Glimpses of the past

I’ve been enjoying dipping and diving around the links on this page. It’s a collection of interviews, articles and photographs from old BDSM publications. To be frank the site itself is a bit of a mess. There’s very little context given and the presentation is horribly jumbled and confusing. However, there’s some interesting stuff there if you’re willing to dig around. For example, this article on Cynthia Slater covers background on the San Francisco SM scene and the formation of the society of Janus in the early 70’s.

The image below, of Empress Kat Prowles, is one that brings back some memories for me. There were several shots of this domme regularly recycled on usenet in the 90’s. I didn’t know anything about her, but the pictures stuck in my mind. It was an era of really bad femdom porn. Typically it consisted of conventional glamor models pulling on a pair of boots and waving a limp flogger towards a camera. It cemented in my mind a sense of unreality around BDSM. That it was all just a fantasy that people didn’t really do. Then I stumbled across the shots of the lady below. She looked real. Like she actually might want to hit me. And that she might even enjoy it. It was one of the first times I imagined myself interacting with a domme, rather than simply jerking off to a leather clad porn model. Those sexy sneering models have all long faded from my mind, but the shot below has stuck with me for well over a decade now.

Empress Kat Prowles

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

I’m safely back in Seattle. Unfortunately I’m feeling pretty wiped out after spending a day in NYC and then around ten hours traveling (door to door time). So it’s time for a short simple post using something from my random grab bag of images that I’ve enjoyed.

I found this one on the devoted sub tumblr. I haven’t determined it’s original source, but I believe that’s the model Xenia Tchoumitcheva. It looks like it could be a candid behind the scenes shot captured while on a fashion shoot. If that’s the case, then the gentleman helping out the beautiful Ms Tchoumitcheva appears to have one of the world’s more interesting jobs.

Shoe Fitting

Escape

Tomorrow I flee the freezing NYC region to return to the warmer and wetter state of Washington. It has been a fun trip, and it ended on a very high note. I spent a good portion of today with the brilliant Miss Troy Orleans. We had a great session and snapped a lot of photographs. Hopefully, when I’ve had chance to sort through them, there will be a detailed session post.

Given I enjoyed some heavy bondage and restraints today, it seems fitting to finish the post with a pointer to an interesting article I read on Harry Houdini. I’m not sure he could be described as a femdom aficionado, but he certainly seemed to have a strong interest in bondage, masochism, exhibitionism and edge play. Given his skill, I’ve no doubt he could have emerged from the ropes in the photograph below in a matter of seconds. For the rest of us submissive types, even if we had the skill, I’m not sure escape would be our first choice…

Ropes

I found this on the darksehnsucht tumblr. I don’t know the original source, but I’d guess it’s from one of the kink.com sites.

Depressed

I’ve followed the 49ers since I was a young boy in the UK. The first game of American Football I watched and actually understood featured Joe Montana and Jerry Rice destroying some hapless opposing team. At the time I didn’t realize I was watching two of the greatest players to ever play the game, but I did realize I was seeing something special, and I’ve followed the team ever since. I’m therefore feeling pretty grumpy right now, after watching them lose a Superbowl for the first time ever.

I’ve got nowhere I’m really going with this. I just wanted to share my grumpiness. As for the image, I stumbled across it earlier tonight and it put a smile on my face, despite the circumstances. I loved her tie and glove combo. Hopefully it’ll have an equally positive effect on my readers.

Breath play

I’m afraid I don’t know the original source for this image. I found it on Ms Roxanne’s tumblr.

The mirror shot genre

Using a camera phone to snap a reflected mirror shot is one of the new genres in candid porn. There are entire web sites dedicated to it, typically involving young women. It often hits the news when celebrities do it, or when the girls involved are teenagers and inadvertently create completely ridiculous legal problems for themselves and their friends.

Here’s a fun variation on the theme – showing your bound, gagged and cock locked slave off. Personally I’d say that it’s the best version yet.

Mirror Shot

I found this on the Fuck Yeah Femdom tumblr.

The boyfriend trainer

For those looking to enjoy some virtual domestic violence, I have just the app for you. As this yahoo post describes, an Apple app called ‘The Boyfriend Trainer’ let’s you lead a guy around on a leash and slap/zap/mace him as you desire.

“Crack that whip and teach your guy a thing or two about being the Perfect Boyfriend!” reads the game’s description. “When scolding doesn’t work, just zap him, whack him and train him to be your ideal man!”

It sounds like a fairly stupid and obnoxious digital toy, but that’s not what annoys me about it. What really bugs me is what I’m sure would happen if this got tweaked into a BDSM app. After all, a lot of the actions described are things some men (including this one) enjoy immensely in the right circumstances. With some minor changes to the game scripts, and a new marketing campaign to cast it as a consensual D/s interaction, much of the criticism would be mollified. Of course if that was the application in question, Apple would undoubtedly ban it from the app store. They don’t allow sexual applications.

Jezebel points it out as a double standard between men and women. What annoys me far more than that is the double standard on sex and violence. Media featuring non-consensual sex and violence is a big part of mainstream culture. This application is a good example, along with movies available on iTunes like The Last House on the Left or I Spit on Your Grave. Yet mix sex and consensual violence together and you’re instantly confined to the porn ghetto.

Luckily there are better ways to train a boyfriend than swiping your iPhone screen. From the smile on the lady below, I’d guess she’s pretty happy with the progress from her training regime to date.

Pegging with a smile

I found this image on the Mujeres Dominantes tumblr. It’s originally from the Strapon Dreamer site.

Let me have just a little bit of peril?

I’m in NYC for the first time in several years, and I just got out of a very enjoyable session with the wonderful Miss Troy Orleans. There’s a lot I could write about, so the obvious topic to pick is an old children’s cartoon called The Perils Of Penelope Pitstop.

You can blame this strange selection on D from Dumb Domme and her post ‘damsel in distress‘. She’s clearly not a fan of the iconic ‘tied to the railroad tracks’ trope…

It angers me that she doesn’t fight the villain harder and that she doesn’t struggle more to escape her bonds. It disgusts me when I suspect she exerts more effort craning her neck to see if a hero is coming than she does in trying to free herself.

This particular post grabbed me, because that villain/heroine dynamic is one of my earliest recollections of being excited by restraint, control and dominance. Specifically in the aforementioned Perils of Penelope Pitstop. If you’ve never seen it then this clip should give you some idea of the plot. Based on a 1914 series called The Perils Of Pauline, the cartoon featured a dashing and attractive young lady who constantly finds herself tied up and threatened by deadly Rube Goldberg like devices. As a child I never knew why it excited me, or how I related to the roles, I just knew there was something very compelling about it.

I get where D is coming from with her dislike of the scene, but I think she misses the submissive’s perspective on it. It’s the victim’s job to be the object of the desire. With ‘object’ being a key word. The villain is charge and creates the danger. The hero is in charge and (hopefully) removes the danger. Both of them desire the victim, but in different ways. The victim gets to be desirable but, as an object, doesn’t get to have control. She looks for the hero because that’s his role and his choice, not hers. She fears her fate but doesn’t control it. And that’s hot. It turns me on just thinking about it.

Obviously as a child I didn’t want to see Penelope actually get bisected by a train. But the combination of danger and helplessness pushed some deep internal buttons. The powerless female and mustache twirling villain might not be great role models, but I’m not sure that matters. After all I grew up wanting to be the victim. Although I never did develop Penelope’s love of pink.

When it comes to pictures of peril, Augustine is always a reliable resource. His images always seem to be the missing the hero character however.

Augustine

Minion required

I’ve spent the evening packing for my upcoming New York trip. Not a fun time. Traveling to LA or Vegas is easy. Neither the climate nor the restaurants demand any sort of significant planning in the wardrobe department. Throw a few short sleeved shirts and a sports coat in a carry-on and you’re good to go. Manhattan in January is quite a different packing proposition.

What I really need is a minion to take care of it. I think I’d suck as a dominant, but having a minion seems like it should be easier to deal with. You never see evil masterminds worrying if their minions are having their needs met. Or doing any aftercare post massacre. Or blackmailing world leaders just because their minions always had a thing for financial domination. They just stick them in a colored jumpsuit and tell them to guard the hollowed out volcano. Can we not create a D/s/m hierarchy for lazy submissives like myself?

While I return to jumping up and down on my case, I’ll leave you with a shot of someone being looked after appropriately. I’ll bet she doesn’t have to worry about shlepping her overstuffed carry-on bag around icy streets.

Submissive caring for shoes of dominant

I found this on the Domina Desires tumblr. It’s originally by Kajali on deviant art, and is entitled Venus In Furs I.

Awards season

As part of writing this post on the Adult Video News (AVN) awards, I took a look at what had won this year. The general idea of giving awards to specific movies strikes me as an anachronism. Who buys porn DVDs these days? However, I figured the specific performers and genres recognized might be interesting. I was very surprised to discover how little attention BDSM and fetish got. There were just three awards that looked vaguely relevant – Best BDSM release, best femdom strap-on release and best foot/leg fetish release. This is out of a total of more than 100 other awards.

I’ve no idea if the titles that won were actually any good. Rubber Bordello looks like it might be fun, the other two (His Booty Is My Duty 2 and Asphyxia Heels The World) look like average porn movies with just passing nods to their supposed audience. But regardless of the selections, I was shocked there was so little recognition of BDSM. They didn’t even distinguish between maledom and femdom. There are no awards for top performing domme, or best submissive, or best rigger, or really anything interesting. What a missed opportunity.

I actually attended the awards ceremony back in 2003. I can’t say I recommend the experience. It’s fun to dress up and walk the red carpet, but the awards themselves are very dull. Amazingly, they’re not allowed to actually show explicit clips, so you end up with a lot of thank you speeches accompanied by Cinemax style edited soft porn. Getting to see Larry Flynt give the hall of fame speech and sitting next to Rocco Siffredi in the bar afterwards were the highlights. Of course if you do it with someone like Mistress T then you might be in for a slightly more exciting time (Updated: You can see Mistress T & friends in her latest AVN experiences here).

Kink is one of the biggest BDSM producers these days, but the only thing they won for was ‘Best Alternative Website’, whatever that means. I’ll leave you with a shot from their Divine Bitches site featuring Maitresse Madeline getting alternative on Robert Axel’s ass.

Maitress Madeline and Robert Axel

Spanked over the chaise longue

This caught my eye when I came across it on the Who’s Sorry Now tumblr. It’s rendered in a very striking style. I don’t know the artist, but I’m guessing it’s the same person who did this piece. Both of them feature slightly androgynous submissive young men that put me in mind of Japanese animation and videogames. I was going to go on to suggest that BDSM and D/s might be an interesting basis for a JRPG, but given the dating games genre that exists in Japan, somebody has probably already done it.

It’s also unusual to see a chaise longue involved in a spanking scene, although when you think about it, that’s actually a very suitable piece of furniture for the task.

Spanked with a belt