Photograph – Page 154 – Femdom Resource

My favorite kind of people

The New York Times has an interesting but annoying article on the subject of sadists. Interesting because, well, it’s about sadists, my favorite kind of people. They’re the Yin to my masochistic Yang. Annoying because it suffers from all the usual problems these kind of pseudo-scientific articles often suffer from. It simplifies, conflates and doesn’t define terms clearly. I’m left with way more questions that I started with. Not to mention a desire to quit my job and do a doctorate on the topic.

The basic point of the article is that sadism is far commoner than people traditionally assume. You don’t have to be a Hannibal Lecter to be classed as a sadist. However, it seems to tangle a lot of things together in strange ways. I’m left wondering…

What’s the correlation between sexual sadists who get off on the reactions of their consensual partners and everyday sadists who get off on hurting whoever they come across? My experience is that the former don’t strongly overlap with the latter.
What’s the split between people who enjoy power, those who enjoy destruction and those who enjoy the suffering of others? The article conflates them all, but for the first two the sadism is incidental to the main goal. Someone watching a clip of a race car crash is typically watching it for the awe and the spectacle of the crash, not because they’re hoping the driver got hurt. Similarly I don’t think shooting a collection of pixels in a videogame necessarily identifies someone as a sadist.
How many people identified as sadists are conscious of their sadism? And of those that are, how many seek out opportunities to act sadistically? Does being aware of the trait cause people to act on it or attempt to control and diminish it?
How many people act sadistically in groups but not in one on one situations? It would seem to me that the dynamics of social bullying are very different, although this article conflates them.
Are sadists typically selective in how they inflict pain? Is it the reaction of the victim that matters? Or the way in which the sadist provokes the reaction?

It’s a fascinating area, and sadly this article doesn’t get to the heart of it. I’m surprised the scientists haven’t paid more attention to people who self-identify as sadists and masochists. They can’t use them to decipher the broader story, but they’d at least be a good starting point. And it’d be way easier to set-up ethical experiments with a pool of subjects who will happily zap and whack each other for fun!

I’m not entirely sure where this shot of two sadists indulging in a little nipple torture comes from. I’d guess it’s one of the Kink sites, but my search foo is failing me.

Pink, black and gold

I’m going to be taking a few days vacation down in San Francisco. That’s usually my cue to say that posting will therefore be a bit erratic. Unfortunately I’ve been so busy in Seattle recently, this might actually improve my chances of blogging more. Flying is usually a good chance to catch up with any writing I need to do, but given the subject matter, this site might cause a few raised eyebrows in nearby seats if anyone is peering over.

I do have some kinky fun planned for my trip. Any SF visit that missed out on that would seem like a wasted opportunity. Although scheduling it around my friends plans is proving tricky, particularly given that only a few know of my kinky interests. One thing I’m confident of is that I will not be doing is any public humiliation scenes, despite how much fun Mistress Alice and her submissive look like they’re having on the Golden Gate bridge with this one. I’d love to know how many tourists went home with a snap of them and their striking outfits to share with friends and family. No doubt it confirmed a few preconceptions about the typical inhabitant of the Bay area!

You can see other shots of this scene at her tumblr post. Her main site is available here.

Understated uniform

Apologies for the lack of posts this weekend. Once again I had plans for stuff to write and, once again, life got in the way. I hate it when that happens.

To start the new week, here’s a nicely composed example of a well worked theme – a dominant lady in a military uniform. This is Lady Stella of Studio Avalon. There are a million shots in this genre floating around, but I like this particular example because it’s quite understated. It’s not a crazy over the top uniform. The camera isn’t shooting from the worms eye viewpoint. And she’s standing on what appears to be a military parade ground. It looks like a great starting point for a serious and intense roleplay.

A lick and a look

I’m not a huge fan of tumblrs that automatically treat oral sex as a D/s act. Sometimes sex is just sex, and there’s no reason to impose a dominant dynamic on it. Everyone enjoys having soft wet squidgy bits rubbed on their genitals.

That said, it is an act that often lends itself to the D/s fantasy. This image is a great case in point. Her look really makes the image work for me. It’s very knowing.

I found this on the Loves to Lick tumblr.

So it has come to this…

Shameless attention whoring ahoy! I figure if Ferns can get away with it, why not me?

Rori is once again taking nominations for the best sex bloggers. Last year I was nominated and ended up on the list, as I blogged about at the time. Now obviously as a serious and dedicated sex blog blogger, I’m above such petty popularity contests. It matters to me not one whit should I be nominated or not. My only concern is to bring you, my dear readers, the best femdom based material I can. But it strikes me that getting nominated would encourage more readers to visit. And that would mean more readers to write witty and insightful comments. And that in turn would create a better quality blog for everyone. So I’m really doing it for all of you out there.

Anyone buying that unimpeachable logic, and wanting to help me help you, can do so by leaving a suitable nomination comment on Rori’s site. It’d make me, I mean you, as happy as a Deviant Kade being tied up by a Simone Kross.

The image is originally from the CBT and Ballbusting site. I found it via the Happy BDSM tumblr.

Slavery. Not as fun as it sounds.

I was amused by this article about an enterprising woman trying to get farm chores done on the cheap.

Masochists who responded to an advert by an Austrian woman seeking “submissive, well-to-do” men found themselves forced to do farm chores such as stacking wood in the nude or cutting the grass while wearing fetish masks.

Instead of the punishment they were expecting, the men were put to work as labourers around their mistress’s farm in north-eastern Austria, near the town of St. Pölten.

Unsurprisingly it turned out that doing real manual labor wasn’t quite as fun as the outdoor fetish frolics they were expecting. I’m not sure what kind of punishment she advertised, but stacking wood in the nude and cutting grass in a leather gimp mask sounds pretty punishing to me.

What’s particularly strange is that she ended up being charged with “illegal prostitution”. Since prostitution is the selling of sexual services, and the lack of kinky sex fun was precisely their complaint, I’d be intrigued to know what tortuous logic led to that charge. If she’d turned up in leather boots and hit them occasional, would that have made it “legal prostitution” ?

I’ll finish with a picture that is probably more in line with what the men were hoping for. It still looks like hard work, but I’m sure the pony gear, fetish outfits and whipping would have made them a lot happier.

This buggy racing shot is from the Other World Kingdom.

A delicate slap to the penis

This post was supposed to be a thoughtful follow-up to yesterdays one on the topic of negotiation. Unfortunately I got sucked into watching an old Columbo movie and ran out of time. If there’s one thing I like more than blogging, it’s well, many things actually. Sex. Bondage. Pain. Wine. Food. Books. Art. Fast cars. So really, among the many things I like more than blogging, one is classic Columbo movies. And that’s where my time went tonight.

I’ll therefore settle for a simple post with an interesting image. I love their expressions. I love the slapping action. But what’s with his blue shirt and her pink boots? It’s good that they’re not in stereotypical fetishwear, but is this the best alternative they could come up with?

The image is originally from the Men in Pain site. I found it on the Femdom Times site.

Anything is contextual

One great way to infuriate a dominant is to claim you’ll do anything. It’s like a red rag to a bull. The typical response is either to reach for an extreme form of play (‘go fetch me my branding iron’) or to propose a very un-fun type of play (‘go clean my car while I watch TV in sweatpants’). The idea being to demonstrate that the submissive better be careful what options he or she open up. Mistress Matisse wrote a column some years ago that covered the topic from the dominant point of view pretty well.

I definitely understand that viewpoint when playing with someone new. In that case communication to set expectations is vital. In past posts I’ve termed the failure to do so Meat Loaf syndrome – ‘I’ll do anything for you….but not that‘. However, I do think it’s a viewpoint that sometimes gets pushed too far. BDSM negotiation isn’t divorced from the normal conventions of discussion. Being a dominant doesn’t give you a right to abandon common sense, and ‘anything’ is always contextual.

If a partner asks me where I want to eat tonight and I reply “Oh anywhere really, you pick,’ nobody would interpret that as carte blanche to do whatever they like. Dumpster diving behind Pizza Hut is out. As is booking tickets for a 6 hour flight to the New York restaurant scene. And if they know I’m horribly allergic to crab, my answer doesn’t mean I’m willing to swell up and die in the local crab shack. I don’t have to specify these things because any friend or partner with half a brain will understand my ‘anywhere’ response as being implicitly qualified.

The same thing goes to BDSM negotiation. Assuming we’re somewhat familiar with each other, then ‘anything’ means activities the same as or vaguely within touching distance of stuff we’ve tried or discussed before. And if there’s something new that a dominant would like to try, then the ‘anything’ response is a great cue to suggest it to me as an option. As a submissive I like to give my dominant choice and flexibility in a scene whenever possible. It seems odd to punish people for trying to do that by deliberately picking the worst possible interpretations of their responses.

Having referenced an article from Mistress Matisse, that gives me the perfect excuse to feature an image of this rather fabulous lady. This is an old shot recently republished on her twitter feed, and captioned by her as “Behold me as a little baby dominatrix! Look how scowly and stern I was! Rar, fear me! (That didn’t last very long.)” Her professional site is viewable here.

Tongue in the right corner

It’s odd what will catch my eye about an image. Here’s a naked guy with a butt plug, and an attractive smiling lady inserting the said plug. There’s a lot to like about that. Yet the element of the picture that prompted me to post it was his tongue, stuck in the corner of his mouth. It’s clearly a natural reaction to his vulnerable position and the plug, rather than an attempt to look good for the photographer. That’s a very human response and it makes the image so much more appealing to my eyes. If only more pornographers could capture that human element in their images.

I can’t track down the original source for this image. Which is very annoying. If anyone can help out then please leave a comment. I found it via the Femdom Style Counsel tumblr.

In her eyes

I just completed a fabulous couple of hours of breathplay with Lady Lydia. It’s strange how powerful an effect that type of session creates. I love many other things, but nothing pushes me as fast and as deep into subspace as breathplay. I typically zone out in the first few minutes. There’s such a sense of intimacy and connection about it. Not to mention the very powerful and primal gestures involved in one person cutting off the oxygen of another.

One of the aspects I particularly like is the ability to look at the dominant as it happens. I find myself focusing on her eyes, the world narrowing down to just the two of us. Normally a long shared look indicates either a challenge (staring someone down) or deep affection (gazing into each others eyes). In contrast submission is often associated with averting a gaze and looking downwards. Yet in this kind of play the shared looks work as a means of communicating acknowledgement and acceptance. There’s no mediation or indirection. It says – “I’m here. I’m with you. I see you. I choose to do this to you/accept it from you.”

The image below is a pegging shot rather than a breathplay one, but it seemed appropriate. I chose it for the looks they’re exchanging and that sense of connection and tenderness.

The image is originally from the Strapon Dreamer site. I found it via the At her Feet tumblr.