F – Page 10 – Femdom Resource

Looking Back

After a decade of blogging I thought it might be interesting to look back and see what has changed.

The obvious answer is that there are a lot less bloggers. I love and appreciate the people on my blogroll, but social media has sucked in a lot of people’s attention and creative output. That in turn has created some interesting knock on effects. When I started blogging I posted and linked to a lot of debates around femdom. They were centered on topics like the invisibility of the domme in society, the negative perception of submissives, the distorting effect of professional dominance, cliches in femdom porn, etc. Sadly, I’m not sure we’ve improved from a cultural perspective in those areas, but there is less writing about those issues. I think the angst about it has moved to social media and that’s a far more ephemeral medium. It’s hard to capture a serious debate in 240 characters or less, particularly when they’re randomly mashed into a stream of thoughts from dozens of other people.

Another change has been a reduction in curated image and artwork sites. Artists and their fans used to create dedicated sites to collect artwork. Kinky porn companies used to shoot a lot of still imagery and publish galleries from scenes. Now most artists and fans publish via social media and kinky porn tends to focus on video only clips. For someone like myself, with a minor fetish for archiving and collating material, it’s somewhat frustrating. I’ve been less compelled to update my resource links, because there is less ‘permanent’ content to link to.

When I started blogging it felt like the dominant model of the internet was a library that anyone could donate a book to. Now it feels more like a big party house with endlessly swirling conversations, a lot of which feature bad faith actors and paid for guests. Much as I enjoy things like Twitter and Reddit, it doesn’t feel like a healthy change. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and yell at some kids to get off my lawn.

Birthday celebrations should usually be accompanied by cake, so here’s Lucy SweetKill serving one up. I’m not sure this approach is one Emily Post would recommend, but it works for me. Fittingly enough, given the contents of this post, I found this on twitter, via Lucy’s feed. It was photographed by JCPhotoMedia.

Gloves for the Last Time

I swear this is my last glove themed post. At least for the moment. I thought I was actually done yesterday, but then an odd thought struck me.

Gloves are not a prominent fetish. The greatest hits of femdom clothing fetishes are things like boots, heels, stockings and corsets. Gloves don’t even have their own special fetish name. There is a Wikipedia article on it, but while super obscure fetishes like crying (dacryphilia) and amputation (acrotomophilia) have specific names, gloves are just gloves. It’s rare you see a kinkster posting about a love of gloves, where shoes and stockings show up all the time.

Yet when I hunted through my archives for interesting photographs to use, I had a multitude of options. That is not normal. I like post photographs to relate to my text and finding something appropriate often takes a lot of hunting around. I frequently spend longer trying to find a suitable image than I do writing the post. With gloves I could written a dozen posts and not run out of material. They seem to be one of those things that are really popular, without anyone actually being aware just how popular they are.

My final long glove post image is from douzocosplay. It’s a cosplay of Ally from Sunstone. You can find more from the artist at her Deviant Art site.

Why Size Matters

My post on long gloves triggered a number of interesting comments. Readers had a variety of different theories on why they were particularly sexy. With advance apologies to the original commenters, I’ll try and summarize them here. I may well screw this up.

Long gloves are explicitly decorative rather than functional, so sends a signal of being desirable and wishing to attract attention.
Gloves are protective armor, insulating the wearer from the world. So long gloves emphasize this separation, elevating the wearer above the viewer.
They emphasize the limb and trigger thoughts of either touching or being touched by them. That’s particularly true for sleek sensual materials like latex, leather, velvet, etc.
Gloves communicate both intent and, in the case of long gloves, high status. Once the gloves are pulled on then things – possibly evil things – are about to happen.

What I like about these theories is that they’re all different, possibly contradictory, yet entirely plausible. In fact it’s possible that they might be simultaneously contradictory and yet all correct, which seems impossible. They work in different ways for different people in different contexts.

This is Cindy Crawford shot by Ellen Von Unwerth for Italian Vogue in 1991. Which of the above theories matches to this particular image? I think I could make a case that it works for all of them.

Short can be Sexy

I’m returning to the subject of gloves for my next couple of posts. A few days ago I asked why long gloves are sexier than short ones. That generated some interesting comments I’ll share in my next post.

However, I’d hate to leave anyone with the impression that only long gloves can be sexy. That’s very much not true. For example, here’s Mistress Audrey Fatale looking particularly fabulous in short black leather gloves. Admittedly, most of the fabulousness comes from Mistress Fatale herself, but the glove is definitely adding a certain something to the shot.

Mistress Audrey Fatale is a Melbourne based pro-domme who offers both virtual and in-person sessions. You can find her professional site here and her twitter feed here.

Diana Rigg

I was sad to read of the recent passing of Diana Rigg. I’m sure a lot of my more mature readers will know her from her iconic role as Emma Peel in the Avengers. She was a 60’s fashion icon, bringing an edge of fetish into the mainstream. Her career was long and varied, with roles ranging from the gun toting Emma Peel to Shakespeare, and from marrying James Bond to hanging out with Kermit. More recently she was Emmy nominated for playing Olenna Tyrell in GoT.

There was no shortage of images I could have used for this post. There’s the iconic catsuit, the minimal super spy look, the 70’s jumpsuit and whatever the hell is going on here. In the end I went with a publicity shot from the movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It might not have been the best Bond movie, but this shot is beautiful. Thanks for everything Diana.

Size Matters

Why are longer gloves sexier than shorter ones? It’s thoughts like this that keep me up at night.

Obviously they emphasize more the shape of the arm, but is the forearm really a super sexy body part? It’s not quite the same as a leg being emphasized by a long boot. Long medical gloves like these imply things are going to be particularly messy, which is hot. But long opera style gloves are also sexy and they’re very much not PPE equipment. It’s a puzzle.

This beautiful image is from the twitter feed of Mistress Euryale, a Hong Kong based pro-domme. You can find the original fullsize version and another shot from the same scene in her original tweet. Mistress Euryale also regularly visits Paris, so if you’re near either there or Hong Kong and would like to meet her, then check out her professional site.

Measuring Progress in Arms and Inches

I love the fact that, despite hanging around kinky websites and social media for decades, I can still discover new things. For example this week, via this twitter thread, I discovered that arm band tattoos are used to indicate interest/progress in fisting. That was news to me.

While it’s definitely not my kink, I did like the comment that Goddess Faustine added to the discussion. She has a mugwort tattoo on her bicep and uses it to measure fisting progress…

So the stalk of the plant is oriented lengthwise along My bicep, and the leaves ascend the stalk from My elbow to shoulder, the further toward My shoulder and away from My elbow the better they’re doing depth progression wise. A lot of fistees enjoy recording progression

I personally don’t think I’ll ever want to explore fisting. I have an irrational fear of things splitting or tearing. However, if I did venture down that path, this sounds like a very beautiful and elegant way to track it.

This lovely selfie of Goddess Faustine is from her twitter feed. She’s a SF based pro-domme and for anyone interested in some mugwort anal action, you can find her session application info here.

Horny

It’s inevitable that when I have a handful of posts bouncing around in my head, I’ll start several of them and finish none of them. Too many ideas is almost as bad as no ideas.

By way of apology for my failure to complete my thoughts, here’s a horny lady with a big weapon. I’ve no idea who she is, why she’s got a sword or what the deal with the helmet it. I’ll just say that I’m a fan of the entire look. If Halloween had more of these outfits and less of the sexy <insert profession here> costumes, I’d be far less of a grouch about the whole thing.

Updated: Thanks to my super helpful readers I can attribute this image to Mistress Verushka who was active in San Francisco scene through the 70’s and 80s’s. I actually featured her in a post last year.

Mistress Antoinette

I’m going to close this series of vintage themed posts by returning to the first one in it. Several readers reached out via comments and emails to say that the domme in the photograph was a Mistress Antoinette. I’d not been aware of her until now, but by all accounts she was an amazing person.

This Rialto Report article provides some interesting background, with tributes from the likes of Dita Von Teese and Annie Sprinkle. Among her many accomplishments was publishing the fetish and femdom Reflections Magazine and creating the fashion company Versatile Fashions. You can hear from Mistress Antoinette as well as see some of her creations in this 1997 video of the Dressed To Thrill Ball.

One reader was kind enough to send me a lovely story of his interaction with her back in the 80’s. I’m sharing it below with his permission.

Way back In 1983, while driving back to San Diego after a few days of climbing in Yosemite National Park, I visited her fetish clothing store, Versatile Fashions Boutique. To my delight she was in the store that day, and was very kind when I told her that I was a longtime fan who loved being submissive to women. She had a reporter coming in for an interview, and for his benefit I was allowed to play her slave, footstool, bootlicker, and errandboy while she chatted merrily and casually with the reporter. It was a wonderful experience for me, exercising my macho rock climber persona on one day, and my worshipful slave persona the next. Plus she was just such a decent person with a big heart and a wonderful sense of humor.

She’s now retired and, based on this article, is sadly suffering from some health problems. She was clearly a kinky pioneer with a great personality. I’m sure we all wish her well in retirement.

Although Ms Antoinette has retired, the fashion company continues today under the brand Versatile Corsets.

Good Advice

Vice magazine has a pretty decent article on how to find a kink positive therapist. For anyone living through the dystopian hellscape that is the US right now, therapy is close to an essential resource. Just below bread flour and slightly above toilet paper. Finding someone who works well for you always involves a degree of trial and error, but this article seems like a good starting point.

This is of course the amazing Mistress T. She’s not actually a therapist, but she does play one on TV.