Myths

Lady Vesper posted a twitter article on the 6 BDSM myths that make her furious. I think they’re a pretty good set. You read the article for her reasoning but the myths themselves are as follows…

  1. The submissive has all the power because they can stop the scene at any time.
  2. The submissive allows the Dominant to dominate them.
  3. The submissive is the vulnerable one (partly true).
  4. The Dominant is responsible for the submissive’s mental state.
  5. Dominants don’t need safe-words or aftercare.
  6. Money makes real BDSM impure.

The first one here is one of my personal bugbears. I frequently see it quoted online, often by people talking about BDSM to a non-BDSM crowd. I think they believe it makes them sound clever, with special insider knowledge of the dynamic. Ooh, what a clever subversion of expectations!

In reality it’s a nonsense statement. As Lady Vesper points out, it mixes up the concepts of power and consent. Anyone can say no and walk away from the scene at any time. That’s not the same as having the power to direct and control the scene.

I find it particularly annoying because it plays into the idea that dominants are simply fetish dispensers, going through the motions of a scene at the behest of the submissive. It diminishes the agency and desires of the domme, which is really the opposite of what femdom should be about.

This shot of Lady Vesper is from her Twitter feed. You can find links to her Fan sites and Substack here.

Her Parlour

I like this shot of Miss Courtney for how it plays with the traditional prison / cage set-ups. Often the shots are taken from inside, looking through the bars at a glaring domme. Or an external shot of a domme gloating over her captive. This has a very different dynamic. She’s waiting for you, almost with an invitation to step inside.

It puts me in mind of that old poem – The Spider and the Fly.

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly,
“‘Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;
….

Who wouldn’t want to be the fly to this particular spider and her steel web?

You can find Miss Courtney’s professional site here, her twitter feed here and her Loyal Fans here.

Loony Balloony

If you have ever wondered just how hard it can be to make adult content these days then I’d direct your attention to this substack post by Ariel Anderssen. It describes a fairly insane situation triggered by her Loyal Fans site.

The short version is that she shoots material in her bedroom and one of the pictures on her wall is the Banksy image – Girl with Balloon. If you’ve not seen before, it’s a famous stencil outline of a girl and a heart shaped balloon. It’s a completely non-sexual image and is clearly just part of the background decor. However, that hasn’t stopped the idiots at Loyal Fans flagging it as content depicting a minor. Which means Ariel’s content gets barred.

I can kind of understand if some dumb AI tool had flagged it. However, the fact that a human has got involved, looked at it, and still decided that it’s illegal content is nuts. Proof that we’re living in the worst possible timeline where nothing makes sense.

For an image I’m obviously riffing on the girl with balloon theme, although this one has a bit more a devilish look in her eye.

This artwork is by Cosmic Crusader, created back in 2010.

Cascading Whip

Here’s some visual loveliness to kick the weekend off with, courtesy of Berlin’s Lady Lexi. I try and avoid posting too many shots of  beautiful dommes in fetish wear – there’s plenty of other sites for that. However, I loved the composition of this image so much, I felt I had to share it.

You can Lady Lexi’s professional site here  and her link collection here. Image was sourced via this post on her Twitter feed.

DDI

I couldn’t do a series of posts on meeting pro-dommes in the old days without mentioned Domina Directory International – or simply DDI. If cards in phone boxes were the low end of the advertising market, this was definitely the high end. It was professionally printed and distributed, with high quality photographs alongside articles and contact details. I remember play spaces having copies in their entrance rooms, particularly if a domme using the space was featured in it. There were European and US editions, and it was even available to purchase in mainstream outlets.

Unsurprisingly, like a lot of print media, it didn’t survive the coming of the internet. There is still a Twitter feed for them, but the last post was over a decade ago.

Unlike a lot of similar magazines from that era, I’ve yet to find any detailed articles on its history or background. It was pitched as by pro-dommes and for pro-dommes, but exactly who the creators were is unclear to me. Mistress Sidonia has a good tribute post on her Femdom Blog, so check that out if you’re interested in her take on it.

This was #27 of the North American edition, although I can’t see a date on it. The banner along the bottom is indicative of its time.

The Morning After

I woke up feeling very tender and sore. Because I’m now over 50 years old that triggered the obvious thought process – “OMG. Am I dying? What new hell is this? Did I just sleep weird or is this a new normal? Do my muscles hate me now?”

Fortunately, after the sleep haze cleared, I realized what was going on. Ms Savannah Sly was in town. Last night therefore featured lots of beating, trampling, biting, pummeling and lots of other painful ‘ings.  It was the really good kind of sore. Lots of happy bruises.

The bad news was I had a doctors appointment I’d forgotten about. It had been rescheduled multiple times and I hadn’t realized the final time landed just hours after a session. Always fun explaining that yes, I know I’m bruised and scratched, and yes, it was entirely consensual. It felt a bit like taking a car from a destruction derby to a mechanic. I know I did all these violent things to it and the bodywork now looks like hell, but you can still fix my brakes and check the engine light?

This is the fabulous Ms Savannah Sly as featured on her Bluesky Feed. If you’d like to support her organization New Moon – which does lots of great things for sex workers – then check it out here.

Broadening Interests

I had an interesting comment left by Tiny Monster on my post about porn escalation. He said his porn had generally de-escalated in terms of nudity and extremeness of activities. The fantasy works a lot better for him if there’s less context and it’s therefore easier to add your own.

I’m very much onboard with this. I wouldn’t say I’ve purely de-escalated the content I like – I still like a bunch of extreme activities – but my interests have gotten a lot broader. I’d much rather see a slightly suggestive clothed image that I can project into rather than a regular run-of-the-mill porn shot.

I suspect the enormous number of captioned femdom images floating around have had a role to play in this. I don’t write captions myself, but when I see an image like the one below, I do start thinking in those terms. Is this a cuckold shot and she’s checking her outfit before heading out on date? Or maybe it’s a report in on your household chores? Maybe it’s both. She’s giving instructions on your household duties while she’s out for dinner with a very special friend. Just make sure there are fresh sheets on the bed and you’re in the guestroom when they return.

It’s a lot easier to spin your preferred fantasy – whatever that may be – with an ambiguous image like than it is with something like this.

 

The Unifier

Femdom lovers are a varied bunch. We all have our own kinks, preferences and hot button activities. There’s no such things as a standard kinky person.

However, in many years of Femdom blogging, I have discover one unifying element. The common thread that seems close to universal. That’s a fondness for Catwoman. For some she’s a formative character. For others, just a fun, sexy mainstream representation of a dominant woman. Either way, it’s hard to find a submissive who doesn’t have a fondness for at least one of the interpreters of the character over the last 60 or so years.

This all came to mind thanks to this entertaining interview with Julie Newmar. She was the first actress to play the character and is arguably still the benchmark.

Newmar made the character her own, setting the template for a long line of successors, from Eartha Kitt to Michelle Pfeiffer and Anne Hathaway. Her dancer’s experience helped with the feline mannerisms: “I adopted two cats in order to watch their physical behaviour.” She even made her own adjustments to the costume, lowering the belt to the hips to accentuate her waist and taking it in until “it was like liquorice poured over the body; it fit that well.”

She clearly knew what she was doing, because that dropped belt was a lovely touch. While Anne Hathaway and Michelle Pfeiffer may have had more overly fetishistic outfits, it’s hard to beat the sensuality and playfulness Julie brought to the role.

Lady Phoenix

I’m safely back in Seattle after my UK trip. Hopefully, slightly more regular posting will now resume.

Before I left I was lucky enough to play with Lady Phoenix in her London space. That proved to be a fabulous way to round off my trip. We indulged in some electrical play, sounding, CBT, watersports and a lot of tease/denial and edging. Combining those activities with a really talented and lovely domme is guaranteed to send me home with a smile on my face.

Thanks to limited time in London I’d done a session just two days earlier with Mistress Miranda (as covered in my previous post). Scheduling sessions so closely together is always a risk because of the short recovery time. Delicate areas are sometimes still in their recovery phase. I think my nipples were described as ‘crusty’ which is  a never an expression you want associated with an erogenous zone! Fortunately, Lady Phoenix worked with the slightly bruised goods I was presenting and judged the intensity of our play beautifully.

If you’re in the London area and interested in sessions, then I’d definitely suggest seeking Lady Phoenix out. She has a great central London space and it was a lot of fun to connect and play with her.

This image of Lady Phoenix is from her Bluesky feed. You can find all her other links here.

Escalation

Ariel Anderessen has a new substack article up on the subject of pornographic escalation. That’s the highly dubious theory that consumers of porn get bored with their initial sexual interests and seek out harder and harder material. So you might start out with furtive glances at the Sear’s catalogue lingerie section but you’ll ultimately end up masturbating furiously to snuff videos from the dark web.

Ariel gives this theory a good kicking and she’s right to do so. It seems like  a bunch of nonsense from the anti-porn crowd. However, while I agree with everything she says, I think there’s an interesting angle she didn’t cover – evolution of fantasy.

Some people are pretty fixed in their kinks. They liked spanking as a teenager, they like spanking in their 60’s. That’s simply their thing. For others fantasy and interests can evolve over time. I think that’s particularly true when your fundamental kink is an underlying emotion or dynamic rather than a specific act or appearance.

For example, I think one of my main kinks is control. That manifests itself in different ways. The original kinky porn I saw featured bondage and corporal punishment, so that became a means of control that I looked for and fantasized about. Over time I encountered different ways you can play with control and that expanded my interests. Today I think that both cuckolding and toilet play are hot, but they weren’t even on my radar 20 years ago. A casual observer might see that as escalation due to porn. In reality my underlying interest hasn’t changed, it has just found new ways to surface.

I also think that fantasy and pornography tends to exist at the border between what you can do and what you can imagine. If you start exploring your kinks and playing out fantasies in real life, then the porn and erotica you desire tend to shift to the edge of that. For example, I still love bondage and still fantasize about it. But now I do regularly get tied up, the erotica I like tends to shift towards heavier and more extreme bondage (like this story). That might look like pornographic escalation, but it’s not porn that’s caused that. It’s the fact I want my fantasy world to exist slightly ahead of my real life world.

This is a shot of Ariel from her social media feeds. You can find more of her writing on her substack. She’s primarily a sub, but for those who like all types of kink you can find links to her work here.  She also has a memoir out.