Boots – Page 11 – Femdom Resource

Enjoying the sights

My solution to easy blogging while on vacation is to ~~shamelessly steal~~ promote other great blogs. In this case it’s the work of photographer Natasha Gornik.

This setting should be recognizable to anyone who has visited Central Park in NYC. The horse drawn carriages are the more famous means of viewing the park (and have drawn the ire of the new mayor), but this looks like one of the pedicabs. Typically they carry tourists, but in this case it’s Mistress Alex and Keith who are enjoying the sights.

I love the contrast between the formal and the fetish in the shot. You can read Natasha’s take on shooting it, along with other images from the scene, in her original post.

Perversity (of the wrong kind)

Most of my posts tend to the positive and upbeat. This one might be a bit more of a rant. Let’s put a nicer spin on it, and call it constructive feedback. It’s aimed squarely at dominants and centers on something that has happened to me too many times to be a coincidence.

Here’s my ~~rant~~ feedback: When you’re playing with someone fairly new, and that person has outlined a few limits (hard or soft) to stay away from, then stay the hell away from those limits. Don’t try and figure out exactly where the line is drawn. Don’t try and determine exactly what about the activity makes it a limit. Don’t toy with anything vaguely related. Just avoid, avoid, avoid.

I’m not a submissive with a lot of limits. When I look at a typical list of play activities, it’s quicker for me to list what I will not do rather than what I will. I’ve a soft limit with hoods and claustrophobia, I’ve a hard limit on humiliation, and I’ve a slightly screwed up lower back that makes extreme bondage positions tricky. That’s about it. Not a lot to remember. Yet multiple times in the last couple of years I’ve played with new dommes who, having been given this list, proceeded to flirt with activities that ran awfully close to these problem areas.

The last time it happened was a couple of months ago. It was my first time I’d played with this particular dominant. Not fifteen minutes into the session, and after my standard limits discussion, she pulled out a hood and asked if it’d be OK because it had both mouth and eye holes. Suddenly I’m thrown out of my happy subby mindset and into evaluation mode. How scary does it look? Can I handle it? Is it an integral part of the scene she wants to try? It would have been fine to show the hood pre-scene to get my opinion, but why bother suggesting it after we started to play? I ended up refusing and it made absolutely no difference to how the scene unfolded.

A similar thing happened towards the end of last year. It was again someone fairly new to me and, after mentioning my screwy back, she proceeded to try for a really awkward bondage position. She had me on my back on the floor, knees pulled up towards my shoulders and my arms pulled down towards where my feet would normally be. After pointing out that this wasn’t a great position for me she gave up on the plan, but it seemed so unnecessary to attempt it at all. Maybe we could have got it to work given time, but I estimate there are around three million and seven safe positions to tie me into, so why try for the tricky number three million and eight?

None of the examples (and I have multiple others) felt like deliberate attempts to break a boundary. It just seemed the limits discussion planted ideas, and that saying “Heavy X is a limit” somehow translated into “… but let’s do light X!”. This seems perverse to me, and not in the good way. Assessing intensity or risk is very hard with someone you don’t know. Much better to stay as far away as possible from potential minefields. Just because someone has handed you a map, doesn’t mean you need to go up to the minefield boundary and start jumping up and down. There’s no shortage of other interesting places to explore.

This artwork by Shohei Yamashiro manages to capture both hoods and an awkward position to bend a slave into. Now if you can just imagine she’s calling him a worthless fool, it’ll have nailed 3 of my personal limits.

Capturing a moment

I was planning to write a post featuring fisting. That was until some friends dragged me away and forced me to drink a lot of wine and have long meandering conversations about life. I’m sadly not an expert of fisting or life, but I can drink a lot of wine, so I was at least successful in one aspect of the evening.

In these circumstances I tend to reach into my grab bag of images that work on their own with little explanation needed. This particular one is from the Strapon Dreamer site. I’m not sure if it’s a shot from before, during or after a scene, but whatever the situation, I like it a lot. They look like two people enjoying a moment, which is something I think everyone can relate to.

Gracy Gimp

This fun and rather charming drawing is entitled ‘Joyeuse Saint Valentin, mon amour’ (Happy Valentine’s Day, my sweet love) and is by the artist Benoit Feroumont under his nickname Gracy Gimp. He’s a Belgium artist who, using his original name, has published a number of graphical novels. You can see more of his non-erotic work on his main site. Under his Gracy Gimp nickname he’s created a series of erotic comics that are explicit, but also sexy and playful. They’re not specifically femdom, but there are a lot of kinky themes.

I originally found this drawing on the SYSART tumblr.

Random datapoints

The relative proportions of dominants to submissives, and the splits along the gender lines, are a well debated topic. Not only are the ratios for active kinksters up for question, but there’s also the issue of how many potential kinky people there are, or even what the percentages would look like if society was less screwed up. It’s a topic I’ve commented on in the past.

It’s also a topic that’s horribly lacking in hard data, and I’m afraid I’m not about to fix that problem. However, I did do a small experiment recently that’s related and I thought kind of interesting. The methodology was pretty simple. I went to the CollarMe site, randomly looked at profiles (with the widest possible selection criteria), and counted the proportions I saw. It actually started as some random browing over a coffee, but after a few minutes I got curious about what I was seeing, and started a tally chart. To keep it simple I just counted straight singles who didn’t switch.

The end results, before I got bored counting, were: Male Dominants = 40. Female Submissives = 22. Male Submissives = 23. Female Dominants = 7. Of those 7 female dominants, the number who were pro-dommes = 6. Leaving me with a grand total of 1 non-professional female dominant.

Now that doesn’t tell us anything about the ratios in the real world. It’s just a small sample of the people who choose to advertise on a particular site. But I was interested in how accurately it matched my intuition of what the numbers would be. I expected male dominants to be the largest group, submissives to be fairly evenly split along gender lines, and female dominants to be rare. I just wasn’t expecting them to be that rare. The contrast of 40:1 across the gender divide is striking.

I have to admit it wasn’t always easy to differentiate the professionals from the lifestyle ads. A couple of what I classified as professional ads didn’t mention payment. However, when I see numerous well lit/composed photographs of an attractive lady modelling several different exciting leather outfits, the cynic in me tends to assume she’s a pro. The non-professional dominants are normally dealing with enough dick pic shots as it is, they don’t need to encourage the hairy knuckle brigade.

While I’m on the subject of exciting leather outfits modeled by professionals – and as an aside let’s just admit I’m a genius at subtle segues to my post images – here’s Dominatrix Ella Kros in a rather striking black ensemble.

If you’re in either Tel-Aviv or London and would like to session with Ella Kros then her contact page is here.

Just for me

I try and pick images for posts that will be generally interesting for a broad range of people, provided that people = kinky and interested in femdom. I didn’t start this blog for it simply to become my online porn collection. There are plenty of tumblrs out there if that’s all your after. However, now and again I feel the urge to post something that’s just for me. Something that pushes all my buttons and makes me silently sigh with a sense of wistful happiness. This is one of those times.

The two shots below are of Mistress Natsukiss. She’s featured in several of my posts in the past (for example here and here). I’ll be the first to admit that a tight leather outfit, black boots and a whip is a look that has featured in countless generic femdom images. But there’s something about Mistress Natsukiss that makes them work afresh for me.

I found these shots via the Phobos tumblr.

A lack of forethought

Today I learned that drinking a lot of rum cocktails is not a wise way to prepare for a scene the next day, no matter how delicious said drinks are. Being hungover and feeling extra delicate really adds an edge to nipple piercing and ball spanking. On the plus side, the rush of endorphins those activities provoke do help ease the symptoms of over indulgence. I can’t sell them as a hangover cure, but they certainly helped take my mind off my aching head.

Fortunately I was playing with Mistress Ai-Li who, expert that she is, worked well around my planning failure. She managed to push me, without provoking any unpleasant reactions, which I’m sure was a result we both desired.

The image is from Mistress Ai-Li’s website. She’s based in the Bay area should you wish to experience her session skills for yourself.

Anything is contextual

One great way to infuriate a dominant is to claim you’ll do anything. It’s like a red rag to a bull. The typical response is either to reach for an extreme form of play (‘go fetch me my branding iron’) or to propose a very un-fun type of play (‘go clean my car while I watch TV in sweatpants’). The idea being to demonstrate that the submissive better be careful what options he or she open up. Mistress Matisse wrote a column some years ago that covered the topic from the dominant point of view pretty well.

I definitely understand that viewpoint when playing with someone new. In that case communication to set expectations is vital. In past posts I’ve termed the failure to do so Meat Loaf syndrome – ‘I’ll do anything for you….but not that‘. However, I do think it’s a viewpoint that sometimes gets pushed too far. BDSM negotiation isn’t divorced from the normal conventions of discussion. Being a dominant doesn’t give you a right to abandon common sense, and ‘anything’ is always contextual.

If a partner asks me where I want to eat tonight and I reply “Oh anywhere really, you pick,’ nobody would interpret that as carte blanche to do whatever they like. Dumpster diving behind Pizza Hut is out. As is booking tickets for a 6 hour flight to the New York restaurant scene. And if they know I’m horribly allergic to crab, my answer doesn’t mean I’m willing to swell up and die in the local crab shack. I don’t have to specify these things because any friend or partner with half a brain will understand my ‘anywhere’ response as being implicitly qualified.

The same thing goes to BDSM negotiation. Assuming we’re somewhat familiar with each other, then ‘anything’ means activities the same as or vaguely within touching distance of stuff we’ve tried or discussed before. And if there’s something new that a dominant would like to try, then the ‘anything’ response is a great cue to suggest it to me as an option. As a submissive I like to give my dominant choice and flexibility in a scene whenever possible. It seems odd to punish people for trying to do that by deliberately picking the worst possible interpretations of their responses.

Having referenced an article from Mistress Matisse, that gives me the perfect excuse to feature an image of this rather fabulous lady. This is an old shot recently republished on her twitter feed, and captioned by her as “Behold me as a little baby dominatrix! Look how scowly and stern I was! Rar, fear me! (That didn’t last very long.)” Her professional site is viewable here.

Appropriate beach fashion

The problem of sand getting into inappropriate crevices is a well known issue with beaches. No matter how appropriately you dress, irritating gritty feelings in awkward spots are almost unavoidable. I therefore dread to think how this gentlemen must have felt at the end of the day. Tightly wrapped plastic tape and a gas mask are about as far from ideal beachwear as you can get. The ladies choices are not a lot better. In fact, if you had to come up with the worst possible things to wear on a hot sandy beach, it would probably look something like this. I guess for him at least, that might have been the idea.

The image sequence is from the Kinky Mistresses site. You can see another shot of the session in question here.

Zippers and a smile

I’m not a fan of Clair Adam’s outfit in this image. It’s fetishistic almost to the point of parody. However, I do like all those clothespins and the smile on his face. She has positioned those clips in some sensitive spots. If she’s going to rip them off zipper style then I predict that smile will be at least temporarily dispelled.

Image is obviously originally from the Men in Pain site.