F – Page 47 – Femdom Resource

Good. Bad. I’m the guy with the blog.

I had an interesting day today. I had hot sweaty sex (of the non-kinky kind) with a gorgeous blonde. That was good. I had my rental car towed and had to retrieve it from the impound lot. That was bad *. I had a 13 course meal in a French/Californian restaurant. That was good. The meal may have contained potassium benzoate, that would be bad.

I have no idea what image would be appropriate for all that. But I’ll go for a shot of a hot sweaty blonde from the undah-wear tumblr. It’s not strictly a femdom shot, but I’m guessing I’m not going to be the only submissive male turned on at the image of a sweaty female body. The term ‘sniffer’ is often used in a derisory fashion, but I think scent is a much under appreciated part of sex. It pushes buttons deep in the brain that the other senses just can’t get near.

Oh, and 10 bonus femdom points for the first person to get the post title reference. It’s an easy one, but I can’t resist the quote.

* It turns out to be particularly tricky to retrieve your car when you picked it up in the early hours of the morning from a rental agency and have no idea what the license number is. Or the color. Or the model. Or even the number of doors. It had a drivers door, so I’d stopped caring once I’d initially established that fact. Combine all that with an automated traffic system with the phone menu from hell, and you can imagine the level of frustration created. I might be a masochist but even I have my limits.

Awaiting her moment

The cane flexing shot is a femdom porn cliche. It pops up all over the place, particularly with mistresses dressed in sexy authoritarian but non-fetish outfits (for example this, or this, or this, …) That’s not to say it doesn’t work. It’s a cliche for a reason. For a lot of submissive guys (including this one) it pushes buttons. However, I normally try and steer clear of the obvious femdom tropes on this blog. They are too easy to find in a hundred other places.

I liked this shot for doing something a little different with the idea. She’s not sneering down the camera lense, but looks to be lost in thought, flexing the cane as a reflex as she ponders the moment. There’s a nice ambiguity to it and it’s possible to imagine any number of storylines to accompany it.

I found it on the Poe’s Mistress (aka French Twist) tumblr. I believe it’s a shot by Ellen von Unwerth. She’s a fashion photographer who started life as a model before moving behind the camera. I suspect the image is therefore from a mainstream fashion shot of some sort.

Holy single tail batman!

I know there are a lot of catwoman fans out there, so here’s a couple of enjoyable images of her. They’re stylistically different but both feature a very happy looking catwoman . The first is by BatgirlOfGotham (free deviant login required), and has a nice big single tail with a stoic (as ever) batman. Hopefully she’ll soon whip a smile onto his face. The second image is by Stephanie Buscema and is based on the Julie Newmar catwoman character. It’s not exactly a kinky shot, but it a very cheerful one, which gives it a great deal of appeal to me. If you like it, she has a number of similar images featuring female superheros on her site. And while I’m on the batman topic, just to finish, here’s a link to great batgirl shot by the artist Houston Sharp.

On the cusp

The shot below is taken from the gallery on Mistress Alex’s site. She has a lot of great images in that gallery, with many that are far more explicitly BDSM than this. There are cages, naked men, whips, floggers and beat downs. All sorts of good stuff. But this slightly more ambiguous image is the one that really appeals to me. I think it captures a moment of balance, the point where all the possibilities of a session begin to resolve into the actualities.

There’s often a lot of laughter and banter at the start of my sessions with Lydia. Some of that is purely practical. It takes time to get ropes tied and bodies arranged, and it’s more fun to talk than not to. A larger part of it is is the nervous energy and anticipation we’re feeding off of. I don’t quite know what’s about to happen, but I’m looking forward to finding out. The domme has got a good idea what’s about to happen, but until it starts to unfold has (presumably) no idea how her ideas will translate into the energy and dynamic of the scene. I love that point of transition, the shifting balance between us, the changing gears of dominance and submission. Hallways are a natural transition place and this image, with its choice of doors and “I was waiting for you” stance, captures an element of that session moment.

Form over function

Here’s a very visually striking pair of Gaspar gloves being modeled by Mistress Veronique. There’s a bit of a militaristic feel to them thanks to all those metal press studs.

While I think these look great, when it comes to playing rather than simply staring, I actually prefer something far more basic. The kind of short black leather gloves you’d use to protect your hands, or improve your grip, or avoid leaving fingerprints. There’s something sexy about function. These have great form, they don’t look all that practical to wear while working a guy over.

I found this on the Bits and Pieces tumblr. It was originally shot for the Boot Lovers site.

A nice kind of sleazy

This image caught my eye because it looks like it was shot in a hotel room, which is a surprisingly rare setting for these kind of shots. I get quite a sexual vibe from it, of rough kinky sex, rather than a D/s scene. I have no idea who the model is or what the context is, but it makes me imagine a fun evening with a high class escort in an expensive hotel. Although that may say more about me than the photograph. And I should again emphasize that’s just the vibe I get from it, I’ve no idea who or where the shot is from.

I’ve only sessioned once in a hotel, and the whole experience created a very interesting atmosphere. It was exciting in a sexy, sleazy and sneaky way. It was in Vegas (always a good start for sleazy) at the Hilton hotel. Vegas has some amazing hotels – Bellagio, Mandarin Oriental, Wynn – but the Hilton isn’t one of them. It has got a real old school feel. By which I mean smoky, worn and a touch shabby. Most of the high end hotels try to keep the hookers from plying their trade too obviously in the casino, but not the Hilton. When I passed through it looked like it a great place to conduct a little business with a lady of negotiable affection.

In my case I’d already pre-negotiated the evening, and it wasn’t affection I was after. I was meeting a pro-domme whose visit overlapped with mine and she was staying and playing in the Hilton. In a normal session, in a studio space, I never feel like I’m doing anything particularly edgy or subversive. The play and the space fit together. Arguably getting naked with a complete stranger for freaky kinky fun is also a pretty good fit for a sleazy Vegas hotel room. But somehow it seemed a lot more socially and morally suspect, which I kind of liked. Trying to keep the screams down so as not to disturb other guests while being draped over the suitcase stand for a caning was definitely a new experience. As was trying to dry off after a golden shower using the paper thin and well used hotel towels. I think I still smelled of pee in the cab on the way back to my hotel, but I’m sure that was no big deal to a Vegas cab driver.

I found this on the Mistress Candy (aka The Ties That Bind) tumblr.

Peaking behind the curtain

I’ve been enjoying catching up on Domina M’s new blog – Look Like Veronica Lake; Think Like Dorothy Parker. She used to be one of NYC’s top pro-dommes, mentored one of the current stars of that city, and has since retired to Barcelona.

She’s writing about the practicalities of being a pro-domme, the behind the scene issues she had to deal with, which I find fascinating. I think it’s always fun to read about unusual jobs. It almost doesn’t matter exactly what the job is – steeplejack, hostage negotiator, matador – there’s just something innately interesting in learning the tricks of a trade. It appeals to the desire to discover a secret, as well as the intellectual pleasure of gaining understanding of a new problem space.

I particularly enjoyed her piece on micro-dommenomics and her attempt to come up with a viable model for an inexpensive session.

A simple foot or OTK session in the morning might be a nice way to start my day. What say $75 for a half hour foot or OTK session in the morning? NO ONE could beat that.
…
There was no way I was going to dilute the “Domina M” brand with a blue light special. Besides the argument was that they wanted the minimum, simply a focus on their fetish. Okay fine. I created a new yahoo email account and advertised, “Simple foot/otk sessions with a beautiful, busty, 29-year-old blond. 8AM-11AM. $75 per ½ hour” every free place I could.
…
After all of that, how many people did I see in those three months? None. Zero. Goose-Egg.
Domina M

The failure of this approach doesn’t surprise me at all. When it comes to luxury goods and services, price may not be a good discriminating factor, but it is normally a good filtering factor. I probably can’t simply use price alone to choose between a $50 bottle of wine and $100 bottle of wine. But I can normally safely exclude the $5 bottle of wine from consideration. If I saw a very cheap price for an unnamed and unreviewed pro-domme I’d assume either she wasn’t smart enough to price herself correctly or was so bad that she couldn’t get business at a higher price. Neither are appealing characteristics. And, as Domina M discovered, the type of clients who don’t make that kind of assessment turn out to be the type of clients not worth cultivating.

In the comment section Miss Troy Orleans remarked on the fact that she’d recently offered a significant session discount to celebrate her eight year dommiversary, and had been surprised when only one person took her up on it. That also surprised me at first glance, but actually makes some sort of sense from a psychological perspective. A discount suggests that, compared to the normal exchange, one person is losing out on the deal. A client with enough disposable income to regularly see a top pro-domme is unlikely to value a transitory financial saving over the negative psychological association of the discount.

If Miss Orleans had reworded the offer to suggest she was going to extend the session length but still charge her normal rate, I wonder if it would have changed the uptake rate? The cost/time ratio is unchanged, but it creates a different emphasis. Now the client isn’t taking something away, but is instead being gifted with something extra. A bit like how restaurants don’t give regular customers discounts, but do send out additional free courses.

Perhaps that might also have been an answer to Domina M’s discount session experiment. Offer it only as a bonus to regular clients who have already paid the full session rate in the past. That weeds out the wankers while rewarding the regulars. Although of course that does still risk diluting the brand. These things are never simple.

I’ve added her blog to the pro-domme section of my blogroll, so hopefully she’ll be popping up there with many more interesting posts in future. Thanks to hmp for the original pointer.

Photograph is of Domina M. For a little background on the photographer see this blog post.

Young woman, big cock

Here’s an example image of what I’ve previously chosen to call ‘Discovered Femdom.’ That is to say an image that started life in one context, often as a type of vanilla porn or fashion photography, but ended up as an easy target for projecting kinky fantasies.

I found it on the entertaining but inappropriately named 333 images tumblr. My first thoughts were – “Cute girl. Love that smile. Wow, that’s a big cock. What’s not to like?” But then I noticed the lack of straps to hold it in place and, given the professional photographer backdrop, began to suspect it was from a traditional porn shoot. Sure enough, it’s from x-art and features the model Gigi R using it in a more conventional self-pleasuring manner. It’s still a great shot, but I’ll like my mental version of what happened next rather than the actual one.

O Canada!

You’ll have to excuse this post. Or not, your call. Either way, it’s going to be a non-femdom focused one. Instead it’s a couple of random things that caught my eye from north of the border.

The first amused me. It’s a series of commercials for a Canadian porn channel that play with the traditional porn stereotypes. There’s a pool boy, pizza guy and a cop ticketing an attractive young lady. They must have had the only casting call where bad acting was a prerequisite.

The second annoyed me. The beautiful woman below is Jenna Talackova, who was disqualified last week from the Miss Universe Canada competition for being born male. She had gender re-assignment surgery in 2010, but apparently didn’t meet the competition requirements of being born a ‘natural woman’. She’d already made it through to the finals, so clearly the earlier judges must have thought she was a suitably attractive competitor.

Miss World and Miss Universe pageants aren’t exactly at the cultural or intellectual cutting edge, but this struck me as particularly dumb even by their standards. In some circumstances qualifying requirements are obviously necessary. For example, this kind of issue can be a thorny one in the area of sports, where genetic men may have a natural advantage. But in a beauty competition? It’s not like being born male offers any kind of advantage. In fact it’s quite the opposite. Are they worried a flood of guys are going to be inspired to try pulling on a frock and entering? If she can overcome the issues of being born with the wrong body and still end up looking this amazing then good luck to her. They don’t ban cosmetic surgery for the other competitors. It seems hypocritical to ban it for her.

Incidentally, if you happen on a news article covering this story I’d advise you to stop reading before you get to the readers comments. Otherwise you may feel like taking a bath afterwards. When you spend a lot of time hanging out on blogs written and frequented by open minded LGBT positive people, you tend to forget just how many hateful people there are out there.

A fetish diversion

I’m not normally big on posting simple fetish shots. I appreciate an attractive latex or leather outfit, but I always treat them as a bonus to D/s or s&m play, not an end in their right own right.

One possible exception I’ll make for this is the Dutch model Ancilla Tilla. I’m not quite sure why, and what it is about her look that appeals, but something about her photographs always really grabs me. She often manages to pull off an elegant classical look, even when wearing some pretty fetishistic outfits. The fact she reminds me of a kinky Scarlett Johansson doesn’t hurt either.