Tag: Artwork

More on Demarcation

This is a follow-up post to my one from yesterday. That tackled the perennial discussion of what sexual activities are acceptable for a domme and why the obvious answer of ‘all of them’ never somehow seems to stick. In that previous post I argued that a large number of pro-dommes are invested in defining domination in a legal safe way, which naturally puts certain activities outside the definition.  While I obviously think that’s true, it’s also only part of the picture. The other part is the out-sized influence that professional domination has on femdom in general.

In any sane world, femdom would be a generally recognized preference, and professional femdom a narrow subset of it that operates within certain legal boundaries. Actually, in any sane world, those legal boundaries wouldn’t exist and sex work would be decriminalized, but lets set that aside for the moment. The general point is that people’s sexual behavior shouldn’t be defined by the professional label. Nobody would take the escort definition of the girlfriend experience (GFE) to be how a man should actually interact with a girlfriend. Yet the pro-domme dynamic is often the lens used to view femdom in general. So any distortion created by the laws around sex work tend to distort how people see the bigger picture and the definition of female domination.

This blog is part of that problem. Over the years I’ve tried to link to and feature the blogs of many lifestyle female dominants. I’m sure I could have done a better job, but I try to share the broadest view of femdom that I can. However, for most femdom bloggers, sharing information is optional and secondary to their kinks. For most pro-dommes, sharing information is a key part of their marketing and essential to how they make money. That creates a public information imbalance. Most femdom blogger avoid sharing photographs for reasons of privacy. Pro-dommes hire professional photographers and take endless snaps of themselves between sessions. My social media feeds are full of them, and I love featuring them here. It makes it easy to create a visually interesting posts. But it’s a distorted view of femdom.

I’ve no idea how to resolve this problem. Pro-dommes have been a hugely important and positive part of my life. I’m happy when I encourage people to visit them. I also think that if I tried to create a blog that featured no professional content at all my readership would plunge. The images they share are undoubtedly striking. At the same time, I don’t think I present a balanced view of femdom. Or a view that leads people towards what I’d like femdom to be. Instead I reflect an information imbalance that’s detrimental to that vision, and I’m not sure what to do about that.

I’ll leave you with a shot that exemplifies my problem. This is of Mistress Iris as captured by Miss May. It’s a lovely image and Mistress Iris is a fabulous domme, but it’s also as relevant to femdom in general as the Noma cookbook is to the average home cook.

You can find Miss May’s professional site here. She offers bespoke web and graphic design services for the global Fetish, BDSM and erotic industry.

Mistress Iris is an LA based pro-domme, who travels extensively. You can find her professional site here.

Demarcation

There’s one topic of discussion in femdom communities that seems to repeat itself with the inevitability of elections, taxes and the return of pumpkin spice lattes. That topic is: What are the appropriate sexual activities for a domme?  The naive reader might assume that the answer is a simple one: Whatever the fuck she wants. After all, the clue is right there in the name ‘dominant’. As in the person in control who gets to make the decisions. Yet somehow that seemingly obvious answer never seems to stick.

This topic recently surfaced once again in a bunch of my social media feeds, and prompted a strong and well written response from Domina Victoria Rage. By coincidence, Mistress T also just published a good post on the topic as well, in that case prompted by a very confused sounding pro-domme client.

I think a big part of the problem here is to do with the laws around sex work in most countries. Pro-domination is typically legal, where any kind of paid sexual act isn’t. Torturing someone for money is A-OK, just don’t make them feel good with an orgasm. Most pro-dommes therefore want to draw very clear lines between their profession and anything that crosses that legal boundary. Hence, in their view, any domme blurring that line isn’t just making a personal choice, she’s challenging their legally safe but entirely arbitrary definition of what domination is. It’s almost seen as an attack on their very identity.

It’s a bit like an old fashion union – “Sorry mate. More than my jobs worth to touch that dick. I’m strictly rope and strap work. Whole different process if you need those pipes cleaning out. I’d love to help, I would, but my governor would be on me like a ton of bricks. Demarcation she’d say. Escort’s a totally different job code and time sheet. We don’t touch the dicks and they stay away from the ropes.”

Here’s someone indulging in all sorts of sexual and kinky acts. However, she’s also filming it, which makes it porn, so that’s legally fine. Presumably the pornographers have a great union, because they get to cross all sorts of lines that show up when no camera is involved.

I believe this is by the artist incase – tumblr here and patreon here.

Erythrophilia

I’d always assumed that pretty much every human behavior was associated with a kink of some sort, along with a fancy sounding -philia label. After all, there are kinks for things like crying (dacryphilia), amputation (acrotomophilia) and noses (nasophilia). Yet apparently, there’s no official name for an attraction to blushing. At least I haven’t managed to find one after an extensive 10 minutes of Googling. The best I came up with was Erythrophilia – which is apparently an attraction to the color red. That amazes me, given that blushing is a sexual response, which would seem to make it prime fodder for kinking on. Embarrassment and humiliation are major kinks, and blushing is very closely associated with those emotions, yet there’s no official label? Maybe it’s too subtle an effect to get people hooked on?

What sent me down this wikipedia rabbit hole was the image below. It’s from The Smutty Rogue, features blushing and is sexy as hell. If you like it then you might want to check out more from his tumblr.

I want to feel you from the inside

Readers of my era may be amused and/or be depressed by this video of teens reacting to music from the 90’s. I personally enjoyed it, particularly their reaction to Closer by Nine Inch Nails. Anyone would think that they’d never heard an artist express the view that he’d like to fuck them like an animal. I particularly appreciated the guy who’d never heard of the band but liked the name for the supposed Freudian suggestion.

NiN is a very domme band. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard them played in sessions. At first I thought it was just because their style and lyrics fitted kinky play, but after hearing a lot of dommes talk about liking them and seeing them in concert, I think it must be more than that. Something about their energy, sound and aesthetics chimes with a disproportionate number of dommes.

This image of someone being felt from the inside, and possibly fucked like an animal, comes from the nsfw zhenya tumblr.

Nice

I like his hands in this image. Hers are the ones doing the grabbing, but his pose is the one that makes this kinky. It’s the vulnerable pose of do what you want, I surrender.

This image has been posted across a lot of different places, but I’m not exactly sure of the original source. I think it’s fan art from a manga series called Tokyo Ghoul.

A Modern Triptych

Anyone who has spent anytime looking at Femdom Artwork will have come across the brilliant Sardax. His drawings and paintings are always exceptional, but I think he really excelled himself with the piece shown below and described in this post.

Commissioned by Lady M as a gift for her submissive, it’s based on a medieval triptych. Housed in a transportable box, it folds out to show the Lady M in the central panel and two alternative personae of her submissive in the smaller flanking panels. As Sardax describes in his post, it can function as a portable personal shrine for the submissive to carry with him.

I think it’s a lovely modern twist on an old concept, and a clever way to make a personalized piece of artwork even more individual and meaningful. It’s also nice to a see a commission from a domme for a submissive rather than the other way around.

If you’d like your own personal work from Sardax, this his commission page is here, although it looks like he’s pretty booked up for the rest of 2018.

Foot Torture

I’ve already posted about how much I enjoyed my session with Mistress Tess earlier this week. What I neglected to mention was how educational it was. For example, I learnt that you could use a goat to torture someone’s feet. I should hasten to add that this information was imparted verbally, and not through any kind of practical demonstration. While Mistress Tess may have a wonderfully well equipped studio, she definitely does not keep any goats out back ready in case any really kinky perverts show up.

Apparently the torture method involved coating the victims feet in salt and then encouraging a goat to lick it off. Ticklish at first, as the rough tongue rasped away at the skin, it’d become progressively more agonizing. It seems a somewhat complicated way to hurt someone, rather than say just beating them on the feet, but maybe there were some really lazy medieval torturers who wanted to delegate everything to their four footed friends.

Amazingly I even managed to find a femdom themed advertisement featuring goat tickle torture.  I’m not exactly sure what’s going on or why a goat is needed – my French is limited to reading menus – but it’s kind of hot.

When it comes to tickle torture, there’s one particular artist who comes to mind, and that’s Augustine.  I don’t think he has ever featured goats in a drawing, but there have certainly been plenty of tortured feet.

Apologies for the ugly watermark on this image. I’m sure it has been added after the fact. Unfortunately I can’t track down a clean version of the drawing. You can find plenty more of Augustine’s art on his tumblr.

Sometimes you know they’re the one

This cute image is by the French artist Arthur De Pins. As I’m someone who is a romantic at heart (buried beneath a deep layer of cynicism), this makes me all gooey inside. If only real life was as simple.

The artists official site is annoyingly flash heavy, but available here should you wish to deal with that. I discovered it via this tweet.

Shoe Fitting

Fetishism and repression always seem to go together. The more forbidden or subversive something is, the greater the thrill.

Take for example this Victorian illustration (found via the Whores of Yore twitter) of what I assume is a device for privacy when fitting shoes. I guess it’s supposed to separate the lady from the process of measuring and fitting the shoe, and hence make it a more mechanical and impersonal act. In actual fact it’s a foot fetishists dream. The gentleman involved is even sporting a lascivious grin.

It looks like the top of the device has some sort of crank system and the panel has a split across the middle. So does it separate and then close around her foot once it’s in the hole? If so, it’s even kinkier than it looks at first glance. It’s device bondage crossed with foot fetishism.

Complex Theological Issues

Here’s a final vintage pulp novel cover to complete my trio of posts featuring them. I’m definitely not a religious man, but even an atheist like myself can see this book clearly raises some challenging theological issues.

Firstly, there’s the whole Satan as a gay woman thing. Is that actually a progressive view? As John Oliver might say – #satanism #feminism. And then there’s the past tense aspect of the title. Is Satan now dead? Or still a woman but no longer gay? Or maybe trans? She’s definitely looking pretty masculine in the background of the cover drawing. For all the sexual and gender confusion, at least Satan is maintaining the tradition of villains with an evil goatee. It’s important to have standards.