F – Page 35 – Femdom Resource

Judge and jury

I was sad to see that Ellen Pao lost her case of gender discrimination against the Venture Capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The very existence of the lawsuit will have had some effect on Silicon Valley, but a win would have done much more to shake up a male dominated tech industry.

I wasn’t on the jury, so can’t speak to the details of the case, but I do know the deck is stacked against women in these situations. The jury is being asked to decide if someone was fired for incompetence or fired because of the firm’s culture and biases. Unfortunately there’s little chance that a randomly selected jury can come to an independent informed decision on the issue of competence in a VC firm. I suspect even a carefully chosen panel of technology experts would struggle on that. Instead they’re forced to use the reviews, notes and opinions from the firm itself, and that’s where the deck is stacked.

I’ve covered the double standards for women working in tech in the past, along with the more general issue of attitudes to forceful women. Characteristics that get a man promoted – aggressive, pushy, argumentative – will count against a woman. Women who are laid back lack initiative, where women who forceful are difficult to work with. Those biases end up in emails and performance reviews. The data that the jury is forced to use to decide competence is coming from a tainted source – the very firm that’s in the dock. So unless it’s a horribly egregious example of discrimination, then the biases of male bosses and co-workers continue to function as part of the trial evidence. I think this Jezebel article does a pretty good job of covering the issue.

I sadly don’t have any answer to this problem, other than raising awareness of it. I’ll leave you with a picture of a very successful independent businesses woman. She’s created her own media empire based on the latest technical innovations. Plus, she has an excellent T-shirt on. This is of course the one and only Mistress T.

Emerald City Comicon

While I was on vacation I sadly missed the Emerald City Comicon. That’s particularly annoying as I live just a block or so from the Washington Convention Center. I could have walked out my front door to get a coffee and bumped into a dozen or more cosplayers roaming the area. I’m not a big comic book geek, but I do enjoy experiencing interesting cultures and seeing people having fun with their hobbies. I particularly enjoy the effort and creativity that goes into cosplay. The fact that this sometimes involves attractive ladies in fetish influenced outfits is just an added bonus.

This is the Baroness (played by Cobra North) and Snake Eyes (played by Danquish). Photographed by The Will Box.

Tabloid nonsense

The past week has seen the tabloid news sites posting numerous articles on Alissa Afonina. She’s a young woman who was recently awarded $1.5M in damages after being badly injured in a car accident in 2008. The reason for all the tabloid interest was that the accident resulted in a brain injury that led to changes in her social and sexual behavior, and in recent years she has earned a living working as a dominatrix. Or, to put it in the most tabloid way possible, courtesy of the Daily Mail – “Star student, 23, wins $1.5m after car crash brain trauma turned her into an impulsive sex-mad dominatrix”.

I wasn’t planning to feature the story at all. All the articles seemed like sensationalist nonsense, designed to sell page views, titillate readers and ignore the serious elements of the story. However, Jezebel put together an interview that I think is worth linking to. I can’t say I like the headline for it, but it’s a well done interview that actually digs into the pertinent issues and treats Alissa as a person rather than a story to be packaged and sold. She comes across as an intelligent and impressive person who has dealt well with a very difficult situation.

She works under the name Sasha Mizaree. You can visit her professional site, her clip store, her twitter feed or her tumblr. If you’re in the Vancouver area you can arrange in person sessions via her main site.

Sad day

I was very sad to read today about the death of author Terry Pratchett. He’d been suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s for some years, so it wasn’t particularly surprising, but that didn’t make it any less upsetting.

I’ve probably never mentioned it here, but his books are a regular part of my self-aftercare when playing and traveling. My vacations to various cities have a regular pattern. I meet and play with an interesting domme on an afternoon. I go for a beautiful meal in the evening. And, while enjoying a glass of wine and spacey on post scene endorphins, I read Terry Pratchett over diner. His gentle blend of humor, parody and witty references can make the end of a great day close to perfect.

His books have a great number of strong female characters (Esme Weatherwax, Gytha Ogg, Angua, Tiffany Aching, Susan Sto Helit, etc), but not a lot of kinky references. The most obvious one I could remember comes from The Light Fantastic. He’s just introduced a female warrior into the storyline…

“Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one’s shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, tightboots and naked blades.
Words like ‘full’, ‘round’ and even ‘pert’ creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down.
Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn’t about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialized buyer.
Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure, and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling’s Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a short sword.
All right, maybe the boots were leather. But not black.”

Terry Pratchett from the Light Fantastic

I’ll leave you an image of another of Sir Terry’s memorable female characters – Adora Belle Dearheart. She’s forceful, opinionated, sarcastic, dresses severely and has been known to put men in hospital with her spiked heels. Just the kind of woman I think my readers would appreciate.

This image is by the artist Rubendevela. Her character is a support and aid to Golems, which explains the large hand holding the ashtray behind her.

Big tech and adult content

The recent decision by Google to ban blogs featuring sexually explicit images/video or graphic nudity continues to reverberate around the blogsphere. While in theory text only explicit blogs are safe, but how long would you like to bet on that lasting? If they can change the rules once, they can do it again and probably will.

Over time Google has clearly got more conservative and less idealistic. Their image search is another good example of that. For example, assuming you have safe search off, compare a search for the lovely Mistress T on Google and Bing. Google barely features her in the results where Bing features a bare her from every angle imaginable. CBT on Google is a lot of powerpoint slides, where on Bing it’s wall to wall penises. My favorite is probably Men in Pain. On Google it’s a lot of stock photos of guys with headaches where on Bing it’s all sorts of good femdom stuff. This kind of conservatism is an expression of Google’s current culture.

They’re not alone in this. Apple has consistently run into bad press for censorship. Facebook recently got into trouble for it’s policy of blocking drag performers from their platform, and has many previous censorship problems. Amazon seems to run into censorship questions every few months.

What I find fascinating (outside my annoyance at the outcome) is how these kind of decisions are taken. The external perception of large tech companies is of corporate monoliths, but the reality is that very few people will be involved with these kind of decisions. I’ll also bet that they’re not taken at a particularly high level. A few product managers get into a room and make a bad call based on very limited information. They end up affected millions of people, but they’re not some grand expression of corporate will taken by cigar smoking board members. They’re a corporate culture filtered through a few people.

I had difficulty picking an image for this post until I stumbled on the shot below. It seemed apt.

The bandwagon rolls on

Having spent the last year or so all over the internet, Fifty Shades of Grey is now popping up on my television. The movie is due out next month and the trailers are running frequently. I’m just hoping it doesn’t come up as a topic of conversation with any of my non-kinky friends. After a few drinks I’ll probably be unable to avoid ripping into it, which might lead to speculation about how I know so much about it.

An article on it that I would be happy to point my friends to is this one in (of all places) the International Business Times. If features San Francisco’s Mistress Morgana, Seattle’s own Mistress Matisse and submissive Stephen Elliot. They do a good job of talking about the complexity and variety in kink, as well as emphasizing the need for consent.

I find it amusing that although most regular people primarily think about maledom when they think about BDSM (in my opinion), it seems like that the majority of articles on it feature female dominants. I don’t think there’s any great underlying social subtext to that. It’s just that journalists are busy/lazy and virtually all professional dominants are female. It’s much easier to find the contact details of a local pro-domme via a quick web search than it is to track down a lifestyle male dominant.

The above image is of Mistress Morgana. She’s a BDSM professional, educator and guide. If you’re in the San Francisco area and interested in experiencing that wooden spoon for yourself, her contact details are here.

Kimchi and a strapon

This is the great Lori Adorable eating kimchi and sporting a strapon, as photographed by Mikey McMichaels. You can see more of his work via his tumblr. Lori Adorable maintains her own tumblr – Girl with the Most Cake. If you’re anything like me it’s the kind of tumblr that you start idly browsing and the next thing you know it’s an hour later and you’ve got a dozen new interesting thoughts to ponder.

Scream therapy

I’m safely back in Seattle after flying back late on Sunday night. I finished the trip with a bang, or possibly that should be a thwack, by playing with the beautiful Domina Ai-Li on Sunday afternoon. It was another really fun session. Playing fairly heavy on consecutive days creates some interesting dilemmas, as dommes do love to poke, prod and generally work over any bruises they spot from the previous day!

In my previous post I commented on the role the eyes can play in a scene. Today I’m going to go a couple of inches lower and talk about the throat. It’s not a body part that gets mentioned often, but I think it definitely played a role in my session with Ai-Li. I had a slightly sore throat when we started (probably as a result of too much drinking and talking in busy bars) and yelling and screaming in pain didn’t help matters. I have a tendency to do that when someone beats the inside of my thighs particularly hard. As a result I tried to bite back my yells to be kinder to my throat, and that in turn seemed to lower my pain tolerance. I think vocalizing is a way to release tension and push through tough situations. It lets me be free and simply express what I feel. Trying to hold it back makes it harder for me to take pain and therefore increases its apparent intensity. So I guess it you want to make it tougher for a submissive, tell him or her to shut the hell up.

Of course if you want to let someone scream but not scare the neighbors into calling the cops, a gag is always a good alternative. It doesn’t give you silence, but does muffle yells while still allowing a healthy moan.

I’m afraid I don’t know who the above domme is. If you do then feel free to enlighten me via the comments.

I was told there’d be no math

While I’m on a 50’s fashion theme, here’s a nice shot of two 1950’s ‘maths teachers’ conferring in front of a chalkboard (blackboard to my British friends). I’ve sadly got no original attribution for it. The lady on the left looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place a name. A reverse image search gives me vanilla 50’s fashion sites mixed in between the femdom sites. I assume the stick was designed for pointing rather than beating, but clearly there are plenty of perverts out there (and in here) willing to imagine other uses for it.

Win, Win, Win

I made it back to a damp and cold Seattle all in one piece. Unfortunately I came down with some stupid bug the day I flew back. I guess it’s better than getting sick on the flight there, but it still sucks to arrive home feeling terrible. Before I head back to my sickbed I want to do a bit of signal boosting for a very worthy blog post.

Mistress T is offering free access to her excellent members site in return for supporting a charitable organization named Kiva that specializes in microfinancing. She’s not asking you to give money – just loan it. You deposit some money with Kiva and pick individuals to receive it. They then repay you over time. In the meantime, as Mistress T describes in her post, she’ll give you access to her top quality femdom porn, with the access period determined by the amount loaned. So you get to help a worthy cause, generate some positive karma, get free porn and get your money back! It’s a win, win, win.

I’ve always been very impressed with Mistress T and the way she conducts herself. Both in her professional and personal life she appears to act with great integrity and thoughtfulness. It’s posts like this one, which’ll clearly cost her time and money to support, that really bring home those qualities. Not to mention that she has a truly beautiful bottom!

Image of Mistress T’s beautiful butt comes from this blog post. Should you wish to see a preview of what her members site offers then check it out here.