Fm – Page 149 – Femdom Resource

Nothing ventured, nothing lost

Ferns has published an insightful new post entitled ‘Being submissive can be scary.’ It addresses the risks and emotional challenges of setting a foot onto the path of submission. Accepting that role, particularly after suppressing it for a long time, can be a scary decision.

The post does a good job of highlighting the specific worries a submissive may have. However, from a personal perspective, I’d refine the list Ferns uses a little. It’s not that I disagree with it; I’d just categorize it a little further. The first few issues she raises were definitely worries I had before I ever took a single slap from a paddle.

Scared that this D/s thing wouldn’t be what he expected.
Scared that the reality wouldn’t live up to what was in his head, in his imagination.
Scared that he wasn’t really submissive, that he was ‘faking it’ somehow, fooling himself.
Scared that he wasn’t really a masochist, that his fantasies over all those years were false.

Those concerns were very real to me. I worried that it would all seem ridiculous and that I’d simply start laughing. I worried that I’d safeword immediately and that nobody would take me seriously. It seemed like doing what you were told should be simple, but I was sure I could find a way to screw it up.

Ferns goes on to list some fears that she describes as tenfold of any of the above, all related to how the submissives self-perception might change.

Scared of leaving behind nearly 40 years of thinking that he knew who he was.
Scared of losing his comfortable place in the world, as part of the ‘normal’ set.
Scared of admitting that he was not the person he had been pretending to be all of his life.
Scared of the idea of never again finding a ‘vanilla’ relationship enough.

For me these were (and still are) real issues, but they played no part in my early submissive experiences. They were, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, my unknown unknowns. I was worried about failing, the immediate risks, not the potential costs of succeeding. I saw BDSM as a potential addition to my life. Something that would enhance my options, not diminish them. It was only in hindsight that I saw the risks of not being able to go back and no longer finding vanilla relationships satisfying. There’s absolutely no part of me that regrets what I did, but I can’t honestly say I entered into it with foresight that Fern’s submissive did.

I think the image is from the charmingly named Bitches-Femdom site. I found it on Equally Deep In Your Eyes tumblr, which has absolutely the worst UI of any tumblr I’ve ever encountered. There are some good images there, but I suggest browsing via the archive. If the owner of this tumblr happens to read this: Please change your theme. You’ve chosen some great images but the navigation mechanism currently sucks ass.

A vulnerable point

I’m not a fan of breathplay via throttling. It seems way too dangerous. There are all sorts of delicate tubes in the neck and it seems impossible to judge precisely what is being squeezed and by how much. I love breathplay in general, just not via this route. However, simply gripping the throat is very hot. The potential threat and danger is a great way to spike your adrenalin. It’s not surprising there are so many aphorisms based on going for, grabbing, or offering the throat. The ribs and the skull protect a lot of the critical organs, but the throat is uniquely vulnerable and therefore exciting.

I found this on the Geek Domme tumblr. It’s originally from the Divine Bitches site.

Happy something

If you celebrate Christmas then I hope you have a happy one. And if you don’t, then I hope all the festive bullshit spreading across the web at this time of year hasn’t been too annoying.

I’m mindful that this can be a miserable time of year for some people. Family situations can make life difficult. If you find yourself dealing with those kind of issues, or dealing with an absence of friends and family, you have my sympathies. I can actually trace my involvement in BDSM to a depressing Christmas period. All my friends were out of town. I had no family in the US. I was single and I was lonely. With nothing to do but watch bad Christmas movies and browse the web I decided that I needed to make a change. I needed to figure out if these fantasies I had for years were meaningful or important to me. After a lot of web browsing and dithering, I scheduled a 1 hour session with a local pro-domme, and the rest is history. There aren’t too many single moments in time I can point to as life changing, but that’s certainly one of them.

Obviously seeing a pro-domme is not for everyone. But if you’re reading this and in the same situation I was in, then I’d urge you to try and realize your fantasies the best way you can. Go to a munch. Talk to your partner. Create a fetlife profile. Research the local pro-dommes. Use whatever approach works best for your situation. You don’t want to spend your life regretting what might have been.

It’s traditional at this time for blogs like this one to feature a festive themed BDSM image and wish everyone a happy holiday. Unfortunately I find mixing Santa and kink is weird and unappealing. There are a few good images out there (e.g. the first one in this post from hmp and what Mistress Sidonia came up with) but mostly it’s a weird mishmash of mismatched elements. So I’ll simply feature an image I like and wish everyone the very best for the season.

A useless shower of bastards

I noticed today that the US Senate has been doing its usual fine job of legislating. With the nations finances in a mess, and a lot of spending cuts and tax rises that nobody wants about to take effect, they took the time to pass a resolution condemning the Village Voice for its adults classified service backpage.com. Apparently it has become “frighteningly simple to order a child prostitute” according to ~~idiot~~ Senator Mark Kirk. The more logical thinkers amongst us might therefore question why, if that incredibly unlikely statement were true, it isn’t equally frighteningly simple to find and arrest the people involved. Unfortunately I suspect logical thinking never entered into this debate.

It has been a bad year for sex work legislation, with California’s proposition 35 being the standout example. The New Statesman recently published a good article on it and similar legislation, attacking the drafting of laws without proper consultation with the ‘victims’ they’re allegedly trying to help. In theory pro-dommes shouldn’t be affected, given that BDSM is legal. However, there’s always a lot of grey area involved in this kind of work. You might be technically completely legal, but do you trust the cops, DA and judge to all agree? Now it only needs one asshole with a loose interpretation of the truth or the law to get a CA sex worker branded as a sex offender for life. And since prop 35 also targets people supported by the proceeds of sex work, her family could also be in the firing line. What a truly terrible piece of legislation.

I’ll leave you with an image of Natassia Dream doing to CJ what the average politician does to the electorate. The shot is from this scene on TS Seduction. You can see here really working her sizable majority in another shot here.

Nice outfit. Shame about the set.

There’s an old quote that runs along the lines of – “The problem with pornographic movies is that they objectify women, they degrade the viewer and they’re so terribly badly lit.” For BDSM porn I often think you could update that quote by talking about the sets rather than the lights.

The faux-medieval dungeon look that crops up in a lot of professional scenes is one annoyance. They’ll have a model dressed like a latex fetishist’s wet dream, in a space modeled on a medieval castle (this for example). These two things do not go together. Or you’ll have shots like below, where it looks like they’ve paid no attention at all to the set. I actually like her outfit. It doesn’t do much for me erotically, but I appreciate the details and effort that has gone into it. But what’s with the TV unit, bedroom furniture and sloppily undressed guy? The outfit screams fancy equestrian fantasy scene and the set suggests we couldn’t be bothered to leave the house on a wet Wednesday afternoon. It’s hard to fantasize about the haughty Miss Tippington-Cambell disciplining the insolent stable boy when it looks like they’re in a suburban semi in Croydon (read that as townhouse in Des Moines for my US readers).

There’s not watermark but I think this is from the Strict Women site. They typically feature more conventional domestic scenes with (usually) conventional dress. I found it on the Hoejhael tumblr.

Smile for the camera

The domme staring down into the camera lens is a long standing femdom porn tradition. This image adds a nice twist to it by her forcing the submissive male to stare back with her. You could read it as her indicating “They’re going to watch while I fuck you.” Or you could read it as “You’re mine so sit up and pose properly for the nice photographer.” Either way I kind of like it.

The image comes originally from the Strapon Dreamer site. I found it on The Heart’s Dark Desire (aka Women With Whips) tumblr.

Is a bad reason worse than no reason?

Does it matter why someone is kinky? Are the reasons important? In some circumstances, can ignorance be bliss?

Miss Margo recently put up a post that got me thinking about these questions. The post itself is a complex one and touches a lot of issues. It’s not my intent to try and unpack it or even respond directly to it. There’s just a single section that I want to use as a jumping off point. It concerns a client of hers named Mel. As a child he was physically abused by his father, and as an adult he now roleplays very heavy corporal scenes as an authority figure to Margo’s errant child. In talking about that childhood abuse, the following exchange happened…

Mel tilted his head to the side, considering, and then said the most incredible thing I’ve ever heard come out of a client’s mouth: “It’s not like it screwed me up or anything.”
I almost started laughing–it was clearly a joke. I waited for him to laugh, but he didn’t.
He wasn’t kidding.
Yeah, that was an instant classic. I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to offend him, but I wanted to ask, Buddy, do you SEE WHERE YOU ARE? You are compulsive enough to act out the same scenario, over and over again, at the expense of many thousands of dollars, for your entire adult life.

I think most people, both kinky and not, would respond the same way as Margo (although perhaps without the same restraint). The childhood trauma certainly did seem to screw him up and to be re-enacting it without that awareness doesn’t come across as a healthy action. But then it got me thinking about my friend Sal, who I just made up. He’s a nice guy, very competent, friendly, and happens to like exactly the same roleplay and activities that Mel enjoys. The only difference between him and Mel, besides the minor detail of Sal not existing, is that he has no idea why he enjoys what he does. He had a happy childhood with no physical abuse. He’s just kinky and, like a lot of kinksters out there, he gets upset when I tell him he’s screwed up. “Paltego,” he’ll never say to me, “you like women sticking needles in your nipples, electrocuting your genitals and pissing on you. So who’s the messed up one here?”

Now obviously I know I’m completely healthy and normal. Sal seems to be as well. But what about Mel? If he likes exactly the same things as Sal, can he be screwed up? Does the reason matter if they’re both now in the same place?

Given this is just a thought experiment, we can push it a step further. Let’s assume all kinky people can be ‘cured’ via therapy or drugs. Should we treat Mel? If he came to his current state because of abuse, it seems right to treat it. But then what about Sal? They’re different in background, but both identical in their current kinky activities. Can we say Mel should be treated but Sal shouldn’t? What if they’re both happy the way they are?

Alternatively, we can flip it around. Let’s say we know for sure that kink is a sexual trait set at birth. Your later life only influences how it ultimately manifests itself. In this case Mel was always going to end up involved in BDSM. The only thing his father did was to direct his interest, not create it. Is he still messed up? If we can trace Mel’s influences but not Sal’s, does that matter? And if Sal has ended up liking the same activities without the traumatic background, what does that tell us about how we’re influenced?

These are obviously all rhetorical questions. I’ve no idea what the answers are. From Margo’s description it doesn’t seem that Mel is using his play to work through issues or address the trauma. He’s simply letting it inform his sexual life, which seems messed up. Yet, why should those of us with no clear reason for our interests somehow get a free pass? Is my desire to be beaten somehow healthier because I’ve no idea why I like it?

Given the theme of Mel’s sessions, a corporal focused image seemed to be the right one to use. Obviously this is femdom rather than maledom. I found it on the Hommage to Dominatrixes tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t know the original source.

Bitesize animations

The last few posts have all been kind of wordy, so here’s one with a visual focus. It’s a collection of fun animations hosted on tumblr. Simply click on each image to jump through to the relevant post and enjoy the animated gif.

Screaming as a second language

This is a continuation of my post from yesterday on safewords and control in a scene. Anybody who read that probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I’m also not much of a fan of the commonly used green/yellow/red safeword scheme. I get the utility of that approach, but it again feels too much like taking control from the bottom. I want to give feedback, but the very unambiguous labeling of the colors feels (to me) more like direction than feedback.

Of course that begs the question – how should the bottom give feedback? Obviously talking after a scene is good. And responding to direct questions during a scene also works. But my favorite mechanism is screaming. Or moaning. Yelling. Whimpering. Grunting. Growling. Basically, any kind of proportional verbal feedback that helps the top know where I’m at.

It sounds kind of obvious when I write it down. Doesn’t everyone cry out when they get beaten, whipped or pierced? The key word though is proportional. I always want the domme to be able to trust the cues that she gets from me. I never try and play the stoic hero. I also try and avoid exaggerating my response, even though it’s sometimes tempting to do so as a defense mechanism to avoid escalation of the pain. Occasionally, when a sensation catches me unawares, and I react more from surprise than hurt, I’ll even comment to let the domme know what happened. I never want her to doubt the honesty of my reactions and start second guessing the intensity of the scene. I’m lucky in that I get to play with a lot of great dommes who are experts at judging non-verbal cues, but I always still make a conscious effort to communicate those cues as transparently as possible.

I’ll leave you with an image of someone about to provoke some non-verbal communication. I’m sure screaming will be involved, let’s hope it’s proportional.

The image comes via the Pure Beauty tumblr.

The internet is not for porn (so says Google)

Google has been messing with their search algorithms again. Specifically image search. The change has not been for the better in my opinion.

Adult bloggers and content providers have long had issues with their approach to sexually explicit content. For example, here’s Bacchus back in 2008 and then again in 2011 highlighting the strangeness of the auto-suggest feature. Now they’ve changed their image search to make it far more reluctant to display sexual images. The algorithm used to be based on classification of the content and your ‘safe search’ settings. With safe search on it filtered porn, with safe search off it didn’t filter. Seemed sensible enough. Now they’re also classifying the query you use. Unless the query shows specific intent to search for porn, they still suppress those images, no matter what your safe search settings. This leads to some pretty bad results.

For, example try image searching for one of my favorite female bloggers and adult stars, Mistress T. Here’s the search on Google and the same search on Bing (you need safe search off in both cases). The Google results are basically garbage, with John Edwards and even Mitt Romney featuring for some bizarre reason. The Bing ones are pretty much what you’d expect for a popular porn star/producer. Or try the famous bondage model Ashley Renee on Google and on Bing. One gives you what you’d expect and one gives you a bunch of police mugshots.

Searching for site names is equally weird. For example, searching for ‘captive male’ gives you a bunch of animal pictures, rather than shots from the site itself. Searching for ‘men in pain’ gives you men with migraines, and the query ‘whipped ass‘ returns random junk. Of course you can always refine your query to really make it clear what you’re after. For example, searching ‘men in pain bdsm‘ does return shots from the kink.com site. However, that refinement is going to change the results returned. Now it’s not giving me the top ranked men in pain images. It’s giving the top ranked ones that also feature the word BDSM near them. Before I could always filter out porn by simply changing my safe search settings to be stricter. Now I have to try and force it to show up by guessing the right query to use. What a stupid change.

Here’s an image from someone else affected by the change. That’s Mistress Madeline, who now barely features in her own image search result page.