Photograph – Page 130 – Femdom Resource

Ssshhh!

I am apparently too noisy to play in a particular San Francisco play space during normal office hours. I discovered this fact recently when planning a forthcoming trip. I’m not sure if I should be proud, ashamed or indignant. I think I’m probably going to go with amused. As someone who tends to the introverted and shy in social situations, I’m entertained by the idea of my naked screaming self disturbing other people.

It’s no big deal to find another location in a kinky city like San Francisco, so I’ll just be yelling and groaning somewhere else this time around. Hopefully I’ll avoid scaring the neighbors in the alternate location. I’m a fan of communicating clearly with my top, but perhaps this is a sign I’ve been overdoing it.

This is the wonderful Paulette Goddard with Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.

Wet Stuff

Michael Phelps continues in his bid to be the most interesting swimmer ever. I’ve zero interest in the sport itself, but I appreciate the fun stuff he’s got up to outside the pool. The latest story has him allegedly being peed on by a pro-domme. I emphasize the alleged part, as the story source is the National Enquirer, which is hardly a bastion of high quality journalism.

While I’m all for hot wet splashy fun, the story does seem a little odd. She claims to have peed on him on a hotel bed. What professional would do that? There would be pee everywhere. Lots of towels might help, but who wants to explain urine soaked towels to the cleaning staff? In my experience pee pads on the floor are the answer in play spaces and the bathroom is the answer in hotel rooms.

Normally when I feature a pro-domme story I link to their contact information, but given this one betrayed client confidentiality and blabbed to the press, I’m not inclined to send anyone in her direction. I can only hope she loses more money from clients staying away then she gaining from the National Enquirer. Instead I’ll finish with an image of a couple in a more appropriate set-up for some wet fun.

I’m afraid I don’t have an original source for this image. If you can point me at one then please leave a comment with the relevant information. I found it via the Felm Cyber tumblr.

Taking notes

I’ve never really got the writing on the body thing. I do know that it’s a hot scenario for a lot of people, but up to this point it hasn’t really pushed my buttons (with some exceptions). I should probably try it, as I often find that kinks can rapidly progress from “Well OK, I guess we can try that” into “Oh my God! Why have we not done this years ago?”

I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution for this. I found it on the Classy Femdom tumblr.

Tabloid nonsense

The past week has seen the tabloid news sites posting numerous articles on Alissa Afonina. She’s a young woman who was recently awarded $1.5M in damages after being badly injured in a car accident in 2008. The reason for all the tabloid interest was that the accident resulted in a brain injury that led to changes in her social and sexual behavior, and in recent years she has earned a living working as a dominatrix. Or, to put it in the most tabloid way possible, courtesy of the Daily Mail – “Star student, 23, wins $1.5m after car crash brain trauma turned her into an impulsive sex-mad dominatrix”.

I wasn’t planning to feature the story at all. All the articles seemed like sensationalist nonsense, designed to sell page views, titillate readers and ignore the serious elements of the story. However, Jezebel put together an interview that I think is worth linking to. I can’t say I like the headline for it, but it’s a well done interview that actually digs into the pertinent issues and treats Alissa as a person rather than a story to be packaged and sold. She comes across as an intelligent and impressive person who has dealt well with a very difficult situation.

She works under the name Sasha Mizaree. You can visit her professional site, her clip store, her twitter feed or her tumblr. If you’re in the Vancouver area you can arrange in person sessions via her main site.

Trust

Theater fans in the Miami area might be interested in a play called ‘Trust’ showing at the Adrienne Arsht Center. The Miami Hurricane has coverage of it here and here.

The show follows Harry (Nicholas Richberg), a shy nerd turned internet billionaire after he sells his website for a fortune….

However, with nothing left to strive for, he feels dissatisfied with his life and goes seeking excitement at an S&M club. He meets a dominatrix whom he knows as Prudence (Niki Fridh) from high school. Prudence enjoys her work in BDSM, but must deal with an unhealthy relationship with Morton (Alex Alvarez.)

When Harry asks Prudence out for coffee, he begins a complex chain of events. From there, the show’s four characters grapple with their relationships and identities as they explore power, love and control.

I’ve not seen it, but the reviews for it seem pretty positive. Feel free to leave a comment if you’ve got some first hand knowledge of the show. The shot below certainly shows commitment from the actors.

The good new days

After all these vintage art posts, let’s do something a bit more modern. I’m not sure where the image below is from originally, but I’d guess it’s a kink.com scene.

There’s a lot of valid criticism that can be directed towards today’s kinky pornography. However, no matter what its problems, I think it’s safe to say that it’s significantly better than what came before. Most vintage photographs look like they’re shot in someone’s front room with a model who has no idea what kink is. For example, I give you this or this. In contrast the shot below has an interesting setting, nice lighting, competent bondage and a sense that the lady concerned might actually know what to do with her new accessory. One can almost believe that the people arranging the shot might have a kinky bone or two in their body.

Crossover

I believe the two images below are from a regular porn film, without a specific femdom slant. I found them via The New Superior Sex tumblr, and reverse image searching led me to this movie (warning youporn link that plays video with annoying music). I can’t say I’m a fan of the other tropes displayed on the youporn page (teen, thin, cutie, etc.) but I do like that it’s normalizing kinky play across regular porn. Blindfolds and bondage can be fun. It doesn’t have to be crazy cattleprods and whips on one side and random orifice stuffing on the other. Sex and sensuality works well with kink, and kink adds a nice edge to them in return.

Blogocalypse cancelled (for the moment)

Google has thankfully reversed course on their plan to eliminate all blogs featuring sexually explicit material. Bacchus does some detailed parsing of the retraction in posts here and here. I’m happy to see that some of my favorite blogs will be sticking around, but the bottom line remains the same. If you’re an adult blog on Google’s blogger, you’re on borrowed time. Move now or resign yourself to living with a digital Sword of Damocles.

It’s tempting to assign malicious intent in these situations, but I suspect it’s just another example of the the dynamics that exist in big tech companies when it comes to sexual material. To make good decisions you need data and debate. You need people to argue both sides of the discussion and play out scenarios based on the data. It’s no doubt easy for engineers to figure the cost of hosting lots of images, to determine the fraction of adult blogs and to point at sites using blogger as free hosting for advertising commercial porn sites. What’s needed on the other side is for people to dig into adult sites and point out their social value. Unfortunately it’s tough for the average tech person to stand up in a conference room and defend porn and explicit sexual material in front of their coworkers. Who wants to be the person telling their boss that the change might save the company millions of dollars, but it’s really important that Servitor’s femdom captions are shared with the world? I can just imagine the scene – “Yes, I know they’re pretty twisted. I’m sorry that castration one made you uncomfortable. And yes, I know Julie mentioned something about contacting HR after the meeting. And OK, so all the photographs are unlicensed. But dammit, it’s our ethical duty to publish them. It’s what our shareholders would want us to do.”

I’m being deliberately facetious, but I think it highlights the dynamics at play. That said, I think if you choose to work on an open blogging platform, you should be able to engage in these kind of arguments (although probably not in that exact form). If you’re not happy supporting forms of expression about subjects you’re not comfortable with, working with bloggers is not for you. Unfortunately the hiring processes for teams within large companies don’t filter all that well for that kind of criteria.
I had no idea what image I should feature with this post, so here’s something generally femdom-y and hot. It was featured on hmp’s blog, one of those that was in the firing line for closure.

I should add that I’ve absolute zero insider knowledge into Google’s decision making process on blogger. I’m just going by my knowledge of the dynamics of big tech companies. For all I know, they might decide everything by games of pin the tail on the intern. Or by having Sergey Brin throwing lawn darts into an organization chart after doing a dozen shots of Jägermeister. Either of those would at least account for Google+.

Keeping it real

After a vacation in the land of the rich, famous and ostentatious, a post featuring this article on financial domination seems appropriate. It’s one of the better ones I’ve seen from the mainstream press on the subject, involving interviews with both fin dommes and their clients.

The bit of this article that made me smile was about one of the clients – Dennis a 38 year old professor.

For him, the appeal of financial domination is that it’s a “very real” form of humiliation and power exchange. “BDSM role-play with whips, chains, bondage is one thing, but at the end of the day those are just games, which focus around male fantasy,” he says. “But handing over your hard-earned money to a beautiful woman while being denied any sexual and/or romantic reciprocation is about as real as female domination gets.”
…
Generally, he prefers Fin Doms between 18 and 27, athletic women who shop at stores like Lululemon, women with “pretty, innocent-looking faces and sparkling eyes that hide greedy, sadistic and narcissistic personalities.”

I spot a significant amount of self-delusion there. I’m all for Dennis getting his kicks in a consensual fashion. He’s clearly got a very particular interest and fantasy. But it makes me laugh to think that it’s ‘real femdom’ where all that stuff with bondage and whips is just games. At the end of the day it’s all fantasy and it’s all real. Nobody would bother with kink if it didn’t fulfill some sort of fantasy. And as long as cash is being handed over, welts are being raised and knots are being tied, then it’s all equally real.

I believe this is another image from the London based pro-domme Miss Antonia Davenshaw. I found it somewhere on tumblr, but detective works leads me back to her twitter feed.

The epicenter of heels

I was out shopping and dining in Beverly Hills today. It’s a shame I’m not a high heel fetishist, because I think the fashion district here might have more women wearing higher heels than anywhere else in the US. I’m used to seeing them worn at night in restaurants or outside clubs, but not so much by women popping out to get a quick coffee at the corner Starbucks. I’d also suggest that if you’ve a thing for well dressed women in heels looking bored and slightly disdainful while spending obscene amounts of money, then Rodeo Drive is your place to go.