Photograph – Page 189 – Femdom Resource

Three days of brutality

Yesterday’s post cautioned against perceiving extreme scenes and edge players as being ‘better’ than others. Today’s post brings you a compelling description of a very extreme scene featuring an astonishing level of masochism. Possibly this lacks consistency, but as Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.

It is true that the quality and the pleasure associated with a BDSM scene has no direct relationship to the severity of the scene. But for the audience in the peanut gallery, extreme behavior is often a compelling draw. In this case the scene is a three day long one, described at length in this post.

The following days were repeated … a pattern of freezing nights in the bunker, ice cold showers in the morning, sessions of brutal torture, beatings, and electrocution. Verbal abuse and no hope of mercy.
stevey from a post on Max Fisch

I found it a fascinating read, although it’s not something I’d ever want to do. I need a little love and care mixed in with my pain, and it sounds like there wasn’t much of that on offer.

The domme dishing out the pain was Madame Celeste de Monial and the scene unfolded at the Chalet of Pain located in Germany. As stevey describes, the location sounds like a smaller version of the infamous OWK. If your tastes run to iron fetters, imprisonment fantasies and serious mental and physical torment, then it sounds like a great place to check out. The image below shows the inside of its underground bunker, and you can see the entrance and descending stairs in this gallery.

It’s not a competitive sport

There’s sometimes an unfortunate undercurrent to BDSM discussions that equates ‘better’ with more extreme and more edgy. A subtle suggestion that a bottom who can take a lot of pain or do more spectacular activities is somehow a superior type of bottom.

I think I can understand the mechanism by which this happens. Most kinky people like to push their own personal limits. They want to take six more hits, achieve that more strenuous position, wear the device one more week, get deeper into subspace. Part of the skill of being a top is figuring out just how far to push – up to the line but not too far beyond it. This creates personal goals, which can get all too easily fitted into a social hierarchical. My goals will always be someone else’s achievements. And if I’m aspiring to achieve something, then it becomes easy to think of the person who has already achieved it as being somehow more successful.

Of course understanding how it happens, doesn’t mean it’s not bullshit. The goal is to achieve personal satisfaction and happiness. Not win a ‘Who can slam their dick in the drawer the hardest’ competition. Everybody processes information and sensations differently. Being born with a higher pain threshold, or greater tolerance to extreme situations, doesn’t make you a better bottom. Good communication, empathy, understanding of personal boundaries, self-knowledge and a willingness to experiment are all characteristics of good bottoms. The ability to shove large things in small orifices, or survive sharp things applied at high speed, doesn’t feature in there at all.

The image features one of my favorite activities – biting. I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution for it. I found it on the Dishevelled Domina tumblr.

The human birthday card

As I mentioned briefly at the time, I was lucky enough to get to session with Cynthia Stone down in LA last month. She kindly snapped a few pictures of our play together and, after much slacking on my part, I’ve finally put together a page describing some of the very enjoyable activities that we got up to.

As the post title suggests part of it involved turning me into a human birthday card, an activity that really should have its own special name. It’s not really forniphilia, as a card isn’t furniture. Decoraphilia? Craftyism? I’d-hate-to-pay-the-postage-ophilia? Anyway, for anyone wanting to see some very creative domination at work, click through to ‘A birthday card for Cynthia Stone‘.

The image is of the aforementioned Mistress Stone. If you find yourself in the LA region then her session information is here. For the masochistically inclined she’s very definitely someone worth spending time with.

A push and a pinch

Something nice and simple tonight. Just a couple of smiles, a push with one hand and a pinch with the other. They look like they’re having fun.

I found this on the tumblr of Ms Savannah Sly, a local (from my perspective) Seattle pro-domme. I’d love to have an original attribution for it, so if you know the photographer or the models then please leave me a comment.

Labeling the world

I received an interesting comment recently on my Femdom Images page. It was from the curator of the Work Is Never Over tumblr and related to my tumblr categorization. Until today the two options were ‘Femdom’ (i.e. All those featuring pictures with a dominant woman somewhere in there) or ‘BDSM and fetish’ (i.e. Anything else I liked that didn’t fit in the first category). Since her tumblr focused heavily on male submissives it ended up in the second group. You can read her entire comment here, but the essence of it was her ambivalence to the categorization.

I’m not sure how to feel about not being categorized as a “femdom” blog— on the one hand, waaa, visibility! (Not to mention: I *am* a female dominant. Hmf. 😉 )
But on the other hand… I despise standard femdom imagery (“Femdom™”)— hence my blog— and I’m distinctly proud that my blog is recognizably different enough from that to have not made it into that list! 😀
(Of course, on the third hand, I always kind of hope that people looking for Femdom™ would come across my blog and see that it doesn’t have to look like that. I guess I’m back to that first hand! XD )

My first thought was how great a three handed domme would actually be. She could tease, tickle and torture you all at once! But stretched metaphors aside, she raised a good point. I’m personally not against a bit of stereotypical femdom imagery now and again. It’s popular for a reason. At the same time I recognize the huge imbalance in the type of material that’s floating around out there. And I’m very much in favor of people who are venturing into femdom being able to find material that will attract them and represent how they might want to play. You don’t need to pull on a thousand dollars of fetish gear, convert the spare room into a dungeon and plaster a sneer onto your face to experiment with female dominance. My goal on this site has always been to provide an interesting mix of material that will have broad appeal (to no doubt mixed success).

In an effort to categorize better I’ve therefore split the tumblr section into 4 rather than 2 sections: General femdom, dominant focused, submissive focused, and BDSM/fetish. These are obviously very imprecise labels, and tumblrs are typically not single themes, but hopefully they’ll provide at least a little guidance when searching for particular types of material. It’ll also give me a chance to expand the submissive focused section which, as a male submissive, I suspect I’ve neglected in the past.

I’ll leave you with an image I liked from the tumblr in question (originally from Men in Pain). It captures a nice moment of connection.

Wanted: Mänskliga Fotpall

Yesterday I received one of the more unusual comments I’ve ever had. It was from a Sandra Lindqvist, a researcher for a Swedish TV company, looking to find people to help them with a documentary.

We are currently working on a documentary series called “Fråga Olle-dokumentären” (“Ask Olle about sex – documentary”) about sex, love and relationships for Swedish Channel 5
…
One topic we would like to cover in our documentary is ”Human Furniture” – Forniphilia
…
I was wondering if you know any Mistresses or just some people that are practicing this? We are going to UK next Wednesday for a couple of days and we really want to meet and do a segment with someone about this when we are there.

Given I haven’t visited Sweden in years, and don’t speak the language, I’ve unsurprisingly never heard of the series. I’m guessing that this is the homepage for it. And while I have featured forniphilia a few times in the past, I wouldn’t describe it as a major kink of mine. The fantasy is kind of fun, but I suspect I’d quickly get bored of the reality.

Anyway, if you’re in the UK (or I assume Sweden), into forniphilia at all and feel you could help out, then I suggest giving Sandra an email. The only forniphilia experts I know of offhand are House of Gord, and they’re US based and maledom.

While I can’t help out directly, the comment does at least give me an excuse to feature a couple of interesting images on the theme. The first features Mistress Alex combining public humiliation, objectification and the morning paper. The second is by David Blázquezz, one of a series of similar images he shot for an exhibition. The shelving construction in the series is particularly impressive.

Loving submissive men

I was browsing the blog ‘Tits and Sass‘ over the weekend when I came across this article. If you’ve not encountered it before, the blog itself is run by sex workers and provides all sorts of commentary and links relevant to their industry. The article in question is by Paris Lee, a former dancer and cam girl, and describes her decision first to get and then to get rid of breast implants. It’s not at all femdom related and, although I found it interesting to read her perspective, I had no plans to blog about it. Until I read her short sign-off section…

Paris lives in Ohio and loves ferrets, dogs, and submissive men…

When I saw that it struck me just how unusual it was. Outside of dedicated D/s and BDSM blogs, I don’t think I’ve ever see that before. The article in question may have been related to sex work, but it had nothing to do with kink or submission. Paris just decided that loving submissive men was a fact about herself worth sticking in that brief biographical sign-off paragraph. I’m glad she did (and does), but it’s kind of depressing to realize just how surprising it was to see that sentence. I probably shouldn’t hold my breath to spot it in a match profile anytime soon.

I’ll leave you with a shot that might encourage more women to adopt a similar sentiment. He looks just so damn cute and perky. I hope she has a treat available if he behaves himself.

This image is originally from the CBT and Ballbusting site. I found it on the Femdom Archive tumblr.

Triple threat

They say that problems come in threes. This image seems like a perfect illustration of that theory. I’m not sure exactly whose butt we’re looking at on the right, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to have three big incoming ‘problems’ pretty soon. Although they also say that every problem is also an opportunity. I can’t say I’d object to having to deal with these kind of opportunities.

TV Guide

I’m going to interpret my blog tagline – the beauty of dominant women – fairly liberally for this post. It’s not femdom related in the sexual sense, but it does relate very much to a strong dominant women. I’ve just spent an enjoyable evening re-watching the first few episodes of Prime Suspect starring Helen Mirren. It comes from a rich tradition of British crime series, which also includes such gems as Cracker and Wire in the Blood.

I have a love hate relationship with these kind of shows. I enjoy the genre and plot structure, but hate the sexual stereotypes they almost always portray. Sex workers are normally damaged powerless victims. The criminals are often sexually warped sadists whose only outlet is violent attacks. It’s certainly not a genre to look at for positive portrayals of BDSM. Despite that, the Prime Suspect series is redeemed by having the wonderful Helen Mirren in the leading role. She plays a strong no-nonsense female character who puts up with a lot of sexist bullshit from her colleagues while still figuring out the cases. It’s a real pleasure to watch such a talented actress sink her teeth into the role.

US TV has a tendency to remake and horribly screw-up British series. I’ve not seen the US version, but looking at some of the online video’s they seem to have repeated the trick here. What was a reserved and complex older female character, with a flinty inner core, has become a skirt-the-rules cop played by a conventionally attractive blonde with a classic in your face New York attitude. In other words, the same thing we’ve seen a million times before. The good news is that netflix has the original UK series available for streaming. I definitely recommend checking it out.

Photograph is of Helen Mirren from a Prime Suspect publicity shot. If you’re a fan of hers, then I also recommend watching Excalibur. It’s a brilliant version of the Arthurian legend featuring her in the role of Morgana.

Origins of a fetish

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.