Mainstream – Page 42 – Femdom Resource

A stroll in the city

This rather silly article popped into my inbox today. It features a smartly dressed man being led around London on a leash. Apparently it provoked a twitter thread with the hashtag #manonleash. I realize it’s not something you might see everyday, but for a cosmopolitanism city of over 8M people, I’m surprised it provoked that much interest. I’m pretty certain if you did it in San Francisco nobody would bat an eyelid.

It’s a good job it wasn’t this couple taking their daily exercise. It might have provoked a twitter meltdown and articles in the national papers.

This photograph is from Serious Bondage.

Grovelling as an art form

I typically shy away from Western articles on the less mainstream parts of Japanese culture. They’re often thinly concealed racism expressed as a veneer of humor around cultural differences. However, this article by Kotaku manages to avoid that trap while presenting some brilliant animated gifs. They’re all about assuming the supplicant or grovelling position, but in increasingly elaborate and acrobat ways. Fortunately, for readers of this blog, the grovelling is all happening before attractive and haughty women. I particularly like the final pyramid apology style, although it does suggest that if they’d spent less time practicing it and more time actually doing the original task, they might not have needed to grovel in the first place.

The image below is from the livedoor page the Kotaku article was derived from. I’m not sure that standing on your head counts as an apology, but it’s certainly eye catching.

Ivy and Robin

Batman and Catwoman often show up in D/s situations, but it’s more unusual to see Robin and Poison Ivy getting kinky. This is from Batman and Robin Adventures #8. Fortunately (or possibly unfortunately) for Robin, Harley Quinn eventually gets upset playing second fiddle to the boy wonder and feeds him the antidote to Ivy’s charms. Although that’s not before he’s spent some time shirtless and massaging her feet.

I originally found this on the Robin Wilde tumblr, which has a larger version of the image.

Abusing a term

I maintain a Google alert on the term ‘dominatrix’. I originally figured that if the term popped up in a news article it’d be a likely article for me to post about. In actuality what it means is that I get an endless stream of links to articles featuring celebrities wearing something that, if you squint and don’t concentrate too hard, could be vaguely considered to be fetish wear. It doesn’t seem to matter what it is, or what the context is, just so long as it’s slightly non-conventional.

Some of them I kind of understand (for example this) while others are completely ridiculous (for example this). The latest example, and one that falls firmly into the ridiculous camp, is Kylie Minogue, with this and then this. Kylie is undoubtedly a very attractive woman, but I’ve played with a lot of amazing dommes, and not one of them has worn anything like those outfits. If you’re going to call something a dominatrix outfit then may I suggest this outfit by Mistress Shae Flanigan as a reference point? Obviously you can be dominant in anything you damn well choose, including fuzzy slippers. But if you’re going to invoke cliches, at least make sure it’s an accurate one.

Poised and posed

Here’s an image for fans of the CFNM kink. It’s by Ben Hill photography and taken from a series of images called ‘One Side Life, the Other Side Death‘. In the words of the photographer it “…is a collection of shots designed to illustrate our collective paths from conception to our final rest.”

I originally stumbled across this via a cropped version that’s floating around on the tumblers. Typically images get cropped to remove watermarks. In this case it appears to have been done to simply make the image a squarer and more tumblr friendly shape. I’m glad I tracked down the original, as this version seems a far superior composition.

Implicit associations

Today’s link to ‘thing that’s not really femdom, but I liked it and wanted to share’ is to something called an implicit association test. This is a test which can supposedly uncover associations that you make unconsciously and may not be aware of. It takes about five minutes to do and you don’t need to register if you don’t want to, simply proceed as a guest. There are tests for (allegedly) revealing your instinctive biases on things like skin-tone, weight, religion, etc.

I found the idea fascinating and headed immediately for the sexuality and gender tests. On the sexuality test it reported I had “little to no automatic preference between Straight People and Gay People.” That put me in a neutral group of about 17% of people. Apparently 68% of people taking the test expressed a preference (from slight to strong) for straight people compared to gay people, and 16% for gay people over straight people. Normally being in the middle of any issue is boring, but I was kind of happy to be in that middle bucket.

The gender test result was slightly more surprising. It tested the association between men/women and career/family. For that the standard curve has 76% of people associating men->career and women->family, 17% neutral and only 6.3% associating women->career and men->family. I was in that latter group with a “moderate association of Female with Career and Male with Family”. Apparently (according to the site) our implicit assumptions come from our everyday experiences. Yet I’ve always worked in an environment of >90% men and as a child I was brought up by a stay at home mom and a working dad. That suggests I’m definitely an outlier here. Or that the test is broken.

I’ve no idea how solid the science is behind it, but I thought it was fun to try. Plus, all that talk of gender and careers gives me a chance to feature an everyday office scene. Perhaps she implicitly associates men with doormats?

This is from the Under Feet site.

Ban Bossy

Sheryl Sandberg (the Facebook COO) has launched a campaign to ban the use of the word ‘bossy’. There’s a website and a video that features famous women such as Beyoncé and Condoleezza Rice. The reaction from the press has been varied, with a few positive articles (like this one), but a much larger number of negative ones. Some of those have been reasonable, and instead wanted to reclaim the word, others have been so stupid I think I killed braincells just reading them.

Personally I like the campaign. Although I don’t think it matters if the word gets shunned or reclaimed. History has shown plenty of successful examples of both cases. I just like the fact that it’s being discussed and people may become more thoughtful of how language can shape expectations or behavior. In my part of the business world, even ‘boss’ doesn’t really get used these days, except perhaps occasionally in an ironic context. People are described as managers or leaders, all words with positive associations. The word ‘boss’ has a negative edge, and the word ‘bossy’ is both negative and highly gendered.

Of course, wearing my kinky hat (handkerchief? handcuffs?), I’m a big fan of the type of woman that might occasionally get labeled today as bossy. Anytime I hear someone describe a female friend as bossy my ears perk up and I start making subtle inquiries into her dating and relationship status. It’s up there with feisty, aggressive and intelligent as great trigger words to pitch to me on any attempted blind date set-up.

This forceful and articulate woman, shown here demonstrating a strong leadership role in her relationship, is from the Subby Hubby site. I originally found the image on the CFNM classics tumblr.

La Maupin

A recent Max Fisch thread was discussing the topic of dominant women in history. Who are the most obvious or the most famous? Obviously one has to be careful assigning the idea of sexual dominance to a public persona. Queen Boudica might have led a rebellion against the Romans, and have become a leading female figure in British history, but the books don’t tell us what she enjoyed doing with her husband Prasutagus. Maybe she enjoyed being spanked in the dull moments between slaughtering Romans? After all, we don’t automatically assume that success in a man implies a particular sexual preference.

That caveat aside, I think my top pick for a dominant woman from history would be Julie d’Aubigny, otherwise known as La Maupin. She was famous as a swordswomen, a singer, an actress, a lover and someone who generally buckled a lot of swash. There’s a good article on her here, another written for frat boys here and a wikipedia article here. Somebody even turned her life into a play.

My favorite story about her would be when she dressed as a nun to break into a convent in pursuit of her lover. The girl in question had been hidden there by her parents, not anticipating that La Maupin would break in, fake the girls death, set fire to the place and then escape with her love (temporarily) in tow. My second favorite story would be the duel she fought against three men, beating them all and injuring their leader. Who she then nursed back to health and started a passionate love affair with. I think whatever definition you care to use for a dominant woman, Julie d’Aubigny would qualify.

I believe this image is of her duel with Louis-Joseph d’Albert de Luynes, son of the Duke of Luynes. That would be the gentleman she injured in a duel and who ended up as a life-long love.

Altered states

This article has been popping up all over the web in the last few days, both on mainstream and kinky blogs. It describes research done on BDSM participants, testing their cognitive response to something called a Stroop task both before and after playing.

The results showed that people playing the pain-receiving role showed poorer Stroop task scores, which are seen with short-term reductions of functions in a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortexAmbler said. This region is linked to executive control, working memory and other higher-level functions.

The pain that comes with sadomasochistic sex may cause the brain to shunt blood flow away from this region, causing a subjectively altered state of consciousness — and the appeal of SM, Ambler said.

My initial response on reading this was on the lines of “Well duh!” Anyone who has experienced subspace and the discombobulation that comes along with that will attest to the altered states that kinky play can produce. I’m incredibly spacey and buzzy after my sessions, and can barely talk during them. I’d probably have difficult spelling my name during an intense play experience, let alone doing a Stroop test. However, I do like the fact that somebody is doing real clinical studies in this area. There’s lot of anecdotal commentary flying around about subspace (see this blog for one), but precious little that is grounded in quantifiable data. Even if those quantifiable measurements only involve 14 people in this particular case.

I’ll finish with a shot of a very kind and helpful lady guiding a gentleman towards his own particular altered state. I like the fact they’ve both sticking out their tongues, but for very different reasons.

I believe this is a kink.com shot, but I’ve no actual proof of that. I found it on the Superioridad Femenina tumblr.

A pig led relationship (plr)

I found these images via this Eros Blog post, which led me to this article and finally to the gallery page of the artist Emily Rangel. These kind of parodies always work best when they have a natural fit with the characters conventional personalities, and I think the artist chose wisely here. It’s easy to picture Miss Piggy as a top, and they’d make for a well matched D/s couple. Or should that be P/f couple?

The article claims these sculptures will ‘haunt your dreams’. That doesn’t worry me at all. I have weirder dreams than this all the time. My problem is that since I first saw these, several hours ago now, I’ve had that damn Mahna Mahna muppets song stuck in my head (original version here). All together now: Do doo be-do-do, Mahna Mahna, Do do-do do, Mahna Mahna, Do doo de-do-do de-do-do de-do-do de-do-do-doodle do do do-doo do!