Paul Kamm

I’m continuing the fine art theme with this post. In fact, I’m even continuing the theme of German artists working between the World Wars. This is by Berlin artist Paul Kamm, who published work in the 1920’s and 30’s. Sadly there’s not a lot of information available online about his background or work. Goddess Ezada Sinn has a post on him along with some of his drawings here.

Offered Prayer

This is by the German artist Rudolf Schlichter. Born in 1890, he survived the the first and second World Wars, despite his work being labelled as degenerate by the Nazis. I’ve featured his work before, and I assume the model in both paintings is the same. According to this article it’s an Elfriede Elisabeth Koehler aka Speedy, who shared his interests in “buttoned boots, bondage and masochistic games.” Clearly the disdainful sneer, beloved of many twitter findommes, is not a new invention.

Time Killers

One of my guilty pleasures during quarantine has been reading the Reddits Relationships and Am I the Asshole. They’re very moreish, alternately amusing and enraging, particularly when consumed via the twitter versions @redditships and @AITA_reddit. They offer a filtered ‘best of’, with quick and easily browsed postings.

My favorite in recent days was this story featuring a bride with a bizarre wedding night ritual. While most newly married couples simply depart for their honeymoon after the wedding, this bride’s family expects them to consummate the marriage while the clan gathers outside the bedroom door. Then they all cheer when the happy and slightly sweaty couple emerge. Some of the bed linen is kept to add to what can only be described as a family fuck blanket.

It’s an insane tradition that nobody should ever follow, but it does make me wish the bride and groom would take the chance to turn the tables on their nosy relatives. They could arrive at the door with bags bulging with rope, coiled leather implements and jiggly rubber outfits. Make the relatives wait for an hour or two outside while creating lots of strange and disturbing noises. Then, just when they think it’s all over, have the bride pop her head out the door and say – “Sorry. We’re totally in the zone here. Killer scene. Could one of you pop down to the kitchen and bring me some clothespins and the big wooden spoon? Also, maybe the big bottle of Crisco?” That should clear the corridor of her parents and cousins pretty quickly.

I’m guessing this image has been cropped to remove the watermark, but I’m fairly certain it’s originally from The English Mansion.

Teddy Girls

I’d guess that the phrase ‘Teddy Boy’ doesn’t mean much to most of my readers. Despite the name, it’s not a furry thing, or a niche kink for gay guys into teddy bears. It was actually one of the very first UK youth subcultures. It started in the 1950’s and leaned heavily on Edwardian fashion cues from the turn of the century. It’s particularly meaningful to me because I’ve seen old photographs of my father and his friends from the late 1950’s dressed in the Teddy Boy style.

What I hadn’t realized was that there were Teddy Girls as well. This twitter thread has some great photographs of them, along with a modern fashion shoot that was inspired by that subculture. The images below are two examples taken from the thread. Obviously, none of this is really related to femdom at all, but I just love the confidence, style and dash of the girls involved.

What’s particularly fascinating is that these images were all shot by Ken Russell, who’d later go on to direct films such as Tommy, Women In Love, The Devils and (particularly relevant to this blog) The Lair of the White Worm.  He took a whole series of striking black and white photographs of teenagers in 1950’s London, capturing both the destruction of the war and the postwar exuberance of youth. You can find more of his work and the background to it in articles here, here and here.

Wighead

This drawing is by the artist Wighead for a 1930’s novel entitled ‘A Genoux Esclave’. You can see more from the book here and there’s an article on the potential identity of the artist here. I discovered the art and its background via this tweet.

These days the idea of a French maid in a sexy black and white outfit with stockings and a little cap exists almost entirely in fetish scenes and silly Halloween outfits. It has become purely a sexual trope. Yet black and white maid outfits in the 19th and early 20th century were a real thing. They were just far more practical. Here’s a picture of one I found from the same era. So what we’re looking at here is a fetishistic interpretation of what was a contemporary uniform of the time. I find it interesting to look at the artwork from that angle. It has a different feel when you consider it from the perspective of a 1930’s kinkster.

History Repeats Itself

Mainstream tech companies being hostile to kink and sex – as I mentioned in  my last post – is nothing new. Some start off friendly and become hostile over time (like tumblr), some are hostile right out of the gate (like Apple). Whatever the route, the end result has been the same for many years.

What I have found surprising is the recent negative feedback on a site created explicitly for adult content –  OnlyFans.  Like Zoom, they’ve been another winner out of the Coronavirus, with a lot of sex workers moving to offering content online. At the same time there have been a lot of threads like this and this highlighting problems content creators have had with it. Rolling Stone followed up on that feedback with an article on the problems here. Apparently this is one of those things baked into the universe like the laws of thermodynamics or planck’s constant. Online platform’s hostility to sex and sex workers grows in proportion to their mainstream success and their corresponding access to conventional funding sources.

Having said all that, I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage people from subscribing. There are a lot of awesome dommes making content on OnlyFans. So if someone you like is publishing on it, then go for it. The majority of the issues seem to be on the creator side, not the consumer side.

On the flipside, if you’re thinking of setting up an OnlyFans site, then it might be worth looking at all the options. I’ve recently seen a significant movement towards the AVN Stars site. I’ve no personal experience of that, but anecdotally there seem to be less complaints from content creators.

This is a shot from the always amazing Domina Yuki. She’s a domme with great content published on both an OnlyFans account and an AVN Stars account. Based on this tweet it seems like her bias is toward AVN Stars.

Sex is Bad, Mkay?

There aren’t many winners when it comes to the Coronavirus, but Zoom is undoubtedly one of them. They went from nothing to being a household name. It’s therefore both depressing and inevitable to see articles like this one – ‘Zoom says it uses machine-learning to detect nudity as virtual sex parties spread‘.  Obviously ensuring people can get dragged into boring business meetings all day is vital, but God forbid anyone actually uses their product for sexy fun. It’d be particularly bad to allow that when a lot of people are alone and frustrated.

Can you imagine if phone companies adopted a similar policy? There’d be a national outcry if they monitored calls and cut off cell service for anyone having an intimate conversation with a partner. Yet apparently tech startups from liberal California have pretty much the same attitude to sex as Mike Pence. Good job guys.

Of course kinky people have a secret workaround. They can combine a boring office meeting with hot femdom activity. I’d like to see the machine learning algorithm that could figure out what was going on here.

This is the amazing Mistress T shooting for The English Mansion. I found the image this post from Mistress Sidonia.

Contact

This week gave me my first physical contact with another human being in almost three months. On the plus side, it was with a woman, unusual outfits were involved and she hurt me. On the downside, it was with my dental hygienist and getting my teeth scraped wasn’t exactly the kind of physical contact I was craving.

It also wasn’t the kind of in-person conversation I was looking forward to after many months of isolation. She wanted to know how my quarantine had been. I wanted to know why she was asking me questions while she had her fingers in my mouth and was repeatedly jabbing me with a metal spiky thing.

If you have a fetish people dressed like extras from the movie Outbreak, then I suspect the next few months are going to be quite fun for you. It really felt like I was potential Ebola patient, rather than someone who might have occasionally exaggerated his flossing habits. Personally I’m more old school when it comes to medical outfits.

This is of course Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver in Kill Bill.

Honor Blackman Throws Down

Last month I put up a post commemorating the passing of Honor Blackman. While I knew she had trained in self-defense, I hadn’t realized quite how seriously she’d taken it. That was until Phil, one of my awesome readers and commenters, shared that she’d actually published a book on the subject. More importantly, he had a copy and was willing to share scans of it with me.

I’ve no way to gauge how well the book holds up today. I’m guessing that it’s probably pretty dated. However, as this article makes clear, it was unusual for its time and, as one of the first books targeted at self-defense for women, it struck a chord with its intended audience. The same article highlights the fact that she shot the Avengers with no stunt artists. She just packed her week with Judo training, stunt choreography and shooting scenes. Quite a woman.

These are two of the images are from her self-defense book. My thanks to Phil for taking the time and effort to share them with me.

Telling Tales

This is one of those images that instantly makes me start spinning story lines in my head. Is she the daughter of the house, humiliating but maybe also secretly delighting one of their older servants? Is it a newly married couple? He’s the the foolish older man who has been ensnared by his lust for a young attractive bride. Or is she perhaps a college friend of the man’s daughter? She spotted his sidelong glances during a visit over the summer break, and now she’s returned to wreck havoc in his life and take everything from him. It’s a real choose your own adventure of an image.

I believe that is Lady Fatale, a pro-domme based out of Amsterdam. You can find her professional site here and twitter feed here.