Tag: Mainstream

50 Shades of Lavender

Literally seconds after I read this Vice article on a new trend for cute BDSM toys and pastel colored fetish gear, the image below showed up in my twitter feed (via this tweet). I think that’s enough evidence to make it official. 2019 is the year of lavender whips, pink cuffs and beige harnesses. Anyone still going old school with black and red is like totally out of date. Until next month anyway.

In all seriousness, fashion designers often seem do a terrible job of adapting BDSM attire into their clothes. This outfit by Dion Lee, and the others featured in Lady Grace’s tweet, are a rather excellent exception. Elegant, with beautiful clean lines, but still retaining the BDSM aesthetic. They were created in collaboration with Fleet Ilya.

Better Late than Never

The Huffpost has an article about a woman who discovered BDSM in her 50’s and ended up with a kinky partner twenty four years her junior. It’s a cute tale and I liked the part about their cleverly constructed cover story for how they met.

What I found surprising about it was the idea of being awakened to BDSM late in life by going to a class on it. I absolutely  don’t mean that critically. I’m always keen for more people to discover kink and I totally get her attitude of “OMG! I need to try all the things!” when exploring the physical side of it for the first time. It’d be great if more people could be converted to the joys of BDSM via classes. I just find it odd – as someone who had kinky thoughts from a very early age – to imagine being not kinky for decades and then suddenly getting into it. For me it seems like a very fundamental love/hate kind of thing, but obviously that’s not true for everyone.

I’m afraid I don’t know the artist for this drawing.

Update: Thanks to a helpful comment I can now attribute this to the artist Kirsty Whiten.

Multidimensional Sexuality

I thought this article covering the latest research on the link between sexual orientation and genetics was interesting. The short version is that’s no such thing as a single ‘gay gene’. Instead there are multiple genes that play a role in sexual orientation, and genetics are only part of the story.

Another interesting aspect – as this tweet makes clear – is that sexual attraction needs to be judged on two dimensions rather than one. The classic kinsey scale is one dimensional, running from 100% heterosexual to 100% homosexual. This latest study shows that we need to think in two dimensions – same sex and opposite sex attraction. Feeling more attracted to the same sex doesn’t necessarily mean being less attracted to the opposite sex, and vice-versa. You could be attracted to strongly to both, strongly to one or strongly to neither.

This image is from the Sunstone comic series by Stjepan Å ejić. It’s a series that manages to cover a pretty full set of sexual dimensions.

Dating Skills

This New York Post article on a domme class for Manhattan women to up their dating game is a strange one. On one hand I’m all in favor of encouraging more interest in femdom and people learning new kinky skills. On the other, it seems very mercenary and calculating, and not in deliberate findom type way. Learning to top so you can match the fantasies of a rich guy and hence convince him to marry you seems like the opposite of female empowerment. But maybe I’m being too sensitive about the whole thing.

This is a screen shot from the show Billions (mentioned here previously). With Maggie Siff playing the partner and domme to Paul Giamatti’s Manhattan power player, it’s cited in the Post article as inspiration for the kinky curious.

The Warrior Princess

I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Katherine Hepburn ever since seeing her in the African Queen as a young boy. Much as I enjoyed watching Bogart as the cranky captain, it was the spunky and bossy Hepburn character that really caught my eye. Much like the late great Lauren Bacall in her movies opposite Bogart.

This image is Katharine Hepburn as Amazon warrior princess Antiope in a stage production of The Warrior’s Husband (1932). The set might look a little shoddy, and their shin guards fake, but her pose and body language is all kinds of hotness. The lucky man whose hair she’s grabbing is Colin Keith-Johnston.

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants

Fans of mainstream movies that explore BDSM and take kink seriously might want to look out for the Finnish movie ‘Dogs Don’t Wear Pants‘.  You can read a variety review here, a cineuropa one here, and an interview with the director here. I described it as mainstream, in the sense its not porn, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope of catching it at your local multiplex. Web or streaming is probably your best bet to catch it when it has a wider release.

The storyline features a man who loses his wife to a drowning accident, and then is drawn to breathplay with a dominatrix to work through his emotions. Part of me dislikes the fact that it makes a connection between trauma and kinks. I love breathplay and yet have zero wet dead relatives. At the same time I understand that ‘normal man and normal woman have kinky fun because they enjoy it’ does lack something in dramatic tension and narrative drive. I’ll take interesting explorations of BDSM over the usual kink and sex work cliches.

Her Barking Dogs

This is a continuation of the public worship/service theme from yesterday’s photograph. It’s a cute shot, although in its original context I’m not sure how much D/s was actually going on. Reverse image search tells me it’s from a 2015 Japanese movie called Orange, which appears to be a mainstream teenage drama/fantasy/love story. No mention of any kinks.

Incompetent or Evil?

Some rare good news for my old country – the UK has indefinitely suspended introducing their porn blocking system. I’d like to say this was because they realized the danger to free speech and had a sudden burst of sanity, but it was really just down to incompetence. I guess if someone comes up with a stupid idea, the best you can hope for is that they’re too stupid to carry it out properly.

In less good news over this side of the pond, US politicians are once again having a go a free speech online and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. As always, sex workers are the canary in the coalmine. Having used bogus sex trafficking fears to weaken the law with SESTA/FOSTA, they’re now trying to expand the wedge and jam more free speech constraints in place. The online tech companies originally lobbied against SESTA/FOSTA, but eventually caved to the politicians. Presumably they thought it was a safe compromise on a topic they didn’t want to defend. Maybe now they’ll learn their lesson. Politicians have an endless appetite for limiting what people can discuss and share, and compromising in one area will only increase that appetite in other areas.

Here’s an image that seems suitable for a politician trying to limit free expression. Although if all the members of the Soviet’s security forces had looked like this, America might actually have lost the cold war.

This is Mistress Nikita. She no longer takes professional sessions but you can access images and video from her main site here.

Pride Knights

Here’s another Pride themed post to finish the weekend off. This is from a tweet by A. Archer, an artist, model, cosplayer and adventurer.  Not strictly femdom, but I’m sure there’ll be many readers out there who appreciate a lady in armor with a big sword. I think it’s a very fun shot, particularly with the six different colors represented across the back row of people.

It seems odd to see brightly colored outfits for combat, but for hundreds of years that was actually common. Not sure anybody ever went in for a rainbow outfit, but before the days of accurate long distance rifles and rapid firing machine guns, camouflage was a low priority.  It was better to look good and create cohesive units that could be easily identified. It wasn’t until the wars of the late 19th and early 20th century that being hard to see suddenly became a big advantage. As an interesting aside, the creator of the Pride Flag, a man called Gilbert Baker, was actually an army veteran who served between 1970 and 72.

If you’d like to support future work of Archer Inventive, there’s a Patreon here.