F – Page 39 – Femdom Resource

Swinging her tail

I’m continuing my equipment theme from yesterday’s post. That one was about beds and this one is on whips.

It was prompted by the the people over at Mojave Outliers dropped me a nice email asking if I’d list their site on my equipment page. I get a fair number of these kind of emails, typically for what look cookie cutter e-commerce sites with a random grab bag of cheap BDSM toys on them. However, the Mojave Outliers site is nicely put together and shows a real passion for the whips, floggers and general swingy things that they’re creating. They’ve got a wide variety of different custom made whips on offer and I was happy to list them.

I should be clear that I’ve no personal experience with their products, and I certainly don’t make any money from posting about them! I just enjoy discovering people who are passionate about what they do and have the skill to create beautiful equipment for others to enjoy. Plus, it gives me an excuse to feature the image below.

This is a Cat Woman Cosplay by Margie Cox, as photographed by Lou Raimondi. It’s almost certainly not a whip from the folks at Mojave Outliers. And given the Margie is a cosplayer rather than a BDSM enthusiast (at least as far as I know), she’s probably not about to whip anyone with it. But I like the image all the same.

Vampire Willow

Life is full of odd coincidences. Yesterday I was joking about vampires, and included an aside about the price of a mortgage on a gothic castle. Today the very first story I read over my morning coffee tells me that Dracula’s castle is for sale. Unfortunately there’s no listed price, and no mention of how accommodating the local wenches are when it comes to open bedroom windows and diaphanous nightwear.

On the plus side, it does give me a chance to continue the theme with one of my favorites – vampire Willow from the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ve blogged about her before, so I won’t rehash that post here. Although in writing this, it struck me that the show steered away from the traditional sexually aggressive and dominant female vampires. There was no shortage of evil females – Drusilla, Darla, Glory, Natalie French, Inca Mummy girl, etc. But no main character in the traditional predatory femme fatale vampire role, which is such a staple of the genre. The two closest matches are vampire Willow and Faith, both associated with the good character roles.

Next!

This looks to be a very impatient looking lady. I’m not quite sure what she’s done to those poor fellows in the background, but clearly she has left them in a somewhat discombobulated state. Either that or she dissolved their spinal cords. No time for foreplay or cuddling afterwards. Just wham, bam, thank you man.

My searching suggests this is fan art of an anime character called Annie Leonhart. I’m afraid I don’t know who the artist is.

Abusing a term

I maintain a Google alert on the term ‘dominatrix’. I originally figured that if the term popped up in a news article it’d be a likely article for me to post about. In actuality what it means is that I get an endless stream of links to articles featuring celebrities wearing something that, if you squint and don’t concentrate too hard, could be vaguely considered to be fetish wear. It doesn’t seem to matter what it is, or what the context is, just so long as it’s slightly non-conventional.

Some of them I kind of understand (for example this) while others are completely ridiculous (for example this). The latest example, and one that falls firmly into the ridiculous camp, is Kylie Minogue, with this and then this. Kylie is undoubtedly a very attractive woman, but I’ve played with a lot of amazing dommes, and not one of them has worn anything like those outfits. If you’re going to call something a dominatrix outfit then may I suggest this outfit by Mistress Shae Flanigan as a reference point? Obviously you can be dominant in anything you damn well choose, including fuzzy slippers. But if you’re going to invoke cliches, at least make sure it’s an accurate one.

Pro Dommes of NY

The latest site that has been catching my eye is entitled ‘Pro Dommes of NY‘. As the name suggests, it’s a collection of images of professional dommes from New York, stretching back over the last couple of decades. I can’t say I care for it’s sub-title – “…from the icons & super-stars to the mediocre and has-beens.” That last couple of categories seems rude and unnecessary. Despite that, I find the site itself fascinating, although I’m not sure I can clearly say why.

I don’t visit New York that often, and I’ve only played there a handful of times, so this certainly isn’t a trip down memory lane for me. Some of the image and dommes are undoubtedly beautiful (see below), but the same could be said for the images on hundreds of current pro-domme sites spread across the web. I think it’s the element of time that makes it interesting for me. It makes me wonder about the person behind each shot: Where are they now? What do they think about it in hindsight? How did their career and life evolve? The images are public, deliberately revealing, and designed to advertise. Yet, what they advertised was a very private experience, and in many cases the character they’re advertising no longer exists, it has been retired by its creator.

We’re used to cleanly dividing the world into real and pretend parts. A bank manager is always real. Romeo and Juliet are pretend characters. An actor is sometimes real (accepting an award) and sometimes pretend (on the stage). I think pro-dommes blurs these boundaries in unusual ways, and each to different degrees. A session with one is both real (I have the welts to prove it) and pretend. Looking at this tumblr, and in particular the older images of ex-dommes, really brings that home to me.

This image is of Mistress Tess, a NYC pro-domme who is still very much active. Anytime I see a mainstream magazine article featuring a pro-domme they inevitably describe themselves a leading or top domme from wherever they hail from. While I’ve yet to have the pleasure of playing with Mistress Tess, from everything I’ve read about her, I think she’s one of the handful of New York dommes who could make that boast and be entirely truthful. If you’re New York based and would like to see her then check out her website.

Pink elephant syndrome

My mini-rant in the previous post triggered some interesting comments and some further thoughts of my own. So this post is a continuation on the topic of flirting with limits when playing with new (or newish) partners.

I should start by stating that none of the dommes that get regularly name checked here (Lydia, Yuki, Ai-Li, etc.) have ever been guilty of this problem. People I play with fairly often know my limits, so the situation doesn’t tend to arise, but even in my first few sessions with them they did the right thing and completely avoided problem areas.

I should also draw clear distinctions between the different circumstances where limits can get violated. The three obvious cases that spring to my mind are when a top deliberately cross a line, when a top simply doesn’t listen and is unaware of a limit, and when a top chooses to play somewhere close to a limit and crosses it accidentally. All of them are bad, but it was the final situations I was really trying to dig into, as it’s something I’ve not seen addressed elsewhere.

One of the comments (from ‘Informed guesswork’) likened it to the Pink Elephant problem. Being told not to picture a pink elephant instantly makes you picture one. In the same way I sometimes think limit discussions trigger the visualization and problem solving parts of a top’s brain…

Bottom: For me piercing / hoods / having bananas shoved up my bottom are limits.
Top: Oh really? (Thinking: That’s a shame I like needles / sensory deprivation / pretending to be a kinky gorilla)
Bottom: Yes. I am terrified of needles / am claustrophobic / witnessed a traumatic event at the local zoo as a child.
Top: OK. Good to know (Thinking: So is it all medical scenes / enclosed spaces / anal fruit situations that are a problem? What if I used a carrot? I remember a great scene I did last year with an aubergine. That’d be fun to try again…)

At this point the top now has pink elephants on the brain and is making connections to similar past situations, while forgetting the million and one other things she enjoys doing that don’t relate to elephants of any color at all.

Obviously the onus should be on the top to avoid this type of behavior, but one excellent suggestion in the comments was to finish a scene negotiation with the stuff you enjoy rather than personal limits. I suspect a lot of people are like me, and the last thing they talk about before a scene with a new person is their limits. After all, it’s human nature to open up with all the positive things you enjoy before adding the qualifiers and conditionals. Perhaps that switching that around would help avoid the pink elephants.

When looking for an image for this post I actually did an image search for elephants and femdom. I didn’t have much hope, but I should have realized that rule 34 can never be violated. Unfortunately the relevant images – of big breasted women waving whips near men being crushed by elephants – was a little too extreme for me to feature. So instead here’s a rather beautiful shot of a naked woman next to a naked elephant. It was taken by Vlad Gansovsky.

La Maupin

A recent Max Fisch thread was discussing the topic of dominant women in history. Who are the most obvious or the most famous? Obviously one has to be careful assigning the idea of sexual dominance to a public persona. Queen Boudica might have led a rebellion against the Romans, and have become a leading female figure in British history, but the books don’t tell us what she enjoyed doing with her husband Prasutagus. Maybe she enjoyed being spanked in the dull moments between slaughtering Romans? After all, we don’t automatically assume that success in a man implies a particular sexual preference.

That caveat aside, I think my top pick for a dominant woman from history would be Julie d’Aubigny, otherwise known as La Maupin. She was famous as a swordswomen, a singer, an actress, a lover and someone who generally buckled a lot of swash. There’s a good article on her here, another written for frat boys here and a wikipedia article here. Somebody even turned her life into a play.

My favorite story about her would be when she dressed as a nun to break into a convent in pursuit of her lover. The girl in question had been hidden there by her parents, not anticipating that La Maupin would break in, fake the girls death, set fire to the place and then escape with her love (temporarily) in tow. My second favorite story would be the duel she fought against three men, beating them all and injuring their leader. Who she then nursed back to health and started a passionate love affair with. I think whatever definition you care to use for a dominant woman, Julie d’Aubigny would qualify.

I believe this image is of her duel with Louis-Joseph d’Albert de Luynes, son of the Duke of Luynes. That would be the gentleman she injured in a duel and who ended up as a life-long love.

Fantasy beats reality

I have mixed feelings about enema play. I find the fantasy really hot, but the reality somehow doesn’t click in the same way.

I love the idea of something so invasive, intimate and controlling. There are exciting tubes, clinical looking apparatus and thick probes to be inserted. It hints at mad medical experiments by sadistic doctors, as well as a ‘it’s for your own good’ nurse dynamic. I like artwork featuring them (Augustine is always a reliable source) and fiction that describes them (for example Tyjord).

Unfortunately the reality involves stomach cramps, bowel movements and lots of sphincter clenching. None of these are in my list of top 1000 sexy things. They put me more in mind of food poisoning and nights out that go horribly wrong. There’s nothing worse than being packed shoulder to shoulder in a crowded dive bar when your curry from earlier that evening decides it needs to make a break for it. The effects of an enema remind me all to vividly of painful minutes spent desperately clenching while queuing for a scummy single stall toilet that wasn’t clean at the start of the evening, and certainly hasn’t improved since then.

Now that I’ve disgusted everyone with that particular mental picture, let me try and redeem myself with a hot enema related image. This has all the good stuff and not a clenched sphincter in sight.

I found this on the Wet Beehive tumbr. I’m afraid I couldn’t track down an original attribution, so if anyone knows who this striking looking lady is, feel free to leave a suitable comment.

Wise words from the web

There have been a number of thoughtful and interesting blog posts popping up recently. Obviously that doesn’t include anything from this particular location, but several posts from my blogroll have caught me eye.

Firstly, Miss Pearl came up with 33 things every submissive man should know. This is territory that a lot of bloggers have covered in the past, but rarely as succinctly and effectively as Miss Pearl has done here. In a similar advisory vein Ferns tackled the tricky issue of ‘How does a sub say no‘. There’s not easy answer to that, but Ferns does a nice job of exploring the complexities of it. HMP and Dymion delivered a rare double header on the subject of ‘Longevity in D/s relationships’. The original post started over HMP’s blog and Dymion followed it up with his thoughts. Both provided some thoughtful commentary. Finally, Kaya wrote about a very emotional and complex scene from her past. It’s not femdom, and her relationship to BDSM is quite different to my own, yet I found the post fascinating.

In other blog news I was happy to see that Constanze Borgia has started updating her site again. She’s been busy helping out an animal charity, and I’m sure she’d be grateful to anyone who contributed.

I’ve also added the ‘Girl on the Net‘ blog to the ‘Sex & Kink Blogs’ section of my blogroll on the right. It’s more sexy fun times rather than BDSM, but I’ve enjoyed reading it. Plus, the eponymous girl is British and some of her phrases and cultural references points make me smile and think of home.

I’ve no idea what picture is suitable for such a wide range of material, so here’s a naked lady with a whip. You can never go too far wrong there.

This image is appropriately entitled Whip, is by the artist RedPandaDee.

Emergency procedures

I just had a really wonderful scene with Lydia. Many needles and much moaning on my part was involved. However, I don’t want to talk about that tonight. Instead I want to talk about a bad scene. A scene with an abusive asshole of a dominant. Specifically, this scene described by Little Dorky Cyclops. I’m not going to try and summarize it, so feel free to go read it if you want the rest of this post to make sense.

I have to admit that a few years ago, when I was not particularly young and still stupid, I would have been sympathetic but bemused by that scene description. I would have been the idiot saying “Why not just safeword? That’s what it’s for.” Now that I’m definitely older and possibly wiser, I get it. I don’t play in public and I’ve been lucky enough to encounter very few bad dominants. I’ve only really had one session go seriously sour on me (described here and here), but I still completely understand LDC’s reaction in the scene. It’s tough to switch gears and take control back from a dominant. You’re fighting the natural dynamic of the scene and a desire to do your bit to make it work. It’s always tempting to think it’ll get better, that that you just need to hang on till the endorphins kick in. It’s easy to safeword on cramping or going numb, but this scene was a far more complex dynamic, with social pressure added into the mix as well.

Obviously the dominant here – Jefferson is his fetlife handle (aged 50, in NYC) – behaved abusively and there are serious questions the people who attended the event should be asking themselves. Hopefully making this public reduces his chances of going to other events and repeating the process, although given he’s done it before I’m not optimistic. From a submissive (and possibly selfish) perspective it makes me wonder what I can do to avoid getting caught in a similar situation. Even assuming the BDSM community can do a better job of policing itself (big assumption), bad dominants will continue to be a fact of life. So what are good self-defense techniques for a submissive to practice?

In a weird way this problem puts me in mind of a common problem in computer systems, namely handling backup and recovery when disaster strikes. I know that sounds like a bizarre connection, but stick with me on this. The problem computer users often have isn’t defining the recovery process or setting up the emergency systems, it’s making sure they work when needed. They’re hard to test properly and are rarely used. Unfortunately when you need them, you need them to work flawlessly, the first time of asking and in the most difficult circumstances. That’s a really bad combination. Typically people find out their recovery system isn’t working the first time they try and use it.

I wonder if submissives face a similar problem? They have a theoretical mechanism for safety, but the only time they use it is when they’re already in a bad situation. That’s exactly when you want to fall back to a frequently used and easily deployed mechanism, not step further into the unknown.

I’ll continue this post tomorrow with a few more thoughts. Feel free to leave comments until then. I’ll finish with what seems like an appropriate image. Thanks to Little Dorky Cyclops we’ve found out about some of that lurking evil in one particular man.

This image is by the artist Ybar. I found it on the Velvet Underground tumblr.