Tag: Photograph

Real or fetish?

When it comes to medical play it’s sometimes hard to tell the fantasy from the reality. Some people invest a lot of money into creating a realistic experience. Presumably at some point, when you’ve got a playspace that’s as well equipped as the average surgical center, there really isn’t much difference.

I originally stumbled across this image on a femdom tumblr and assumed it was a medical fetish shot. In that context and with her pose, that seemed the most likely thing. Then I looked at it some more and thought that it actually could just be a regular medical shot. After all the equipment looks pretty serious and she doesn’t have the usual fetishistic nurse outfit. Some hunting around got me to a medical fetish site that currently appears to be dormant. So it actually is femdom, but I wouldn’t have been too surprised to end up at a medical equipment catalogue. I always admire the dedication of people who invest this level of effort and detail into realizing a particular fetish.

MedicalFetish

Comfy shoes

After all the high tech VR posts, I’m going old school with this one. A naked person, some nipple play and a traditional St. Andrews cross.

Clearly the gentleman is enjoying the situation and, quite frankly I can’t blame him for that. But what really caught my eye was the shoes they’re wearing. BDSM imagery is full of ridiculous high heels and boots sporting a hundred and one straps and buckles. It make me smile to see someone wearing comfortable shoes and socks. Their might be some bondage and nipple torture going on, but there’s no reason anyone’s toes should get cold.

ComfyShoesThis is from the specimen01 tumblr aka ‘A Journey into Utopian Femdom’. It has a lot of good images on it from the same couple. I particularly liked this one featuring the comfy shoes and a great smirk.

More virtuality

Following up to yesterday’s post, I’ve a few random additional thoughts and links on the idea of VR and femdom.

For more background on kink.com’s attempts in this space, there’s a short behind the scenes film from Divine Bitches here. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give you much idea about the final results. Even the performers seem uncertain about the whole thing. There’s also a company working on a 3D interactive femdom experience. No offense to anyone working on that, but I think it demonstrates my point that we’re still a couple of hardware generations away from anything realistic.

The tech guy in me is thinking that we need a standard for control channel metadata, outside the video/audio experience. Imagine a POV scene that had additional information to control things like vibrating butt plugs and electrified cock rings. I’ve had some amazing experiences lying down while the domme stood or leaned over me and did evil things to my genital region. With VR, teledildonics and the appropriate control data standards that would seem to be an experience that could be mimicked to some extent. Of course the problem with standards is that they’re so good, everyone wants to have one.

I also think there’s some interesting scope to play with VR in real life scenes. Sensory deprivation and sensory overload has always been part of the BDSM tool chest, although mostly focused on touch. When it comes to vision the options have been limited just to deprivation until now. A VR headset might create alternatives to do heavy layering of visual and auditory systems while adding or removing sensations elsewhere. It removes an element of the interaction in the scene, but so does a blindfold or earplugs, and they’re common toys people use.

POVHere’s another extreme image of the kind that would work well in VR for fans of high heels and POV femdom porn.

Virtuality

This article has some interesting background on how VR porn gets made, including a link to a video on how kink.com shoot their VR scenes. There’s only one vaguely femdom bit, but I was amused by the fact that I recognized the domme immediately and knew what the journalist was about to say.

Personally I think that this area will take off massively when very realistic computer modelling and real-time human animation can be handled on home VR hardware. Then rather than passively look around a scene you’ll be able to interact with it and change it. We’re probably at least two hardware generations away from that – so 4 to 5 years – but I think that’ll be the tipping point for the mass market.

In the meantime VR does lend itself to some niche genres. For example, I imagine giantess fans will have some interesting new experiences. Or really anyone into the ‘looking up at a lady who teases/scolds/insults you’ genre. Femdom clip stores seem full of those films (for example here or here), so there’s clearly a sizable market out there.

LookupNot exactly sure who originally shot this image, but it’s definitely a good example of the kind of scene I’m talking about.

Objectification (of the bad sort)

In the last week the British press has been full of a story featuring John Whittingdale – a politician and member of the government – and a dominatrix who worked under the title Mistress Kate. Almost universally the coverage of it has been terrible and depressing. The facts seem fairly straightforward: They met via match.com in late 2013 and dated for six months. He allegedly had no idea what work she did until someone tried to sell the story in early 2014. When he found he broke off the relationship. In 2015 he was appointed to a more senior goverment position, one related to press regulation, and in 2016 the story broke in the newspapers.

The depressing element in most of the coverage (for example this) is how they objectify the woman involved. She is made to seem entirely ‘other’. Given they dated for 6 months, and attended a number of events together, they presumably had made a connection. Their meeting on a conventional dating site suggests it was just two people looking for a partner and a relationship. Yet in the articles she’s reduced to a purely sexual persona based on her job. She’s a chance for papers to list some titillating details about her dungeon or services while pointing at him for being so stupid as to date such a person. It’s taken as read that obviously he’d break off the relationship when he found out. Everyone involved, both him and the journalists, seem to treat her a non-person once her role as a sex-worker was revealed. It’s a horrible thing to see.

Even the more positive writers seem to miss the point. Articles like this and this use the story to make the point that seeing a dominatrix is a perfectly fine thing to do. Obviously I agree with that general point, but it once again objectifies the woman by equating her with her job. She’s a sex worker, and a pro-domme. Emphasis on work and pro. Maybe she’s kinky in her private life but maybe not. And if she is kinky at home, she might be a domme, a switch or a submissive. They met on match.com, not on fetlife and there’s no indication I’ve seen that they had a D/s relationship. It’s a bit like hearing somebody is dating a professional chef and exclaiming ‘Wow, you must really love food!’ Well perhaps the chef cooks at home and a passion for food is one of the elements that brought them together. But maybe they’ve many other things beside that in common, or perhaps the chef doesn’t like to cook at home, or it might just be a job to the chef. We can separate people from their professions in almost all other cases, yet not it seems when it comes to sex workers.

Given this post has been all about the unpleasant kind of objectification, let’s finish with something more cheerful. This is the sexy and more literal kind of objectification.

Stool

Wonky wires

Apologies for the lack of posts in the last few days. My internet connection failed me for an extended period. After much cursing, rebooting of routers, fiddling with settings and calls to my internet provider, I finally fixed it. Combining my degree in electrical engineering and many years of experience as a software engineer, I skillfully unscrewed the wallplate and randomly wiggled the sockets wires around until some lights came on. You can’t learn stuff like that in college.

In other internet news, of the slightly more significant kind, it looks like Yahoo is up for sale. Normally I wouldn’t care about this, but Yahoo own tumblr, a prime source for finding great material to post here. To Yahoo’s credit they seem to have left tumblr to do its thing, despite the worries expressed when the original deal went through. There’s no guarantee a new owner would continue that. Even more worryingly, one of the names in the frame is the Daily Mail. For those that don’t know it, this is a horrible right wing UK tabloid that hypocritically loves to rail against sex, kink and alternative culture while simultaneously featuring it to attract eyeballs. I can’t imagine a worse site to control something like tumblr.

Here are a couple of images that illustrate the kind of excellent material that can currently pop up there. I stumbled on these at ‘A Gentle Mistress‘ via this post. I believe this is the photographers site and the extended sequence of images can be seen here.

Rope1
Rope2

Where do they get those wonderful toys?

The Kink studios may not quite be Batman (ref here), but they do seem to have a greater array of fancy bondage furniture than anyone else out there. Maybe there are some Japanese studios that rival them, but I’d be surprised. Great gear of course doesn’t necessarily make a great scene, but I think it’s always fun to see a fancy new toy and imagine playing with it. I’ve been in some very well equipment dungeons, but none of them had a full body dunk tank.

This is from Men in Pain and features Miss Brooke, Lucy Lee and Diablo. I was amazed to see it’s from back in 2004.

DunkTank1

DunkTank2

Witchy

Those who like to mix spiritually and paganism with their BDSM may be interested in this article. It discusses some of the overlap between the two, both in the practices and the communities.

Alternatively, for those who aren’t so much into the spiritual side, but do like to see a sexy powerful witch, I’ve got you covered as well. Here’s Charlize Theron as the evil witch queen Ravenna from Snow White and the Huntsman. Not a great movie by all accounts, but Ms Theron can always brighten a film up.

EvilQueen

Caveat venditor

Top tip of the day: If an unknown person on the internet offers you a large sum of money for doing very little, it’s probably certainly a scam. The latest example of this comes to us from New Zealand, where women were offered thousands of dollars for photographs of their hands and feet. Unsurprisingly the money never showed up, but some of the photographs did make it to a fetish website.

Clearly the people that did this are assholes of the first order. Taking advantage of people is a shitty thing to do. However, if the worst thing that happens to you is untraceable foot photographs showing up on a fetish site, then maybe you can treat it as an important life lesson that was cheaply learned. Whoever you’re dealing with, whether it’s selling a sofa on craiglists or photographs for drooling internet perverts, always get the money up front.

I particularly enjoyed the byline to the news article – “Internet watchdog warns ears and elbows could be next as young people are being duped into sending pictures of body parts to fetish websites.” That makes it sound like there’s some bizarre hierarchy of perversion. Watch out kids, after ears and elbows, it’s just a small step to the serious hard pornography of armpit hair and nasal passages. These perverts are working their way around all parts of the body and they must be stopped!

Only a handful of people were scammed, so it’s probably the work of a single maladjusted fetishist with nothing but a gmail account and zero social skills. Somebody should tell the internet watchdog that pretty much by definition fetishists tend to have highly focused interests. They’re not going to switch their sexual attention from feet to ears just because their scam got spotted.

FetishGiven this post has been all about fetishes, you’ll have to excuse me if I indulge one of mine with this image. I’m always a sucker for an elegant and well dressed lady in a tight pair of boots.

Camouflage

I wonder who thought this was a good look to go for? Did they start with the outfit and then go looking for a matching chair, or vice-versa? Or was the outfit and the setting all just a lucky coincidence? Are there people out there with a leopard skin fetish? Or are they aiming for the camouflage fetish market? Does she curl up, concealed on the chair, waiting for her moment to leap out with claws unsheathed? Have many unsuspecting male submissives been surprised and mauled by that most dangerous of predators – the indoor leopard domme?

Miss HybridI’m not sure who this attractive but somewhat oddly attired lady is. I’d guess it’s from a more commercial and conventional porn shot than a femdom one, but that’s only a hunch.

Updated : Thanks to my wise and learned readers (specifically Simon) I can now attribute this to the Miss Hybrid site. I was partially wrong about it being from a conventional porn shot, as Miss Hybrid’s material definitely has a fetish and femdom slant, but there’s more regular sexual activity than the standard femdom clips. Also, for anyone reading this and wondering how I could be such an idiot as to miss the big logo on the image – I changed the image. The original had the logo chopped off, but thanks to the attribution I managed to find the original version with logo intact.