Tag: Photograph

Drinks at the Pool

We might be heading into the last few weeks of summer but, when the sun isn’t doing a disappearing act, it’s still pretty hot in most parts of the US. Perfect weather for consuming cool drinks outside. The best I can manage is a glass of wine on a restaurant patio. This lady has a much better set-up. I only hope she doesn’t drift off into the deep end. Treading water and keeping her drink above it might present a problem.

I found this on the Garden of Eden tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution for it. I do recognize the gag being used as Scott Paul Design one.

Update: Thanks to a very helpful comment, I can now attribute this to the lovely Mistress Ezada Sinn. You can see another shot from the same scene in her post here.

Service with a Smile

I’m continuing the maid theme with a somewhat puzzling image. As far as I can tell this is a product from XDress, but this particular shot comes from the seller The Underwear Expert. They’ve done a good job in dressing everyone quite elegantly in stylish black and white, but what’s with the ‘why so serious’ expression? He does not look like a man having fun. I think if you’re going to try and pull off high heels, a frilly dress and a beard, a sense of humor is definitely required.

Sleek Maid

This photograph breaks a couple of my soft rules for picking images for posts. Firstly, it’s a headless shot. I typically shy away from close shots of random limbs and appendages. Secondly, it features cross-dressing and a French maid outfit. I very occasionally feature those two ideas together, but they normally lean on themes of humiliation and ridicule, which really doesn’t push my buttons.

However, I like this shot, because the submissive’s look is so sleek. There’s a cool looking leather corset, a short skirt and a well packaged package. It doesn’t suggest humiliation or a submissive embarrassed by the outfit. It puts in mind a stylish maid, who’ll deliver afternoon tea on time, get the cucumber sandwiches just right, and look damn good while doing it.

Eve’s Glory

I hadn’t intended to continue the WWI theme beyond yesterday’s post. It’s not exactly a great femdom or feelgood topic. However, then I remembered an exhibition of photographs I’d stumbled across called Eve’s Glory. It was by the photographer A. Tamboly and featured women wearing classic military uniforms from the 19th and early 20th century. While at first it seems a bit gimmicky, I actually think it’s a really interesting way to look back at that era. They reminded me of cosplay, or a videogame, which speaks to the impossibility of the images. It’s inconceivable to imagine a woman in a senior military role of the time, and these images really make that resonate.

I believe this uniform is that of a German Field Marshall from pre-WWI.

Returning to life

Talking about tumblr sites (as I just was), I was happy to see Maria of Girls Rule, Subs Drool had started posting again. When tumblrs, or any kind of blog for that matter, goes dormant for a long period, 99% of the time they never come back. I always enjoyed Maria’s content choices and personal posts, so I was very happy to see this fall into that rare 1% of exceptions.

I found this on the Girls Rule, Subs Drool tumblr, but I’m afraid I couldn’t track down an original source.

The proliferation of animated gifs

It used to be easy to find appropriate images to illustrate my posts. I’d jump onto tumblr with a theme in mind and typically find something suitable within a few minutes. Now I try that and I’m faced with wall to wall animated gifs. They’ve gone from old fashioned and annoying web page gimmick to what feels like 90% of tumblr contents in a couple of years.

Ironically, like the Oatmeal, I’m actually a fan of animated gifs. They work particularly well for sex and kink shots. I just wish tumblr had an option to filter them out. Sadly, given the number of sites only producing movies these days, and the shift away from commercial image sets, I suspect it’s a trend that’s not about to reverse itself. With movies as source material, animated clips is the natural way to feature them.

In the meantime I’ll have to look further afield for good image sources. For example, the shot below is from twitter, specifically Mistress Amiko’s feed. So far twitter does not seem to have succumbed  to the animation craze in quite the same way as tumblr.

Scary Crusher

I’ve played with plenty of ball crushers in the past, and I’ve always been amazed by how my tolerances can change during the progression of a play session. As adrenaline surges and the body adapts, what can seem incredibly intense at the start can end up as background noise to whatever else is happening. However, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a ball crusher designed quite like this. Those are some fearsome spikes. I’m not sure this would ever fade into background noise, no matter how many endorphins were pumping.

This looks like the kind of thing you might find in an exhibit on the Spanish Inquisition, but I stumbled across it via Mistress Lucy Sweet Kill’s twitter feed.

The good and the bad

A few posts ago I was ripping the Metro site for silly advice on CBT for beginners. Fortunately, the good news is that there are better sources of advice out there. Kink Weekly has some good suggestions for anyone wanting to torture a cock or two. Lucy Khan (whose CBT skills I can personally attest to) has the right idea…

restrain him, blindfold him, and simply tickle, lick, bite, and poke at his junk!

The bad news is that Metro is still publishing idiotic writing on kink. The latest is this article, which lists the following fetishes beginning with ‘F’: Face slapping, fear play, female masking, femdom, feminisation, …wait, what was that previous one? Femdom? One of these things is not like the others. What an incredibly obnoxious and male-centric categorization. It reinforces the idea of male dominance as the default BDSM configuration, and turns dominant women into objects for men with a particular femdom fetish. It’s like listing career choices beginning with F as: Farmer, Farrier, Female, Fire Fighter, etc. I’m betting that maledom isn’t going to be listed under ‘M’ when they get around to it.

Anyway, rant over, and I’ll finish with someone following Mistress Lucy’s advice on mixing biting and CBT.

Old School Tenderness

This image has a very old school vibe to it. There’s the all black outfits, the leather studded collar, the peaked cap and the grainy black and white photograph. Yet there’s a tenderness and playfulness to it that’s rare in vintage BDSM shots.

I’ve no idea where it’s from. Google tells me that its best guess for the image is ‘February’, which isn’t exactly helpful. If AI ever does take over the world, I think it’s unlikely to get its start as Google’s image search algorithms. They may be ‘A’ but they’re rarely ‘I’. My best guess for it would be a shot from an old pro-domme advertisement in something like DDI, but that’s based on nothing other than my instinct. If anyone does recognize it, I’d love to the who the domme is.

The annoying BD

While I’m talking about the definition of BDSM (as I just was), allow me to air a pet peeve. Most readers probably know that the acronym stands for Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, Sadism & Masochism. I get the second and third pairing, but that first one always bugs me. Why is bondage explicitly paired with discipline? People tend to hand wave around this issue being saying they’re related activities. For example, Wikipedia says…

  they have conceptual similarities, and that is why they appear jointly.

Frankly, that seems like bullshit to me. I think people just like the symmetry of the phrasing and the clever re-use of the letters, and therefore gloss over the fact the first pair makes no sense being tied together (ahem).

Personally, I’d drop discipline entirely. Bondage is such a common and important shared activity then I think it deserves a special place in the acronym, but discipline can slide under the D/s bit as a particular style of that dynamic. That’d keep the same four letters, but make it a lot more logical.

These beautiful bondage images come from Amaury Grisel. You can see more from the same shot in this post.