Hades and Persephone

Apologies if you had trouble reaching the site over the weekend. My site hosting service was screwed up again, much to my frustration.

The artwork below is by Jessica Madorran, and is a twist on the traditional representation of Hades and Persephone. In Greek mythology Persephone was the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest and agriculture. When the god of the underworld, Hades, kidnaps the beautiful Persephone the result is a great famine, as Demeter curses the land while roaming it looking for her daughter. Zeus eventually brokers a compromise, with Persephone spending just one third of the year in the underworld with Hades. During that time Demeter grieves for her daughter, causing us mortals to get stuck with winter. Not quite sure why abducting a helpless maiden should get you a compromise deal of 4 months visitation, rather than say a well deserved thunderbolt up your ass, but that’s Greeks gods for you.

The twist in this artwork is a gender reversal, with a female Hades and a male Persephone. I like that change, but it’s odd that someone would commission such a piece. Is there such a thing as a greek mythology gender-swap fetish? Apparently so.

You can see more of Jessica’s work here.

Finding a Dominant Woman

Probably the commonest question and debate topic for submissive men on forums and blogs is: How do I find a partner who is a dominant woman? I’m afraid I personally don’t have any great advice on that. I just double checked around my condo again, and I’m definitely shy one dominant woman partner. However, I can point you to somebody who might be able to help – Sharyn Ferns and her new book. As anyone has read her blog will know, she is both a dominant woman and a fine writer. Those strike me as two excellent credentials to have when writing a book entitled ‘How to find a Dominant Woman.’ It costs about the same as a cup of coffee, so really, what do you have to lose?

This artwork is by sadistic smilez.

Palette Cleanser

After the heavy scenes and crazy toys of the last couple of posts, I thought it was time for a change of pace. A palette cleanser as it were. Something simple and sexy, showing femdom at its minimal best. Think of this post as a small scoop of raspberry sorbet, in the shape of some hot femdom artwork.

This is by the artist domirine.

All the cool kids are doing it

Teen Vogue is not a publication that I thought would ever intersect with my areas of interest. As an actual teen (many, many years ago) I might have sneaked a look at Cosmopolitan sex articles now and again, but Vogue was always far too high fashion and culture to be interesting.

Fast forward a couple of decades and, weirdly, comments about Teen Vogue articles began popping up on my radar from political twitter feeds I follow. Apparently they were doing a better job than a lot of mainstream sources in covering the disaster zone that is American politics. Now I find myself linking to this recent piece on BDSM and consent. It doesn’t break new ground on the topic, but for a magazine with ‘Teen’ in the title, it’s a pretty solid article. Sex and teenagers is always going to be a combustible combination, particularly when you mix in the crazy complexity that is BDSM. Unfortunately banning behavior with teenagers never works, particularly when material is just a click away on the internet, so I’m happy to see this kind of well thought out mainstream coverage.

This looks like an image cut from Manga, but I don’t have an original attribution unfortunately.

KinkD

There’s a new kinky dating app available – KinkD. Its userbase is pretty small at present – 30K is the number mentioned – but it has got some press coverage (e.g. this and this and this), so maybe it’ll grow quickly. I hope they succeed, as there’s definitely a gap in the market. They really should tweak their imagery however. The lady they’re featuring sporting a black lacy mask doesn’t really seem to know what she’s supposed to be doing with the crop she’s holding.

This artwork is by Apollonia Saintclair and is called La visite galante (Enjoying the visit). KinkD should really hire her to create their promotional material, as it’s much sexier than what they’re currently using. If you’d like to see more she has a book and prints available. 

First Time Not So Fun

I hadn’t planned on doing multiple posts on first time experiences with a dominatrix. The previous one by Marga Gomez was simply an article that popped up in my inbox and made me smile. Yet weirdly, a day later, this video piece from Duncan Trussell on his first dominatrix experience showed up.  Even more weirdly, both Marga and Duncan are professional comedians, although their specific experiences and the context of them couldn’t be more different.

It’s hard to know what to say about Duncan’s video piece. It’s a lot less about kink, and a lot more about the human condition. His trigger for hiring a domme was the death of his mother and the resulting scene is . . . strange.

This image is kind of random. If anyone has a better suggestion for a suitable image after watching Duncan’s Vice video piece, I’d love to hear it. It’s not the kind of scene that lends itself to fun femdom shots.

No pain, No gain

After my previous yoga related post, Phil mentioned via a comment that working with a personal trainer in a gym was another BDSM like experience. He’s right of course. There’s a similar sense of being dictated to, pushing limits and suffering pain.

I have weirdly differing responses to those three different scenarios. With a domme being hurt and bossed around is hot sexy fun. With a yoga teacher I tend to be bemused about what she thinks I’m capable of and frustrated when I fail. With a personal trainer my internal unspoken reaction is one of “Fuck you! Don’t you know how heavy this thing is? Do I look like I have muscle tone? I’m in goddamn agony here!” No idea why I react so differently in these three cases. Maybe I should try combining them to see what happens?

The Fearful Symmetry

I’ve been doing yoga with an instructor over the last couple of months. I’d like to say it was all about getting in shape, but it’s really more about maintaining flexibility and not degenerating any further. In middle age you sometimes have to work just to stand still.

There are some obvious similarities between a yoga session and a BDSM session. They both feature physical discomfort, awkward positions, pushing at limits and having a woman firmly tell me “Now we’re going to do 6 more of those.” However, the slightly less obvious similarity that struck me today was about symmetry. Dommes and yoga instructors are always obsessed by it. You just know when start a yoga position or stretch on one side, you’re going to have to repeat it on the other. And any tortuous beating, piecing or pinching from a domme always has to be mirrored equally on both sides of the body.  I’ve even had dommes comment on how annoying it is if they can’t get things like marks and needles lined up neatly and symmetrically.

If there are any dommes reading this, then can I suggest occasionally trying asymmetric play? It might annoy your inner neat freak, but it will blow your submissive’s mind. Particularly if there’s no warning beforehand. We’re so trained to expect particular patterns that being random and uneven will inject a real element of surprise and uncertainty into a scene.

This image was shot by the photographer Henrieta Haniskova and is entitled ‘Yoga Dominatrix’. Yoga fans may recognize the pose. I think it’s ‘Upward Facing Dog’ but I’m far from an expert. There’s a description and fun video on the making of the image available here (also on Vimeo). Both of the models are actually yoga instructors. It’s a shame there aren’t more images from the shoot available, as it looks like they tried a lot of different positions before settling on this one.