F – Page 38 – Femdom Resource

Pink elephant syndrome

My mini-rant in the previous post triggered some interesting comments and some further thoughts of my own. So this post is a continuation on the topic of flirting with limits when playing with new (or newish) partners.

I should start by stating that none of the dommes that get regularly name checked here (Lydia, Yuki, Ai-Li, etc.) have ever been guilty of this problem. People I play with fairly often know my limits, so the situation doesn’t tend to arise, but even in my first few sessions with them they did the right thing and completely avoided problem areas.

I should also draw clear distinctions between the different circumstances where limits can get violated. The three obvious cases that spring to my mind are when a top deliberately cross a line, when a top simply doesn’t listen and is unaware of a limit, and when a top chooses to play somewhere close to a limit and crosses it accidentally. All of them are bad, but it was the final situations I was really trying to dig into, as it’s something I’ve not seen addressed elsewhere.

One of the comments (from ‘Informed guesswork’) likened it to the Pink Elephant problem. Being told not to picture a pink elephant instantly makes you picture one. In the same way I sometimes think limit discussions trigger the visualization and problem solving parts of a top’s brain…

Bottom: For me piercing / hoods / having bananas shoved up my bottom are limits.
Top: Oh really? (Thinking: That’s a shame I like needles / sensory deprivation / pretending to be a kinky gorilla)
Bottom: Yes. I am terrified of needles / am claustrophobic / witnessed a traumatic event at the local zoo as a child.
Top: OK. Good to know (Thinking: So is it all medical scenes / enclosed spaces / anal fruit situations that are a problem? What if I used a carrot? I remember a great scene I did last year with an aubergine. That’d be fun to try again…)

At this point the top now has pink elephants on the brain and is making connections to similar past situations, while forgetting the million and one other things she enjoys doing that don’t relate to elephants of any color at all.

Obviously the onus should be on the top to avoid this type of behavior, but one excellent suggestion in the comments was to finish a scene negotiation with the stuff you enjoy rather than personal limits. I suspect a lot of people are like me, and the last thing they talk about before a scene with a new person is their limits. After all, it’s human nature to open up with all the positive things you enjoy before adding the qualifiers and conditionals. Perhaps that switching that around would help avoid the pink elephants.

When looking for an image for this post I actually did an image search for elephants and femdom. I didn’t have much hope, but I should have realized that rule 34 can never be violated. Unfortunately the relevant images – of big breasted women waving whips near men being crushed by elephants – was a little too extreme for me to feature. So instead here’s a rather beautiful shot of a naked woman next to a naked elephant. It was taken by Vlad Gansovsky.

La Maupin

A recent Max Fisch thread was discussing the topic of dominant women in history. Who are the most obvious or the most famous? Obviously one has to be careful assigning the idea of sexual dominance to a public persona. Queen Boudica might have led a rebellion against the Romans, and have become a leading female figure in British history, but the books don’t tell us what she enjoyed doing with her husband Prasutagus. Maybe she enjoyed being spanked in the dull moments between slaughtering Romans? After all, we don’t automatically assume that success in a man implies a particular sexual preference.

That caveat aside, I think my top pick for a dominant woman from history would be Julie d’Aubigny, otherwise known as La Maupin. She was famous as a swordswomen, a singer, an actress, a lover and someone who generally buckled a lot of swash. There’s a good article on her here, another written for frat boys here and a wikipedia article here. Somebody even turned her life into a play.

My favorite story about her would be when she dressed as a nun to break into a convent in pursuit of her lover. The girl in question had been hidden there by her parents, not anticipating that La Maupin would break in, fake the girls death, set fire to the place and then escape with her love (temporarily) in tow. My second favorite story would be the duel she fought against three men, beating them all and injuring their leader. Who she then nursed back to health and started a passionate love affair with. I think whatever definition you care to use for a dominant woman, Julie d’Aubigny would qualify.

I believe this image is of her duel with Louis-Joseph d’Albert de Luynes, son of the Duke of Luynes. That would be the gentleman she injured in a duel and who ended up as a life-long love.

Fantasy beats reality

I have mixed feelings about enema play. I find the fantasy really hot, but the reality somehow doesn’t click in the same way.

I love the idea of something so invasive, intimate and controlling. There are exciting tubes, clinical looking apparatus and thick probes to be inserted. It hints at mad medical experiments by sadistic doctors, as well as a ‘it’s for your own good’ nurse dynamic. I like artwork featuring them (Augustine is always a reliable source) and fiction that describes them (for example Tyjord).

Unfortunately the reality involves stomach cramps, bowel movements and lots of sphincter clenching. None of these are in my list of top 1000 sexy things. They put me more in mind of food poisoning and nights out that go horribly wrong. There’s nothing worse than being packed shoulder to shoulder in a crowded dive bar when your curry from earlier that evening decides it needs to make a break for it. The effects of an enema remind me all to vividly of painful minutes spent desperately clenching while queuing for a scummy single stall toilet that wasn’t clean at the start of the evening, and certainly hasn’t improved since then.

Now that I’ve disgusted everyone with that particular mental picture, let me try and redeem myself with a hot enema related image. This has all the good stuff and not a clenched sphincter in sight.

I found this on the Wet Beehive tumbr. I’m afraid I couldn’t track down an original attribution, so if anyone knows who this striking looking lady is, feel free to leave a suitable comment.

Wise words from the web

There have been a number of thoughtful and interesting blog posts popping up recently. Obviously that doesn’t include anything from this particular location, but several posts from my blogroll have caught me eye.

Firstly, Miss Pearl came up with 33 things every submissive man should know. This is territory that a lot of bloggers have covered in the past, but rarely as succinctly and effectively as Miss Pearl has done here. In a similar advisory vein Ferns tackled the tricky issue of ‘How does a sub say no‘. There’s not easy answer to that, but Ferns does a nice job of exploring the complexities of it. HMP and Dymion delivered a rare double header on the subject of ‘Longevity in D/s relationships’. The original post started over HMP’s blog and Dymion followed it up with his thoughts. Both provided some thoughtful commentary. Finally, Kaya wrote about a very emotional and complex scene from her past. It’s not femdom, and her relationship to BDSM is quite different to my own, yet I found the post fascinating.

In other blog news I was happy to see that Constanze Borgia has started updating her site again. She’s been busy helping out an animal charity, and I’m sure she’d be grateful to anyone who contributed.

I’ve also added the ‘Girl on the Net‘ blog to the ‘Sex & Kink Blogs’ section of my blogroll on the right. It’s more sexy fun times rather than BDSM, but I’ve enjoyed reading it. Plus, the eponymous girl is British and some of her phrases and cultural references points make me smile and think of home.

I’ve no idea what picture is suitable for such a wide range of material, so here’s a naked lady with a whip. You can never go too far wrong there.

This image is appropriately entitled Whip, is by the artist RedPandaDee.

Emergency procedures

I just had a really wonderful scene with Lydia. Many needles and much moaning on my part was involved. However, I don’t want to talk about that tonight. Instead I want to talk about a bad scene. A scene with an abusive asshole of a dominant. Specifically, this scene described by Little Dorky Cyclops. I’m not going to try and summarize it, so feel free to go read it if you want the rest of this post to make sense.

I have to admit that a few years ago, when I was not particularly young and still stupid, I would have been sympathetic but bemused by that scene description. I would have been the idiot saying “Why not just safeword? That’s what it’s for.” Now that I’m definitely older and possibly wiser, I get it. I don’t play in public and I’ve been lucky enough to encounter very few bad dominants. I’ve only really had one session go seriously sour on me (described here and here), but I still completely understand LDC’s reaction in the scene. It’s tough to switch gears and take control back from a dominant. You’re fighting the natural dynamic of the scene and a desire to do your bit to make it work. It’s always tempting to think it’ll get better, that that you just need to hang on till the endorphins kick in. It’s easy to safeword on cramping or going numb, but this scene was a far more complex dynamic, with social pressure added into the mix as well.

Obviously the dominant here – Jefferson is his fetlife handle (aged 50, in NYC) – behaved abusively and there are serious questions the people who attended the event should be asking themselves. Hopefully making this public reduces his chances of going to other events and repeating the process, although given he’s done it before I’m not optimistic. From a submissive (and possibly selfish) perspective it makes me wonder what I can do to avoid getting caught in a similar situation. Even assuming the BDSM community can do a better job of policing itself (big assumption), bad dominants will continue to be a fact of life. So what are good self-defense techniques for a submissive to practice?

In a weird way this problem puts me in mind of a common problem in computer systems, namely handling backup and recovery when disaster strikes. I know that sounds like a bizarre connection, but stick with me on this. The problem computer users often have isn’t defining the recovery process or setting up the emergency systems, it’s making sure they work when needed. They’re hard to test properly and are rarely used. Unfortunately when you need them, you need them to work flawlessly, the first time of asking and in the most difficult circumstances. That’s a really bad combination. Typically people find out their recovery system isn’t working the first time they try and use it.

I wonder if submissives face a similar problem? They have a theoretical mechanism for safety, but the only time they use it is when they’re already in a bad situation. That’s exactly when you want to fall back to a frequently used and easily deployed mechanism, not step further into the unknown.

I’ll continue this post tomorrow with a few more thoughts. Feel free to leave comments until then. I’ll finish with what seems like an appropriate image. Thanks to Little Dorky Cyclops we’ve found out about some of that lurking evil in one particular man.

This image is by the artist Ybar. I found it on the Velvet Underground tumblr.

Turning points

Servitor has an occasional series of femdom themed image captions that he calls ‘Turning Points’. Unlike his normal captions, which are fairly explicit in their BDSM themes, this series is more about the potential for something to happen. As the title suggests, they capture a potential turning point in a relationship, a gateway for a shift from vanilla to femdom.

I like them a lot, but I also find them a touch bittersweet, even sad. This puzzled me. That’s not a usual reaction to hot femdom image captions. After some pondering I think I finally figured out the reason. It’s because they represent a moment that many submissive men desperately desire and yet never experience. Porn is ultimately always about fantasy. Almost all of it completely unrealistic. I might fantasize about being screwed in the locker room of my gym by aggressive naked ladies, but I haven’t spent a single second wondering if it’s ever going to happen. I know it’s not. Servitor’s turning point series hits a little closer to home. Many submissive guys are in vanilla relationships where either their partner isn’t interested in kink or they’re afraid to ask her about it. An evolution into femdom that comes from her is a fantasy that they’ve thought about for years. These images remind me of that fact and hence make me a little sad.

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.

News from north of the border

A professional dominatrix made a little bit of history in Canada yesterday. Terri-Jean Bedford (actually a retired pro-domme), along with Amy Lebovitch and Valerie Scott, won their case in front of the Canadian Supreme Court to strike down the countries anti-prostitution laws. This Tits and Sass post has a round-up of various links on the news. You can see some of the positive reaction from pro-dommes and other sex workers in twitter comments like this, this and this.

Some of you might be wondering why a pro-domme is involved in anti-prostitution laws. After all, don’t pro-dommes abstain from sex with clients? The reality is that when it comes to sexual matters the law is frequently an ass. In this case Terri-Jean Bedford was legally working in her own space as a pro-domme in 1994 when the Toronto police raided and arrested her. The confiscated all her equipment, splashed her name across the papers and ultimately (in 1998) convicted her of keeping a bawdy house. Since then, with the help of a dozen anonymous backers, she’s been fighting the legal system. And, as it turns out, winning.

The confluence of sex, commerce, morality and law is always going to be a complex one. I’ve therefore adopted a simple rule I always start with in these matters – listen to the voices of the people involved. It’s fine to debate with academics* and politicians, but not all opinions are equal. And in this case the opinions of sex workers are both far more important and (as far as I can tell) unequivocally in favor of this ruling. So a big congratulations to Ms Bedford, someone who can certainly rock a leather jacket and riding crop look.

I’m actually in the process of reading her book Dominatrix on Trial. I’ll put a review of it up at some point soon.

* The exception to debating academics would be people like Gail Dines and Melissa Farley. Their twisting of facts and obvious bias disqualifies them instantly from any sensible debate.

Airline femdom

After this post Servitor quite rightly took me to task for having no good examples of airline femdom. He cited the NOFX track S&M airlines (great band, but not their best track), the artwork of the brilliant Sardax and his own particular riffs on the theme.

All these are fine examples, but I think he’s missing one of the best, albeit most subtle ones. That would be the Delta safety video featuring the stewardess who is definitely not a fan of smoking. I’m sure that many a submissive flyer felt a delightful inner quiver when she did her finger wag (around 1:50 in the video).

I’d always assumed she was an actress hired to film the video, but it turns out she’s a Delta flight attendant who has continued to work as one. That’s particularly impressive given how many delta flyers must have asked her for a personal reprise of her starring role.

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.