Photograph – Page 163 – Femdom Resource

Alternatives to ‘The Device’

Via a post from Tom I came across some interesting thoughts on chastity devices by Ms M. It’s on the subject of the honor system versus devices and why she feels a physical device is absolutely necessary.

Personally I’ve never deliberately got involved in chastity play. That’s not because I don’t like the idea. It definitely pushes a few buttons. Unfortunately I think it’d only work for me in the context of a lifestyle relationship, and I seem to have misplaced mine. Some pro-dommes do offer it, but it doesn’t appeal to me in that context.

Observant readers may have noticed my use of the word ‘deliberately’ at the start of the previous paragraph. That’s because I have accidentally stumbled into chastity play. In turns out that heavy CBT play will create that interesting side effect. I certainly don’t want to get stuck with weird marks or scars to explain on my special little friend. Nothing would kill a seductive mood quicker than a conversation that starts with – ‘No honestly, it’s not the result of a weird disease. Just the after effects of a cock piercing and then a lot of jerking off.’

So any significant bruising or burn marks in a delicate area means operating in a strictly hands-off mode for as long as it takes. I’ve had mornings where I wake up and my first thought is – ‘Has that bruise gone yet?’ Swiftly followed by a check beneath the sheets and a stream of cursing. There’s nothing like being cock-blocked by your own hemoglobin.

Here’s a fun shot of Mistress Madeline leaving someone with a few nice marks of their own. It’s obviously originally from the Men In Pain site.

Powerpoint pornography

After the yahoo/tumblr news I thought it might be interesting to share some of my thoughts on mainstreams internet companies and how they handle adult material. I have an insiders perspective on this, having helped develop several mainstream consumer internet products inside large software companies. I’ve also many friends in companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook that I’ve swapped war stories with.

From an outsiders perspective it’s often tempting to see these kind of companies as either incompetent, prudish, evil or mercenary. Sometimes all at the same time. In reality, while there are no doubt a few employees who meet that description, most of the developers are smart people trying to build the best product they can. When it comes to adult material there’s typically no broad censorious urge to remove it. These companies do huge amounts of data mining and certainly know just how popular it is. You can bet that Google continually tracks the number of queries with adult intent and has dozens of metrics tracking just which sites and images porn surfers prefer. No sane company leader wants to screw over a big percentage of their users if they can avoid it.

The problem comes from the general corporate culture around building software. It doesn’t mesh well with our social culture around adult material. Specific problems I’ve seen include…

A lack of champions.
Product features often get added because someone says – ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if it did X?’ They get people excited in the idea and the feature gets added. But it’s tough to stand up in a meeting and effectively announce your sexual preference by saying something like – ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had fetlife integration and I could track all my kinky friends and BDSM events?’
No dogfooding.
Dogfooding is an industry term meaning to use your own product internally and find bugs before your customers do. But who wants to file bugs based on their sexual habits? It’d take a brave man to file a bug entitled – “Our new shopping application didn’t return the butt plug I was looking for in its results. All returned plugs were too small in girth. Please fix.”
No bragging rights.
It’s fun to show off what you’ve built. Both formal and informal presentations on new features are a good way to get noticed and promoted. But if your new feature is pornography related, then those screenshots get a little trickier to compile. Nobody wants to spend an hour writing a presentation and then 4 hours carefully drawing black bars over all the genitalia in it.
No pressure to prevent regression.
People who don’t like adult content are often very vocal about it. The same is not true about people who do. So when someone complains to Google that his daughter has been traumatized while doing a school project on hairless cats, there might be pressure to fix the results returned for “bald pussy“. It’d be tough to be the person in the meeting speaking up on behalf of all the one handed porn surfers spanking it to bare pudenda.

Almost all modern software development is collaborative and iterative. Creating features and improving a product involves suggesting usage scenarios and brainstorming what would make a more compelling user experience. Yet sharing our sexual thoughts and preferences is very much frowned on socially. The Yahoo VP who loves browsing tumblr porn is probably not going to mention that fact. The Yahoo VP who hates the risk of being associated with tumblr porn is probably going to be very vocal about that fact. So the debate is unbalanced and lots of small decisions gradually add up to a deteriorating service to users wanting adult content.

Given the post topic, an office type shot seemed appropriate. This is of course the lovely Mistress Eleise de Lacy from Femme Fatale films.

Yambler

As regular readers might guess, I’m a big fan of tumblr. Most of my images for posts come via tumblers, and I love the way their reblogging and following mechanism makes it easy to walk a network of similar content. I also like the simplicity and uncluttered layout that tumblrs tend to promote. For a site like this one I want the control and security that comes with owning my own domain and running open source software. But if I had any spare time at all, I’d definitely be tempted to set up a tumblr to complement my posts here.

It was therefore disconcerting to read today that Yahoo is going to buy tumblr for $1.1B. That’s not a company with a great track record in acquisitions, as flickr and geocities users will tell you. Large corporations that rely heavily on advertising dollars also do not mesh well with sites heavy in pornographic content. On the positive side Marissa Mayer did promise “not to screw it up”, which at least suggests some self-awareness and understanding of history. However, to avoid the screwing, they have to understand what the ‘it’ actually is, and I wouldn’t bet a dollar on that.

Bacchus has been blogging heavily on this topic in the last few days. So if you have an adult tumblr I’d advise reading his posts on tumblr’s robots.txt behavior, searching your tumblr and backing up your tumblr. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an image from the 11% of adult material on tumblr. I found this on Alternative Femdom. I believe it’s originally by the photographer Valentin Casarsa.

Playing with a cliché

I like this image for the way it takes a standard fetish scenario and twists it. Leather boots and trampling are featured all over the place in femdom imagery. But substitute some hard wearing combat boots and some real pain into the situation, and suddenly it has a very different feel to it. It pushes masochistic buttons rather than fetishistic ones.

I also like the practicality of the boots. A domme should be comfortable in what she’s wearing. Over the top fetish footwear can be fun, but it shouldn’t be confused with dominance and submission.

I found this on the Work is Never Over tumblr. Based on the watermark I believe this is originally from Nero di Venere.

White Shirt, Armor bonus +1.

I was amused but slightly saddened to stumble across this post over at the Repair Her Armour tumblr. It provides some entertaining drawings of the typical outfits for female characters in on-line role playing games. As you’d expect practicality is not high on the requirement list. Obviously just the thing you want for protection when charging into a cave full of orcs is a metal bikini and stiletto heels.

Predictably enough there’s a dominatrix style outfit on the list. The tumblr artist also gets bonus points for noting that these games often can’t seem to decide if it’s supposed to be a dominatrix or a slave outfit. They just throw a bunch of leather, chains and spikes at it and call it good. Some kinky photographers do much the same thing.

I’m not opposed to some leather and chains now and again, but even in a BDSM setting they can get a bit old. So it made a nice change to find these two images, with nary a hint of cow hide in sight. Just a barefoot woman in a white shirt taking charge of her guy.

The images are from the Woman Worship site. I found them originally on the Geek Domme tumblr.

For anyone wandering about the slightly odd title – armor bonus is an old RPG term and reflects just how much protection an item of clothing gives. Oddly the strange metal bikinis and leather lingerie that female characters get stuck with often seems to offer the same protection as a full suit of armor. In this case her white shirt isn’t going to help much against a bunch of orcs, but this guy doesn’t look like he’s about to put up much of a fight.

Beware of guys with cameras

I often turn up for a session with a camera in my pocket. I like to document some of the more interesting activities I get to experience, even if the end results aren’t exactly studio quality. However, it turns out there’s another type of guy with a camera, and as Rain DeGrey entertainingly describes in this blog post, he’s someone to be avoided at all costs. It sounds like a horrible situation, but she turns it into a great anecdote.

I wrote about the cost of hiring a professional fetish model sometime ago. At the time I commented favorable on the comparison to hiring a pro-domme (for example), while at the same time making it clear these were not in anyway comparable activities. Obviously some other guys can do the same maths, but arrive at very different conclusions.

Of course the sign of a really talented photographer is when somebody will actually pay you to shoot them. One of the best in the BDSM world is Natasha Gornik. She’s the photographer of choice for a lot of the top pro-dommes. So after Rain’s tale of terrible photography, let’s finish with a couple of great shot’s from Natasha’s portfolio.

Antsy

It has been a couple of weeks since I last played and the absence of action is starting to make me grumpy. Some people get sub-drop after playing. I get lack-of-sub-drop.

What’s holding me back is an annoying minor injury. It turns out that scowling at a body part doesn’t make it heal any faster. Nor does prodding it every few minutes. Or concentrating really really hard on healing thoughts. I feel like evolution has let me down. Of course I want my body to get better so I can hurt it again. Perhaps it’s getting smart? Healthy equals that nasty lady in leather hitting it. Niggling injury just equals the odd prod from its disgruntled inhabitant.

I need to feel like this guy again. That controlling arm around the throat. The squeeze of the hand to the face. Slowly sinking back into her control. The warmth of her. So close but untouchable. Damn. That would be good.

I found this image on the Isn’t he lovely when he cries tumblr. It’s originally from the Divine Bitches site.

Forcefully taken

This is one of those images that made my breath catch in my throat when I saw it. It was a real ‘oh…my…God’ moment. A particular position and situation that I’d never even thought about suddenly became a question of ‘When and how can I make this thing happen?’. The forceful screw up against a restroom wall is a common enough trope in movies (both pornographic and mainstream), but somehow I’d never pictured it in the femdom context.

I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution for it. I found it via the Miss K tumblr.

Updated: Thanks to my observant and knowledgeable readers (in this case scottie), I have a proper attribution. This is Empress Cruel. I think it’s from this clip on the TD24 site. Empress Cruel herself has retired and has no main web site that I can find.

A modern day Aegis

Today’s post brings you a scene that I did with Mistress Cynthia Stone a couple of months ago. Sadly I’m not the most efficient person when it comes to a timely documentation of my activities, and these photographs have been lurking on my computer for weeks. Hopefully the much delayed end result is both interesting and informative for anyone looking for session ideas beyond the standard bondage and beating format.

I should issue the standard warning that the activities depicted may be considered edge play. There is a small amount of blood shown in the images. If you’re OK with that then click through to a page I’ve entitled ‘Casting with Cynthia Stone;.

The image is of Mistress Cynthia Stone taken from her web site.

Bondage mouth puppet

I’m continuing the Japanese femdom theme, but coming forward a few decades. I’d guess this is from the 80’s or 90’s, although I don’t have an original attribution.

The mouth and nose are often neglected in BDSM play. Gags get stuffed in, hoods pulled over or faces fucked, but it’s rare to see people actively playing in a narrow focused way like this. Which is odd, because it’s such a sensitive and important area. It’s how we taste, smell and breath. It’s how we communicate. It’s packed with both nerve endings and symbology. It’s an opening into the body. A vulnerability.

Of course there are some practical considerations. It’s hard to hide marks on the face. I did some face rope bondage with Troy Orleans earlier this year, and didn’t pay too much attention to her warning about the marks that were left. I stopped at a tiny Italian cafe on my way home and wondered why the guy kept glancing up to stare at me as he fiddled with his espresso machine. It wasn’t until I looked in the mirror back at my hotel that I saw the unmistakable deep rope impressions that ran from the sides of my mouth up across my cheeks. I don’t think the barista could have been in any doubt what they were.

As I mentioned I’m afraid I have no attribution for this. It looks like an image scanned from an old BDSM magazine. I do have a shot from another angle showing a close-up of the face.