The beauty of dominant women
Something short and sweet to start the weekend. This is from the 60’s comic Barbarella by Jean-Claude Forest, famously made into a movie by Roger Vadim with Jane Fonda. The film is objectively bad, while also being an entertaining 60’s exploitation sci-fi flick, packed with fetishistic elements.
After two posts on serious subjects, I think it’s time for something more lighthearted. This video from Comedy Central has been popping up all over my twitter feed and made me laugh. It takes the conceit of food porn and adds a kinky angle, with a dominatrix who really does enjoy playing with dominating her food. It’s not often you see someone sensually sliding a butt plug into fruit. I particularly enjoyed the exploding watermelon trick. How have I never know about doing that before?
Occasionally I like to do a post that features someone who wasn’t necessarily dominant in the usual sense of this blog, but was an outstanding and forceful figure. A few past examples have included Beryl Swain, Julie d’Aubigny and Marlene Dietrich. Today’s post features another incredible woman – Freddie Oversteegen.
She was a Dutch resistance fighter in World War II, and passed away recently, aged 93. Aged just 14 when the Nazis invaded in 1940, she worked with her sister and a student named Hannie Schaft. As her obituary in the New York Times explains…
The three staged drive-by shootings from their bicycles; seductively lured German soldiers from bars to nearby woods, where they would execute them; and sheltered fleeing Jews, political dissidents, gay people and others who were being hunted by the invaders.
She obviously didn’t subscribe to the view that there were some fine people on both sides.
You can also read obituaries for her in The Guardian and The Washington Post. Seducing and then shooting Nazis made her a very literal femme fatale. It’s amazing that as a teenager she could do what she did, and also sad that she had to. She was ultimately awarded the Mobilization War Cross by the Dutch government, although not until 69 years after the war ended.
I was originally going to feature some fetishistic femdom military imagery with this post, but then figured that might not be in the best possible taste. So instead here is an elegant Dutch domme – Mistress Manouk. She can definitely pull off the femme fatale look.
The New Orleans Dominatrix Convention is coming up in October. Specifically it runs from the 4th to the 8th. I’m sadly not going to be there, but if you can attend, you might want to look out for a Second Line Parade that’s being organized. It has been put together by Simone Justice to remember and celebrate the lives of people the BDSM community has lost in recent years. As their press release says…
More than 100 dominatrixes will strut The French Quarter dressed in full fetish regalia comprised of leather, latex and thigh high boots while dancing to a brass jazz band, waving parasols and handkerchiefs.
The second line parade is a uniquely New Orleans tradition, held for many kinds of occasions, and anyone on the street is welcome to join in the revelry.
You can read more about this New Orleans tradition here. It sounds like this one should be quite the event. If you know of anyone you think should be specifically called out for this memorial, then Simone Justice has been collecting suggestions.
I’ve no idea what fetish outfit Simone Justice plans to wear for the parade, but based on this image, I’m sure any attendees will be in for a visual treat. If you’re interested in seeing her in her professional capacity, her main site is here.
This Guardian article on surgical penis extensions isn’t really anything to do with femdom, but I found it fascinating, so I’m going to feature it anyway. Some of my takeaways were that it always seems to be a guy self-esteem issue, their female partners don’t really care about it, and that often the guys getting the surgery aren’t that small anyway.
The really crazy thing is that it doesn’t make any difference to the erect length, it just makes it look longer when its flaccid and hanging. Apparently that’s better for the locker room image. Who seriously gives a shit about that? Between the attribution of Trump’s pussy grabbing to just ‘locker room talk that all guys do’ and now this surgery for a bigger locker room dick, I’m really wondering what kind of gyms people are going to. Personally I just get in, get changed and get out. Apparently there’s a whole sexual dick measuring thing (both literal and metaphorical) going on that I’ve thankfully missed out on.
I’m not into Small Penis Humiliation (SPH), but frankly that seems a way more healthy reaction to dick size issues than having a surgeon chop at a ligament and stuff fat into your dick. No SPH scene ever left someone with a bent misshapen dick that doesn’t work properly anymore.
Of course another alternative is to go totally artificial. You can have any size you (or she) likes in that kind of set-up.
This is from Mistress T’s twitter feed.
In the past I’ve published posts on scientific studies when they had positive things to say about BDSM. For example, this one on flow and this one on psychological health. It seems only fair therefore to feature one that has a more troubling message.
The study in question looked at empathy in female submissives, and came to the conclusion that they have reduced empathy to other peoples suffering. As described in this article, the experiment was done by showing them photographs of people with neutral and ‘in pain’ expressions and watching what parts of the brain lit up. Apparently female submissives had unusually low responses to the ‘in pain’ photos in the parts of the brain normally associated with empathy.
I understand the methodology behind this approach. It reminds me of an anecdote from a doctor studying psychopaths who’d been jailed for violent crimes. He described showing an expression of a frighted man to one of his subjects and asked what he thought the man in the photograph was feeling. The prisoner laughed and said he didn’t know, but it reminded him of the looks on peoples faces just before he stabbed them. Clearly being able to relate expressions to internal emotions is a key part of empathizing with someone.
However, that said, while I understand the general approach here, it does seem flawed in this case. They’re starting from the premise that pain is a bad thing, and therefore seeing someone in pain should trigger empathy and concern. That’s true for most people but not for masochists. We have a much more complex relationship to pain. It’s an ambiguous sensation and therefore context is important. If I see someone stub their toe then I wince and feel bad for them. If I see someone tied up and caned in a BDSM movie I get excited and wish it was me. If I just see a pained expression alone, it’ll probably depend on my mood and what’s on my mind. Lacking context for the pain I’ll add my own, and that could generate all sorts of different emotional responses.
I think if you’re going to study empathy in kinky people, you really need to take into account their sexual wiring. For example, study their responses to happy or surprised faces rather than people in pain. Or put the pain into a suitable context. I’m sure non-kinky people would be disturbed by and empathize with the apparent pain of the man in the image below. As a masochist my reaction to the image is quite different, because I understand in this context the pain for him might be a sort of pleasure.
I’m afraid I’ve no idea who created this image. If you can help attribute it then please leave me a comment.
Here’s a final post (for the moment) on a pet theme. Just after I published yesterday’s post on pro-dommes and animals, I noticed this tweet from Mistress Baton. For those not wishing to click through it features an image with the text “You don’t get to tell me what to do, you’re not my dog.” Her accompanying comment is that “The only creatures who can boss Dominatrice around are our pets.”
So I guess the lesson here is that if you’re going to top from the bottom, make sure you’re as cute as a puppy. Otherwise best do what you’re told.
This image is Mistress Adreena Angela with her personal puppy.
Over the last decade or so I’ve been lucky enough to meet and interact with a lot of fabulous pro-dommes. They’ve all had their own unique style and approach, but there is one unusual commonality that I’ve observed. It’s not that they were intelligent, empathetic, well-organized and excellent communicators. I mean all those things were true, but being a successful professional dominant tends to naturally select for them. Pointing those out is like pointing out that most basketball players are tall and most politicians can lie convincingly. It comes with the territory.
The unusual commonality I’ve observed is a love of animals. That’s obviously not a characteristic unique to pro-dommes, but it seems to be significantly skewed compared to the general population and to manifest itself in many different ways. Pro-dommes are frequently enthusiastic and proud pet owners, adopters of abandoned animals, volunteers at pet rescue centers, vegetarians or vegans and supporters of animal related charities. I’m obviously generalizing a lot here about a big group of people, and it won’t be true for everyone, but it is true for most of the dommes I’ve played with and true for a lot of the pro-dommes I see posting on social media.
I actually made this observation to a pro-domme last year. Although in fact, I only got as far as saying that there was one common theme I’d noticed before she beat me to the punch. I hadn’t even managed to finish my sentence before she came out with exactly the same observation.
An optimist might suggest that this trait derives from dommes possessing a nurturing and empathetic personality type that fits well with caring for animals. A cynic might suggest its because the average pet is a lot more obedient, dependable and trainable that 95% of male submissives.
This shot is from Mistress An Li and features, in her words, her two bitches playing. The one on top is her puppy and the one apparently losing the fight is her submissive in a pet crawler outfit.
Mistress An Li is an LA based pro-domme, and her professional site is located here.
I rarely like to criticize people online, and particularly not dommes. However, I have to say that Mistress Silver has chosen a pretty confusing name for her pet here. Judging by the cage and dish she obviously owns a dog, yet she has chosen to call it ‘man’. That can surely only lead to problems.
Typically I’m not a fan of role playing, workplace scenarios or humiliation scenes. I like being beaten for fun, not because I screwed up. Yet something about this image gives me the shivers. And I mean that in the best possible way. It’s like a kinky performance evaluation, where literally everything you did went badly wrong.
I think it’s the variety of expressions that make it work. The woman on the left never had any faith in you, and she’s totally unsurprised to be proven right. The woman in the middle didn’t know you existed until 20 minutes ago, and now can’t believe she’s been dragged into this bullshit performance review. The woman on the right was the optimist. She really thought you could pull it off. But now you haven’t, she’s going to need to explain to you in great detail exactly where and how you screwed it all up.
Setting aside my fevered imagination for a moment, I think this is orginally from a Japanese idol group called Nogizaka46, and taken from a song called synchronicity. You can see more images from the sequence here.