Bondage – Page 41 – Femdom Resource

Goddam roleplaying bullshit

I first came across this image via the Selina Minx tumblr. I can’t say I was a huge fan of the bondage. It’s very sloppy, and I’m not sure how it’ll progress into anything that’ll actually restrain. However, I did like the smiles, the casual attitude and the lack of fetish clothing. Encouraging kinky play that’s focused on fun and pleasure seems like a good thing. Unfortunately I then did the reverse image search and stumbled across several very annoying articles. I suspect this is a stock photograph and it has been used for a number of Cosmo ‘spice up your sex life’ articles. For example, this and this. These are almost always terrible. For example, here’s a quote from one of them on bondage…

Although in reality it’s wrong, in fantasies and role play, its significance is completely different. In the real world, restraining someone is assault or rape, even. In role play, in contrast, it signifies: “you’re so desirable that I can’t resist you. You have such power over me that I want you at all costs”. And for a woman, it can be very liberating.

It’s hard to know where to start with this. Yes, bondage can liberating, but for men as well as women, and on both sides of the knots. As for the rest? Words fail me. I don’t play in some fantasy world of magic and unicorns. I play in a reality of bondage, masochism and negotiated consent. The idea of someone being so desirable and irresistible that you want to tie them up whatever the cost is deeply troubling.

Roleplay can be a lot of fun. I’ve nothing against it. But it’s just one narrow slice of kink. Instead it often seems to be treated as all encompassing. That’s particularly true for the mainstream press, who treat BDSM as a subset of roleplay. Can’t we just tie people up and beat them for the sheer hell of it? I want to get fucked up by someone being themselves, not someone pretending to be someone or something else.

Perverting perversity

I thought this was an interesting article on the history of the word pervert. Apparently it started off as a word to describe an atheist. It wasn’t till the end of the 19th Century that it became associated with sexual depravity. Prior to that unconventional sexual acts were simply seen as a sign of moral degeneracy and decadence. It was the early sexologists who created the idea of sexual desire being an orientation and re-purposed perversion (‘turning away from the right course’) to describe people who fitted into that group.

The really shocking thing about this is that it means the highly historically accurate Blackadder II, set in 16th Century Elizabethan England, used the word incorrectly for the character of the baby eating bishop of Bath and Wells.

Bishop: Yes. You see, I am a colossal pervert. No form of sexual depravity is too low for me. Animal, vegetable or mineral — I’ll do anything to anything.
Edmund: Fine words for a Bishop. It’s nice to hear the Church speaking out for a change on social issues.

The clip itself can be seen here. And for any of my US readers who have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, I suggest checking out one of the most brilliant comedy series ever recorded. It’s currently on NetFlix streaming, although I’d recommend skipping the first season and sticking to seasons 2, 3 and 4.

As for an image I wanted something featuring a whole heap of perversity, and the one below seemed to fit the bill. There’s bondage, cross-dressing, cuckolding, homosexuality and butt plugs. All sorts of good stuff.

I found the image via the sissiebondage tumblr and once again I’ve failed to track down an original source for it. Either Google reverse image search is really sucking these days or I’m picking particularly obscure images. If anyone knows the artist then feel free to leave a comment.

Sadism revisited

I feel the need to return to the topic of sadism and sadists. Some of the comments left on my post from a few days ago were thought provoking. In particular I was struck by how overloaded the term ‘sadist’ is.

Most labels we apply to people also carry a judgement about their behavior. Consent (or the lack of it) is seen as so important it’s often baked right into the label itself. For example, if I have consensual sex with a partner them I’m a lover, but non-consensual sex with anyone makes me a rapist. I can be a consensual flirt, but never a non-consensual one. That’s sexual harassment. I can be an employer of consenting workers, but only a slaver or trafficker of non-consensual ones. Actions themselves can be neutral, but the labels we use on people rarely are. A punch is neutral, but a boxer is not the same as a mugger.

Sadism is fairly unusual in that respect. It carries no information on consent. It’s accurate to describe a domme who enjoys S&M as a sadist. It’s also accurate to describe a horror movie psychopath in the same way. This strikes me as problematic when talking about kink in a mainstream context. As hmp accurately pointed out, non-kinky people really don’t get the idea of consensual sadism at a gut level. Having the same label used for very different behaviors is therefore particularly confusing. People are used to labels implying judgement about behavior, and given their gut feel about the infliction of pain, their default view of sadism will always be a bad one.

Masochism doesn’t have this problem. It’s a more passive label and consent is naturally implied. We really need another word for sadist that pairs more tightly with masochist. That way we could leave sadism as the general label for non-consent and save the new word for only when masochists are consensually on the receiving end. I’ve no idea what that word should be however. Any suggestions? Maybe I should get Dan Savage on the case. He’s done a pretty good job so far coining pegging, GGG and Santorum.

Given the subject matter it seems only fitting to finish with an image of a sadist in action. This is from the Divine Bitches site.

A nice neat package

Apologies to anyone who has recently left a comment I haven’t responded to. My blogging time on this particular vacation is proving to be even more limited than I expected. I will get back to all the comments in the next day or so.

In the meantime here’s a fun bondage shot featuring Princess Kali and a neatly packaged male. I really like the little extra touches like the big toe ropes and the wrap around his balls. I imagine that’s a pretty stressful position to be in.

The image has been messed with as so often happens on tumblr (I found it via Continuous State of Desire). I believe it’s originally from a Men in Pain shoot with Princess Kali.

My favorite kind of people

The New York Times has an interesting but annoying article on the subject of sadists. Interesting because, well, it’s about sadists, my favorite kind of people. They’re the Yin to my masochistic Yang. Annoying because it suffers from all the usual problems these kind of pseudo-scientific articles often suffer from. It simplifies, conflates and doesn’t define terms clearly. I’m left with way more questions that I started with. Not to mention a desire to quit my job and do a doctorate on the topic.

The basic point of the article is that sadism is far commoner than people traditionally assume. You don’t have to be a Hannibal Lecter to be classed as a sadist. However, it seems to tangle a lot of things together in strange ways. I’m left wondering…

What’s the correlation between sexual sadists who get off on the reactions of their consensual partners and everyday sadists who get off on hurting whoever they come across? My experience is that the former don’t strongly overlap with the latter.
What’s the split between people who enjoy power, those who enjoy destruction and those who enjoy the suffering of others? The article conflates them all, but for the first two the sadism is incidental to the main goal. Someone watching a clip of a race car crash is typically watching it for the awe and the spectacle of the crash, not because they’re hoping the driver got hurt. Similarly I don’t think shooting a collection of pixels in a videogame necessarily identifies someone as a sadist.
How many people identified as sadists are conscious of their sadism? And of those that are, how many seek out opportunities to act sadistically? Does being aware of the trait cause people to act on it or attempt to control and diminish it?
How many people act sadistically in groups but not in one on one situations? It would seem to me that the dynamics of social bullying are very different, although this article conflates them.
Are sadists typically selective in how they inflict pain? Is it the reaction of the victim that matters? Or the way in which the sadist provokes the reaction?

It’s a fascinating area, and sadly this article doesn’t get to the heart of it. I’m surprised the scientists haven’t paid more attention to people who self-identify as sadists and masochists. They can’t use them to decipher the broader story, but they’d at least be a good starting point. And it’d be way easier to set-up ethical experiments with a pool of subjects who will happily zap and whack each other for fun!

I’m not entirely sure where this shot of two sadists indulging in a little nipple torture comes from. I’d guess it’s one of the Kink sites, but my search foo is failing me.

So it has come to this…

Shameless attention whoring ahoy! I figure if Ferns can get away with it, why not me?

Rori is once again taking nominations for the best sex bloggers. Last year I was nominated and ended up on the list, as I blogged about at the time. Now obviously as a serious and dedicated sex blog blogger, I’m above such petty popularity contests. It matters to me not one whit should I be nominated or not. My only concern is to bring you, my dear readers, the best femdom based material I can. But it strikes me that getting nominated would encourage more readers to visit. And that would mean more readers to write witty and insightful comments. And that in turn would create a better quality blog for everyone. So I’m really doing it for all of you out there.

Anyone buying that unimpeachable logic, and wanting to help me help you, can do so by leaving a suitable nomination comment on Rori’s site. It’d make me, I mean you, as happy as a Deviant Kade being tied up by a Simone Kross.

The image is originally from the CBT and Ballbusting site. I found it via the Happy BDSM tumblr.

Big things in small places

I thought I’d finish my trio of artwork posts with an image from Kami Tora. On the face of it, with that enormous pink dildo, this looks like a typically stylized and over the top bit of femdom artwork. I really like Kami Tora’s work, but exaggeration is part and parcel of his style. However, the funny thing is, there are probably a few guys out there for whom this would not be a completely crazy insertion. For example, check out this animated gif or this one. I’m constantly amazed what a lot of lube, years of practice and a kinky dedication to stuffing enormous objects up your butt can achieve.

Wrapped in rope

Here’s a fun image to start the week. I have several longer posts lined up, but having spent the evening slicing, dicing and simmering in the kitchen, didn’t get chance to finish any of them off. This is by the artist Barry960 who has featured in a previous post. It captures a nice chemistry between the two of them. She looks happy with all her intricate rope work and he looks as though it has turned out to be a bit more involved and restricting than he was expecting.

A delicate slap to the penis

This post was supposed to be a thoughtful follow-up to yesterdays one on the topic of negotiation. Unfortunately I got sucked into watching an old Columbo movie and ran out of time. If there’s one thing I like more than blogging, it’s well, many things actually. Sex. Bondage. Pain. Wine. Food. Books. Art. Fast cars. So really, among the many things I like more than blogging, one is classic Columbo movies. And that’s where my time went tonight.

I’ll therefore settle for a simple post with an interesting image. I love their expressions. I love the slapping action. But what’s with his blue shirt and her pink boots? It’s good that they’re not in stereotypical fetishwear, but is this the best alternative they could come up with?

The image is originally from the Men in Pain site. I found it on the Femdom Times site.

Back to reality

I’m safely back in the Pacific Northwest, feeling a little zonked after taking a (delayed) red-eye flight from Hawaii. I’ll miss the sound of the surf, but I’m looking forward to some decent coffee and some well made cocktails that don’t feature a blender in anyway. Hawaii is famously relaxed, but in some aspects island time isn’t so much slow as 40 years behind the curve.

After all the sunny outdoor shots of the last few posts, this seems a good image to mark my return. It’s more my speed, featuring a dark interior coupled with some nice rope bondage and intense nipple torture. It features Daphne Rosen and Wolf Hudson in a Men in Pain shoot. You can see another fun image from the scene here.

Oh, and just for the record, the post title is a small nod to a famous Red Dwarf episode.