Fm – Page 46 – Femdom Resource

Mark Dektor – Switch

After all that recent verbiage on kinky thought experiments, I think its time to get back to some basic femdom. This image is by the Los Angeles based Mark Dektor. He has an exhibition called ‘Switch’ that has just started at the Artist Corner Gallery in LA. As Isabella Sinclaire posted via her Instagram, he manages to create an amazing representation of the kinky world. Plus, he has shots of the fabulous Nina Hartley, which I think makes it instantly better than any other art exhibit, kinky or otherwise, that foolishly chooses to leave her out.

This is from this instagram post by Mark Dektor, and features Guerin Swing and Aine Patrick.

More Tumblr Thoughts

I spotted a few pro-dommes suggesting that tumblr blocking porn might be a good thing, as it’d remove a source of free porn and push more people to buy from content creators. That’s an interesting thought, and it’s hard to know how these kind of changes will play out, but it does seem to miss some aspects of the bigger picture. Firstly, tumblr was also used by sex workers to advertise and attract clients. With it gone, the only social media site still friendly to sex workers is twitter. That’s a precarious situation to be in. Secondly, I think the broader internet ecosystem for kinky content has helped dramatically increase the potential audience for kink.

It’s tempting to divide the world into kinky and vanilla people. In reality I think there are three groups. There’s obviously those who have zero interest in it and those who’ll always be active in it. In the middle, and possibly the largest group, are the potential kinksters. For these people the broad availability of kinky imagery and writing is a gateway. It draws them in with fantasies and ideas that they didn’t realize was their ‘thing’ until they saw it. Seeing someone act out their kinks normalizes the idea of trying your own.

I’d actually put myself in that middle category. I think I’ve always been kinky, even before I knew what sex or BDSM was, but I’m not sure I’d have ever truly discovered or explored my kinks without the internet. I couldn’t have imagined broaching the topic with a partner or calling an unknown pro-domme from a card in a phonebox. It was porn that expanded my imagination and kinky bloggers that made me realize that this was something I could try out for real.

Obviously tumblr removing adult content is not the same as it being removed from the internet. However, it was the largest and most user friendly of the porn hosting platforms. The more porn is pushed into the unfriendly corners of the internet, and the more it’s suppressed by search tools, the fewer conversions I think we’ll see from potential kinksters to actual kinksters. Which means fewer potentially kinky partners and fewer clients for pro-dommes.

These photographs are a great example of the kind of thing we risk losing. This is from Misingui’s tumblr, which features a lot of equally wonderful images. These two are from this post. Rigging is by Misungui, the model is Stan Briche and the photographer is Ludovica Anzaldi.

Bye Bye Tumblr

I’m sure most readers will have seen the news that tumblr is going to ban porn from December 17th. It’s depressing but, after their acquisition by Yahoo and then Verizon, not entirely surprising. I’ve written about the challenges of dealing with adult content in corporate environments in the past. As a relatively small independent platform with a history of being friendly to porn, tumblr would never have wanted to decimate its user base like this. For Verizon, its a case of cutting a fraction of users of one product in one division. The risk/reward calculation for them looks very different. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less a shitty and horrible thing to do to a community.

As Bacchus at ErosBlog has been pointing out for over a decade now, if you don’t own your domain and do your own hosting, you’re always going to be at risk of being screwed over by your platform of choice. Sadly that’s not really an answer for the average tumblr user. I’m lucky in having the time and resources needed to run a site like this one, but it’s definitely a non-trivial investment. The average tumblr user, who wants to post some hot photos and share some thoughts, isn’t going to want to spend an hour with tech support trying to figure out why his database has crashed and why /dev/dva1 has run out of space (as I did over the weekend).

Unfortunately, I don’t really know of a valid alternative that I can point people at. There are other platforms for sharing adult content (like imagefap and various tube/hub sites), but they tend to have horrible UI, dodgy advertising practices, poor community tools and a terrible attitude to content creators. If I had VC level money, I’d be treating this as an opportunity to create a new platform and fill a sudden gap in the market. As it is, I can only keep my eye open for somebody else doing that.

In the meantime, there are tools for archiving your favorite tumblrs. Bacchus has a post on one approach. I’ve had some luck using TumblrThree, although it’s not exactly a polished UI. There are also people working on more broadly archiving tumblr content for posterity. If anyone else has either suggestions for archiving content or for good places to move it to, feel free to leave a comment here. I’ll share updates and suggestions as the situation evolves.

My own image page is packed with tumblr links, so it looks like I’ll need to delete most of those next week. This particular image is via 11dutch tumblr. I believe that is Mistress Baton.

The Two Kinkster Problem

I’ve finally got time to get back to my post from last week entitled ‘Pick a Side‘. That was all about the morals and ethics of certain kinky activities. Is it reasonable to cast some kinks as wrong or bad, while falling back on the argument of ‘as long as its consensual adults, its OK’ for other kinks?

I got some interesting comments, which prompted me to think more on the issue, and come up with a thought experiment. Let’s call it ‘The Two Kinster problem.’

Mistress Mary and Submissive Sam, both risk aware consensual adult kinksters, enter their own deserted, well equipped private playspace and close the door behind them. An hour later they emerge sweaty, breathless and happy. They both tell you that they had a great time, and you ask them what they did. At this point, is there anything they can say that’ll make you think they did something ethically or morally wrong?

There’s obviously no incorrect answer. I’m just curious what answers or comments readers might have to the question.

When it comes to philosophical questions, I only know of one famous philosopher with a femdom connection – Aristotle. I’ve covered the story of him and Phyllis previously. This particular image of them is by the French painter Étienne Jeaurat.

Intermission

I had intended to write some followup thoughts to yesterday’s post. Unfortunately, I ended up spending too long in the kitchen tonight. The chicken escabeche, roast potatoes and spicy arugula salad that resulted was well worth it, but I ran out of blogging time. I’ll therefore offer up this rather lovely artwork by way of an intermission. This is by the Spanish artist Anna Dart.

Update: Via a comment Ferns pointed out that this is actually based on a photograph of David and Victoria Beckham. Oddly enough, I featured that original photograph in a post just over a year ago.

The Pleasure Revolution

The Guardian has an interesting article on female sexual pleasure featuring five women speaking out on the topic. It packs in a lot of complex issues, and left me wanting to hear more from everyone interviewed. From the perspective of this blog, the most relevant voice was the last one featured, that of Reba Maybury. The article labels her as a dominatrix, but she seems to be part performance artist, part political agitator and part pro-domme. It’s hard to tell from the article if kink is an intrinsic part of her life or just an interesting tool for exploring power dynamics and gender politics.

What struck me as particularly odd was this section…

A socialist of mixed-race background, Maybury only dominates white, preferably right-wing, men. “I can’t force myself to be even fictionally cruel to any other type of man. It makes the performance a lot easier,” she says. “I could never be mean to someone who wasn’t white, because the world is run by white men, isn’t it?”

To a kinky submissive person such as myself that seems …. odd. Her white, right-wing male clients will doubtless enjoy being dominated. That is after all why they reach out to her. I’m sure being called selfish, disgusting, misogynistic assholes is exactly what some of them desire. On the other hand, a non-white or left-wing man who would also enjoy being dominated, has to go without. So she meets the needs of those she dislikes and withholds it from those she supports. That doesn’t seem optimal.

I think it’s absolutely possible to mix kink and progressive politics. For example, as I covered here with Mistress Couple and the Trump voters. I also love the idea of Dominatrix Maybury getting her right wing submissives to help her create a book whose profits go to sex workers. That’s a fabulous concept. But as she recognizes at the end of the article, our kinks and our politics align in complex ways and they don’t necessarily influence each other. If you want to punish wealthy white conservatives, then maybe don’t beat or humiliate them if that’s what makes their dicks hard?

I’m not sure who this man voted for, but he’s a white guy in a suit, so there’s at least a chance he matches up with Reba Maybury’s criteria. The sexy bondage here comes courtesy of the TS Seduction site.

Minds Eye

This striking but rather unusual image is by Berlin based photographer Pitt Prickel and features Madame Curie. He’s entitled it “Prayer: In My Mind’s Eye” and I came across it via his original tweet.

I like it but find it oddly unsettling. I can browse past beaten torsos, genitals full of needles and guys being pooped on without a raised eyebrow. Yet somehow a man with an eyeball head mask praying to a domme in a decaying urban space gives me pause. I think its the Lynchian juxtaposition of the familiar, the eerie and the surreal that make it work.

The secrets of the penis

Bustle has just published a somewhat odd article – 8 Tips for Pleasuring Someone With A Penis, According To A Dominatrix. The 8 tips are fine. Just the kind of sex advice you expect in these Cosmo style articles. It’s the dominatrix bit that puzzles me. Aren’t they famous for doing very non-pleasurable things to dicks? And don’t they attract the kind of men whose idea of what’s pleasurable differs significantly from the average? It seems a bit like having an article titled ‘8 tips for caring for animals, according to a butcher.’

Obviously I’m not a dominatrix, but I do have a close and complex relationship with a penis that’s attached to a dominatrix visiting masochist. Personally, given the title, I might have expected 8 tips more like…

Penises are tougher than you think, so feel free to slap them around pretty hard. They’re not going to fall off.
Tie them up to keep them engorged with blood and easy to play with. Just make sure to periodically check no bits are getting too cold and at risk of dropping off.
For maximum style points, consider using the helicopter move when its time to remove any cord. Imagine you’re starting a lawnmower with a pull cord, and aim to get the flappy bits spinning like a helicopter rotor.
If you’re planning to clamp the balls in a vice, keep in mind some men are asymmetrically sized. You want to aim for a good even level of pain across the entire scrotum, not just on the one larger side.
It’s fun to stick needles into the skin of a penis, but be careful not to nick a vein. If you do, you’ll get a big red swelling like a golf ball on the side of the dick, which’ll freak out both you and your penis owning friend.
Randomly ruin the occasional orgasm to add an element of surprise to your lovemaking. Or ruin all of them and add an element of consistency.
Nerves become numb to electricity overtime. So if you’re shocking the penis, remember to keep cranking up the power every few minutes.
If he has an upcoming sexual encounter with a non-kinky partner, check before whipping the penis. He might find that black bruises and bloody whip marks on his shaft and head are hard to explain and dramatically reduce the odds of sexual intimacy with his alternate partner.

Obviously these aren’t based in any way at all on personal experience. Just some random thoughts that came to mind, totally out of the blue.

Here’s a technique that surprisingly didn’t get mentioned for pleasuring a penis. I don’t think that’s a classic boxing stance, or that she’s following the Marquess of Queensberry rules, but I suspect it’ll be an effective approach. This is obviously from the Divine Bitches site.

The dominatrix from the original Bustle article is Lola Jean, who also bills herself as a sex educator and instructor. Those titles make much more sense in the context of the article.

Rage against the dying of the light

I must be getting old. In past years I could stack up play sessions over a short period without a problem. On this trip I’ve done three, and now feel like I need to trade my beaten up body in for an updated model. I’d love to think that’s because I’m doing more intense play, but frankly I think I’m not recovering as fast. Age may bring wisdom, but it also bring flab, aches and slow recovery. However, I’m not letting that slow me down, and will be playing again one final time before my flight home. While the body says no, the Id and Ego say ‘bring it on’.

I found this image on the Alternative Femdom tumblr.

Pegging Problems

Dan Savage’s advice column is always worth reading. This weeks column caught my eye because it featured a man who enjoyed being pegged and his partner who very occasionally, when the stars aligned, enjoyed doing the pegging. Dan’s advice about talking more and carving out dedicated time was good and wise. However, I did think he missed a trick by not following up on this part of her letter…

I just want to get it over with and move on with our day, not deal with the pageantry of dress up, stiletto heels, collars and cuffs, lubricating buttholes, graduating to bigger dildos in a session, etc.

I’m not averse to a bit of femdom pageantry myself, but it’s always a nice optional bonus when time and circumstances allow, not the main event. You can have a mind blowing pegging scene with just a simple lubricated strap-on. If time and energy are the issue, then cut the fluff rather than dropping the entire event. Hell, if anal play is the goal, then just a disposable glove, a bit of lube and an enquiring finger (or two) can create amazing sensations.

Despite the fact that I’m lucky enough to experience a lot of femdom dress up and elaborate scenes, my personal pegging fantasy features absolutely no kinky accouterments at all. I always picture a snuggly Sunday morning, when our only plans are to sleep in, read the papers and for me to cook Sunday dinner. I’m happily dozing as my partner slips out to grab her harness and slide back into bed with me. There’s no ropes, leather or stiletto’s. Just some nibbling, nuzzling and hot, intimate sex, that happens to be a pegging scene. I guess we always fantasize about what we don’t have.

This pegging artwork is by Jas. She has a Patreon you can support here and merchandise available here.