The beauty of dominant women
Finally, to finish off this run of medically themed posts, a drawing from the great Namio Harukawa. A lot of his work is very explicit in its themes, but I like this one for it’s slightly more restrained approach. It could almost be a normal nurse/patient scene. Almost. He’s looking just a little too entranced with the curvy vision in front of him, and she’s not exactly maintaining her distance. Sure enough, in later shots, it gets a little more explicit.
Yesterday’s post on the reality of medical facilities got me thinking about the origins of fetishes. Scott left a comment about his recent medical procedures and how unerotic they were, which aligns with my personal experiences of hospitals. Yet, the medical fetish seems to be a very popular one. I think that offers a great illustration of just how complex fetish origins can be.
Looking at ‘simple’ fetishes like feet, latex or stockings it’s tempting to come up with a very reductive explanation, involving just the right mixture of the item in question, a female figure of desire and an impressionable child. A suitable blend of positive elements and poof, fetish wiring imprinted into the brain. But how does a child subvert something as unpleasant as a hospital stay into an erotic charge later in life? That’s not an obvious ‘positive’ origin at all. One might guess that fear, female authority figures, clinical intimacy and a focus on the body all play a role. But it would seem impossible to boil it down to some sort of Pavlovian response to basic stimulus.
I’m not really a fetish person, but like a lot of areas of human sexuality, I do find them fascinating to ponder. They may manifest themselves in a similar fashion (fetishized+fetishist=fun), but their origins must be highly variable and complex.
This seems to be a suitable image to continue the medical femdom theme. I found it on the iHonorHer blog. I believe this is Stephanie Seymour from Vogue France in 1995.
I’m back in Seattle after a vacation packed with a little more incident than I was hoping for. My mother is in town from England for a few weeks and I thought I’d show her the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately she got a little too up close and personal with some of the beauty, after slipping and falling on the beach. Two days, two hospitals and many hours later, she was sporting a cast and couple of metal pins to hold a broken wrist bone in place. Not a great souvenir to bring back from vacation.
I have to say that if you ever want to cure somebody of a medical or nurse fetish, just make them spend time in some real medical establishments. I wasn’t the one being treated, but I did get to kill a lot of time just hanging around different bits of the hospitals. They’re horrible places. Beige and grey throughout, with drab utilitarian furniture, scuffed surfaces and condescending public service posters plastered everywhere. The only gleaming white and visually interesting places – like the ICU or operating theater – are the spots you’ll only experience in really bad situations when sexy fun time is definitely not in your thoughts.
The nurses varied from brusque and surly through to efficient and helpful. But none had me rushing out to fake up a minor injury to get treated. I saw more eye catching women in 10 minutes in downtown Vancouver than I did in 10 hours at nurse central. My favorite was the highly officious one who insisted on getting my agreement on the $600 initial fee before starting treatment. This while mom was moaning in pain and going into shock. I’m not sure what poor foreigners are supposed to do if they injure themselves in Canada. Just moan quietly and try not to bleed too much before they can get home?
Anyway, just because reality sucks, doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the fantasy. Here’s an image from Peter Coulson featuring a nurse and patient depicted as many of us would wish them to be.
I do a lot of sessions that never get blogged about. Either we don’t remember to take photographs or they’re intense but not particularly visually interesting. However, today’s post brings you a scene I did last week with Lady Lydia which was both a little unusual and we remembered the camera for.
As the post title suggests it features suturing. There’s no blood and nothing particularly graphic in the shots. Unless you count a naked me as graphic (I wouldn’t blame you if you did). That said, there is some piercing and skin sutures involved, so I’ve put the details on a separate page. If you’re interested in seeing what a very talented domme can do with a cutting needle, some surgical suture and a willing volunteer, then feel free to follow the jump.
Augustine’s artwork featured in my very first post to this site, and he was the first artist I added to the Femdom Artwork page. He closed the original site for his work some time ago, so I was very happy to hear (via a comment he left) that he’d started a new tumblr featuring both his old work and any new pieces. There are only a handful of drawings there currently, but I’m looking forward to seeing it grow in the future.
Medical role play is pretty common in BDSM and particularly in femdom. It’s a natural fit with the dominant female authority figure and all those invasive and potentially painful medical treatments. Everything from needles and catheters through to straightjackets and dental gags have been appropriated into the kinky domain.
Most femdom medical imagery is pretty fetishistic, with lots of shapely nurses brandishing random medical equipment and staring into the camera. For example, this kind of shot. Pretty but not all that scary. For really disturbing kinky medical themed images it turns out the fashion industry is the place to look. Specifically this shoot for Interview Magazine by photographer Steven Klein featuring Karolina Kurková and Crystal Renn.
Apparently it draws heavily on the institutional white trend of Spring 2012 and features such designers as Jennifer Fein, Stella McCartney and Dolce & Gabbana. It’s certainly one of the most fetishistic and BDSM heavy fashion shoots I’ve ever seen. I’m guessing they must have hired a professional bondage rigger for the ropework shot. I think if a photographer for somewhere like Kink.com had come back with these images they’d have sent him away with the instructions to come up with something a little less fucked up next time.
The io9 site recently published an article discussing four fascinating papers on the subject of measuring pain. The studies in question were all done back in the 1940’s with the goal of coming up with a reliable and reproducible method for quantifying levels of pain. The scanned versions of papers can be read online: Paper 1 (1940), Paper 2 (1947), Paper 3 (1947) and Paper 4 (1948). They’re fairly readable and easy to understand, assuming you having a grounding in basic maths and science.
Pain in itself is a curious topic, as it’s such a uniquely subjective experience. We normally build understanding by shared references. Yet, if I tell someone my back hurts, how do we establish a common reference point? With external stimulus, like color or sound, we can measure the spectrum or the loudness irrespective of a person. Something like taste or smell is a little more complex, but there’s at least an external object (the food itself) to breakdown and analyze. It’s also possible in those cases to construct a common language from more primitive elements (sweet, bitter, salt, etc.) Just look at wine tasting notes for an example of that approach in action. But with pain? How do you measure something that’s completely internal, and can manifest at any point in the body, to a huge range of stimulus, or sometimes to no apparent stimulus at all?
The scientists behind these papers tackled the problem by proposing a scale for measuring pain, with a unit called the dol. They created it using controlled doses of heat on volunteers, and measuring when they could detect a difference between the heat intensity levels. They discovered that on average people could distinguish 21 levels of different intensity between nothing and maximum pain. This maximum wasn’t some safety limit set by the scientists. It turns out that there’s an upper limit on pain, a maximum beyond which increased intensity isn’t detected as greater pain. Working with this 0 to 21 detectable level changes, they assigned 1 dol =equals 2 levels, and created a 0 to 10.5 pain scale.
There’s all sorts of interesting bits of data in the papers. For example, mood and fatigue made no difference to the perception of pain, but gripping an iron bar tightly or hearing a very loud sound did. That fits the common intuition that being distracted from pain lessens it. They also showed that pain did not sum over an area. In other words, the intensity of the pain was purely related to the intensity of the heat energy applied, not the size of the area it was applied to. Initially that seems a little count-intuitive, but it does fit to the idea that being distracted can help reduce pain. One thing that can distract you is a different pain. That wouldn’t be true if pain was additive.
The most interesting finding is one that I think the io9 article misunderstands, or at least misrepresents. It says…
The study’s authors concluded that 8 dols of pain equaled four successive two dol experiences. This arithmetic aspect of the dol contrasted existing beliefs of the subjective nature of pain.
That seems to suggest some sort of progression in time, where you can reach very high pain levels by repeatedly applying a low pain stimulus. That’s not what the study found. What they discovered was that the scale is linear. So the increase in intensity between 1 and 2 dols, is perceived as the same increase in intensity when moving from 8 to 9 dols. I think most people would think of a pain scale like the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes. That’s a log scale, and so going from a magnitude 4 to 5 earthquake is basically nothing, where going from a magnitude 7 to 8 is huge. Similarly, you might expect that a 1 to 2 change in pain isn’t much, where going from 8 to 9 is very scary, but it’s actually perceived as the same change in intensity. This also means that the standard 0 to 10 scale doctors often use, where 0 is no pain and 10 is worst pain you can imagine, actually makes sense. There is an upper bound to pain and the scale between zero and that maximum value is a simple linear one.
The io9 article has a sense of ‘Wow, look what these crazy scientists used to be able to get away with.’ To me it didn’t seem that bad. As a masochist I may have a distorted view on this, but it’s only temporary pain. I suspect if they’d hired an attractive female doctor with an authoritative attitude to perform the tests, as in this artwork by Waldo, then they’d have been inundated with volunteers. Although that might have thrown their experimental results off. They claimed mood didn’t make a difference, but I doubt they also considered or induced sexual arousal.
The last few days have found me hunting through my archives of femdom art and erotic fiction in search of a little creative inspiration. I’m trying to carve out time to do some more femdom fiction writing, which for me is an enjoyable but slow process. Normally I just start bashing away at whatever random theme comes to mind, typically without any prepared plan or structure. Occasionally that turns into something worth publishing, but more often than not it bogs down and ends up being left to rot in my unfinished ideas folder. This time I’m trying to be a little more scientific. I’ve been analyzing some of my favorite authors (e.g. Tyjord, drkfetyshnyghts and Anne Gray) to see what parts of their stories really push my buttons. It has been interesting and educational to try and deconstruct why certain passages really grab me. For example, I liked this a lot.
Jason panicked as he felt the tugging on the front of his collar as Victoria pulled the chain through the ring on the ceiling. For a moment he thought they were going to hang him as he choked from both the gag and the pressure on his collar.
Seeing the distress in his eyes, Kristi leaned over his ear and whispered to him, “you can ease off the pressure a bit if you lift yourself up on your toes.” Gratefully he did so, putting all of his weight on the rubber encased balls of his feet. Immediately, Victoria took up the slack in the chain and hooked the taught metal to another ring in the wall near her. Kristi then grabbed another strap and buckled it around his newly exposed instep.
From ‘Jason’s Vacation’ by Tyjord
The apparent concern, the whispered words of apparent comfort and advice, and then the cruel betrayal. That’s hot.
I’m thinking of setting a story inside a medical establishment, so I’ve been browsing artwork along those lines. The piece below is one that particularly grabbed me. I know from personal experience that a little Icy Hot or VapoRub can be pretty painful when applied to delicate tissues. I can’t imagine what it’d be like when slathered on liberally with a painters brush.
It’s not signed but from the style I believe it’s from Tink2001. His work has featured here in the past (for example here, here and here). He has a personal site with a small collection of images located here.
On an entertaining side note I tried putting this into Google’s image search to see what it would come back with. That’s often a good way to find other sites that have featured particular artists. In this case it came back with “Best guess for this image: 3d animal porn”. Not exactly what I was hoping for.
A few weeks ago Lady Anna emailed me to ask if I’d be interested in reviewing her site – The Anna List Medical Fetish Clinic. She’d give me free access for a month and in return I’d write an honest review on what I found there. Obviously my first thoughts were around the ethical dilemma this posed. The best reviewers – the Michelin inspectors, the New York Times correspondents – never accept any kind of gratis service. They pay as they go. Don’t my readers deserve the same kind of journalistic integrity? My second, third and fourth thoughts were “Woohoo! Free kinky porn!”. After wrestling with these complex issues for at least 7 or 8 seconds, I rationalized that my readers deserve an honest appraisal of the kinky content that’s out there, whatever the risk to myself. I shouldn’t be worrying about the cost to my public image when I have a higher duty to look at all this porn for my readers. And if you don’t like that rationalization, I have others.
Immediately after emailing her to accept I was struck by another troubling thought. What if the material sucks? It’s one thing to comment on random images I stumble across on the web, but quite another to write my typical nonsense when the creative person in question is staring over my shoulder. Fortunately for me, and other kinky porn connoisseurs out there, it definitely doesn’t suck. I think she’s managed to capture on video a really good sense of some very compelling D/s sessions.
I guess I should start with the technical stuff first. She has four main video sections – dental, medical, rubber and operating. There’s also a collection of audio only files and an archive with older footage that’s less overtly medical. Most films are 10 to 20 minutes in length, and are shot in high def with solid camerawork. It’s not simply a static camera that captures everything from a single wide angle viewpoint as I’ve seen elsewhere. There are around 60 films, so far mostly in the medical and rubber clinic sections, and a new film is added each week. As should be obvious from her facilities page, she has a very well equipped set-up, with one of the best collections of medical equipment that I’ve seen. It gets used to for a lot of breathplay, anaesthetic roleplay and immobilizing bondage.
When it comes to the actual sessions themselves, her style is very cool, calm and collected. There’s no ice queen or snarling mistress here, just a matter of fact, it’s for your own good style of domination. There’s a genuine feel to it, which seems a weird thing to say given the heavy medical trappings. After all, you’re clearly not watching genuine medical procedures. Yet there’s a real sense of connection and trust between Lady Anna and her patients. This isn’t a couple of fetish models who just met an hour or so before a scripted scene. She also has a nice style of communication, chatting to the patient, but adding commentary for the viewer in the process.
Sometimes in professional porn it feels like you’re watching a circus act, a kinky cirque du soleil. The submissives are super-subs, pushed through a rapid sequence of extreme and amazing acts. They might express pain, but it’s rare to get a genuine sense of fear or a difficult limit being flirted with. In contrast both Lady Anna and her patients come across as a lot more human. There’s a feeling that the submissive is being challenged and the D/s dynamic between them explored. It’s not fast cutting, high paced material, but it does capture more of the feel of a real session.
Downsides? There’s really nothing that shouldn’t be obvious from the site itself. Obviously it’s just Lady Anna playing with her submissives in a medical fetish context. So if you’re looking for a wide variety of skinny models wearing traditional pro-domme gear then you’re liable to be disappointed. And while there’s less pure medical roleplay than you might expect, the setting is clearly a clinical one. If medical type activities doesn’t appeal, or you’re looking for lots of non-medical style play (e.g. corporal, cuckolding, strap-on, etc.), then I’d look elsewhere. But if the preview material is appealing to you, then I can’t think of any reason not to give it a shot.
In the last few days, as I’ve hunted around for interesting medical style femdom images, I’ve been surprised by the numerical differences between photographs and artwork. There’s a relatively limited amount of interesting medical photographs. The English Mansion has a pretty extensive clinic section and there are some dommes that specialize in medical shots (like Lady Anna’s clips), but it’s generally not a common theme. In contrast it seems to be a very popular subject for artists. Just looking through my Femdom Artwork section, artists such as Augustine, Dmitrys, Namio Harukawa, Rubex, Sardax, Kami Tora, Vernice61 and Waldo have all done non-trivial amounts of medical themed work.
I suspect that’s partly because suitable equipped spaces are hard to find, where dungeon and domestic interiors are a dime a dozen. I also suspect it’s something to do with balancing the harder reality a photograph presents to the viewer. A domme in a Halloween style nurses uniform and a toy stethoscope just looks kind of silly. But a fully equipped and realistic medical space (like this German one) is probably too much for all but the most hardcore medical fetishist. Balancing between those two seems difficult. I’d guess a lot of submissives want to take some of the themes of control, invasion of personal space and helplessness from medical procedures but recast them slightly. This kind of fantasy projection seems easier in artwork, where more is left to the viewers imagination.
Obviously to illustrate this I needed a medically themed image that illustrates this flexibility of fantasy. So here’s something from the obscure artist known as German. There’s a lot going on, with a feminized young man, some oral worship and a nurse with an enema in progress.
I found this image on a new site dedicated to this artists work that someone was kind enough to email me. If you like this image then I’d suggest taking a look at the site, as there’s a huge number of similar drawings there. Here’s another one from there that I particularly liked.
