Artwork – Page 49 – Femdom Resource

Are you OK?

This is a cute and appealing work of art. It manages to be playful and still hit an emotional note. However, that’s not why I featured it. I picked it out because it makes an important point that rarely gets the attention it deserves. The web is full of sexy imagery and descriptions of people doing crazy kinky stuff. There’s an endless parade of people apparently enjoying whatever their partner chooses to throw at them. Sites like kink.com may feature pre and post session interviews, but I’ve yet to see a clip where someone stopped and re-negotiated the scene once it had started. Blogs like this one talk a lot about great scenes, a bit about abusive dysfunctional scenes, but very little about scenes that start with the best of intentions but end up reaching emotional or physical roadblocks.

The reality is that consent is a continuous process. It’s not a box to be ticked pre-scene. Playing with a partner is not a competitive sport, where the goal is to finish or to achieve some previously agreed level of kink. Something that starts well may unexpectedly twist and go sour on you. Even if the fantasy was hot, there’s no guarantee about the reality. I’m sure most submissives have been in this situation where something isn’t right, yet we’re reluctant to stop and disappoint our partners. We act OK, kind-of, right up until we get that clear option to stop. Learning to spot the warning signs and then acting on them correctly is a skill both sides have to develop.

I’m not exactly sure who the artist is for this. The earliest tumblr posting I can find is this one, but I’m not clear if it was posted by the actual artist or not.

Paging Dr Stoker

Apparently vampires had the right idea all along. According to recent research, young blood can reverse the effects of aging, although the researchers are strangely quiet on necessity (or not) for virginity on the supplier of the blood. Unfortunately, before everyone rushes off to check out the price of mortgages on gothic castles and what outfits they can accessorize with an opera cape, I should point out they’ve only tested it on mice so far. It also needs to be administered via transfusion, so neck sucking isn’t going to help with any wrinkles.

While immortality doesn’t appear to be quite within our reach just yet, the story does give me an excuse to feature some sexy female vampires. This artwork is by the animator and artist Bruce Timm. He’s worked on numerous animated series from DC comics, and is the co-creator of the Harley Quinn character from the Batman series. This is a cover from a British horror magazine, that I found here.

Missed opportunity

Advice columns have become far more entertaining thanks to the spread of the internet and the more open sexual culture that has gone along with it. Instead of questions on gift etiquette or workplace squabbles, we now get questions about what to do when your friend’s new girlfriend turns out to be your dominatrix.

I don’t think the basic advice given – ‘stop seeing her’ – is necessarily wrong, but the logic and framing of the response is horrible. It would seem like a good opportunity to reduce the stigma of sex work and focus on the work aspect of it. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant or a pro-domme. If you’re overlapping a professional relationship with a social one then there are a few obvious questions to answer. For example: What happens if I need to end just the professional relationship? What information am I comfortable sharing with someone in both circles? Is this likely to lead to a conflict of interest? What are the odds of problems in one form of the relationship spilling over into the other?

It might be that the answers to these questions indicate that there’s not a problem to resolve. I can conceive of some relationships and social groups where mixing in pay for play wouldn’t be an issue, although this particular case doesn’t sound like one. But there’s no reason to make this specifically about sex and and sex work. It’s really about making smart decisions that minimize risk for everyone involved.

Having missed one opportunity the columnist then really screws the pooch by making the blanket statement that ‘sex workers are not notorious for their long, stable relationships.’ So rather than reduce stigma she manages to increase it with a gratuitously offensive stereotype. She might have got the basic answer right, but the rest of the column is a huge fail.

The artwork is by the artist Camille MM. Given the original letter writers description of his sessions, it seems like an appropriate one.

Decadence

I’m safely back in Seattle after my trip to Las Vegas. Having enjoyed a few days of sunshine, fine dining and alcohol I now feel I should adopt the role of the martyr and be both scourged and purged. Unfortunately I know that scourging in my case is yet another form of decadent enjoyment. If I really wanted to do penance for my visit to the city of sin, I should probably sit alone in a small beige room. Being beaten only warms my libidinous instincts.

This image, by Édouard-Henri Avril, is a good reflection of my conflicted state. He’s being both beaten and stimulated. I suspect that this is a win/win scenario for him.

Next!

This looks to be a very impatient looking lady. I’m not quite sure what she’s done to those poor fellows in the background, but clearly she has left them in a somewhat discombobulated state. Either that or she dissolved their spinal cords. No time for foreplay or cuddling afterwards. Just wham, bam, thank you man.

My searching suggests this is fan art of an anime character called Annie Leonhart. I’m afraid I don’t know who the artist is.

Luisita

This is from the brilliantly named Fetish Sleaze Art blog. That captures three things I always enjoy in one memorable title. It’s by the artist Robert Maguire who specialized in crime noir and femme fatale illustrations. It’s cliched and very much of its time, but I have a real soft spot for these kind of illustrations and pulp novels. I’m not really sure why she’s holding a whip and he’s holding his forehead. A whip isn’t an ideal instrument for whacking someone in the head with, but I guess logic isn’t a priority in these drawings. Drama and attitude is what counts.

Check out my enormous package

I have no idea what’s going on here. His pose is an aggressive ‘look at this big boy’, more usually found when brandishing an appendage rather than a huge medieval chastity device. She’s also got a look of ‘oh my, that’s a big one’, something better suited to lustful appreciation than chastity key holding.

I’ve failed to track down a source or an artist. If I had to guess I’d say it’s a vintage comic or book cover done by an artist used to illustrating more traditional erotica. Often illustrators in the 60’s and 70’s were simply given the title of a new publication and told to use their imagination. Perhaps this title featured femdom and chastity, but the artist couldn’t imagine anything other than a thrusting male and a wide eyed female.

I found this on the Old Erotic Art tumblr.

Rope & candles

I don’t feature a lot of posts with female submissive imagery. In fact, looking at my post tagging, there have been around 60 Ff images, out of over 1,200 total posts. That’s not because I don’t appreciate it. I enjoy its aesthetic and can relate to the submissive experience of any gender. The problem is that so many Femdom/Femsub images end up fixated on the submissive at the cost of the dominant and the dynamic between them. They end up being femsub rather than femdom, and I figure there are quite enough pictures of bound and gagged women floating around with a blog about female dominance adding to them.

This image is an example that strikes the right balance for me. The dominant is an integral part of the scene, and it nicely captures a moment of tension. It also continues the Shibari theme from yesterday’s post, which pleases the anal retentive blogger in me. It’s by the artist RedPandaDee and, according to his comment on it, the dominant is Saki Kamijoo and the submissive is Skinny Redhead. You can see a video of Saki Kamijoo at work here.

Experimenting with gargalesis

Sometimes I can be a little slow. For example, I spent ages starting at this image trying to figure it out. Why, I wondered, are two women tickling him, while the third is drawing a picture of a costumed superhero? How could those different things possibly be related? Only after an embarrassingly long time did I figure out that the third woman is actually drawing a color coded map of his ticklish zones. That’s both scientific and particularly evil.

In my defense I will say that I’m extremely ticklish, so a color coded map wouldn’t make much sense for me. All my body parts trigger a strong reaction, so it’d just be red all over. I can’t say I particularly kink on being tickled, but I have noticed that some dommes really get a kick out of the reaction they can provoke with it. So I do enjoy feeding off their reaction to my reaction. It’s a perversely entertaining feedback loop.

Incidentally, the title of the post features the scientific name for tickling. Femdom Resource – bringing you entirely accurate and completely useless information, one post at a time.

I found this image on the Lunar Black tumblr. It’s initialed with something that looks like DH??, but I can’t track down the artist. If anyone knows then please leave a comment.

Ivy and Robin

Batman and Catwoman often show up in D/s situations, but it’s more unusual to see Robin and Poison Ivy getting kinky. This is from Batman and Robin Adventures #8. Fortunately (or possibly unfortunately) for Robin, Harley Quinn eventually gets upset playing second fiddle to the boy wonder and feeds him the antidote to Ivy’s charms. Although that’s not before he’s spent some time shirtless and massaging her feet.

I originally found this on the Robin Wilde tumblr, which has a larger version of the image.