Fm – Page 159 – Femdom Resource

Spanking theory

When I look back over my posts it strikes me that I’ve featured a surprisingly small amount of traditional style spanking. I have to go all the way back to last year to find a posted image that even alludes to it. This isn’t a deliberate choice on my part, but clearly there must be a degree of subconscious selection going on here. I also don’t think I’ve ever directly asked for a spanking, although I have enjoyed them when a session has naturally evolved in that direction.

In some ways I find spanking an odd activity. I don’t mean that it’s weird or wrong, but just that it seems to possess unusual characteristics that other activities don’t share. It has a historical and a cultural meaning that doesn’t exist with other types of physical D/s interaction.

One thing that held me back for a long time from doing my first pro-domme session was the idea that it’d feel weird. I imagined that I’d be embarrassed by the scene or start laughing when someone tried to tie me up. In the event that didn’t happen. I’ve done scenes that most non-kinky people would think were very unusual, and found them entirely normal, at least for my strange measure of normality. In hindsight I think that this is down to the lack of context. I have no cultural conditioning around how two people should behave when doing play piercing, breathplay or heavy bondage. I just do it and enjoy it. And yet when I get pulled over someones lap for a spanking there is a passing moment of discombobulation. It has a meaning and wider context that come along with it, despite the fact I was never spanked in that fashion as a child.

I got to thinking about this while reading Red Rump’s entertaining tale of his early yearnings for a little babysitter spanking action. Like Red Rump, and a lot of kinky people, my desires started when I was young. However, I didn’t focus on a particular activity. Instead I fantasized about very general ideas of control and restraint. The idea of pain and punishment was always subservient to this broader sense of being dominated. For a lot of spanking fans it seems to be the other way around, where the specific activity is the focus and the elements of domination flow from that. I think it’s telling that the two activities with the most cultural context, spanking and bondage, also attracts the most dedicated and focused followings.

Personally, despite rarely having them, I have always enjoyed a traditional spanking. The sense of closeness to the dominant and the physical communication between the two bodies make for a very unique experience. But I think for me it’s in spite of the cultural background. That’s something I have to overcome in order to simply enjoy the raw activity for what it is. I suspect for a lot of spanko’s it’s the reverse situation, and a lot of the enjoyment comes from the broader context it has and the personal meaning they bring to the act.

Anyone managing to make it through all that random wurbling from me deserves at least a good spanking picture, so here you go. She certainly seems to be enjoying applying that hairbrush with some serious force.

I found this on the lash kisser tumblr site.

Black, white and blonde

I’ve noticed images from Femme Fatale Films popping up on any number of tumblrs and blogs recently. With examples as striking as this shot (which came to me via the Femdom Marriage tumblr) I can’t say I’m all that surprised. I love the calm composed nature of the shot, as well as the color contrasts between the dark clothes and whip, his marked pale skin and her long blonde hair. I can imagine her inflicting a very deliberate controlled whipping, all fury and no sound.

This is Mistress Eleise de Lacy, and the session it is taken from is called Dining Service. You can see a short trailer for it in their updates section or join for access to the full video.

Bringing up the rear

Here’s the last of my field of three horse related posts. It’s a little more artwork from Robert Bishop, this time featuring a nicely costumed bucking horse. Unlike the previous animals, this one seems a bit feisty, but she doesn’t look like she’ll have any problems keeping him under control. I suspect she might even enjoy a little intransigence from her mount.

Horseplay

Riding gear is a fairly common theme in femdom porn. It’s a natural fit. Leather boots. Tight jodhpurs. Riding crops. There’s also the idea of a woman controlling a big powerful dumb beast with a snapped command or a flick of her wrist. That has a certain resonance.

However, it’s pretty rare to see an actual horse involved in a shot. Normally the man plays that role. In this case the male in question has been forced one step lower in the hierarchy, from beast to inanimate footstool. The horse itself looks fairly bored by the proceedings. I just hope for the footstool’s sake that it doesn’t decide to take a pee at this point. I’m a fan of water sports, but horse piss lapping around the knees is definitely a deal breaker. And there’s a good entry to add to the list of sentences I never imagined myself typing.

This is taken from a set of images created by the femdom town site. I found it originally on the Whip Mistress blog.

The bad old days

Bondage blog pointed me at a long but fascinating interview with John Blakemore. He was one of the very early producers of bondage movies back in the 70’s, shooting stuff for HOM and Cal-Star. The original material was before my time, but various stills and fuzzy video clips have been floating around on usenet for years.

All his movies are M/f and a world away from any kind of female dominant aesthetic. However, for anyone interested in the history of porn and BDSM, it’s an informative glimpse behind the scenes and back in time. As he makes clear, he was operating in isolation, in very murky legal territory and with old fashioned technology.

At the time, the laws in the United States prohibited any form of penetration, or sex with bondage, or actual torture and so I made these films expressly for the European market, to be taken out of the country. They were not even edited here. I had to hand deliver the raw footage. It was never out of my possession. I put it in Barbara’s hands; she in turn put it in the hands of someone from Europe. And even then, it was probably risky, although the film had not yet even been developed. It was raw footage that had not yet been developed. And it went out of the country and it did not come back. I was rather shocked to find out a couple years ago that some of this stuff is available.

While I do find it fascinating, it’s not an interview that makes me warm to the man. His approach and attitude comes across as pretty disturbing. He’s not big on concepts like SSC (Safe, Sane and Consensual) and some of his views are fairly ludicrous.

The simple fact of the matter is that in the Western world for the last 2000 years, if you take a young man that’s full of testosterone…and you put him in a situation where he has the place, the equipment and the ability to do anything to a gorgeous young woman that he wants to, with absolutely no repercussions of any kind, he will torture her and rape her.

Clearly technical issues areas like picture quality and the production values aren’t the only things that have improved since the bad old days of BDSM porn.

Given his work is all male dominant, I’m not going to feature any shots from it here. Fortunately he mentions the artist Bishop in the interview, who also used to do work for HOM. That therefore gives me an excuse to feature some of his wonderful artwork.

What do I owe you?

The Dishevelled Domina put up a post a few days ago that got me thinking about the process of sex blogging and image sharing. The post was entitled ‘Yer not the boss of me!‘ and was a good rant about tumblr’s that accompany their images with very broad sweeping statements about the right way to behave. For example, captions of the form “a real mistress will lock her husband up, throw away the key, and fuck other men” or “inspections are one of the things that a true Mistress knows how to do correctly.” DD was, to put it mildly, not a fan of such things.

To a large extent I’m with her on this one. I find the best image+commentary blogs are the ones that concentrate on their personal reactions to an image. They supply background, point out details or add a little humor. Spanking blog and bondage blog are two good examples of this approach, and it’s one I’ve always tried to follow. I don’t want to reinterpret an image, or interpose myself between it and the viewer, I just want to share my feelings about what I see. As soon as you start adding specific context to an image then you’re no longer sharing the image, but instead you’re sharing your personal modification of it. You create something new, text that imposes its own preferences, which may well clash with your reader’s.

Where I depart ways with DD is in her reaction to this phenomena. I have to ask myself, what does a blogger (or tumblr) owe his audience? Who are they posting for? In her post DD puts an open letter to tumblrs…

…if you try to fucking boss people around or tell us what we ought to like or do I am going to want to stab you in the jimmy, or vajayjay, respectively.
Please stop this deeply annoying shit and try to grow an awareness of something other than your own wank-bank.
Dishevelled Domina

But is there anything wrong with a tumblr being someone’s personal wank-bank? People blog for a lot of different reasons. I don’t write this one to get off, but that approach doesn’t have to be a universal one.

When I see an image and caption like this one, I don’t see it as an instruction for 50% of the planet’s population. Or even for the smaller fraction of dominant females. I see it as someone creating their own new little piece of erotica. It’s a fantasy snippet that, along with the image, tells a story they enjoy. It’s not particularly a story I care for, but the same could be said for a lot of the erotica out there.

I think in many ways the problem is actually a technical one. Tumblr makes it trivially easy to share and reblog images, but it drags all the comments along with it. It really needs better tools to slice, dice and mash the content as it flows between sites.

I’ll leave you with an image from the Superior Femme tumblr (originally by Frank Herholdt). This is a tumblr site whose images I like, but the captions often clash with my personal preferences. In this case the caption was “She’s taken his money, his family, his house. Now she’s working on his dignity.” That really doesn’t do much for me. We could go with “A real mistress will get her cuckold to paint her nails before she heads out for a night of fucking”, but then DD might come and stab me in the jimmy. So I’ll just say I like the coloration of the image, and his look of concentration. I’ll leave further interpretation to the viewer’s preferences.

Organic bondage

I’ve featured Catwoman in the past (here and here for example), and now here’s another of Batman’s female foes, Poison Ivy. I’m no expert on the Batman backstory, but according to her wikipedia page she’s a powerful villainess who prefers to kill her enemies with a poisonous kiss. As a fan of blending the sensuous with the sadistic I kind of like that. Much better than riddles or freeze rays.

This image is by the Italian artist Gabriele Dell’Otto. In a nice kinky crossover the original Poison Ivy was apparently modeled on fetish star Bettie Page. This rendering doesn’t really carry that across, but it’s still a very beautiful sexy image.

I found this via the XombieDIRGE tumblr.

Surrender v’s Submission

Troy Orleans has a new blog post up where she talks a little about her blogging history and what motivates her to write. It also includes an ask for interesting questions for her to answer via the blog. I’m kind of surprised that some readers see her blog as a source of wank material, and simply ask to have scenes described. Given the vast flood of porn available online, with an almost infinite supply of images and fiction, a pro-domme blog seems an odd place to try and elicit material to bash the bishop to. Clearly I have too high a respect for my fellow man. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

I didn’t realize she had had a formspring account for questions, and I enjoyed browsing back through it. One particular comment caught my eye.

I sorta think that most of my play partners are fairly submissive to me, but their submission is something that I’ve earned over time and not “submission” in a fetishistic sense. I’m rarely asking my play partners to do things they don’t want to do or “forcing” them to “submit” to anything. Rather, it’s that they give themselves over to me out of trust and respect and a passion for the journey that comes with good, intense, highly skilled play. Throughout my practice, I’ve always maintained that what I seek is not submission, but surrender.
Troy Orleans

If you look up the dictionary definitions of ‘surrender’ and ‘submission’ they’re almost identical, and yet surrender resonates with me and the way I play much more than the idea of submission. To surrender feels like a voluntary act. When I’m in a session the mistress doesn’t need to be overtly dominant. I cooperate. Encourage even. I enjoy being a partial instrument in my own demise. In contrast the concept of submission seems to suggest a response to a forceful act of domination. The other term often used in this context is ‘bottom’, but that never quite aligns with me either. That loses too much of the power exchange component. After all you can be a dominant bottom. Perhaps I need to coin a new word. Surrenderist? Surrendission? Surrmission?

My ugly neologistic musings aside, if you’ve got an interesting question for one of the top NYC dommes, then I suggest firing it in Troy Orlean’s direction. Just don’t try and use it to pad your wank bank. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an impressive image of heavy bondage from her Salon d’Orleans.

Bruised

I’m feeling a little tender right now. I sessioned with Domina Yuki earlier today, and have collected a nice set of bruises, spread across various body parts. I’m going to see her along with Domina Ai-Li tomorrow, and therefore expect to extend my collection further.

We did get some photographs from today’s session, so expect some first hand evidence of said bruising in future posts. In the meantime here’s a nice shot of someone else’s bruised torso, along with a little high heel CBT. The only area lacking bruises looks like the inside of his thighs. That’s an area which, I can tell you from first hand experience, is really great / hideously painful / great and hideously painful (strike-out as applicable) to apply a tawse or single-tail.

I found this on the Rue Montorgueil tumblr. It’s originally from the sadly defunct Young Goddess site. I commented on the demise of this site in an earlier post. If you go and read the Young Goddess root page it’s now an odd rant on the evils of masturbation by (presumably) the former owner and maintainer of the site. It’s very …. peculiar, particularly given the context.

Relaxing on a bed (really)

Here’s the flip side to yesterday’s post. Once again there’s a bed involved and a male receiving the attention, but the overall dynamic couldn’t be more different. This is a very fun happy scene. I love their smiles and closeness. From a D/s perspective I really hope she’s making the most of the moment and teasing him, but it’s kind of hard to tell from this shot.

My ideal world is somewhere between the two extremes expressed in this post and the last. However, given the chance, I’d take either of them in a heartbeat.

I found this on the Everything For Her tumblr.