Looking Back

After a decade of blogging I thought it might be interesting to look back and see what has changed.

The obvious answer is that there are a lot less bloggers. I love and appreciate the people on my blogroll, but social media has sucked in a lot of people’s attention and creative output. That in turn has created some interesting knock on effects. When I started blogging I posted and linked to a lot of debates around femdom. They were centered on topics like the invisibility of the domme  in society, the negative perception of submissives, the distorting effect of professional dominance, cliches in femdom porn, etc. Sadly, I’m not sure we’ve improved from a cultural perspective in those areas, but there is less writing about those issues. I think the angst about it has moved to social media and that’s a far more ephemeral medium. It’s hard to capture a serious debate in 240 characters or less, particularly when they’re randomly mashed into a stream of thoughts from dozens of other people.

Another change has been a reduction in curated image and artwork sites. Artists and their fans used to create dedicated sites to collect artwork. Kinky porn companies used to shoot a lot of still imagery and publish galleries from scenes. Now most artists and fans publish via social media and kinky porn tends to focus on video only clips. For someone like myself, with a minor fetish for archiving and collating material, it’s somewhat frustrating. I’ve been less compelled to update my resource links, because there is less ‘permanent’ content to link to.

When I started blogging it felt like the dominant model of the internet was a library that anyone could donate a book to. Now it feels more like a big party house with endlessly swirling conversations, a lot of which feature bad faith actors and paid for guests. Much as I enjoy things like Twitter and Reddit, it doesn’t feel like a healthy change. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and yell at some kids to get off my lawn.

Birthday celebrations should usually be accompanied by cake, so here’s Lucy SweetKill serving one up. I’m not sure this approach is one Emily Post would recommend, but it works for me. Fittingly enough, given the contents of this post, I found this on twitter, via Lucy’s feed. It was photographed by JCPhotoMedia.

A Decade of Femdom Resource

I launched this site exactly ten years ago today. So happy birthday to me and a big thank you to all my readers.

Despite the fact that I’ve been aware for months that I was due to hit this milestone, it still seems quite extraordinary to have made it this far. In that time I’ve written 2,896 posts, which works out to writing a new post approximately every 30 hours for a decade. I’ve been running it for a third of my adult life.

I created the site because the Femdom blog that I wanted to read didn’t exist. I like to think that it now does and all that time hasn’t been wasted. However, it would have died a quick and early death if nobody else had read it. So thanks to everyone out there, readers both past, present and future. It might be a cliche, but it’s also true: I couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks for the clicks, views and comments.

This will not be my final post on the topic. As is my usual style, I feel a series of posts coming on. In the meantime, I’ll finish with some art from Augustine. My very first post  featured his work, so it seems appropriate to return to it a decade later.

Interactive Gags

I’ve been surprised in the past by how much some dommes like throat fucking. From both comments on social media and personal experience it’s clearly a real button pusher. On multiple occasions I’ve been spluttering and coughing on a dildo wondering ‘Why?’

I guess I shouldn’t be too perplexed. Gags are hot, and a strap-on in the mouth is just an interactive form of that. From the domme perspective of intimate penetration and generating a strong reaction, there’s not much too choose between the throat or the anus. In fact, if you want to watch for a subs response, the face works way better. It’s just the submissive’s bad luck that they don’t have a prostate in the back of the throat. Which makes me wonder – was there ever a gay version of deep throat that went with that particular spin?

This is by the artist Skyldfri, sourced from this specific tweet.

Stay Down

This makes for a nice contrast to the image in my previous post. That was all sweetness and vulnerability. This has a far more brutal edge to it. I particularly love their expressions. It’s a nice contrast of gleeful sadism and accepted suffering.

The style of this seems familiar. I’m sure I’ve seen work from this artist elsewhere, but I’m afraid I can’t place the name right now. I discovered it via this tweet.

Updated: By way of a tweet from Sardax I can at least attribute this 70’s Japanese magazine “Fuzoku-kitan.” The actual artist remains unknown.

Gloves for the Last Time

I swear this is my last glove themed post. At least for the moment. I thought I was actually done yesterday, but then an odd thought struck me.

Gloves are not a prominent fetish. The greatest hits of femdom clothing fetishes are things like boots, heels, stockings and corsets. Gloves don’t even have their own special fetish name. There is a Wikipedia article on it, but while super obscure fetishes like crying (dacryphilia) and amputation (acrotomophilia) have specific names, gloves are just gloves. It’s rare you see a kinkster posting about a love of gloves, where shoes and stockings show up all the time.

Yet when I hunted through my archives for interesting photographs to use, I had a multitude of options. That is not normal. I like post photographs to relate to my text and finding something appropriate often takes a lot of hunting around.  I frequently spend longer trying to find a suitable image than I do writing the post. With gloves I could written a dozen posts and not run out of material. They seem to be one of those things that are really popular, without anyone actually being aware just how popular they are.

My final long glove post image  is from douzocosplay. It’s a cosplay of Ally from Sunstone. You can find more from the artist at her Deviant Art site.

Why Size Matters

My post on long gloves triggered a number of interesting comments. Readers had a variety of different theories on why they were particularly sexy. With advance apologies to the original commenters, I’ll try and summarize them here. I may well screw this up.

  1. Long gloves are explicitly decorative rather than functional, so sends a signal of being desirable and wishing to attract attention.
  2. Gloves are protective armor, insulating the wearer from the world. So long gloves emphasize this separation, elevating the wearer above the viewer.
  3. They emphasize the limb and trigger thoughts of either touching or being touched by them. That’s particularly true for sleek sensual materials like latex, leather, velvet, etc.
  4. Gloves communicate both intent and, in the case of long gloves, high status. Once the gloves are pulled on then things – possibly evil things – are about to happen.

What I like about these theories is that they’re all different, possibly contradictory, yet entirely plausible. In fact it’s possible that they might be simultaneously contradictory and yet all correct, which seems impossible. They work in different ways for different people in different contexts.

This is Cindy Crawford shot by Ellen Von Unwerth for Italian Vogue in 1991. Which of the above theories matches to this particular image? I think I could make a case that it works for all of them.

Short can be Sexy

I’m returning to the subject of gloves for my next couple of posts. A few days ago I asked why long gloves are sexier than short ones. That generated some interesting comments I’ll share in my next post.

However, I’d hate to leave anyone with the impression that only long gloves can be sexy. That’s very much not true. For example, here’s Mistress Audrey Fatale looking particularly fabulous in short black leather gloves.  Admittedly, most of the fabulousness comes from Mistress Fatale herself, but the glove is definitely adding a certain something to the shot.

Mistress Audrey Fatale is a Melbourne based pro-domme who offers both virtual and in-person sessions. You can find her professional site here and her twitter feed here.

Diana Rigg

I was sad to read of the recent passing of Diana Rigg. I’m sure a lot of my more mature readers will know her from her iconic role as Emma Peel in the Avengers. She was a 60’s fashion icon, bringing an edge of fetish into the mainstream. Her career was long and varied, with roles ranging from the gun toting Emma Peel to Shakespeare, and from marrying James Bond to hanging out with Kermit. More recently she was Emmy nominated for playing Olenna Tyrell in GoT.

There was no shortage of images I could have used for this post. There’s the iconic catsuit, the minimal super spy look, the 70’s jumpsuit and whatever the hell is going on here. In the end I went with a publicity shot from the movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It might not have been the best Bond movie, but this shot is beautiful. Thanks for everything Diana.

Size Matters

Why are longer gloves sexier than shorter ones? It’s thoughts like this that keep me up at night.

Obviously they emphasize more the shape of the arm, but is the forearm really a super sexy body part? It’s not quite the same as a leg being emphasized by a long boot. Long medical gloves like these imply things are going to be particularly messy, which is hot. But long opera style gloves are also sexy and they’re very much not PPE equipment. It’s a puzzle.

This beautiful image is from the twitter feed of Mistress Euryale, a Hong Kong based pro-domme. You can find the original fullsize version and another shot from the same scene in her original tweet. Mistress Euryale also regularly visits Paris, so if you’re near either there or Hong Kong and would like to meet her, then check out her professional site.