Fm – Page 135 – Femdom Resource

Red doesn’t always mean stop

I was intrigued to read this article on the relationship between color and behavior. Its basic conclusions are that color can have a significant effect on emotional response, and that people associated with red appear more sexually appealing. Women in red bordered images are rated more attractive, red clothes generate more hits on dating sites and hitchhikers in red have a better chance of being picked up. It apparently works for both men and women, although the article doesn’t cite any studies featuring men as the subjects.

Clearly this is where I’ve been going wrong. My wardrobe is full of blue, grey and black. I should have been modelling my style on Santa Claus or The Flash. Or possibly even Little Red Riding Hood, if I wanted to throw a bit of kinky cross dressing into the mix.

The mistress in this Divine Bitches shoot has certainly got the red look well sorted out. She’s even color coordinated her electroshock prod. I wonder if the attraction created by her dress is neatly offset by the pain of being shocked in his mouth? That’s the kind of useful survey that scientists never seem to get around to.

Nothing to be sniffed at

Over at the Pure Liquid Kink blog there’s an interest post up about scent. It ponders why scent play isn’t more common, and why it isn’t talked about it more. After all sense of smell is a huge part of our sensorium.

Offhand I can think of a bunch of different reasons for its limited usage. Firstly, it’s hard to control. It’s relatively easy to modify your appearance or the sounds you make. In contrast making your body give off a particular scent is more of a black art. Secondly, it’s tricky to schedule. It takes time or a gym visit to develop a good sexy funk and, unless you have immediate access to a shower, it can’t be removed instantly. So planning is required. Finally, it’s a tough thing not to share. What’s sexy for a partner might not be so sexy to share with your work colleagues. After all, you wouldn’t want them nicknaming you after a well known Terry Pratchett character.

…his smell has become strong enough to not only melt earwax but to acquire a separate existence. In fact, it outclasses him, and is usually referred to in text as being almost another character entirely, who occasionally arrives ahead of Ron, opts to stick around for a while after his departure, and even goes to upper-class parties without him.
Wikipedia entry on Foul Old Ron

While that kind of smell is a little more edge play than I care for, the overall idea of scent play is a hot one for me. The natural perfume of a woman is sexy. It’s both a very physical and very intimate thing. And while it’s true that scent doesn’t get talked about a huge amount, there’s clearly a lot of interest in it. Whenever I see pro-dommes or porn stars selling clothing items, smell is frequently a big advertising point, whether it’s funky sneakers or more intimately fragranced items.

I found this image on the Adore Femdom tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution.

Me not think too good

It has been a long day. I did an intense and very enjoyable session with Cynthia Stone on the afternoon and followed it with an excellent dinner at Spago. I’m certainly not complaining, but my ability to write coherent and witty posts may have been curtailed. Not that there was ever a great potential there to start with.

While I attempt to sleep off this cocktail of adrenalin, endorphins and alcohol, I’ll leave you with a shot I found on the wonderfully named Food, Fucking and Femdom tumblr. That’s pretty much my favorite three things in life. In this particular case I love the blurred cane and the well marked ass.

The mystery of the disappearing dildo

I’ve never read any of the Harry Potter books, but a reverse image search tells me this is fan art featuring two of the characters – Harry and Ginny. Presumably she’s showing him her latest magic trick. Using just an ordinary school tie and a completely conventional strap-on harness, she can make her magic wand disappear completely from view. It’s a neat trick, but I’m going to bet that Harry has a fair idea where she has hidden it.

I’m afraid I don’t know the original artist. I found it on the Felm Cyber tumblr (originally larger version available here).

Guilt+Force=?

This is continuation of yesterday’s post on ‘force’ based scenes, originally triggered by this post by Stabbity. Reading those first will probably help this make more sense.

Force in a BDSM scene can undoubtedly be very hot. For one thing it suggests passion and emotion. As a submissive being on the receiving end of that is energizing. It’s hard to be forceful towards something you’re indifferent about. Force in a scene also brings in ideas of objectification and control. A lot of BDSM toys are about removing some element of control, whether that’s over motion, speech, sight or sphincter muscles. Force can be a further extension of that, removing the ability to control consent, albeit in a consensual non-consent kind of way.

I get all those aspects of force in a scene. The one associated aspect that does puzzle me is the idea of removing or shifting guilt. This came up in the comments to Stabbity’s post.

I also feel that the use of force enables a sub who is ashamed of a certain desire to experience it without guilt. I see it most frequently in regard to forced bi scenarios. The sub wants it but doesn’t want to admit (either to others or to himself) that he wants it. So by passing off the responsibility to the dom, he’s essentially free to indulge without worry. – roo-roo

This is a view I’ve seen expressed many times in the past, and I have to say I don’t get it. And I mean that in the ‘I personally don’t understand’ way, not in the ‘it’s wrong’ way. Can guilt be really shifted so easily? Mixing the complex emotions of a forced BDSM scene to a genuine sense of guilt sounds like a combustible emotional mix. If a traumatic childhood experience with a Salvation Army lady had left me with fetish for stealing from charity collection boxes, I’d (hopefully) feel very guilty about that. Would dragging a domme into my coin pilfering schemes make me feel any better? Can guilt be shared or even shifted like that? It seems such a reductive view of an emotion. Perhaps it depends on someone’s ability to compartmentalize and buy into their own stories and fantasies. Maybe if I roleplayed in scenes I’d understand this better.

As I said, it’s not an unusual or uncommon view on force in scenes, but it does leave me scratching my head. Perhaps the fact I’m not an emotional masochist may have something to do with that. While I ponder that, I’ll leave you with another fun piece of artwork, this by Kami Tora. Not quite as overtly physical as the Stanton drawings from yesterday, but it does have some nice hair pulling and forceful pegging.

Use the force

Stabbity has started an interesting discussion on ‘forced’ scenes over on her blog Not Just Bitchy. There are a lot of ideas worth digging into, both in the post and the comments. For the moment I’ll start with her basic idea, which is that the fantasy of being forced to submit (imagine quotes around that if you prefer) is partly a fantasy about submission and domination being easy. It removes the risk of screwing up on both sides of the D/s equation. I kind of get this from the dominant point of view, but I’m not so sure about the submissive side.

For a dominant there are always a lot of choices in a scene. Just picking up a bundle of rope raises issues of where to tie it, how tightly, what to attach it to, when to loosen it, etc. And that’s before anyone has even been hit, shocked, pierced or penetrated. Adding force into the mix adds a safety margin to decisions. It suggests that the scene isn’t primarily for the benefit of the submissive and therefore there’s less to get wrong. If that wasn’t enough warm-up for you or that penetration was a little rougher than you like, well that’s just tough. I’m forcing you to do it.

On the submissive side I’m more skeptical, because personally I don’t worry all that much about screwing up in a scene. That’s not to say I’m some perfect submissive. I worry about communication. I worry about the intensity I can take. I worry about getting a cramp after we’ve spent 30 minutes getting me bound in just the right position. I worry about a spider scuttling across my naked body when I can’t move. But all these things are just as much an issue in a forced scene. I’ll safeword out if a major limit is exceeded whatever the nature of the scene (particularly if arachnids have decided to crash the party). Similarly the quality of my communication isn’t affected by being forced. I worry about being a good or a bad submissive, but not typically about screwing up.

That’s not to say force doesn’t offer some interesting possibilities for the submissive, but I’ll save further thoughts for another post. In the meantime I’ll leave you with some artwork by Eric Stanton. He was always a great illustrator of powerful forceful women who could physically bully and dominate weaker men.

Oxygen. An overrated luxury.

I’m not a big fan of social media. I’ve got accounts on things like facebook and twitter, but I never really use them. Mostly I don’t see the point. However, recently Lydia has started using the Vine application and for once I kind of get it. Having a friend tweet what they’re doing 160 characters or less seems pointless, but seeing a little video clip suddenly brings the whole thing to life. It’s information rich enough to be interesting while being short enough (6 seconds or less) to not require significant time investment.

I got to enjoy a great breathplay session with Lydia tonight and she tweeted two short Vine clips from it. One showing me in ropes and with a pillow over my head and one showing her and the plastic bag she was suffocating me with. I wouldn’t say they capture the session mood at all. That was a very positive, sensuous, shared experience that had me deep in subspace. In contrast these remind me of something from a horror movie. They’re the kind of clips the crazy serial killer sends the police to taunt them while torturing his latest victim. But for all that I do think they’re kind of fun. They’re easy to create and give a little taste of what’s going on in somebodies life.

For an accompanying image I wanted some sort of breathplay shot, but they’re surprisingly hard to find. In the end I had to raid some old femdom folders on my hard drive for the images below. I don’t have a source for them. I do know the young lady appears to be enjoying give her bound slave a good dunking.

That’s just not cricket

This series of images makes me smile for it’s cartoon like progression. The four shot sequence reminds me of an old photo booth filmstrip. However, I certainly wouldn’t recommend trying to reproduce it. Falling backwards like that onto your hands and arms like that would not be good. I think this is also the first time I’ve ever seen a cricket bat used in a BDSM shot. As implements go it’s probably a little heavy to use effectively, but it’s certainly fearsome.

The female model is Lorelei and the photographer is Titus Powell. As you’d expect given the sporting equipment, they’re both UK based.

An article for masochists (in the wrong way)

I try and bring my readers a range of links. Some smart, some funny and some annoying. Sadly, this article on Slate by William Saletan is from that final category. His basic point seems to be that S&M will never go mainstream. That may or may not be true, or even desirable, but his backing reasoning is idiotic. It takes the form of slippery slope arguments, a sure sign of a poorly thought out point of view. For example…

BDSM can be quite dangerous. Responsible practitioners insist it must be “safe, sane, and consensual.” But it attracts people who like to push boundaries. Some submissives are adrenaline junkies: They don’t believe in safety. Recently, several men have admitted to or have been charged with or convicted of crimes including sexual abuse, kidnapping, and murder, all under the cover of BDSM. These men don’t represent BDSM, but they do represent the far end of sadism.

The first part of this is just dumb. Some people like motorsport, rock climbing or parachuting out of planes. They’re adrenaline junkies. Do they also not believe in safety? And if some people go motor racing without a crash helmet does that mean it’s inherently unsafe for all? The second part is offensive. If they don’t represent BDSM then why bring it up? It’s like talking about dating and then bringing up the fact that some men are rapists.

He then goes onto claim that consent cannot be maintained, safewords don’t work and that non-consensual slavery is alive and well. It’s tempting to go through his reasoning line by line and pull it apart, but life’s too short to spend on this kind of drivel. However, I do want to comment on some of the posts and comments I’ve seen around the internet that followed the article. As you’d expect a lot of people were annoyed by it (including Dan Savage) but a few tended to make the argument “Yes, there are crazy people doing X but there’s nothing wrong with Y.” Inevitably X was something they thought weird (piercing, electricity, breathplay, etc.) and Y was something they liked (bondage, pegging, D/s roleplay, etc.). In doing this there making exactly the same mistake Saletan does.

There isn’t a hierarchy of kinky activity or gateway activities to the world of the Cenobites. People doing edge play don’t have more issues with consent or safewords than people doing light bondage. Dangerous activity isn’t limited to BDSM and the capacity to abuse isn’t correlated with your sexual tastes. Sadly assholes who put others at risk and have issues with consent are a worldwide problem in all parts of life.

I’ll finish with an activity that Mr. Saletan considers particularly harrowing – breathplay. I just hope the Sado Girls site didn’t need to pay for psychological counseling for these two after the photoshoot.

Office bully

The first image from yesterday’s post put me in mind of this shot. I like the fact it works whoever you prefer to imagine to be the titular boss. She can either be a controlling subordinate or a bullying manager and it’s still hot.

I first stumbled across it on the Thoughts of a Dork tumblr. It’s originally from a fashion shoot for Harper’s Bazaar in Spain. It was shot by Benjamin Kanarek and features Yulia Kharlapanova.