F – Page 43 – Femdom Resource

The beauty of the visual

Tumblr is a wonderful resource for writing blogs like this one. I try and create a new post every day, and without the vast number of femdom tumblrs out there to draw on, I don’t think I’d be able to achieve that. Most tumblrs, particularly the sexually explicit ones, focus on a single theme. However, I always enjoy stumbling across a site that casts its net a touch wider.

Blogs in general tend to be one dimensional. This one is a good case in point. If I was writing about the multidimensional paltego there would be a lot more posts on food, wine, cocktails, books, politics, history and science. Unfortunately consuming a written blog post takes time, and so writing broadly limits your audience to those who enjoy all (or at least most) of your topics. As it is you can be a teetotal fruitarian Republican who thinks that Romulus and Remus are Star Trek characters, and still enjoy this blog if you also happen to like femdom. Although if you do perfectly match that description then you have my sympathy. Let’s never be friends.

The beauty of a tumblr is how easily it can be consumed. A viewer can spend 10 minutes or 10 seconds on an image and still have an appreciation for it. This makes it much easier to create a wide ranging blog that had broad appeal. For example, the shot below is originally from the photographer Simon Pais-Thomas, but I found it via the Avalanche tumblr. It’s obviously curated by someone who likes elegant and forceful women. He or she also has a penchant for feet. But along with the femdom related shots, there are bookshops, graveyards, pop culture, architecture and humor. It’s a visually appealing glimpse into someone’s brain.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in the background to tumblr and its design philosophy, the New York Times recently carried an interesting article on it.

When no news is good news

The extended trailer for the movie Cloud Atlas was recently released. It’s a movie I’m really looking forward to, and it marks the return of the Wachowskis, who shot to fame with the original Matrix movie. They also released a short introductory video which is notable for featuring the first official public appearance by Lana Wachowski. She was formerly known as Larry until going through gender reassignment. As this Salon articles discusses, the real big story here seems to be what a non-event this was. There was no big media kerfuffle, just a lot of general positive articles that covered the facts in a non-judgmental way. What a pleasant surprise.

As far as femdom links go, there is a connection, as Lana was (and presumably still is) reported to be a fairly kinky person. She attended BDSM clubs and had a well publicized relationship with Ilsa Strix, a highly regarded pro-domme from LA, as described in an infamous Rolling Stone article. It’s an unwritten law of human nature that people tend to believe what they read, unless they happen to know something about the subject in question. In those cases the writing is invariably found to be horribly wrong and misinformed. Oddly enough, this doesn’t cause people to stop believing everything else they read. I have zero personal knowledge of any of the people in the Rolling Stone article, but it does seem like a lot of sensationalized gossip cooked up by people only peripherally involved. The BDSM comments and discussion of pro-domme behavior are also fairly ludicrous. My favorite was this one, describing how Ilsa Strix played…

If her submissive said, ‘I don’t really think I’m interested in needles,’ she might just come up and, boom, put a couple of needles under their fingernails

Any pro-domme who thinks that a good way to introduce piercing to a submissive is needles under fingernails is going to go broke in short order. By all accounts Ilsa was a smart and excellent domme, and so it’s quotes like that which make me doubt the veracity of the article beyond the very basic facts.

I’ll leave you with a couple of shots of Trinity, from the first Matrix movie. It’s one of my favorite movies, and the appeal of watching Carrie Anne Moss kick ass in slow motion never really fades.

In repose

Yesterday’s post promised hot babes in skin tight leather, and while that was originally intended sarcastically, I thought this photograph would fulfill my promise while still being an interesting image. I’ve no idea if it’s posed or a candid shot taken between poses. There’s no watermark and I couldn’t track down an attribution. I find it kind of sweet. A sleeping person naturally draws out a sentimental and protective reaction. I’d guess it’s an evolutionary programmed response. She’ll be up to beat your ass and slap you with those gloves, just as soon as she’s grabbed a quick 40 winks.

I found this on the Fetish World tumblr site.

Squaring the circle

I was sorry to see that Ms K has decided to retire from professional domination. I’ve never met her – it has been many years since I returned to the UK – but from her blog posts it was clear she was a thoughtful and conscientious pro-domme, and it’s always a shame to lose someone like that from the profession. I found her follow-up post listing some of her reasons for stopping a thought provoking one.

I was finding it hard to reconcile being the Dominant woman I am with feeling a sense of having to oblige those subs who were paying for my time, with things they enjoyed even if I was beginning to find those things less interesting …[snip]… I gave up as I only wanted to play with subs prepared to do it my way.
Ms K

All jobs require compromise at some level. It doesn’t matter if you’re the founder of a start-up or a cog in a big corporate machine, there are always trade-offs to make and boring tasks to complete. Yet most jobs don’t have the idea of dominance and control at the heart of them. As a software developer, I might not like every feature I deliver, but there’s no conflict with my inherent software developeriness. The same can’t be said for a dominant doing something she doesn’t enjoy. What does a domme do when the demands of the business contradict her reasons for doing it?

Professional domination is frequently described in a derogatory fashion as service topping, and that’s something that annoys me twice over. Firstly, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with service topping. Making someone happy and delivering a great experience is a wonderful thing. I don’t think anything less of a chef just because she decides to cook professionally. Secondly, I think both service topping and ‘true domination’ (whatever that means) can occur in both professional and non-professional relationships. Money is only one aspect of many in a relationship, professional or otherwise. But I have to agree that it can be a particularly gnarly aspect to deal with.

It’s also a problem that cuts both ways. As a submissive I don’t want someone simply running through a list of activities with me. I want a dominant who is enjoying what she’s doing and expressing her natural creativity as we play. Specifying a ‘to do’ list runs counter to the D/s dynamic, but several dommes I’ve played with in the past wanted exactly that. I’d guess that was partly to make their lives easier, and mostly because too many clients in the past started with “Oh you can do anything you want to me Mistress!” and finished up with “Well I don’t like that, and we didn’t do this, and why this? That wasn’t what I wanted.”

It’s my personal suspicion that the most financially successful pro-dommes are those who can get personal satisfaction both from one-off service top type sessions and from building longer-term relationships involving more D/s elements. I’ve also anecdotally observed that a lot of pro-dommes start with a lot of the former and evolve towards the latter as their careers and interests progress. It strikes me as a pity that both dommes and clients aren’t more open about the distinction between the two approaches. Everything gets lumped under domination, when in fact that’s simply a catch-all for anything under the BDSM and fetish umbrella.

I’m afraid I don’t have any images of Ms K to use (her website has been taken down), so I’ll instead go with another retired pro-domme, the legendary Isabella Sinclaire. It was originally shot for bootlovers.com.

A day of much torture

I was seriously tortured twice today. The first time involved clips, whips, needles and Domina Yuki. That was a lot of fun. The second time was an extended tease and denial session, culminating in a ruined climax, courtesy of United Airlines. I’m sure some pro-dommes think they’re experts at frustrating and denying clients, but they’ve got nothing on the major US airlines. Having a flight repeatedly postponed for 5 hours, only to be cancelled because the pilots have run out of flying hours, creates a level of suffering to daunt even the toughest masochist. It made the handful of needles I got shoved in my scrotum earlier that day seem like a pleasant diversion.

The single upside to the entire fiasco was watching an attractive and mature flight attendant in a natty blue suit boss people around in an officious manner. It wasn’t quite the image below (I can’t imagine those heels are good for traveling in), but in the cultural and visual wasteland that is the average airport, I’ll take what I can get.

I found this on the femdom-sm tumblr.

Site Updates

I’ve been doing a little housekeeping. However, before I get into the changes, I’ve a request for information. Otto’s spanking art blog got killed recently by those good folks over at Google. Does anyone know if he’s set up home elsewhere? I’d like to link again if he has. Also Augustine seems to have closed his account at imagefap where he posted all his work. Does anyone know of a new site for him? I really enjoy his drawings and it’d be a great shame if he’s vanished from the internet.

That said, let me get to the changes…

I’ve done some cleanup to the Femdom Fiction page. I removed a number of dead links and added new ones to the BoundStories site and to Bella’s list of femdom stories.

On the BDSM Equipment page I added links to Cupid’s Bedroom and Chastity Heaven.

There are three new blogs lurking over on the blogroll to the right and on my main Blog links page. These are:

Unspeakable Axe written by Axe, a NYC based submissive, who is also responsible for the most excellent Masocast.
Pieces of Margo written by Miss Margo, who (among other things) works as a professional switch in NYC.
Post Modern Sleaze written by Electronic Doll, a female BDSM practitioner based in London.

And on the Femdom Image page I’ve added a number of tumblr links.

Finally, let me say one thing to those people who have sent (or plan to send) me links to their tumblrs or blogs. I love to get these. I always try and look. However, if they’ve only got a handful of posts (or a handful of pages in the tumblr case) then I typically just bookmark them and come back to look in a few weeks time. So many sites gets started and, after an initial burst of activity, quickly die. So either wait for a month or two before submitting the link to me, or expect that I’ll keep an eye on it but not post the link immediately.

I’ll leave you with an image I found on the newly added Dominant Ladies tumblr. I believe it’s of Maggie Q and taken from her new show Nikita. I’ve another shot of her in a more fetish outfit and brandishing a gun here. I haven’t seen the new series yet. The original film by Luc Besson was excellent. The American remake and subsequent TV series less so. Whatever the qualities of this latest series, as a beautiful but deadly assassin, Maggie Q certainly looks the part.

Context is king

I’ve often observed that the context for an image is very important. Put an image in a fashion magazine and I’ll think of it as a sales pitch for a brand or a designer. My instinct will be to look at the clothes and the model from an intellectual, not emotional, point of view. Advertisements are about selling things, so there’s an inherent degree of mistrust in the interaction. Put the same image in a femdom tumblr stream and it changes how I perceive it quite dramatically. I’ll start looking for and projecting D/s elements. I might spin little stories about the scene in my head. I may think of myself in the scene, or how I’d interact with the model. It’s exactly the same image I’d flip past in a copy of Vogue, but somehow somebody else labeling it as erotic and kinky gives me permission to do the same. It creates a far more emotional reaction.

The two shots below are examples of the kind of images I’m thinking about. I found them both on the Strangely Compelling tumblr. The first was a shot for Numero magazine by Greg Kadel. You can see more images from the shoot here. The second is from a sequence titled Orchidee Noir by the photographer Jose Herrera for Oxxo Magazine.

Public service film, British style

This advert for road safety strikes me as quintessentially British. Sexual innuendo, double entendres and weirdness in seemingly normal suburbs are a big part of British culture and humor. Road safety and kink aren’t obvious companions, but go ahead and click the link and you’ll see why I featured it. It puts me in mind of Personal Services, a British movie from the 80’s about commercial sex, kink and suburban strangeness. The scenes in the film bear no relationship to any kind of sex work I’ve ever encountered, but it is pretty funny, as this set of clips demonstrate.

While I’m on the subject of advertisements and motorbikes, am I the only submissive male around here with a crush on Carly Foulkes, the girl from the T-Mobile ads? I always kind of liked her in the early pink look adverts, and throwing on motorcycle leathers only added to the allure. There’s something very sexy about a girl who can ride a bike or drive fast. A skintight leather suit doesn’t hurt either. I’ll leave you with a picture of the beautiful Ms Foulkes herself.

Relieving the stress

In the last couple of posts I talked about stress and panic in BDSM scenes, particularly when playing with sensory deprivation and bondage. Dealing with just that pairing alone can be challenging for a submissive, and it gets even tougher when pain is stirred into the mix. I therefore thought in this third and final post on the topic I’d share a technique that I’ve found helps me deal with such sessions.

What I try and do when the hoods and straps go on, and I feel that first tickle of panic, is to visualize the scene from outside. I try and create a mental model of the room and imagine what a camera would capture. I picture what I must look like, where my limbs are, how they are positioned on the furniture, where the ropes are. I picture the dominant, where I think her body is in relation to mine, what equipment she has. I try to integrate what limited sensory input I have into this mental model – the feel of a cushion, the tightness of a rope, the touch of her hand.

The goal is to overcome the turning inwards that comes with panic. That overwhelming feeling that nothing else matters but to escape. Picturing the scene helps keep a coherent thought processing running. It also ground me in the reality of what is happening. I can ‘see myself’ and reassure myself that I’m in a safe place. Typically doing this mental exercise for a few minutes gets me past difficult moments and into a place where I can relax into the bondage.

A variation on this is just to picture the dominant’s face. I often do this when pain is added to sensory deprivation. It’s an easier picture to create when rational thought is hard. It also allows me to make a stronger emotional connection and to feel that I’m suffering for a purpose. That I’m suffering to please this specific and important person.

I’ll finish with a couple of beautiful faces that I’d be happy to try picturing if they felt like inflicting some pain on me.

The first of these is the actress Famke Janssen, who played Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye (in action here and here). She also played Jean Grey in the two X-Men films (the third one only exists in an alternate universe I refuse to be a part of). The second shot is Amber Heard, an actress who was in Zombieland (good), The Rum Diary (bad) and the upcoming Robert Rodriguez movie, Machete Kills (who knows). I found both images via the Dominant Ladies tumblr.

Blogpocalypse

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.