The beauty of dominant women
Somebody here looks pretty pleased with themselves. There’s a nice contrast between her perky cheerful pose and his well welted ass. I’m guessing his expression would be slightly less cheerful.
I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this. Feel free to help me out via the comments section.
Updated: Thanks to my ever vigilant readers I can now attribute this as Cassie Hunter aka The Hunteress. She’s an English pro-domme who appears to have retired just in the last month.
Continuing on from the last post, this is another F/m rope bondage scene, but has a very different dynamic. This is less about tender and more about control and pain. It’s still sexy as hell though. I think it’s the hand to the back of the neck that does it for me. She doesn’t just want him tied up, she wants him exactly in the position she demands.
I found this on the ‘Please Take My Control’ tumblr. I’m afraid I haven’t managed to track down an original attribution. If anyone can help with that then please leave a comment.
Kind of ironic that after my last post entitled ‘Stupidity in the UK – now slightly reduced‘, the country just voted to leave the EU. I’ll avoid going into the politics, and try not to alienate 50% of my UK readers, but I can’t say I’m a fan of that result. My opinion doesn’t really count for much however, as I’ve been away too long to have been able to vote.
I’ll mark the moment with a quintessentially British femdom scene. This is an older man dressed as a public schoolboy, enjoying the English Vice, being administered by the strict English mistress Domina Liza for the English Mansion site. Feel free to imagine him as David Cameron or Boris Johnson (depending on which side you were) if it’ll help you deal with the result.
I cast a pretty wide net when it comes to articles I feature here. I’m not averse to featuring something that’s interesting but with only a loose connection to femdom. This one, entitled ‘The insane double standard for women working in tech‘ is a good case in point.
It highlights a study that found that in performance reviews men get assessed on their actions, where women get assessed on their personality. In 83 reviews of men, just 2 highlighted personality issues, where out of 94 for women, an amazing 71 did. As you might expect, the personality issues highlighted for women were all the usual ones about tone: You’re too pushy, too aggressive, too abrasive. The kind of characteristics that countless men in the workplace display every day of their lives without issue.
I’m not going to try and equate being an effective and forceful worker with dominance. That would be foolish. Sexual preferences are very different to work attitudes, and the goal here is equality of treatment, not the right D/s label. But I think it’s an interesting example of the broader cultural perceptions at work. Society is comfortable with the classic dominatrix trope, as it’s typically perceived as a sexual roleplay targeted for the benefit of men. Yet put a forceful opinionated women in a software company, along with a 100 forceful opinionated guys, and then suddenly people have a problem.
I realize with this image I’m not really helping and I’m continuing to play into the dominatrix trope. Unfortunately, on the tumblrs I frequent, it’s tricky to find a shot of a sensibly dressed female software developer making a solid argument for the design of her database schema. So sexy dominatrix boss it has to be.
This puts me in mind of religious imagery. Not the woman obviously. Religions have never been big on women in corsets wielding canes. Or women of any description really. But his posture has a touch of the martyred Saint about it. The supplicant pose, the straining muscles and the rictus of agony are all very familiar from religious paintings. Sadly, while the renaissance artists got up to all sorts of sexual shenanigans, I don’t recall nipple clamps featuring anywhere in their work.
It’s originally from a Men in Pain series. I found it on the I Own his Key tumblr.
Given the length of the last few posts, I’ll keep this one short and pithy. The quote of the day is:
Anyone who thinks a woman who’s being paid to cane and sodomize people is vulnerable and exploited? Has never caned and sodomized anyone.
That’s from the twitter feed of Mistress Matisse. Feel free to discuss that amongst yourselves.
I was hoping to finish with an image featuring both a cane and a strap-on. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything I liked, so I’ll double down with an image for each. In both cases the ladies in question seem to be tending less to the exploited and more to the happy.
The first image has had the watermark annoyingly chopped, but I believe it’s from Young Dommes. I found it on the Who’s Sorry Now tumblr. The second image is from the Strapon Dreamer site. I found it on the Pegging with a Smile tumblr.
It has been a long day. I did an intense and very enjoyable session with Cynthia Stone on the afternoon and followed it with an excellent dinner at Spago. I’m certainly not complaining, but my ability to write coherent and witty posts may have been curtailed. Not that there was ever a great potential there to start with.
While I attempt to sleep off this cocktail of adrenalin, endorphins and alcohol, I’ll leave you with a shot I found on the wonderfully named Food, Fucking and Femdom tumblr. That’s pretty much my favorite three things in life. In this particular case I love the blurred cane and the well marked ass.
Looking through old Leda images while preparing yesterday’s post put me in a bit of a corporal mood. So expect a few more images on that theme over the coming days.
Today’s shot features Cassie Canes approaching her target zone at speed. Personally I find a cane can hurt like hell when delivered with just a rapid flick of the arm. Heaven knows how much more it stings when the disciplinarian arrives at a gallop.
Before a fast bowler in the game of cricket delivers his first ball he will carefully pace off his run-up. The idea is to ensure his foot lands perfectly on the line (called the crease) as he releases the ball. I wonder if Miss Canes did the same thing? That’d certainly be a more ominous sight than the usual practice swishes.
I found this image on the Femdom Marriage tumblr. Obvious it’s originally from the Cassie Canes site.
This is a continuation of my post from yesterday on safewords and control in a scene. Anybody who read that probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I’m also not much of a fan of the commonly used green/yellow/red safeword scheme. I get the utility of that approach, but it again feels too much like taking control from the bottom. I want to give feedback, but the very unambiguous labeling of the colors feels (to me) more like direction than feedback.
Of course that begs the question – how should the bottom give feedback? Obviously talking after a scene is good. And responding to direct questions during a scene also works. But my favorite mechanism is screaming. Or moaning. Yelling. Whimpering. Grunting. Growling. Basically, any kind of proportional verbal feedback that helps the top know where I’m at.
It sounds kind of obvious when I write it down. Doesn’t everyone cry out when they get beaten, whipped or pierced? The key word though is proportional. I always want the domme to be able to trust the cues that she gets from me. I never try and play the stoic hero. I also try and avoid exaggerating my response, even though it’s sometimes tempting to do so as a defense mechanism to avoid escalation of the pain. Occasionally, when a sensation catches me unawares, and I react more from surprise than hurt, I’ll even comment to let the domme know what happened. I never want her to doubt the honesty of my reactions and start second guessing the intensity of the scene. I’m lucky in that I get to play with a lot of great dommes who are experts at judging non-verbal cues, but I always still make a conscious effort to communicate those cues as transparently as possible.
I’ll leave you with an image of someone about to provoke some non-verbal communication. I’m sure screaming will be involved, let’s hope it’s proportional.
The image comes via the Pure Beauty tumblr.
I’ve been pondering on pain in recent days. What draws some people to it? What makes a masochist and why do other people find them so strange?
I think if you asked most people why they didn’t like pain, they’d assume you were crazy. It hurts. What else is there to say? However, when I look at how people experience pain in everyday life, I suspect that it’s not the sensation itself that’s the primary issue. Instead, it’s the fear and uncertainty that comes with it. Sure when you hit your thumb with a hammer there’s that brief flash of agony that temporarily blocks out coherent thought. But after that, as it subsides to a dull throb, what stays with you is the uncertainty. Have I fractured something? Did I damage the nail? Is it going to swell up? Will I need a trip to the ER? It’s a similar story with chronic pain, like a bad back or a damaged ligament. The pain might be manageable, but what stresses people is the lack of control. They don’t know when it’ll stop, when it might flare up, how much it might impact their daily life.
It’s hard to find examples of pain in normal life that doesn’t have this element of fear and uncertainty. However, there are a few – working out, eating spicy food or playful biting and scratching during sex. The sensations here are often painful ones, but are not described that way. There is no fear or uncertainty, the situation is a controlled one, and therefore the perception is a much more positive one.
When discussing masochism there’s often a lot of talk about wires getting crossed in the brain, as though there’s something fundamentally different about masochists. I wonder how true that really is. Growing up I was never particularly interested in pain. What fascinated me was exchanging control. Pain seemed like an interesting way to emphasize that exchange – I can hurt you and you can’t stop me – but it didn’t seem like an end in itself. It was only when I got physically involved in BDSM that I began to think about it differently. The very safe and defined limits of a play session allowed me to experience the sensation of pain, but divorced from the negative connotations it usually has. I began to explore and appreciate the sensation both in its own terms and as a tool for play.
I therefore wonder if there are a lot of other people out there who would be masochists, but never have the chance to find out. Is appreciating pain perhaps something not inherent in certain people but – at the risk of sounding like a cross between a Bond villain and a Cenobite – just something that needs to be cultivated? People can learn to appreciate oysters and good wine. Maybe nipple clamps and leather floggers are a similarly acquirable taste.
I’ll leave you with a couple of shots from Divine Bitches of Mistress Madeline helping somebody cultivate their own particular palette for pain. If he hasn’t developed one already, this looks like the perfect time to start.
