BookClub – Femdom Resource

The Dominatrix Archetypes

If you’re a fan of guidebooks and learning more about BDSM then you might enjoy this new release – The Dominatrix Archetypes by Mistress Damiana Chi. I’ve not read it yet myself but I’ve played with Mistress Damiana several times in the past (including just a few weeks ago) and I know her to be a very skilled domme. She’s been a successful pro-domme in LA for many years now, so she’s doubtless got a lot of insight to share.

From her description of the book…

If you are a Woman who is a lifestyle or professional Dominatrix or you want to become one, this book will show you how to REVOLUTIONIZE THE WAY YOU DOMINATE.

If you are a submissive, you will also gain tremendous value from reading this book. You will learn about what you should and deserve to experience with an ethical, conscious Dominatrix.

You can find it on Amazon or via its official site.

There is More to the Story

Regular readers will probably be aware who Mistress T is. A prolific producer of Femdom porn and a kinky blogger, I’ve featured her on this site multiple times in past posts (e.g. here, here, here, etc.) Now she’s added another string to her bow as the author of her autobiography – There is More to the Story. I’ve just finished reading it and thought my readers might appreciate a review. The short version is that it’s an extremely entertaining and fast read that kept me eagerly flipping pages right to the end. If that isn’t enough to get you to hit the “Buy Now” button, then read on.

It’s probably worth starting with what the book is not about. It’s not an analysis of kink, D/s or why her clients are into the fantasies she creates. Nor is it a guide to repeating her success as a femdom content creator. Anyone looking at the ‘how’ or ‘why’ of professional femdom should look elsewhere. Instead it’s a very revealing and personal reflection on the life of a complex, curious and kinky woman who happens to have ended up as a femdom porn producer.

Mistress T isn’t a professional writer, but she is a talented amateur one, and the anecdotes and stories she has to tell zip past the reader at an astonishing rate. It bounces from dodging white slavers in Thailand to taking ayahuasca in South America. From stripping in Canadian mining towns to shooting BDSM porn for some of the biggest producers in California. There are challenging relationships, a difficult childhood and messy breakups. Not to mention the peep shows, poop scenes and angry monkeys (fortunately not all at the same time). It’s probably fortunate that Mistress T chose to keep the story moving at a rapid pace. With this wealth of material, a writer given to endless scene setting and self-analysis would have produced something of a length to rival Game of Thrones (albeit with less violence and more sex).

For me, while I enjoyed reading about some of the more outlandish situations Mistress T finds herself in, what really stood out was how much she shared about her life. The book’s title is well chosen. I’m sure it would have been easier to string together some entertaining stories and sell another version of her Mistress T persona. Instead she’s honest about the emotional challenges she’s faced and the toll they’ve often taken. I’m sure it took a lot of courage to share those details, and its those sections that really give the book its heart. She also does a great job of closing the circle and pulling everything together in the final chapters.

Criticisms? Just two minor ones. I’d have been tempted to more tightly edit the sections on working vanilla jobs and expand the later sections on her as Mistress T. The problems of crappy low paid jobs and messy love affairs have been tackled by many great writers, but managing a complex personal life whilst also becoming a successful business woman producing kinky porn is a less well trodden path. I also found it slightly odd she chose to pick fake names for some of the production companies she worked with. Anyone vaguely interested in femdom porn will quickly work out who/what she’s talking about, so it doesn’t add much other than momentary confusion. Perhaps that was done under legal advice?

You can pick up a copy of ‘There is More to the Story’ at Amazon in either kindle or paperback form. I absolutely recommend that you do. It’s one of the best autobiographies I’ve read from someone in the adult entertainment business.

You can read more from Mistress T on her blog and purchase her porn here.

Book Club : Domme Chronicles

This is the second edition of my highly erratic series of posts on Femdom books. Today I’m writing about “Domme Chronicles: Erotic tales of love, passion, & domination” by Ferns. I’ve actually got three different approaches to this review, so feel free to choose your own adventure from below.

Approach number one puts you, the reader, in charge. Do you know of Ferns’ writing? If not, go and read it and come back. She’s an excellent and prolific femdom blogger, and this book is drawn from her online writing. Now you know it, do you like it? If not, then you probably shouldn’t buy this book. That way lies disappointment and frustration. If you do like it, and you’d like a nicely curated and edited collection of her fiction, then perhaps you should go buy the book. It sounds like it might be right up your alley.

If you can’t be bothered with approach one, then let us move to approach two. This is where I shift the burden of reviewing to my fellow blogger hmp. He’s put up a fine review of it that’s far more thoughtful than anything I’m likely to come up with. Check that out and see if it floats your dinghy.

Finally, if all that doesn’t work for you, we get to the last and least of the three approaches. That’s what I think about it. And personally I find it interesting for the space it occupies in the erotic fiction landscape. No doubt many readers are now muttering to themselves “WTF is this idiot on about now”, so let me explain.

One dimension of erotic fiction writing is the context provided. Is it very direct, with short punchy descriptions of scenes, or is it full of background and character sketches? The former is who does what and how, while the latter tends to fill in the why. Another dimension is the degree of realism. Is it the kind of thing you might have done last night (if you had an amazing night)? Or does it ignore basic physical, legal and moral rules? Is it the kind of thing where days of extreme bondage in crazy positions can be shaken off in a few seconds? Where gangs of leather clad young college girls kidnap middle aged men and spirit them away to femdom island, where they’re strapped to the bed of exquisite torment and force to lick every inch… Ahem. Where was I? Oh, right, book club.

So the writing of Ferns is both very direct and realistic. The book is packed with beautiful vignettes that capture a moment, either a short physical interaction or an emotional connection. They’re distilled glimpses of femdom relationships. That strikes me as unusual for erotic fiction. Typically I’ve observed that realism pairs with longer more contextual writing, and shorter scene descriptions pair with unrealistic over the top scenarios. That’s not a criticism, just a comment about the style in contrast with what I normally see floating around the online erotic fiction libraries.

I personally enjoyed it the book on an intellectual level, but it wasn’t a button pusher for me on a deeper id level. I like a touch of escapism in my erotic fiction, and this typically made me want to go and enact the scenes, not imagine them. However, I do think it’d be a fabulous book to give to someone who was dabbling in femdom, or who wanted to understand its appeal. You might not necessarily convince them to try it, but I don’t think it’d be possible to read this book and not understand the deep appeal it has for some people.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image. If anyone can help out with that, then please leave a comment.

Book Club: Dominatrix on Trial

Welcome to a new series of occasional posts featuring femdom or kink related literature. The plan is to review and recommend books I think might be interesting to my readers. The reality will probably consist of me blathering about whatever caught my eye recently in the kindle store.

First up is Terri-Jean Bedford’s Dominatrix on Trial : Bedford v’s Canada. She’s the retired pro-domme who was recently in the news for taking on the Canadian prostitution laws. This is her autobiography and it splices the drama of her legal entanglements into her life story and work as a pro-domme. She had a troubled upbringing, and an early life that featured drugs, prostitution and low paid jobs. She eventually found stability and a profitably career working as a pro-domme in a dungeon space she designed and created. That is until the police raided it in a very public fashion and splashed her name across the front pages. Rather than take the easy plea bargain she fought back, and the book describes how and who helped do so.

I’ll get the negative stuff out of the way first. Bedford is a solid writer, and communicates the who/what/why information clearly. However, she doesn’t bring it vividly to life in the way a professional writer might have done. I believe she wrote the book over a number of years as the cases progressed, and it’s a shame it couldn’t have been as a collaboration with someone with more literary experience. She also writes a fair amount about her dungeon and the interests of the people who visited, which might be shocking to vanilla readers, but will probably be old news to regularly visitors to this blog. Finally, in several spots she makes sweeping statements about BDSM and why people, particularly submissive men, are kinky. She may be accurately describing her experiences, but I don’t think they can be extended universally, given how complex and varied the world of kink is.

All that said, I did enjoy the book. Some righteous anger at the broken legal system and those who enforce it can be cathartic. Her life has been a turbulent one, and it was inspiring to hear how she kept fighting and about the people who rallied around to help, contributing time and money to her cause. A lot of the lawyers worked pro bono, but the court expenses still racked up quickly, and she was in no position to pay them. The lawyer Alan Young comes across as particularly heroic, leading her original defense to the charges, and then leading the constitution challenge that was eventually successful. The book itself stops just before the recent Supreme Court announcement, but watching that final chapter play out on the news made for a particularly satisfying conclusion all of its own.

You can pick the book up at a variety of online locations – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Google, etc. Given she’s now retired with health issues I’m sure she’d be very grateful for every copy sold.