around how brilliant it was to see this kind of crossover. It’s not a freakshow collaboration. The kind where a mainstream brand gets some free publicity by doing some ‘shocking’ S&M images and briefly flirting with controversy. Instead it seems to be the case where artists in two different but related fields saw a chance to work together. The end result is some great art and a message of normality* and acceptance for femdom. That can only be a good thing.
You can see the rest of the images at the Afira site under the Dark Daze collection.
* OK, so the images don’t depict anything close to normal. But neither does a lot of advertising. I mean that it’s normal in the same sense that a brand might choose a sports star or a music start to cast a positive light on their products. It’s halo style advertising, which is very unusual in a BDSM context.
I’m beginning to wonder if my blogroll is going to need some major revisions come July 20th this year. That’s the release date for the new Batman movie – The Dark Knight Rises. This film features a powerful double whammy, in the form of catwoman as played by Anne Hathaway. I know from past posts that there a lot of catwoman fans out there (HMP and lovetosubmit, I’m looking at you) and Anne Hathaway fans aren’t exactly thin on the ground (calling Servitor). I therefore fear that this deadly combination will just be too much for some of my submissive fellow travelers, a peak of perfection that will leave them drained, apathetic and with no reason to keep blogging. We’ll just be left with a lot of puzzled female bloggers wondering what the hell happened and where everyone went.
In an effort to lessen the shock and acclimatize everyone ahead of time, here’s an intriguing new poster from the movie (full resolution version here). I kind of like it. And by ‘kind of like’ I mean ‘Dear God, would you look at that.’ I only hope the movie itself is a little tauter than the previous one. I enjoyed it, but I think it would have benefited from more aggressive editing and a shorter running time.
