As regular readers might guess, I spend a fair amount of time hanging around tumblrs. I only feature femdom material here, but I can find material that pushes my buttons across a wide range of kinky activities and gender combinations. Hence my tumblr browsing is broad. One thing I found fascinating is looking at how different kinky groups typically skew their selection of material. Obviously my observations are entirely anecdotal and completely unscientific but what the hell. This is a blog, not a peer reviewed paper for Nature (although somebody should write one of those).
As you’d expect, lots of straight male submissives feature dominant women in exotic undergarment, with the occasional naked man as just a prop in the scene. They also have a smattering of what I’d call action shots. i.e. Images that catch a more complex D/s interaction. Essentially they post what they desire (the dominant woman) and, to a lesser extent, the interaction they wish to experience.
Straight female dominants also tend to post what they desire, buff naked submissive men, together with action shots. But the ratio is different to what submissive guys post. As a SWAG (Stupid Wild Ass Guess) I’d say it’s more like 50/50 compared to 80/20. There’s a clear preference towards more complex interactions and connections over eye candy.
Straight male dominants are heavily focused on their object of desire – naked bound women. The vast majority of shots are either of sole females or of disembodied males interacting with females. There might be an appendage in the shot, or a hand, or a whip, but almost all of the material is designed to let the viewer imagine himself as the dominant. It’s rare to see intense emotional connection in the images.
The most interesting one I find is the straight female submissive. Following the pattern above you’d expect them to post a mixture of Mf action shots and images of hot male dominants. And yet from my observation there’s a very heavy skew to posting shots of female submission. They might post more action shots than male dominants, but they rarely seem to post images of buff male dominants. Uniquely amongst these four groups they seem to post what they’d like to experience or who they’d like to be, rather than what the type of person they desire.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that male dominants are the least visible group in BDSM pornography. That’s a conclusion that should raise a few hackles given the ubiquity of the Mf dynamic in culture and porn.
The image is of Claire Adams from Men In Pain. I found it on the ‘my Wife, my Goddess‘ tumblr. It represents the kind of shot I personally enjoy the most.
