Fm – Page 110 – Femdom Resource

Stress and Submission

This is my last post (for a while at least) on the topic of the alpha submissive (previous posts are available here, here and here). I’m afraid I’m finishing with a bit of a rant.

You can guarantee that whenever this topic comes up somebody will start talking about powerful people having stressful jobs. They’ll talk about difficult decisions, the responsibility of power and how BDSM and submission is a way to temporarily escape from that. For example, here’s an Alternet article and a Psychology Today article making exactly that argument. This is, in my not particularly humble opinion, complete bullshit. Not the part about submission as escape, just all the rest of it.

You know what’s stressful? Juggling two minimum wage jobs to try and cover your rent. What’s a difficult decision? Trying to decide if you should wipe out your savings on a hospital visit. Responsibility is bringing up your children in a not so great neighborhood while your deadbeat ex stiffs you on child support payments. Forget the guy investing $100M for Goldman Sachs. Give him $100 in his personal checking account and see how he feels about that.

I’m lucky enough to have a well paid job now, but I grew up in a family with very little money. I remember the stress that any unexpected expense could generate. There was always an underlying anxiety that something would go wrong and we wouldn’t be able to deal with it. Money might not buy happiness, but it sure as hell takes the edge off unhappiness. It turns problems into inconveniences. And nobody needs a good beating to take their mind off an inconvenience.

I think society prefers to think about executive and finance jobs as being particularly stressful and responsible in order to justify their incredible salaries. In some cases they may well be worth those salaries. Steve Jobs probably was. Jeffrey Skilling probably wasn’t. But whatever their worth, when the biggest downside to a decision is that you might have to settle for a new Ferrari rather than that yacht you had your eye on, that’s not a stressful decision. If anyone needs BDSM to take a ‘breather from the growing burden on selfhood’ (to quote the Psychology Today article), it’s the guy trying to cheaply fix the transmission on the 13 year old Ford that he needs to get to work tomorrow.

This is Miss Davenshaw, a London based pro-domme. She specializes in roleplaying corporate scenarios. So if you fancy being taken in hand by a strict female executive, I suggest dropping her a line.

A theory revisited

I had a lot of interesting comments to my post from a few days ago entitled ‘The Alpha Submissive‘. Sadly nobody had any hard data on the dubious theory that male submissives tends to be successful alpha types in daily life so, as usual, I’m going to be forced to make stuff up as I go along. With that proviso in mind, I thought I’d revisit the topic over the next few posts.

One point I should have made clear is that I’m not suggesting the contrary theory of submissives being particularly unsuccessful. I just suspect that the two factors are uncorrelated with career success, in much the same way that other sexual preferences appear to be.

Most comments agreed with me that the clients of pro-dommes are a skewed and unrepresentative sample set. However, I think it’s a mistake to assume that they’re an entirely uniform crowd of overpaid middle aged guys. When writing the original post I was put in mind of this article on two NYC pro-dommes. One of the dommes comes across as a scammer, and a great advertisement for doing your research before meeting anyone. The other is a real professional with a variety of clients.

Jesse, a 58-year-old transit worker, is probably her favorite; they often meet and chat about school and work before sessions. He even gets a discount from Georgia, who knows he’s strapped financially. “Every paycheck, I take a little bit of money out and put it in an envelope,” he says.

From the article Jesse sounds like a nice guy, but I doubt he’s the kind of person most people think of when they think of a pro-domme client.

I’m once again slightly stumped on what image I should feature for this post, so I’ll just go with something visually appealing from Men in Pain. I found this via the Classy Femdom tumblr.

Ask an expert

When it comes to talking to adolescents about kink I tend to steer a wide course. I don’t have any children – a state of affairs I’m quite content with – and assume that parenting skills are above my pay grade. Nobody wants to hear from the happily unattached single guy exactly how they’re screwing up their kids. However, I do think I can spot good and bad advice when I see it, and I happened to run across great examples of both in the last few days.

On the positive side we have this from the excellent Dan Savage. Personally I find it astonishing what the son in question shares with his mother. I’d rather do CBT with used rusty fishhooks that share a sexual fantasy with my parents, but I admire his mother for being smart enough to not freak out and to contact Dan for advice.

On the negative side we have a sequence of blog posts from Miriam Grossman MD – here, here, here and here. I would say her arguments are laughable, but she’s a qualified doctor who is making money from advising the parents and children that come to her. So not really a laughing matter. She automatically conflates BDSM with abuse and sets up ludicrous strawman arguments around the idea of consent. Apparently psychologically healthy women dream about wedding gowns rather than handcuffs. Does that mean I should be dreaming about tuxedos and cummerbunds?

Of course the really annoying thing is that she’s not wrong in describing Christian Grey as abusive. He absolutely is. Just not for any of the reasons she gives. So thanks E L James. You’ve got me agreeing with the crazy crowd.

I’ve no idea what image would be suitable for this post. So I’ll finish with a shot of a lady biting a man on the ass. Enjoy!

The publicity machine

The 50 Shades movie is hitting screens (to some less than flattering reviews), and that means the publicity machine is cranking into high gear. There’s articles on everything from the spin-off products, through the people protesting it to the douchebags trying to cash in.

Fortunately, amongst all the dross, there are a few reasonable articles that have emerged. This one has some good background on why someone might enjoyed BDSM. This one by Lady Velvet Steel covers why real kinky play is so different from what the movie portrays. Finally, this gives the view from the submissive perspective on the good and the bad in the movie.

The alpha submissive

Is there any hard data to backup the oft cited theory that most submissive people are powerful and successful alpha types in their public lives? This recent article by Susan Wright is the latest to trot this idea out, and it often gets referenced in mainstream discussions of D/s. Personally I’m skeptical.

The only data I usually see is anecdotal from pro-dommes, and that doesn’t strike me as a great source. Firstly, their sample set is massively skewed towards middle aged guys with jobs that provide them with hundreds of dollars of discretionary income. Secondly, they have a vested interest to portray their clients in a positive light. No smart business person says bad things about their product or customers. Even outside the professional realm I think there’s a tendency to react to the perceived mainstream perception of submission. Kinksters assume people will think submissives are weak, weird or wimpy, so emphasize the opposite.

So I ask the question: Does anyone know of an actual study on this? Or is it just one of those sex myths (like supposed sex trafficking at the World Cup or Super Bowl) that gets endlessly repeated despite a lack of actual evidence?

Great hair

Here’s a final hair and shaving related post to go with my two previous ones (here and here). In this case it’s a study in contrasts. Her beautiful long cascading hair and his stylish short haircut and shaven groin. I’m afraid I have no idea who the original creator of this image is.

I found this on the forBABALON tumblr.

Pain two ways

I had two women inflict pain on me today. I’m pretty sure the first didn’t intend to. She was my very sweet and careful dental hygienist who found it necessary to prod and scrape my teeth with sharp spiky things. The second women was Lydia, and she definitely intended to hurt me. I could tell by the way she laughed each time I groaned. However, I’ll always take caning, suffocating and nipple clamps over that vibrating pick they use to get tartar off teeth in the hard to reach places. That’s a bit much even for my masochistic nature.

The young lady below appears to be offering some sort of dental inspection. Although neither that chair nor the knife look to be standard equipment. I do hope he has good insurance to cover all eventualities.

I believe the above image is from Sado Beauties.

A careful squeeze

There are two great expressions in this image from Divine Bitches. You can see tension in both faces, but in two different ways. It’s a nicely balanced moment, with just small variations in pressure able to tip it one way or another.

Barbershop Duo

This is my last fan art post for the moment. It’s also the strangest. The two characters below are humanoid personas developed by the Crypton Future Media corporation of Japan. The woman is Hatsune Miku and the man Kagamine Len. They’re both singers voiced by Vocaloid voice synthesizer technology developer by the Yamaha corporation, and have apparently performed on stage as animated projections. If you think that sounds like something from a William Gibson novel, you’re not alone in that.

Mitku is apparently ‘an android diva in the near-future world where songs are lost’ and her name is ‘easily the most recognizable of the vocaloids’. I’m not sure what inspired the artist to depict her shaving the genitals of another virtual persona character, but I’m glad he or she did. It doesn’t do much for me erotically but it’s the kind of oddball find that puts a smile on my face.

I believe the artist for this goes under the handle wokada. I found it on the Felm Cyber tumblr.

Murder Tie

I seem to be on a bit of a fan art kick. This is another fan drawing from a TV series I’ve not seen, and was inspired by a movie I have. In this case the TV series is Hannibal. The inspiration is the Hannibal Lecter character featured in the novels of Thomas Harris and the movies Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs. I believe the two characters below are Hannibal himself and his psychiatrist in the TV show Bedelia_Du_Maurier.

There are actually three drawings in this series and you can see them all on the original tumblr post. The tie is apparently a reference to a costume element from the show.