Mainstream – Page 33 – Femdom Resource

Asexual sex

Cosmopolitan hasn’t got a great track record on sex articles. Occasionally however it does put up something interesting. The latest example of this would be an article on asexuality – ‘Can You Be Asexual, but Also Enjoy Kink?‘

It’s better than there usual silly sex advice, and treats the subject seriously. That said, I find it odd the way it describes the intersection of kink and asexuality. It seems to treat ‘sex’ as a synonym for PIV/oral/anal and BDSM as something quite distinct from that. Asexuality is therefore cast as a lack of interest in the former (since that’s ‘sex’), but not the latter. What I know about asexuality you could probably write on the back of postage stamp, but this seems kind of odd to me.

I’ve had a lot of intense kinky fun that didn’t resemble regular vaginal/anal/oral sex. Some of that kinky fun resulted in orgasms and some didn’t, but all of it felt sexual to me. It might not have looked much like sex to any observer hiding under the spanking bench, but it was certainly plugging into my sexual circuits. Of course, that’s a personal perspective. I’m not claiming everyone experiences kink in the same way. But I’d be interested to know how many people enjoy D/s or BDSM and feel it doesn’t connect some,how to their sexual wiring, no matter how unusually configured that wiring is. Is someone asexual if they exclusively prefer BDSM as way to express their sexuality? Alternatively, how many people enjoy BDSM in a non-sexual way?

Dude In Distress Here’s someone from Dudes in Distress enjoying some kinky distress. It might not look like sex to most observers, but if I was in that position it’d definitely be pushing a lot of my internal sexual buttons.

Latex Fashion

Jezebel recently published a lengthy article/interview with Sonia Agostino. If you don’t recognize that name (and I didn’t), she’s a fashion designer specializing in latex. Her most recent claim to fame is providing the outfits for Kylie Jenner in her recent controversial photoshoot.

I thought it was interesting because she repeatedly emphasizes her lack of interest in fetish and kink. She originally started with the Baroness – who is very much a fetish designer – yet has evolved to use latex outside a specifically fetish focused scene. I think her work presents an interesting question – can you create non-fetish fashion from a material inextricably linked to fetish? I’m not sure she’s succeeded in that yet. Celebrities who wear her clothes seem to do so to create an alternative/edgy/kinky image. People still like latex for the fetishistic message that comes along with it, even if the clothing is interesting and elegant in it’s own right. Personally, I hope she succeeds in broadening the appeal of latex. It’s a fun material and I’d love to see non-kinky friends of mine trying it out.

This image is entitled Bird Smoke and is from Sonia Agostino’s site.

Worst domme ever

After yesterday’s terrible boss post, today we have this story of a terrible domme. What started as some kinky bondage fun turned into a less fun game of hide from the crazy stalker lady. Bad breakups and nutty ex’s are always a bad scene. I imagine it gets a hell of a lot worse when they have photographs of you cross-dressing, tied to up and surrounded by sex toys. Particularly when they send them to your friends, family and work colleagues.

It’s not an amusing story, despite the tabloid attempts to stick in puns about restraining orders. However, I had to smile and marvel at the ladies logic. Apparently, after indulging in all manner of kinky play with him, she then felt it was her ‘civic responsibility’ to expose his ‘sexual deviance’ and that she was ‘trying to protect the world from this man’. That clearly makes sense. She might have vandalized his car, bombarded him with texts, outed him to his family, tried to get him fired and chased him across the country, but he’s clearly the dangerous one.

thecrueltouch-paperback This vintage femdom book cover seemed an appropriate illustration, given the title and tag line on it. The great artwork is by Paul Rader.

Worst boss ever

Forced feminization is always a fairly controversial topic. Some people find the idea insulting to women and refuse to do scenes involving it. Sue Stenhouse, an ex-city official from Rhode Island, is clearly not one of these people. She thought it’d be a great idea to make a male bus driver dress up as an elderly lady and sit behind her at a press conference.

As stories go, it’s a pretty spectacular one. I particularly like the part where the bus driver had to drop by the local beauty salon in order to borrow a wig. If Sue had asked around, I’m sure she could have found plenty of guys willing to give it a shot and with a full collection of outfits already. After all, it does combine the two hot button topics of forced feminization and public humiliation. Alternatively, and this is just a crazy thought, maybe she could have got a genuine elderly lady to sit behind her for the press conference?

forced-feminization The above image is the kind of sleazy porn art from the 60’s and 70’s that I love. I found this on the Femdomology Site.

High heel worship

This story about a planned church in the shape of an enormous high heeled shoe seems tailor made for a blog like this one. There’s even a video of it available (which I assume is a computer render).

Assuming it’s not a hoax or elaborate publicity stunt (which seems likely), the ‘idea’ is to attract more women to church. Apparently buildings in the shape of objects people lust after is supposed to encourage them to visit. If it works then I assume the US will quickly be overrun by churches in the shape of burgers, monster trucks and Kim Kardashian’s butt.

Doubtless the vast majority of women will tell the church to get stuffed and take its patronizing attitude somewhere else. However, they might attract a bunch of kinky guys who want to lick the heel or imagine being crushed under it. Macrophilia is a pretty tough fetish to indulge in, but this seems perfect for those with giantess fantasies.

Heels This lady may not be a giantess, but it’s a nice pose with a high heeled shoe. The watermark suggests it’s from Lightwerk studios in Köln, but I can’t find a website for them anywhere.

Updated: Thanks to my every helpful readers I now have links for the photographer – here, here and here.

Neat and tidy

The title of this guardian article certainly doesn’t bury the lead – ‘After cleaning a 91-year-old’s bondage gear, I couldn’t look at him the same way again‘. On one hand I can only hope to emulate the gentleman’s stamina and perseverance. Age should not be an impediment to kink. On the other hand leaving sex toys out for someone else to deal with is a touch skeevy. My mother used to be a cleaner when I was a young boy, and I’ve lots of respect for anyone dealing with other peoples mess. People who embarrasses others unnecessarily, not so much.

I’m afraid don’t have any images of nonagenarian’s in bondage. Oddly enough they’re not a big part of the kinky porn scene. Instead you’ll have to settle for this bondage shot from TS Seduction. I like the combination of ropes, head bondage and torn suit. I’m guessing it wasn’t an Armani black label.

Suit Bondage

Food for thought (cont)

After that brief interlude, I’m back with a couple of final thoughts on the case of Gilberto Valle. If you missed the previous post then go read it from a couple of days ago. I’m not going to repeat myself, damn it.

One thing that repeatedly came up in the documentary on him was a variation on the slippery slope argument. Several people, including one of the jurors, expressed the idea that he was inevitably building up to committing a crime. Having started looking at sexually violent images, and moved onto discussion and chat, he’d feel ultimately compelled to up the stakes for bigger and bigger thrills. It’s an argument I’ve heard before about kink and it always strikes me as ridiculous.

In non-sexual areas we never assume people will lose all reason and control when exploring their passions. Imagine someone who is keen on flying. They start with buying a few magazines and video games on the subject. Then they begin visiting airshows and hanging out on pilot forums. Eventually they decide to get their private pilot license and fly for fun at weekends. Nobody is going to argue that the inevitable next step will be to sneak onto an military airbase and steal a fighter jet. That would certainly be a bigger thriller (and one guy even did it once), but we don’t assume the desire to fly will rob someone of their rationality. We typically explore an interest till we reach some sane limit based on cost, availability, legality, risk, etc.

Yet when it comes to sex a lot of people seem to believe that either you have a stable list of kinks and interests, or that you’re on one long slide into the abyss of depravity and illegality. I think it’s because people can only imagine two options. Either you’re satisfied with what you’ve got, or are never fully satisfied, and must therefore seek out stronger and edgier thrills. They have difficulty imagining more fluid and variable sexual interests that aren’t simply a constant escalation of sensation. Of course the situation isn’t helped by some crazy people who do escalate and go on to do horribly depraved things. But exception cases are always that – exceptional. It’s possible to explore non-consensual fantasies without ending up a rapist or cannibal, much as it’s possible to enjoy fantasies of medieval battles without hacking people to death with a sword.

I’ve no idea what was going on in Gilberto Valle’s head when he was chatting online. They were disturbing conversations, and I don’t think it was wise or ethical to feature his wife and friends in the chats. But much like free speech, it’s easy to defend something you agree with, harder and yet far more important to defend it when you don’t. In drawing a line between conspiracy and fantasy, we should always err towards giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt.

cat_and_spider_mouse
This image is from vore fan comics on DeviantArt and entitled Cat and Spider Mouse. Vorarephilia, as described by wikipedia, is the erotic desire to be consumed by, or sometimes to personally consume, another person or creature. Vore fantasies are separated from sexual cannibalism because the living victim is normally swallowed whole. Apologies if anyone is disturbed by the image, but vore does occasionally show up in femdom artwork, and it seemed appropriate given the original subject matter.

Food for thought

A new year of femdom blogging is opening up before me. So what better way to get going than with some articles on a man who fantasies about killing and eating women? Not exactly femdom I know. If fact, about as far from femdom as you can get. However, the story does raise some important issues around fantasies and on-line behavior that are worth pondering.

The man in question is Gilberto Valle, a former NYC cop. He frequented fetish websites and chat rooms where he shared some very dark discussions around torture, murder and cannibalism. More problematically he used the names and photographs of his wife and female friends in these discussions. When his wife found out she was understandably horrified and told the police. He claimed the discussions were all fantasies. They claimed they were a conspiracy to commit a heinous crime. The jury believed the police and found him guilty. That conviction was then overturned by the judge who said he couldn’t be found guilty for a ‘thought crime’.

There’s a good article on the case, written just after his conviction, available from the New York Magazine. Slate has a follow-up interview with him after he was released. What prompted this post was a fascinating HBO documentary on the case called ‘Though Crimes’. I watched it last week and it raises some really interesting issues around how lines can be drawn between fantasy and reality. If you’re in the US and have HBO on-demand, it’s currently available there.

A key part of the goverment case centered on his Google searches. For a crime to take place there has to be intent – a substantial step taken towards committing it. In this case, lacking hard physical evidence, his searches were taken as evidence of intent. That’s a pretty scary jump to make. The barrier between having a thought and expressing it to a search engine is almost non-existent. How do you distinguish between the intent of someone trying to create a realistic fantasy and the intent to carry out that fantasy? How many of us would like to explain our search histories to the world? Or to defend them to a prosecutor trying to cast them in the worst possible light?

The law has evolved based on the physical world, where actions have costs in time/money/effort. That tells us more about intent. I don’t have much sympathy for the conviction of Chris Asch, one of the people involved in the online discussion, who amassed a very scary collection of tools. You don’t need to own a stun gun to write a good fantasy about using one. But the online would has essentially zero barrier to actions like searching, typing or clicking. One can only hope the law can evolve to incorporate this fact. An online search is much more like a thought than an action.

I generally think that incorporating real people into sexual or violent stories without their knowledge is pretty unpleasant and unethical. But if my opinion doesn’t sway you, and you write about dark non-consensual fantasies online, then keep this case in mind. If you end up as next weeks headlines, it might suck to be thought sick and weird, but that’s definitely better than adding dangerous and criminal into the mix.

– Image Removed by Request –

Happy 2016

I hope all my readers enjoyed the last evening of 2015 and didn’t wake up too hungover for the start of 2016. Champagne is the traditional way to greet midnight on New Years eve, and I always used to try and stash a bottle of good champagne away for that moment. However, experience has taught me that the time to drink the good champagne is at the start of the evening, when everyone will appreciate it. By the time midnight rolls around then anything the right color with a few bubbles in it will do.

The image below is from an advertising campaign for Dom Perignon champage. It was shot by Karl Lagerfeld and features Claudia Schiffer. I’m not really sure what the connection between the champagne and the fetish gear is, but that’s often the case with these kind of ‘artistic’ ads. I certainly wouldn’t object if my 2016 featured several bottles of Dom and a whip wielding Claudia Schiffer.

Dom Perignon campaign featuring Claudia Schiffer

Lending a helping hand

This news article on a Hull based dominatrix helping to feed the homeless om Christmas day put a smile on my face for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s obviously a very very nice thing for Hull’s Mistress Dita to have done. From reading the article it’s also not her first efforts in this area, so she’s clearly someone to be applauded. The second thing I like was the way the article itself was written. The word dominatrix was used in much the same way you might say ‘local business owner’ or ‘entrepreneur’. It’s rare for the press to resit the urge to make stupid comments about kink or BDSM or sex work whenever the chance arises. To see it treated with such a neutral tone makes a pleasant change.

Mistress Dita If you’re looking for a pro-domme in the Hull area of the UK, then Mistres Dita certainly seems like a great person to connect with. Her site isn’t responding to me right now, but her twitter feed is very active and has contact info in it.