This is a companion shot to a well known image that has been floating around on the web for years. I featured the more common shot in a post way back in 2011. I always liked that image, so was very pleasantly surprised to discover this other, less well known one, of the same domme by photographer Charles Guyette.
I think they’re both wonderfully erotic shots, and that’s from someone who has spent a couple of decades experiencing all the kinky imagery an uncensored internet has to offer. I can’t even begin to imagine the effect they’d have had on a submissive male 80 or more years ago. I’m guessing that for anyone lucky enough to have a hard copy of this back in the day, it was a well hidden and highly treasured possession.
I discovered via the mrunderheel’s twitter.
Personally, I’m fascinated by the thought that our activities were carried out as avidly back in the last century ( the first half thereof) as they are now. I often equated Femdom / BDSM as a modern phenomenon but clearly not – the difficulty lies in unearthing evidence of the scene back then. Some of the depiction of scenes at the Berlin clubs of the Weimar Republic and the super work of Klaw and Willie in the fifties in the US are strong pointers to the fact that we didn’t start the fire so to say. I, like you, adore the old images.
Definitely not a modern phenomena. This post covers a flogging scene from back at the end of the 17th Century – http://www.femdom-resource.com/2018/03/09/the-cully-flaugd/
I suspect a non-trivial fraction of men have had a sexual thing for submitting to powerful women for thousands of years, but without modern communication and recording equipment, it was very much buried and isolated. It was only in the 20th Century with (as you say) things like clubs of the Weimar Republic and artists like Klaw and Willie that it began to get wider attention, and generate a feedback loop. Suddenly a guy who might never have figured out his desires sees a photograph like this or drawing by Stanton and the switch is flipped.
I share your fascination with the history and old images. In fact this comment inspired my latest post on the history of the word ‘dominatrix’. So thanks for that!
-paltego