The Modern Muse

The Guardian recently published an interesting article on the modern concept of the Muse. It highlights the unequal way artistic collaboration is viewed when it involves men working with women versus men working with men. A beautiful female actress may inspire a male director, but she is typically portrayed as passive, waiting to be molded and guided by his genius. In contrast, when it’s a male star and director, like De Niro with Scorsese or Depp with Burton, then it’s typically seen as two individual talents coming together on a collaborative venture.

The article finishes by questioning what effect the increasing number of female directors will have on the interpretation of this dynamic. That got me thinking about the kinky equivalent. Could a male submissive be a muse in the traditional sense to a female dominant? Obviously male submissives frequently inspire sexual attraction and hot kinky fun. If they didn’t we’d be stuck with only professional dommes, all of whom would be really, really bored with their job. But what about artistic inspiration? While most scenes involve creativity, I don’t think many of them are art in the traditional sense of the word. However, there are exceptions, and BDSM can clearly be a performative act. So are their male submissive muses who inspire their dominants to new creative heights while also being passive vessels for that creativity to be poured into?

If nothing else, it’d make for a great setting for femdom fiction. The beautiful submissive who inspires a dominant to increasingly sadistic and controlling acts in the name of art. The muse who sparks a creative fire that ultimately destroys him.

This artwork is of course by the brilliant Sardax, from this post on his site showing his artistic muse as a cruel mistress. 

Fetish Pony

Fans of fetish artwork will recognize the distinctive style here of Michael Manning. He’s the creator of well known series Tranceptor and The Spider Garden. What I particularly love about this specific piece is that it’s a commission by  @DrPonyBatBond, featuring him with Mistress Michelle Lacy. In a world where content creators have to fight to get paid for their work, and erotic content is constantly being stolen, it’s great to see someone commissioning original artwork from an artist they admire. The nature of the piece and the kinks involved also fit beautifully with the artists personal style, resulting in a very memorable image.

If you’d like to commission your own piece from Michael Manning, then his commission page is here. Alternatively, you could subscribe to his Patreon here.

A New Kind of Resolution

This is the time of year for making resolutions. Normally this means I pick some, fail to keep them, feel bad about that and finally forget them entirely. This year I’m going to try a new approach – giving everyone else in the world a resolution. Obviously this is unlikely to be entirely 100% successful, but the same is true for my usual resolutions and at least when this fails, it’ll be other peoples fault rather than mine. Genius.

The resolution I’m assigning is this: Resist the urge to share, re-tweet or forward stupid or ugly things on social media. Thinking that something is dumb and then simply moving on is a perfectly valid action. There’s no need to spread that shit around.

In theory this resolution should be an easy one, as it involves *not* doing something. It’ll actually save you time! Unfortunately, social media companies are very good at hacking our emotions and appealing to people’s innate sense of fairness. We want to punish wrongdoers and unite our tribe against them. Re-tweeting a slam on someone seems to achieve this. In reality it just triggers social media chain reactions, drives user clicks and makes the social media companies money.

I should qualify at this point that I’m not talking about situations where influential people or companies do or say something terrible. In that case social media actually helps balance the scales somewhat. Lots of quieter voices can unite to match a much louder one. I’m taking about the cases where some misogynistic / homophobic / anti-sexwork garbage shows up on my social feed from some random idiot with just a handful of followers. Inevitably in those cases it’s because someone I follow has shared it with comments explaining just how terrible and wrong it is. So an opinion which would normally have died quietly and alone in a dusty corner of the internet is now being broadcast to tens of thousands of people and generating all sorts of craziness.

If you’re re-tweeting a troll then you’re making them happy. If you’re arguing with an idiot then you’re wasting your time. If it’s just some random person who did a stupid thing, then leave them to their stupid thing and move on. There’s no need for to pile on and humiliate them over it. Jon Ronson has excellent book on the effects of social media on that last category of people, which I think is well worth reading.

I think we all like to imagine our social media selves as the lady below. Rather than a simple paddle we’ll deploy our cutting wit and re-tweet button to change the mind of the ignorant and punish the evil. In reality we’re more like someone who treads in dog shit on the way to a party and decides that rather than quietly scraping it off we should show all our friends just how nasty it is.

The caption is of course from Servitor over at Contemplating the Divine. Sadly, the School Mistress site that created the original image appears to have ceased to exist.

That’s Hedy!

Continuing the theme of vintage shots of women holding whips badly (it’s a very narrow fetish niche), here’s Hedy Lamarr in a shot from the 1946 movie ‘The Strange Woman‘.  I’ve blogged about the awesomeness of Hedy before, but even a fan like myself would have to admit, she doesn’t exactly look committed to the role of fearsome whip wielder in this shot. You get the impression she has no idea why she’s been given it in the first place.

The post title obviously derives from a certain well known comedy film. Amusingly, Hedy Lamarr actually sued for $10M over the use (or abuse) of her name and ended up accepting money (presumably a lot less) in an out of court settlement.

Happy New Decade!

I hope all my readers had an enjoyable end to their year and that the next decade will bring them many good things and new experiences. From a personal perspective the last ten years have been an amazing period of kinky experimentation and personal growth. I’m hoping I can continue that growth for at least another decade to come.

We’re now heading into the twenties, which means we’ve finally got a sensible name for our current period of history. It’s also an evocative one, given the huge cultural and social changes that happened in the previous twenties.  This image is from around that era and was a product of Studio Biederer. The clothing may be a touch more conservative than today’s typical femdom whipping scene, but clearly people’s kinky proclivities haven’t changed in a hundred years.

I find it impossible to post an image from Studio Biederer without also mentioning that the two brothers behind it were both Jewish, and killed by the Nazi’s in the holocaust. People’s kinks may not have changed in the last hundred years, but neither has their capacity for racism, violence and cruelty. Something we should all keep at the forefront of our minds as we move forward into the next decade.

Mistress Adrienne

I was very sad to hear of the recent passing of Mistress Adrienne of NYC. While our paths never cross in real life, I always admired her obvious creativity and talent. She had an amazing reputation as a domme and fetishist, as shown by the numerous tributes being paid on social media – Mistress Blunt, Daddy An Li,  Mistress Morgan, Lady Sophia Larou, Mistress Iris, Michelle Lacy and too many more to list.

This site has featured her images in past posts (for example here, here and here). While dommes in fetishistic outfits aren’t exactly an unusual thing, for Mistress Adrienne fetish and fashion was clearly a hugely important part of her identity, creativity and aesthetic. She had an amazing sense of style and the dedication to make it work, as described in this anecdote by Amikoland.

I’ll finish with an image and tweet she shared back in November. It makes me tear up a little reading it now. Rest in Peace Mistress Adrienne.

Although I’m a woman of #blackleather & dark fantasy, I’m a soul of LIGHT 🕯 Days get darker in winter months, but The light never goes out for inspired & content people. How will you make the most of your current reality? #leathergoddess #inspiration

A Dame To Die For

I’ve been watching a bunch of film noir over the holidays, so this seems an appropriate image to share. It’s odd that guns and knives in BDSM  are a total turn off for me, yet I’m a sucker for a deadly femme fatale. Particularly the scenes where she turns the tables on the helpless schmuck she’s ensnared, holding him at gunpoint while explaining what a fool he’s been. I think it’s because the gun in these scenes is incidental, a necessary device to give her power, rather than being a fetishistic focus. I’m actually kinking on the betrayal and the masochistic pleasure of trusting someone you know is going to ultimately hurt you.

This illustration is by Robert Maguire, an artist famous for his crime noir covers. I believe (based on this article) that it was for a novel called ‘So Cold, My Bed’ by Sam Taylor.

SMpedia

Fans of Japanese BDSM may want to check out SMpedia. Based on a machine translation of their front page it’s ‘a non-profit database established to accurately convey the process of the birth and development of post-war Japanese SM culture to future generations.’ I have absolutely zero ability to read Japanese, but the modern browser translate tools seem to do a pretty good job to convey the gist of its pages. There is an English language version known as Nawapedia, but there’s a lot less content and it doesn’t appear to be being updated.

The artwork below is from the site and by 小悪征夫, which Google translate as Yukio Koaku.

There is also a twitter feed for the site, which is where I spotted this image.