Artwork – Page 64 – Femdom Resource

A Fastidious Dominant

I’m pretty certain this is artwork by Kahori. It has his* very distinctive artistic style and the symbol/signature in the corner resembles the ones on other drawings from him.

Like a lot of his work it shows a more delicate and less forceful style of domination than is normally seen in other femdom images. His artwork often does a good job of conveying the idea of a relationship between the participants, rather than simply focusing on the mechanics of a kinky activity.

Little thoughtful moments in a scene, like wiping the cheek of a gagged slave, really touches something deep within me. That’s partly because it plays to the idea of the caring sadist, a blend of sweetness and acidity that I find so appealing. But I think it’s also because it emphasizes what the dominant is not doing. She could simply remove the gag if she wanted him to stop drooling. Wiping the cheek instead reinforces the fact that removal isn’t currently an option. She’ll do what’s necessary to keep him exactly as she wants him.

* I’m using a male pronoun in this post for clarity, but I don’t actually know the gender of the artist. Apologies if I’ve got it wrong.

I heart you

This is a sketch by the artist known as Vernice61. He’s featured here in the past, and you can see a whole collection of his drawings over at the Mistress Fantasy blog.

I like his work a lot. The women always looks very calm and in control, and he’s never shy about stuffing all sorts of tortuous ideas into a single drawing. In this case we have inverted suspension bondage, some nipple torture, a hood plus gag and what looks like a large needle about to inserted into the scrotum. However, what really caught my eye about this image was the little hearts emanating from the slaves head. Weird, but kind of cute.

Would a rose by any other name…

…still hurt as much when shoved into my asshole?

Yes, I know, I bastardized the original phrasing. Despite the common usage, there was no ‘would’ in the original Shakespeare’s line. But it was too hard to resist given this first image.

When I first saw this (on snail meilk) I thought it was fairly unique. After all, how often do flowers feature in a BDSM scene? Forniphilia might be fairly common, but it’s not often you see a human vase. Or at least I didn’t think so until I stumbled across the second image on the Willing Submissive tumblr site. Clearly having a functional but decorative slave is more appealing than I originally suspected.

Kitten has kryptonite claws

This isn’t the first time Superman has made an appearance here, but in this instance Catwoman seems to have actually put a scratch or two in the man of steel. She looks pretty happy about her handiwork. I think the appropriate expression would be ‘like a cat that got the cream’, although that may have other connotations in this particular context.

I know a lot of guys cite Linda Carter’s Wonder Woman as one of their earliest memories of being attracted to a powerful female figure. I certainly enjoyed watching that as kid, but for me it was Julie Newmar’s Catwoman that really grabbed my attention. There was something so much more exciting about a darker and more morally suspect character than the wholesome all American Wonder Woman.

I found this on the iHonorHer blog.

Once upon a time…

I don’t feature a lot of femdom fiction or erotic writing in my daily posts. There are a couple of practical reasons for that. A few pages of text is less visually appealing than an image, and I like my front page to be aesthetically interesting. There’s also considerable more investment needed on the part of the reader. If someone doesn’t like one of the images I post they can quickly move on. Reading a story is a much greater time sink.

Despite that I think I should really make more of an effort to highlight good erotic writing. It’s actually my porn of preference, and I’m sure I spend longer browsing fiction sites than I do photographic or video alternatives. Even as a teenager I enjoyed the letters and fiction over the images in the tattered porn magazines we’d pass around at school. My friends always used to think that was kind of weird, so I guess nothing much has changed there.

My fiction pages lists a whole bunch of resources for finding good writing. Author’s like Anne Gray, drkfetyshnyghts, Abe Froman and Musker have produced some really excellent work. I’ve even given it a shot myself, albeit with mixed results.

One author I’ve particularly enjoyed recently is Tyjord. His writing can be a little extreme, featuring lots of enemas, intense predicament bondage, watersports and humilation. There’s also older sister with younger brother interactions, which some people might find off-putting. But if you’re like me, and enjoy your femdom fiction a little edgy, featuring over-the-top situations, he’s definitely worth investing some reading time in. For a gentle introduction I’d start with ‘A place to stay‘, or alternatively head for ‘Christopher’s Predicament‘ to go straight into the more extreme stuff.

Picking an artist to accompany Tyjord’s work is a on-brainer. Augustine’s art fits it perfectly. I believe they’ve already collaborated a few times together, and I’d love to see what they could do in a longer joint work.

drkfetyshnyghts

Submissive men on sale. Big discounts. Take one home, just $1.99

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at Delving Into Deviance, triggered by a post entitled ‘The devaluation of male submission‘. I came at it via Tom Allen on his vanilla edge blog, along with his interview at Dishevelled Domina.

I think it’s worth reading and raises some good points. I certainly agree with Tom when he talks about a lack of cultural models for male submission and female dominance. Outside of the stereotypical dominatrix dynamic, there is really no good understanding of these roles in conventional society. I also have a lot of sympathy with Dev in her original post when she expresses frustration at the ice queen archetype and the preconceptions of what femdom should and should not be. I frequently feel the need to fight against the tired cliche of the snarling domme dressed in leather. However, a number of the arguments in her post had me scratching my head.

One contention seemed to be that the ratio of submissive men to dominant women is 1:1, and she links to a post by Bitchy Jones arguing exactly the same thing. Now while there are a lot of good things you can say about Bitchy’s writing, such as entertaining, thought provoking and heartfelt, I never found logical coherent arguments to be her strong suit. In this case the argument seems to run: The ratio of dominant women to submissive men is 1:20 (made-up number), the actual ratio is 1:1 (made-up number), therefore 19:20 (made-up number) women are being excluded from their true identity as dominants. This is because of the current screwed up culture of femdom (supposition without evidence).

All the anecdotal evidence points to the existence of considerably more submissive men than dominant women. As Dev herself says, any woman signing up to a BDSM site is going to get an instant influx of men messaging her to be her slave. I think it’s fine to say that more women would enjoy exploring a more dominant role given better cultural models. But if you’re going to go completely against the existing evidence, and claim that the ratio is actually 1:1, it’d be nice to have some real data points to base that on. Or even some anecdotal evidence to throw onto the other side of the scales.

There’s also this statement:

As I’ve come to realize the fucked up state of femdom, I’ve concurrently become aware of the fucked up state of male submission – namely, it’s devaluation. While female dominants are made out to be some scarce resource, male submissives are depicted as a dime a dozen – common, and, even more disturbingly, weak and worthless.

Who is depicting male submissives as weak and worthless? When does this happen? The role doesn’t exist in the mainstream world, so it’s hard to see how it can be denigrated in that context. Good pro-dommes certainly don’t treat their submissives as weak and worthless. Maybe the reference is to local kink community activities, but that seems like it’d depend very much on the specific local community in question. Male submissives obviously can’t rely on their submission alone to make them valuable, the numbers just don’t work out. But that’s true for most things in life, both kinky and vanilla. Any relationship is about the total package each individual brings into it, and components of that package that are both rare and useful will always be more valued.

Finally, there’s this:

Pro-Dommes meet a need. They are the supply to a demand. However, they contribute to the perpetuation of a picture of female domination that just doesn’t reflect real life.

Whose real life are we talking about? Are not pro-dommes part of real life? They’re certainly part of my life, which seems pretty real to me. There often seems to be a tendency to draw very black and white distinctions between pro and lifestyle play. But in reality pro-dommes are normally lifestyle players themselves. And many lifestyle people enjoying playing with a lot of the accoutrements found in a professional dungeon. Pro-dommes aren’t dressing up in leather because they all own shares in cattle farms. They’re doing it because lots of people find it attractive.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Dev’s writing and I’ll be adding her blog to my blogroll. I’d certainly like there to be a lot more dominant women out there, and treasuring male submission is a fabulous thing to do. I’m just not sure I follow all the arguments in this particular post.

This image has been floating around a number of tumblr sites. I found it on lunar black. I liked it for showing an atypical activity for a femdom situation and still making it work. I’m certainly no fan of strictly demarcated lines for what is and isn’t appropriate dominant behaviour.

Added Rubex to Femdom Artwork

Fans of medical torments, nurses and breathplay may appreciate the artwork of Rubex. He’s featured a couple of times in posts in the past here and here (although sadly the femdom-wiki gallery referenced has since vanished).

Incidentally, if anyone has suggestions for artists I should add to my femdom artwork pages then feel free to leave a suitable comment or email me. No guarantees I’ll feature them, but I’m always on the look out for interesting femdom artwork and artists to promote.

What do you want from me, blood?

Warning: This post contains discussion of blood play, so if that’s not something you want to read about, I suggest skipping to the next one.

After yesterday’s post on pretentious art with a kinky theme, I thought in this post it’d be good to look at some kinky artwork that I actually liked. The work in question is by Ms Sade Ami and was created by using drips of blood from a masochists cock to paint onto a large canvas. You can see the general setup from the first two images below, and the final completed work in the right-hand image (click to enlarge). A full gallery showing the whole process in a lot more detail (along with a video clip) is available here.

Painting with bodily fluids is nothing new. Andre Serrano is probably most famous for it, but lots of modern artists have dabbled with their own (and others) internal juices. It was even the theme of one of the very early splatter movies, made by Hershell G Lewis back in the 1960’s, featuring a crazy artist searching for just the perfect shade of red.

Ms Sade’s outfit reminds me a little of a horror movie. The mask and the apron are imposing and just a little scary. But I like the final work and the process that went into creating it. I often find there’s a lot of creative energy that gets channeled into a session, and this looks like a fascinating way to direct that into something tangible.

Pseuds Kinky Corner

The satirical British magazine Private Eye runs a regular column called Pseuds Corner, containing reader submitted quotes of journalists being particularly pretentious or pompous. It’s normally dominated by art critics, who typically suffer from the biggest gap between their perception of the world (and themselves) and how the rest of us experience it. I couldn’t help thinking that this recent review of a modern dance piece in the Guardian would make a good submission to the column.

In Diaghilev on the Beach, former Boston Ballet dancer Joseph Mercier presents a reworking of Nijinsky’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, set to Debussy’s score. Mercier locates the piece at a balmy poolside, where two cocktail-sipping, harem-panted Nefertitis (Sarah Cattrall and Natalie Clarke) indulge their slave (Mercier), who is costumed in golden briefs and a jewelled dog collar. As Clarke languidly oils her breasts, Cattrall leads Mercier around, occasionally permitting him to lick her feet, and alternately stroking and slapping him. Nijinsky’s 1912 work ends with the faun shuddering in orgasm over a scarf stolen from a nymph, and a century later Mercier references the critical reaction (“filthy and bestial”, according to Le Figaro) by having Cattrall lubricate a butt plug attached to a jewelled animal tail, and insert it in her slave’s proffered rectum. It’s a startling moment, and even among the too-cool-for-school Chisenhale crowd occasions a quiet intake of breath. But the piece works. It perfectly reproduces the timeless languor of the original, it matches it in provocation, and in Mercier’s assumption of the most abject characteristics of the Faun and the Golden Slave from Schéhérazade (another Diaghilev sex-ballet), pitches reverberant questions about the dominant-submissive relationship of performer and audience.

I’m normally all for exploring questions about dominant-submissive relationships. And some languid breast oiling combined with a little foot worship, slapping and anal play sounds like a pretty good way to spend a Tuesday night. I may even add it to my ‘ideas for sessions’ list. But the idea of sitting in an audience and watching a modern dance interpretation of it? That sounds like the bad kind of humiliation and psychological torture.

Admittedly this image is more a garden scene than a balmy poolside, but there is a collar, leash and tail butt plug involved. It’s an image I like for the stillness and thoughtfulness of it. They’re not heavily involved or interacting. Just sitting for a private moment with their thoughts.

I’ve seen work by this artist before, but I can’t recall his or her name. As usual, I’m sure one of my highly knowledgeable readers will know the answer, so please leave a comment if you can help me attribute it.

Deadly Little Miho

In my last post I mentioned I wasn’t a big comic book fan. As far as the traditional superhero comics go, this is a true statement. I was never a fan of their infinite episodic nature, the endlessly complicated back stories and their clunky expository dialogue style. However, in recent years I have started purchasing the hardback collected editions of some of the more interesting and self-contained comics (or graphic novels). Titles such as Sandman, Hellboy, The Last Man and Fables manage to combine striking artwork with interesting and complex storytelling.

By far my favorite purchase to date has been the Frank Miller library edition of Sin City. The story is ridiculous, the violence excessive and the morality dubious. But I love it. The artwork is both distinctive and beautiful, and the dialog has the staccato brutality of James Ellroy crossed with the romance of Raymond Chandler.

There’s certainly no shortage of characters with a fetish or BDSM slant. But my personal pick would have to be Miho, the sadistic Japanese assassin. Silent, lethal and unstoppable, she toys with each man she fights, before finishing him off in spectacularly violent fashion. She may not be a domme in the commercial sense, but she’s undoubtedly a beautiful dominant woman.

The first image below is taken from the film version, starring Devon Aoki as Miho. The second image is Frank Miller’s drawing of her from the cover of the Family Values story.