F – Femdom Resource

I Want Your Sex (again)

I’m going to risk repeating myself here. I blogged about the new Greg Araki movie – I Want Your Sex – back in January when it was doing the festival circuit. There wasn’t a trailer for it back then and the reviews were mixed.

It’s now on general release. There are a bunch of positive reviews for it. And there is a trailer which makes it look both funny and pretty damn kinky. I’m now actually excited to see it.

The Guardian has a recent interview with Araki on the film, where he reveals it was originally written as a male boss dominating his female intern. That was back in 2014. Fortunately for us, he decided to flip it around.

I have seen some comments online saying that it’s a shame to have a domme being portrayed as consent violating and abusive. I do get that, but I suspect in this kind of comedy everyone is going to be portrayed with some major character flaws. Sane, safe and sensible make for great scenes but not great drama.

Olivia Wilde in a scene from ‘I Want Your Sex’.

Authenticity

Ivy Harte has published a short substack article on authenticity in pro-domme sessions – Have We Mistaken Unpaid for Authentic? I think it makes a nice company piece to the article on BDSM myths from Lady Vesper I featured last week. Money was actually featured in the last myth there, but I think Ivy Harte offers a slightly different take on the topic.

People sometimes imagine that authenticity and intention exist at opposite ends of a spectrum, as though something carefully crafted must somehow be less real. I don’t think that’s true. We don’t assume a conversation with a therapist is somehow less meaningful because money changed hands.

I’ve riffed before on this topic. There’s a conflation of money with power, where really it should be linked with consent and capacity. Contributing money creates the space and time to play, it doesn’t create power over the play.

When I’m getting pierced by a domme those are authentic needles. It’s not fake blood that comes out. Impact play give authentic bruises. I’m not pretending to be tied down and faking those screams. Nor are there real and fake version of subspace.

People have no trouble untangling money and power in other areas. Buying a theater ticket doesn’t give me the power to direct the play. I could hire a band for a party, and make song suggestions, but I don’t get to control how they play or suggest new lyrics. Only when I comes to BDSM do people get hung up on the idea that money equals power equals control.

This is Goddess Ivy in a shot sourced from her Bluesky feed.

Myths

Lady Vesper posted a twitter article on the 6 BDSM myths that make her furious. I think they’re a pretty good set. You read the article for her reasoning but the myths themselves are as follows…

The submissive has all the power because they can stop the scene at any time.
The submissive allows the Dominant to dominate them.
The submissive is the vulnerable one (partly true).
The Dominant is responsible for the submissive’s mental state.
Dominants don’t need safe-words or aftercare.
Money makes real BDSM impure.

The first one here is one of my personal bugbears. I frequently see it quoted online, often by people talking about BDSM to a non-BDSM crowd. I think they believe it makes them sound clever, with special insider knowledge of the dynamic. Ooh, what a clever subversion of expectations!

In reality it’s a nonsense statement. As Lady Vesper points out, it mixes up the concepts of power and consent. Anyone can say no and walk away from the scene at any time. That’s not the same as having the power to direct and control the scene.

I find it particularly annoying because it plays into the idea that dominants are simply fetish dispensers, going through the motions of a scene at the behest of the submissive. It diminishes the agency and desires of the domme, which is really the opposite of what femdom should be about.

This shot of Lady Vesper is from her Twitter feed. You can find links to her Fan sites and Substack here.

Her Parlour

I like this shot of Miss Courtney for how it plays with the traditional prison / cage set-ups. Often the shots are taken from inside, looking through the bars at a glaring domme. Or an external shot of a domme gloating over her captive. This has a very different dynamic. She’s waiting for you, almost with an invitation to step inside.

It puts me in mind of that old poem – The Spider and the Fly.

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly,
“‘Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;
….

Who wouldn’t want to be the fly to this particular spider and her steel web?

You can find Miss Courtney’s professional site here, her twitter feed here and her Loyal Fans here.

Loony Balloony

If you have ever wondered just how hard it can be to make adult content these days then I’d direct your attention to this substack post by Ariel Anderssen. It describes a fairly insane situation triggered by her Loyal Fans site.

The short version is that she shoots material in her bedroom and one of the pictures on her wall is the Banksy image – Girl with Balloon. If you’ve not seen before, it’s a famous stencil outline of a girl and a heart shaped balloon. It’s a completely non-sexual image and is clearly just part of the background decor. However, that hasn’t stopped the idiots at Loyal Fans flagging it as content depicting a minor. Which means Ariel’s content gets barred.

I can kind of understand if some dumb AI tool had flagged it. However, the fact that a human has got involved, looked at it, and still decided that it’s illegal content is nuts. Proof that we’re living in the worst possible timeline where nothing makes sense.

For an image I’m obviously riffing on the girl with balloon theme, although this one has a bit more a devilish look in her eye.

This artwork is by Cosmic Crusader, created back in 2010.

Cascading Whip

Here’s some visual loveliness to kick the weekend off with, courtesy of Berlin’s Lady Lexi. I try and avoid posting too many shots of beautiful dommes in fetish wear – there’s plenty of other sites for that. However, I loved the composition of this image so much, I felt I had to share it.

You can Lady Lexi’s professional site here and her link collection here. Image was sourced via this post on her Twitter feed.

DDI

I couldn’t do a series of posts on meeting pro-dommes in the old days without mentioned Domina Directory International – or simply DDI. If cards in phone boxes were the low end of the advertising market, this was definitely the high end. It was professionally printed and distributed, with high quality photographs alongside articles and contact details. I remember play spaces having copies in their entrance rooms, particularly if a domme using the space was featured in it. There were European and US editions, and it was even available to purchase in mainstream outlets.

Unsurprisingly, like a lot of print media, it didn’t survive the coming of the internet. There is still a Twitter feed for them, but the last post was over a decade ago.

Unlike a lot of similar magazines from that era, I’ve yet to find any detailed articles on its history or background. It was pitched as by pro-dommes and for pro-dommes, but exactly who the creators were is unclear to me. Mistress Sidonia has a good tribute post on her Femdom Blog, so check that out if you’re interested in her take on it.

This was #27 of the North American edition, although I can’t see a date on it. The banner along the bottom is indicative of its time.

The Morning After

I woke up feeling very tender and sore. Because I’m now over 50 years old that triggered the obvious thought process – “OMG. Am I dying? What new hell is this? Did I just sleep weird or is this a new normal? Do my muscles hate me now?”

Fortunately, after the sleep haze cleared, I realized what was going on. Ms Savannah Sly was in town. Last night therefore featured lots of beating, trampling, biting, pummeling and lots of other painful ‘ings. It was the really good kind of sore. Lots of happy bruises.

The bad news was I had a doctors appointment I’d forgotten about. It had been rescheduled multiple times and I hadn’t realized the final time landed just hours after a session. Always fun explaining that yes, I know I’m bruised and scratched, and yes, it was entirely consensual. It felt a bit like taking a car from a destruction derby to a mechanic. I know I did all these violent things to it and the bodywork now looks like hell, but you can still fix my brakes and check the engine light?

This is the fabulous Ms Savannah Sly as featured on her Bluesky Feed. If you’d like to support her organization New Moon – which does lots of great things for sex workers – then check it out here.

Broadening Interests

I had an interesting comment left by Tiny Monster on my post about porn escalation. He said his porn had generally de-escalated in terms of nudity and extremeness of activities. The fantasy works a lot better for him if there’s less context and it’s therefore easier to add your own.

I’m very much onboard with this. I wouldn’t say I’ve purely de-escalated the content I like – I still like a bunch of extreme activities – but my interests have gotten a lot broader. I’d much rather see a slightly suggestive clothed image that I can project into rather than a regular run-of-the-mill porn shot.

I suspect the enormous number of captioned femdom images floating around have had a role to play in this. I don’t write captions myself, but when I see an image like the one below, I do start thinking in those terms. Is this a cuckold shot and she’s checking her outfit before heading out on date? Or maybe it’s a report in on your household chores? Maybe it’s both. She’s giving instructions on your household duties while she’s out for dinner with a very special friend. Just make sure there are fresh sheets on the bed and you’re in the guestroom when they return.

It’s a lot easier to spin your preferred fantasy – whatever that may be – with an ambiguous image like than it is with something like this.

The Unifier

Femdom lovers are a varied bunch. We all have our own kinks, preferences and hot button activities. There’s no such things as a standard kinky person.

However, in many years of Femdom blogging, I have discover one unifying element. The common thread that seems close to universal. That’s a fondness for Catwoman. For some she’s a formative character. For others, just a fun, sexy mainstream representation of a dominant woman. Either way, it’s hard to find a submissive who doesn’t have a fondness for at least one of the interpreters of the character over the last 60 or so years.

This all came to mind thanks to this entertaining interview with Julie Newmar. She was the first actress to play the character and is arguably still the benchmark.

Newmar made the character her own, setting the template for a long line of successors, from Eartha Kitt to Michelle Pfeiffer and Anne Hathaway. Her dancer’s experience helped with the feline mannerisms: “I adopted two cats in order to watch their physical behaviour.” She even made her own adjustments to the costume, lowering the belt to the hips to accentuate her waist and taking it in until “it was like liquorice poured over the body; it fit that well.”

She clearly knew what she was doing, because that dropped belt was a lovely touch. While Anne Hathaway and Michelle Pfeiffer may have had more overly fetishistic outfits, it’s hard to beat the sensuality and playfulness Julie brought to the role.