F – Page 41 – Femdom Resource

I don’t judge

Today’s post continues the amusing video theme. While yesterday’s was funny but a little silly, this one is funny with an edge. It’s called ‘Shit Girls Say to Dominatrices‘ and was created by Miss Ginger Millay. While ostensibly from the point of view of a pro-domme, there are plenty of comments in there that I’m sure lifestyle dommes will have also heard. The line and follow-up about accepting Jesus particularly made me smile.

The video’s creator is a NYC based pro-domme. I’m sure she’s fabulous at many aspect of her job, but I particularly like her librarian look as shown below. I never roleplay in scenes, but if there was ever a gateway scenario, it’d be Miss Millay in the library with an overdue book. Much more fun than Miss Scarlet in the study with the candlestick.

The art of marketing

Someone dropped me a link to this video advertising Wodka Vodka. It’s an amusing commercial, featuring a woman getting jobs done thanks to a quick internet ad and a succession of helpful horny slaves.

However, it particularly caught my eye because of a post I recently stumbled across from San Francisco’s Vinyl Queen. In it she lists the efforts she goes to in order to get a client to actually show up at her play space. The vodka commercial is entertainingly unrealistic, but it wasn’t until I read her post that I realized the extent of the gulf that exists in professional BDSM between advertising and closing the deal. For a lot of her new clients…

These men ultimately hate the fact they can’t rid themselves of this part of their psyche, so it comes out sideways in their dealings with the ONE person who can offer them a brief respite from their desire to submit/serve/be tortured—you get the picture. So instead of my calendar booking up like a medical office, it fills up in a manner unique to this profession. Enter: The Hand Holdee

Despite my website being very detailed and clear about my interests and limits, the Hand Holdee loses all semblance of reading comprehension and memory. It’s like he WANTS me repeat what he KNOWS is on the computer screen in front of him. He is so conflicted internally that he has to hear the words he wants come out of my mouth so he will feel more secure in the days/weeks/or months leading up to our time together.

So for a pro-domme advertising and marketing is only a starting point. Ironically enough, and to tie it all back to the starting point of the post, for vodka marketing is pretty much the first, last and only point that matters. The basic product is interchangeable, varying only slightly depending what filtering is done and what water is added. So, as this fascinating article describes, how you market it is key. The Wodka of the kinky commercial is actually trying a new approach in that respect.

Playing with the cliche

I try and avoid posting too many stereotypical shots of dommes in fetish gear staring into the camera. It’s not that I’m not partial to the occasional one now and again. They’re popular for a reason. However, there are plenty of tumblrs featuring them already, and I like to try and keep this sites appeal as broad as possible.

Occasional one will catch me eye as being a little different, and this is such a case. All the standard elements of the cliche are there. Leather boots. Tight latex. Black gloves. But she looks so relaxed and calm. There’s no sneering or haughty posture. I get the feeling she’d be a lot of fun to play with. She manages to look great without appearing to be trying too hard.

I found it on the my wife is in charge tumblr. I’m afraid I’ve no attribution for it. Google images can’t find a single copy of it, let alone the original site. If anyone knows who this is leave a comment and I’ll update the post.

Melt in the mouth

I’m not typically an ice cream fan. Normally I’d prefer a sorbet. But a naked lady, a strap-on and a tub of ice cream? That works. That really works. Add some champagne into the mix and we could be talking about the perfect evening in.

I found this on the I Crave Domination tumblr. I’m afraid I can’t track down an original attribution. Weirdly google images can somehow figure out this is a shot about ice cream, but not who originally published it.

Identity crisis

I’m going to do something fairly foolish in this post and disagree with someone who doubtless knows their business far better than I do. Not to mention someone who lives locally, swings a mean single tail and could almost certainly kick my ass. I’m talking about Domina Victoria Rage and her recent post on safety and screening when setting up pro-domme sessions.

There’s a lot of good information in it, but I do have to take issue with her suggestion that clients should always use aliases. She goes onto say…

Come to me with a real sounding first and last name and that’s a red flag that you might take my privacy as lightly as you’ve taken your own.
There’s no reason on the planet why personal information should be exchanged on either side, anything you say is a gamble because both of you – just by seeing each other – are in a position to do damage to the personal life of the other.

Anyone I session with, or even just meet, will know my real name. I’ll typically provide it in the first few exchanges of emails. And a domme who expects me not to do that creates a red flag of my own. It suggests to me that she’ll not take my privacy seriously and that the onus is on me to always guard information from her. I’m absolutely sure that’s not the case for Domina Victoria, but I would find it really weird to not use my real name with a domme when I’m trusting her in so many other ways during a session. I would feel inauthentic.

While using an alias is pretty much universal for pro-dommes, it’s certainly not for clients. Some dommes demand a photographic id before a session, or will take credit cards, which instantly rules out fake names. And personally I don’t buy the argument about creating risk to personal lives. I’d be much more worried about crazy ex-girlfriends than pro-dommes. The former typically know your social circle, know your intimate sexual secrets and may have nothing to lose by spreading gossip. That’s a scary mixture. In contrast a pro-domme sharing information risks her professional reputation and therefore her livelihood. She has a strong incentive to keep information private. I’m not saying it has never happened, just that as things to worry about, it’s way down my list.

As an entertaining side anecdote on identify and verification – I once had someone complain that my professional linked-in profile didn’t have enough contacts. I had a 100 or so listed, but she said she preferred to see 200+ before she trusted it! This was someone I’ve never mentioned here, and someone who crossed a few of the legal lines that pro-dommes are typically so strict about. She was therefore far more concerned about legal entrapment and demanded strong proof of identity before she’d meet. I was highly entertained by the fact that my long neglected linked-in profile might suddenly be a kinky sex deal-breaker. I wish I’d know that when I was busy deleting all their spammy emails to update it!

I’ll leave you with a shot from Domina Victoria’s blog. I love the contrast of the white skin, the red nails and the big glorious cock.

Strange but true

It’s not often that I run across a new kink I haven’t heard of. Many wasted hours on the stranger parts of the internet have left me distressingly well informed about unusual kinks. However, courtesy of this Max Fisch thread, I’ve a new one to add. It’s called slaughtering or pig-play and, as far as I can tell, it means pretending to be a pig while the domme acts out a fake slaughtering process.

I guess I was aware of cannibalism being a kink in itself (thanks to the infamous Armin Meiwes case) but hadn’t realized it was actually something people role-played in scenes. I’ve never seen it offered by a US or British pro-domme, but apparently it’s not unheard of for German ones to do so. I assume something about that culture lends itself to the development of this particular kink. Perhaps raising pigs and butchering them are a more common part of the childhood experience than they are over here.

Personally the idea leaves me absolutely cold. I’ll certainly not be incorporating it into any of my future scenes. However, I’m always happy to expand my knowledge on the odder corners of the kinky world.

The image is of Mistress Kristin. She’s a German pro-domme who offers pig-play.

Geek Pride Day

Apparently May 25th is Geek Pride Day. It’s based on the release date for the first Star Wars movie (25th May 1977), but also ties into Towel Day (for fans of Douglas Adams) and the Glorious 25th of May (for fans of Terry Pratchett). Personally I can take or leave Star Wars. The positive feelings generated by the first two and a half movies have long since been dissipated by the crap that came afterwards. However, I am a big fan of the late great Douglas Adams and the prolifically great Terry Pratchett. So, as a geeky guy myself, a post to mark the day seems in order.

Cosplay is a natural fit for both Geek Pride Day and this blog. There are any number of classic domme style cosplay outfits I could have featured. For example, Black Widow, Cat Woman or The Baroness. But somehow the slightly less conventional Joker character below grabs me. Partly because it’s so well done, partly because of the gender twist, but mostly because of the intensity of that look.

This is from San Diego Comic Con 2009 and features TysKas.

Powerpoint pornography

After the yahoo/tumblr news I thought it might be interesting to share some of my thoughts on mainstreams internet companies and how they handle adult material. I have an insiders perspective on this, having helped develop several mainstream consumer internet products inside large software companies. I’ve also many friends in companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook that I’ve swapped war stories with.

From an outsiders perspective it’s often tempting to see these kind of companies as either incompetent, prudish, evil or mercenary. Sometimes all at the same time. In reality, while there are no doubt a few employees who meet that description, most of the developers are smart people trying to build the best product they can. When it comes to adult material there’s typically no broad censorious urge to remove it. These companies do huge amounts of data mining and certainly know just how popular it is. You can bet that Google continually tracks the number of queries with adult intent and has dozens of metrics tracking just which sites and images porn surfers prefer. No sane company leader wants to screw over a big percentage of their users if they can avoid it.

The problem comes from the general corporate culture around building software. It doesn’t mesh well with our social culture around adult material. Specific problems I’ve seen include…

A lack of champions.
Product features often get added because someone says – ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if it did X?’ They get people excited in the idea and the feature gets added. But it’s tough to stand up in a meeting and effectively announce your sexual preference by saying something like – ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had fetlife integration and I could track all my kinky friends and BDSM events?’
No dogfooding.
Dogfooding is an industry term meaning to use your own product internally and find bugs before your customers do. But who wants to file bugs based on their sexual habits? It’d take a brave man to file a bug entitled – “Our new shopping application didn’t return the butt plug I was looking for in its results. All returned plugs were too small in girth. Please fix.”
No bragging rights.
It’s fun to show off what you’ve built. Both formal and informal presentations on new features are a good way to get noticed and promoted. But if your new feature is pornography related, then those screenshots get a little trickier to compile. Nobody wants to spend an hour writing a presentation and then 4 hours carefully drawing black bars over all the genitalia in it.
No pressure to prevent regression.
People who don’t like adult content are often very vocal about it. The same is not true about people who do. So when someone complains to Google that his daughter has been traumatized while doing a school project on hairless cats, there might be pressure to fix the results returned for “bald pussy“. It’d be tough to be the person in the meeting speaking up on behalf of all the one handed porn surfers spanking it to bare pudenda.

Almost all modern software development is collaborative and iterative. Creating features and improving a product involves suggesting usage scenarios and brainstorming what would make a more compelling user experience. Yet sharing our sexual thoughts and preferences is very much frowned on socially. The Yahoo VP who loves browsing tumblr porn is probably not going to mention that fact. The Yahoo VP who hates the risk of being associated with tumblr porn is probably going to be very vocal about that fact. So the debate is unbalanced and lots of small decisions gradually add up to a deteriorating service to users wanting adult content.

Given the post topic, an office type shot seemed appropriate. This is of course the lovely Mistress Eleise de Lacy from Femme Fatale films.

A modern day Aegis

Today’s post brings you a scene that I did with Mistress Cynthia Stone a couple of months ago. Sadly I’m not the most efficient person when it comes to a timely documentation of my activities, and these photographs have been lurking on my computer for weeks. Hopefully the much delayed end result is both interesting and informative for anyone looking for session ideas beyond the standard bondage and beating format.

I should issue the standard warning that the activities depicted may be considered edge play. There is a small amount of blood shown in the images. If you’re OK with that then click through to a page I’ve entitled ‘Casting with Cynthia Stone;.

The image is of Mistress Cynthia Stone taken from her web site.

Contemplating the situation

This young lady appears to be taking a moment to pause and reflect on the situation in front of her. I’m not sure if it’s intended to represent a moment before, during or after the use of that whip. Whichever it is, I like her air of calm contemplation, with just a hint of what could be amusement.

This lovely watercolor is by the Italian artist Leone Frollo. The Femdom Artist site has a selection of his other works available.