Bondage – Page 58 – Femdom Resource

You and me babe, how about it?

This image is taken from a sequence titled ‘Backyard Love’ by the photographer Ville Varumo. That title makes me think of a pulpy porn novel set in the deep south of the US, with a cover featuring a busty blonde in daisy dukes. Instead it’s actually based on the classic love story ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Or, if like me you tend to the cynical, the classic tale of two idiotic teenagers who would make fine candidates for a Darwin award.

Anyway, regardless of the source, I kind of like the image. Although I’m not sure I can put my finger on why. There’s a nice sense of balance and elegance to it. The wall and the blindfold actually makes me think of a firing squad, which isn’t sexy, but certainly adds an interesting edge to it. You can see the rest of the sequence at the homotography blog.

Oh, and ten bonus kinky points (zero monetary value, non-transferable, void where prohibited) to anyone who can name the link between this post and the title I gave it.

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.

It’s the little things…

…that make a great photograph. In this case it’s her stretching motion and the associated facial expression as she reaches up to beat his feet. There’s plenty of restrained naked man that’s within easy reach. But she’s not simply waving the strap around, hitting whatever is in range while the photographer clicks off shots. She’s a mistress with a mission. She wants to inflict a particular type of pain, and she’s not going to let a simple matter of height or reach get in the way of that. That simple stretch conveys so much more about the scene we’re witnessing than all the other fetish elements.

I found this on the dominance and submission tumblr site. It’s obviously originally from the men in pain site.

Kinky Catwoman continued

Yesterday’s post got a couple of follow-up comments on the snarling sexiness that was Julie Newmar’s Catwoman. lovetosubmit commented about her taunting Batman when she had him in a compromising position, and that certainly struck a chord with me. As a youngster I can remember being transfixed by scenes of her tieing up Batman, long before I knew what femdom, kink or even sex was. So for all the other fans out there of Ms Newmar’s catty glory, here’s her another shot of her, this time taunting the helpless Adam West.

How I likes em, how I keeps em.

I think this is a fascinating picture. It doesn’t press significant buttons in my sexual id, but it definitely appeals on an aesthetic and super-ego level (to temporarily continue the Freud theme). The coloration is really interesting, with the silver bodies, minimal but coordinated clothing and the mottled metallic background. There’s also a nice sense of geometry and balanced tension to it, with the silver blood puddle adding just a touch of organic messiness. It has a little bit of rodeo theme, but with the cowboy being the one to be run down and hog tied.

The post title is actually the title the female model gave to the piece. She has a deviant art site under the name slinkapics,, which is where this was originally posted. The photographer is Geoff Simpson.

I found the image originally on snail meilke, and used tineye to track down the original. I’m not sure if Depo Guto from snail meilke reads this blog (some of the cross-posts makes me think he might), but if he does I just want to say thanks for all the images he’s posted there. He’s a great locator and distributor of interesting femdom images, and I certainly appreciate all his work.

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

Oh, snap!

I’ve never played with rubber bands, but I think I’m going to have to add them onto my ‘to do’ list. I image there’s a nice building sense of tension and anticipation once the band is stretched back. A whip or cane comes as a strike out of the blue, but with a band you can see the energy just waiting to be released.

The domme is Mistress Varla, and the image is taken from this K is for Kink scene. There’s a short video clip also available, with a very entertaining shot of one of the bands being applied at speed.

Incidentally, if you’ve never played with this kind of plastic wrap, I can definitely recommend give it a try. It’s a really easy way to mummify someone and create a sense of heavy bondage without lots of expensive gear. It also shrinks slightly as it warms, which can create interesting effects over a lengthy play session. I’m not sure exactly what type is being used here, but I know the stuff they using for wrapping boxes on pallets works very well.

The distillation of sensation

The images in today’s post come courtesy of this serious bondage article, and feature Ms Yin Q, now of Glint studio.

I have to admit that before I gained any experience in the reality of BDSM I used to think heavy bondage aficionados were a little strange. I kind of got it on an intellectual and fantasy level. A lot of kinky activities are about the transfer of control, emphasizing power by removing freedoms we normally take for granted. But all the customized leather and rubber equipment just looked so strange, so alien. The weird forms of people wrapped in it seemed to play into the stereotypes of odd fetishists doing unexplainable things in their own little worlds.

Having now had a chance to explore some aspects of these worlds for myself, I think I have a much better appreciation for what’s going on. Truth be told I still think it all looks a little peculiar, but I now understand that it’s not necessarily about fetishizing a material and simply wanting to be wrapped in it. There may be an element of that for some people, but it’s the bondage subspace and the sensory changes that seem to be the main goals. As Ms Yin says in the article…

I am obsessed with sending sensations to different orifices and body bits through Erostek stmulators, temperature control, catheters, and feeding tubes, sound bites to earphones, and remote control vibrators.
Not to mention the simple, but powerful act of letting the body be—stepping away and allowing the subject to melt into their head/body space.

I was personally amazed at the impact that heavy bondage and sensory deprivation had on the way I experienced stimulation. Pain and pleasure very quickly became magnified. A whip stroke that might normally only produce a murmur suddenly produces a howl. Miss Troy Orleans talked about much the same effect in her recent post on layering. It seems that the brain constantly tries to normalize and balance its sensory input. In a noisy environment it helps to tune out the superfluous signal. And in the signal poor environment of heavy bondage and isolation it grabs onto whatever it can and magnifies it.

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.