The beauty of dominant women
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As regular readers may know, I occasionally like to feature women who weren’t sexually dominant (as far as we know) but were amazing and impactful historical figures. For example, a couple of past examples include Julie d’Aubigny and Beryl Swain.
Today, inspired by this article on the Blue Stocking site, I’m featuring another – Ada Lovelace. Given I’ve spent a large part of my life writing software, she’s a figure near and dear to my heart. Her notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine are the first example of what we think of today as computer programming. They pre-date the work of the equally brilliant Alan Turing by 100 years. From this article…
She then summarises how a sequence of computations would work on the Analytical Engine; with “Operation Cards” to define the operations to be calculated, and “Variable Cards” to define the locations of values. Lovelace discusses “cycles” and “cycles of cycles, etc”, known to contemporary programmers as loops and nested loops. She gives a mathematical notation for them, which comprises the first instance of a recorded software loop.
She then moves on to Note A, wherein she portrays an extraordinary concept of a general-purpose computing machine– a simply unparalleled vision.
Sadly, she died young, aged just 36. Babbage’s analytical engine was never built and history had to wait until the 1940’s and 1950’s for computer programming to return. That historical gap presents an interesting ‘what if’ moment that fiction authors have enjoyed filling.
There is a programming language named after Ada , although it’s sadly not a widespread one these days. That’s a shame, as I’d much prefer writing in something called Ada rather than the unimaginatively named variations of ‘C’ that are now common.
Image of Ada Lovelace as featured in this article on her in the New Yorker.
I’m always intrigued to discover new kinks I’ve not heard of before. After 20+ years on odd corners of the kinky internet this doesn’t happen too often, but occasionally I’m still surprised.
For example, today I discovered Anesthesia is a kink. I obviously knew of medical fetishism and breathplay, but hadn’t realized that the drugs and equipment for anesthesia was also a thing for people. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. As a process, it has all the kind of elements that get fetishized. Lots of control, ritual, uniforms and special materials/equipment.
Personally, while I do enjoy medical play and breathplay, anesthesia alone doesn’t do much for me sexually. However, I could get into fetishizing a really good nights sleep.
I found this image via tumblr. I believe it’s by Leela Lapin who specializes in these kind of heavy medical fantasies. You can find more from Leela via her links page.
Finishing up my series of scent themed posts with a bottom shot. Although I feel that part of the body is in a bit of a different category to the others featured.
Armpits, genitals and (to a lesser extent) feet have an ongoing natural odor. Unless you’ve just got our the shower or have gone crazy with deodorant, there’s an underlying scent that’s typically there. Bottoms are a bit more binary. The either don’t smell or they smell in a very different kind of way. That kind of scent play has its fans, but it’s more of a niche kink I think.
I believe this is Cybil Troy. I’m sure her hygiene is impeccable and her bottom therefore scented like a summer breeze.