Tag: Photograph

Ambiguous Moment

My favorite femdom images are often those with a degree of ambiguity to them. The kind that let you project your own stories and fantasies into them. For example, what’s happening in the image below? Is this a candid shot captured between filming a scene? Aftercare at the end of a whipping? Or just a pause and a chance to inspect her handiwork before wielding the whip again? I like to imagine it as a caring sensual moment, a contrast of touch and sensations to the intensity of the whip. But that probably says more about my kinks than it does about the image itself.

I believe the domme here is Lady Diosa. I’m not aware of a professional site for her, but she does have films posted here.

Delicious!

At first glance this seems like a perfectly ordinary photograph. Just an attractive masked lady drinking a can of La Croix in a kitchen while a naked man with strange headgear cooks in the background. I’m sure that counts as any Tuesday in Domina Yuki’s world. However, if you look closely, very closely, at the can in the original fullsized image, there is an subtle hidden message. For anyone whose device doesn’t let them zoom effectively, I’ve done the work for you here. There’s absolutely no danger of ever having a shortage of that particular product.

From this tweet in Domina Yuki’s twitter feed.

Jennifer Brooks

A final image in this vintage themed series of posts. Miss Brooks below is Jennifer Brooks who started out as a spanking model and gradually shifted into playing primarily dominant roles over time. I knew her from her work in the Leda videos from Ed Lee. I hadn’t realized until I start researching this post that she actually went on to start her own company for spanking films called Brooks Applications and also published the Femdom magazine Behind the Scene. You can see an example cover from Issue 4 (1993) of that here. 

I’m pretty certain I’ve browsed examples of her latter work, without actually realizing it wasn’t associated with Leda. My bad. She shut down her company just over 10 years ago in 2009. Whatever you’re doing now Miss Brooks, thanks for all the great magazines and videos you created over the years.

I feel I can’t complete this post without a callout to the text alongside the cane image above. It’s not often that kinky porn will include a phrase like “Guaranteed to break the will of the most wretched curmudgeon…” Kudos to whoever wrote that caption. As a man who sees curmudgeon in his future, I’d agree the cane is an excellent implement to break that particular affliction. 

Name that Toy

Today’s vintage shot features a rather strange toy. It looks like a feather duster that got attacked by moths or a device for scrubbing out boiler pipes. I’m not sure if it’s a tickly thing, a slappy thing or a hitty thing. A softer way to cane someone maybe?

I’ve seen similar toys in other old kinky shots, so it was clearly a thing you could buy back then. I’ve never encountered it in a modern playspace or seen one for sale online, so presumably it wasn’t a lot of fun to use. Any ideas from readers on what exactly this strange thing is and how it’s used?

Doggishness

Continuing the vintage theme, here is what looks like an early example of public humiliation and/or puppy play. I say ‘looks like’, because it turns out that this isn’t a D/s or porn shot, but is in fact Art. I originally guessed it was a domme in 60’s London, but it was actually shot in Vienna in 1968 as a piece called “From the Portfolio of Doggishness.” Clearly I don’t have to explain to my highly educated readers what makes this art rather than a couple of kinksters screwing with the locals for giggles, as I’m sure it’s self-evident.

The woman holding the leash is Valie Export and I have to say I do like her slightly disinterested pose and expression here. I would say it’s hot, but that obviously wouldn’t be appropriate for a serious artistic piece of this nature. 

As a slightly random observation, I do think it’s funny that the image of Lucy SweetKill I featured recently appears to capture the idea of Doggishness far more accurately than this image does. Almost all dogs are way more enthusiastic about going for a walk than the man (Peter Weibel) is here.

Unexpected Juxtaposition

I had one of those odd moments today where my kinky world and my regular world briefly crossed streams. I was waiting for my afternoon coffee while flipping through mainstream sites on my phone and totally not prepared for Mistress An Li to pop up in an opinion piece on a videogame site. 

The article in question is this one, and it’s a well written piece on the sexiness of the 2019 game Control. Sexiness in videogames is obviously nothing new, but in this case it’s less about the appearance of the protagonist and more about her confidence, power and mastery of her environment. That leads the writer into a BDSM connection and in turn to interviewing and quoting Mistress An Li (someone I sessioned with last year). I think the article does a great job of connecting all the dots together in a meaningful way, and not simply using a pro-domme or BDSM as clickbait. I was left surprised, impressed and with a desire to go play the game.

This image is from Mistress An Li’s instagram. You can also find her here on twitter and visit her professional site here. 

Black, White and Leashed

This fabulous image comes courtesy of Mistress Lucy SweetKill via this tweet. It’s a common trick to convert explicit shots to black and white in order to make them look more ‘arty’, but this has clearly been constructed from the start with a monochrome palette in mind. The elegant simplicity of the outfits paired with the blank but shaded background work beautifully. 

I particularly like the contrast between their universal body language and the extremism of the appearance. A dog walker’s attention being caught by something while the dog pulls ahead on it’s leash is a common sight on city streets. Deploying that body language here makes an otherwise stark and fetishistic scene so much more human and relatable. 

A New Kind of Resolution

This is the time of year for making resolutions. Normally this means I pick some, fail to keep them, feel bad about that and finally forget them entirely. This year I’m going to try a new approach – giving everyone else in the world a resolution. Obviously this is unlikely to be entirely 100% successful, but the same is true for my usual resolutions and at least when this fails, it’ll be other peoples fault rather than mine. Genius.

The resolution I’m assigning is this: Resist the urge to share, re-tweet or forward stupid or ugly things on social media. Thinking that something is dumb and then simply moving on is a perfectly valid action. There’s no need to spread that shit around.

In theory this resolution should be an easy one, as it involves *not* doing something. It’ll actually save you time! Unfortunately, social media companies are very good at hacking our emotions and appealing to people’s innate sense of fairness. We want to punish wrongdoers and unite our tribe against them. Re-tweeting a slam on someone seems to achieve this. In reality it just triggers social media chain reactions, drives user clicks and makes the social media companies money.

I should qualify at this point that I’m not talking about situations where influential people or companies do or say something terrible. In that case social media actually helps balance the scales somewhat. Lots of quieter voices can unite to match a much louder one. I’m taking about the cases where some misogynistic / homophobic / anti-sexwork garbage shows up on my social feed from some random idiot with just a handful of followers. Inevitably in those cases it’s because someone I follow has shared it with comments explaining just how terrible and wrong it is. So an opinion which would normally have died quietly and alone in a dusty corner of the internet is now being broadcast to tens of thousands of people and generating all sorts of craziness.

If you’re re-tweeting a troll then you’re making them happy. If you’re arguing with an idiot then you’re wasting your time. If it’s just some random person who did a stupid thing, then leave them to their stupid thing and move on. There’s no need for to pile on and humiliate them over it. Jon Ronson has excellent book on the effects of social media on that last category of people, which I think is well worth reading.

I think we all like to imagine our social media selves as the lady below. Rather than a simple paddle we’ll deploy our cutting wit and re-tweet button to change the mind of the ignorant and punish the evil. In reality we’re more like someone who treads in dog shit on the way to a party and decides that rather than quietly scraping it off we should show all our friends just how nasty it is.

The caption is of course from Servitor over at Contemplating the Divine. Sadly, the School Mistress site that created the original image appears to have ceased to exist.

That’s Hedy!

Continuing the theme of vintage shots of women holding whips badly (it’s a very narrow fetish niche), here’s Hedy Lamarr in a shot from the 1946 movie ‘The Strange Woman‘.  I’ve blogged about the awesomeness of Hedy before, but even a fan like myself would have to admit, she doesn’t exactly look committed to the role of fearsome whip wielder in this shot. You get the impression she has no idea why she’s been given it in the first place.

The post title obviously derives from a certain well known comedy film. Amusingly, Hedy Lamarr actually sued for $10M over the use (or abuse) of her name and ended up accepting money (presumably a lot less) in an out of court settlement.