The beauty of dominant women
Here’s a nice picture to finish off the weekend. Someone is clearly enjoying themselves. It’s probably not slave number 52, but who knows when it comes to masochists. Judging by the bright red color of his bottom she’s being very faithful to the instructions written on him. I hope she keeps that grin going all the way to strike fifty.
As the watermark makes clear, this is originally from the Young Dommes site. I found it on the The Heart’s Dark Desire tumblr.
After yesterday’s lengthy post, here’s something short and sweet courtesy of the artist Caroline O’Grady.
The two images below are taken from her thesis series entitled Dom & Sub. The first is Instigation (part 1) and the second is Post-Play (part 4). You can see the others 3 parts over at on her blog. There’s also Negotiation, Play and Aftercare.
I love the fact she’s using these as part of her academic thesis at her College of Art. It’d certainly make for a more interesting Viva Voce than the dry and boring discussions that typically result.
I’m starting this post with a warning about the links it contains. Normally that would mean I was about to discuss edge play and feature potentially disturbing images. However, in this case the links are to conservative journalists talking about kink. I realize that may still constitute edge play for some people. On the face of it they’re discussing extreme porn from kink.com, but it quickly gets into general issues of consent and sexual ethics.
What started this unlikely flurry of posts was an essay by Emily Witt entitled What Do You Desire. The heart of the piece is a description of a shoot for the Public Disgrace site, but it also encompasses the tech culture, San Francisco culture and Emily’s own personal life. It’s an essay that got a lot of attention across the web, not just from the writers below. Personally I was unimpressed. As a kinky and techy person, who lives on the West Coast and visits the Bay Area often, I expected to read something I could relate to. Something that reflected, at least in some way, my experiences. Instead it comes across as a high concept piece. Rather than immersing herself into the culture and drawing conclusions from it, I got the impression Emily went in with a concept and cherry picked her observations to match.
While I might not have been impressed, a lot of other people were. What particularly entertained me were a series of posts from conservative writers. Roughly in order (as they responded to each other) there was: Rod Dreher, Noah Millman, Alan Jacobs, Noah Millman 2, Rod Dreher 2, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Conor Friedersdorf and Rod Dreher 3.
There’s enough material in those articles for a dozen posts, but I’ll try and limit myself to just this one. As you might expect they have a few interesting insights scattered randomly through a whole steaming mound of ignorance. I don’t fault them too much for that. No doubt if I was writing about Conservative Evangelical Christians in the South on the basis of a single provocative article I’d also reveal a lot of my ignorance about that group. What I will fault them for is the horrible underlying logic in some of their arguments. Particularly Rod Dreher writing here on the subject of consent.
His argument is, at the heart of it, a variant on the slippery slope fallacy. He starts out by defining consent as the way people judge right from wrong. He then points out consent alone can never be enough, because people can consent to terrible things. For example, the cannibal who ate a willing victim. And therefore, if consent is not your guiding light, then what can be? How can anyone define what is morally right? The only answer must be God.
For all its many flaws, Christianity (like Islam, like Judaism) at least offers a standard by which to judge right and wrong….
…Christianity at least holds on to the idea that Truth exists, and is knowable, however imperfectly.
The huge glaring flaw in this appeal to absolutism is of course the problem of defining religious Truth. Saying Jesus would have frowned on cannibalism is uncontroversial. But what was his position on silk scarves tied to the headboard? Or a little nipple biting during coitus? And if that’s OK, does he draw the line at nipple clamps? How about anal sex between a loving couple? What if it’s a loving gay couple? I haven’t noticed too many burning bushes appearing recently to give us guidance on these areas.
Of course what people like Rod Dreher really want to impose with a religious standard is their standard. They really know what God meant to say. Of course in reality they have no divine hotline. They’re just people making judgement calls about right and wrong like everyone else. They just don’t trust the rest of us to do it properly.
I’ll leave you with an image of two sinners doing terribly wicked things. I know it might look like a beautiful image of two people enjoying an intense and intimate moment, but that can’t be right. Nipple clamps are clearly the work of Beelzebub.
The image is from the always excellent bondage is not a crime tumblr.
After a few weeks in which we were both traveling a lot, I finally got chance to get together with Lydia tonight. Cock and ball torture was on the menu. A lot of prodding, thwacking and zapping later, I’m a happily blissed out bunny. A bit tender and sore in some places, but definitely happy.
I can only hope the gentleman in the image below felt equally good after Mz Berlin got done with him. He certainly shouldn’t have been able to complain about a lack of focus on her part.
This image is from the Captive Male site. I originally found it on the In A Humbler tumblr (although that version had the site watermark trimmed off it).
Weirdly enough after writing the above post, while scanning through the tumblr reposts of this image, I came across this tumblr post, which is actually from the male submissive in the picture (Bondage Toy). Even more strangely he’s located in my part of the world and has obviously played with Lydia in the past. Of all the thousands of CBT pictures I could have picked for the post, what are the odds I’d pick not only someone local who’d played with Lydia, but also left enough information for me to find that out? Particularly given the only thing of his in the shot are a pair of dangling testicles.
As the title states, I’ve added a bunch of new tumblrs to the Femdom Image page. I’ve also cleaned out any dead or dormant sites and removed a few that were no longer showing appropriate content. The new entries are…
The image below is taken from the Dudes in Distress tumblr. It’s a nice combination of colorful rope and predicament bondage. He’s one lucky distressed dude.
Sadly the post title doesn’t refer to another entry in the eponymous Dummies series. Which is a shame, as I think it might make an entertaining read. Instead it refers to a one-woman show by Eleanor O’Brien. It’s based on her experiences training as a pro-domme in NYC and looks like it might make for an amusing evening. Apparently one of the dommes she mimics is called Margo, but I’m sure that’s no relation to the NYC based Miss Margo of my blogroll! If you’re in Portland and interested in attending, it’s playing this weekend (14/15/16 June) at the CoHo theater.
I have to admit my first thought on seeing the original article title – once I got over the strange syntax (surely it should be Domination for Dummies) – was that if you’re a dummy, you probably shouldn’t be a dominatrix. My second thought, hard on the heels of the first, was I wonder if anyone has a fetish for incompetent dominatrices? The kind who’d hit themselves with their own whip, giggle during serious interrogation roleplay and tie themselves into knots rather than the submissive. I’ve never heard of such a kink, but if the internet has taught us anything, it’s that if you can imagine it, somebody will fetishize it. If it does exist, then it strikes me as one of the most dangerous kinks you could possibly have.
Picking a picture this post was tricky. I didn’t want to use a recent shot and risk an angry email from an offended domme. Luckily when you’re looking for incompetency in kink, you can always turn to 70’s porn. This one’s a real doozy. There’s a weird belt leash, an incompetently waved whip, some strange eye makeup, a slave apparently enjoying his dinner and a domme about to brain him with a champagne bottle for some reason. Perhaps she think slaves should be christened in the same way ships are?
Like the title says, I’ve added a number of blogs to my femdom blog page and the dynamic blog roll over on the right. Hopefully many of them will be both new and interesting to my readers. Specifically the added entries are…
I’ve also added my first non-English blog – Lady Lua and net – which is written in Spanish. My foreign language skills extend as far as restaurant menus and cooking terms, so judging blogs is tricky. However, I occasionally get emailed links to non-English blogs that look interesting, so I’ve decided I’ll take a shot with on-line translation tools and include a few that I think might be good.
Also, while I’m on the subject of blogs, does anyone know what happened to Lily over at the Black Leather Belt blog? I always enjoyed her writing and she simply seems to have vanished from the blogosphere.
Finally, the image below is taken from the newly added blog of Mistress Liliane Hunt. She’s a San Francisco based pro-domme, shown here indulging in some puppy play.
Stabbity recently put up a post on the well worn expression – “The gift of submission”. This crops up fairly regularly in D/s discussions and I think it’s fair to say that Stabbity is not a fan. She doesn’t like the mismatch between the D/s dynamic and the cultural assumptions that come with a gift. For example, it’s rude to take back a gift, but entirely correct to take back submission should that be desirable and/or necessary.
I agree with her general point, but also dislike the expression as it’s commonly used for a different reason. To me it always seems to have an element of hypocrisy. A gift is given primarily for the benefit of the recipient. I’m not going to give someone a bottle of wine and then expect to be able to drink half of it. Yet submission is almost always about meeting personal needs. Obviously one always wants to do that in a mutually beneficial relationship, but it’s rarely a case of being singularly beneficial for the sake of the domme. In fact, of all the situations where the enjoyment is unevenly distributed, I’d bet that the vast majority skew to favor the submissive. Beating a kinky partner when you’re not really into it is being GGG. Beating an unwilling partner because you’re kinky is abuse.
Despite all these problems, I would like to reclaim or recast the expression. For me when I think about the gift of submission, I think about it being a gift to myself. I’m not sure how I ended up wired as both kinky and submissive, but I do now appreciate that it happened. For many years I compartmentalized that side of myself, treating it as something distinct from who I actually was. Acknowledging it and incorporating it into my life certainly hasn’t made my life simpler, but has made it far richer and more interesting.
In contrast to the standard usage of the phrase, which paints submission in an altruistic light, I’ve often been tempted to see it as a selfish trait. That it’s a flaw in me that will put additional demands on a partner. Thinking of it as something that I’ve been given, as a gift that gives me unusual yet desirable characteristics (plus a rich source of NSFW anecdotes), helps me fight that negative view. It’s not quite a superpower, but it can be a complex-yet-beneficial power.
The image is by JSV Photography. He has a blog here, including this entry on the above photograph. He also has an eBook of bondage for those of you into beautiful women in rope. I originally found the image on the Redhead with a Riding Crop tumblr.
This is kind of a screwed up image. It’s by German Jim and, like a lot of his work, has a composite feel to it. The vintage drawing seems to have been married with a photograph for the face.
However, artist techniques aside, what’s really odd is the aim of the lady. I’ve done a number of GS scenes and, to be frank, women are not the best aimers in the world. They don’t have the pipework for it. If they can hit my mouth, from a few inches away, seven out of ten times, then I consider myself ahead of the game. Hitting the target from a standing position while staring in a different direction and wearing a big skirt, well that’s a goddam miracle. I’m blessed with better aiming equipment, and I couldn’t pull this shot off. This lady should pee for the Olympics.
The origin and subject of this artwork is a little obscure. It’s signed as ‘Faun Songs’, which would seem to map to this deviant art account, although I can’t see it in the gallery there. It started out on a similarly named tumblr, although I found it on the Vengeful Goddess tumblr. I believe it’s fan art of two characters from a webcomic called Homestuck, which I’ve never heard of before but is apparently fairly big in its own way.
Whatever the source and inspiration, I like it a lot. There’s a real warmth to both their interaction and the style with which the drawing has been rendered. The hand around the throat and the murmured expression of praise are also nice touches that really make the scene work.
