Fm – Page 146 – Femdom Resource

PDS

I was going to follow-up my previous post with some comments on my personal feelings about PDS (Public Displays of Dominance and Submission). However, as I started to write it, I realized I really wasn’t adding much to the debate. The rules on how a shared public space should be used are endlessly debatable and mutable.

So instead let me make a meta-point: Everyone stands on a slope. By which I mean there is no fixed point and stable surface from which to cast other opinions down. If you read the comments on the two articles I previously linked to (here and here) you’ll see a lot of de facto assumptions about what is appropriate behavior in public and what should be reserved for private spaces. The comment writers don’t seem aware that their universal truths are not universal at all. Unfortunately, if you hang out on BDSM forums and blogs, you’ll often see much the same attitude coming from the opposite direction.

This isn’t to say that there’s no right or wrong. Just that whatever position you adopt on any subject, be aware that you’re on a continuum. It’s still possible to draw lines and acceptable limits. Just don’t try and pretend that what you’ve chosen is somehow God given or universally accepted. Anyone arguing from that perspective instantly loses credibility.

After all that pontificating, let me make amends to my readers with some more leash shots. In this case they’re from The Properly Leashed Male tumblr and feature gentlemen being pulled by something a little more sensitive than a neck.

Leash laws

Earlier in the week I came across this story on a public display of D/s. It’s an advice column, and featured the story of a woman taking her leashed partner for walks in a residential area. The letter writer was a concerned neighbor who wanted to know how to handle it. While the ultimate advice given was good (be friendly and don’t worry about it), the tone it was couched in was obnoxious. It seemed to have no understanding of why somebody might do it and attributed it entirely to a juvenile desire to shock.

I was pondering writing about this when, courtesy of a post from Mistress T, I was pointed to a follow-up article. The domme in question, a woman named Kai’enne, had seen the article and contacted the columnist. It’s a much more positive piece and puts across their D/s lifestyle in an understanding manner. It reflects well on all involved, although the reader comments are depressingly full of the usual hateful rubbish you might expect.

Then, just minutes after I’d read that article, I came across this post by Mistress Alex. It features leashes, public exhibitionism, bootblacking and the photograph below. I wonder what the original letter writer would have said to this scene in her neighborhood?

Mistress Alex is a NYC based pro-domme. Her blog is available here and her professional site is here.

Glimpses of the past

I’ve been enjoying dipping and diving around the links on this page. It’s a collection of interviews, articles and photographs from old BDSM publications. To be frank the site itself is a bit of a mess. There’s very little context given and the presentation is horribly jumbled and confusing. However, there’s some interesting stuff there if you’re willing to dig around. For example, this article on Cynthia Slater covers background on the San Francisco SM scene and the formation of the society of Janus in the early 70’s.

The image below, of Empress Kat Prowles, is one that brings back some memories for me. There were several shots of this domme regularly recycled on usenet in the 90’s. I didn’t know anything about her, but the pictures stuck in my mind. It was an era of really bad femdom porn. Typically it consisted of conventional glamor models pulling on a pair of boots and waving a limp flogger towards a camera. It cemented in my mind a sense of unreality around BDSM. That it was all just a fantasy that people didn’t really do. Then I stumbled across the shots of the lady below. She looked real. Like she actually might want to hit me. And that she might even enjoy it. It was one of the first times I imagined myself interacting with a domme, rather than simply jerking off to a leather clad porn model. Those sexy sneering models have all long faded from my mind, but the shot below has stuck with me for well over a decade now.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

I’m safely back in Seattle. Unfortunately I’m feeling pretty wiped out after spending a day in NYC and then around ten hours traveling (door to door time). So it’s time for a short simple post using something from my random grab bag of images that I’ve enjoyed.

I found this one on the devoted sub tumblr. I haven’t determined it’s original source, but I believe that’s the model Xenia Tchoumitcheva. It looks like it could be a candid behind the scenes shot captured while on a fashion shoot. If that’s the case, then the gentleman helping out the beautiful Ms Tchoumitcheva appears to have one of the world’s more interesting jobs.

Escape

Tomorrow I flee the freezing NYC region to return to the warmer and wetter state of Washington. It has been a fun trip, and it ended on a very high note. I spent a good portion of today with the brilliant Miss Troy Orleans. We had a great session and snapped a lot of photographs. Hopefully, when I’ve had chance to sort through them, there will be a detailed session post.

Given I enjoyed some heavy bondage and restraints today, it seems fitting to finish the post with a pointer to an interesting article I read on Harry Houdini. I’m not sure he could be described as a femdom aficionado, but he certainly seemed to have a strong interest in bondage, masochism, exhibitionism and edge play. Given his skill, I’ve no doubt he could have emerged from the ropes in the photograph below in a matter of seconds. For the rest of us submissive types, even if we had the skill, I’m not sure escape would be our first choice…

I found this on the darksehnsucht tumblr. I don’t know the original source, but I’d guess it’s from one of the kink.com sites.

Depressed

I’ve followed the 49ers since I was a young boy in the UK. The first game of American Football I watched and actually understood featured Joe Montana and Jerry Rice destroying some hapless opposing team. At the time I didn’t realize I was watching two of the greatest players to ever play the game, but I did realize I was seeing something special, and I’ve followed the team ever since. I’m therefore feeling pretty grumpy right now, after watching them lose a Superbowl for the first time ever.

I’ve got nowhere I’m really going with this. I just wanted to share my grumpiness. As for the image, I stumbled across it earlier tonight and it put a smile on my face, despite the circumstances. I loved her tie and glove combo. Hopefully it’ll have an equally positive effect on my readers.

I’m afraid I don’t know the original source for this image. I found it on Ms Roxanne’s tumblr.

The mirror shot genre

Using a camera phone to snap a reflected mirror shot is one of the new genres in candid porn. There are entire web sites dedicated to it, typically involving young women. It often hits the news when celebrities do it, or when the girls involved are teenagers and inadvertently create completely ridiculous legal problems for themselves and their friends.

Here’s a fun variation on the theme – showing your bound, gagged and cock locked slave off. Personally I’d say that it’s the best version yet.

I found this on the Fuck Yeah Femdom tumblr.

The boyfriend trainer

For those looking to enjoy some virtual domestic violence, I have just the app for you. As this yahoo post describes, an Apple app called ‘The Boyfriend Trainer’ let’s you lead a guy around on a leash and slap/zap/mace him as you desire.

“Crack that whip and teach your guy a thing or two about being the Perfect Boyfriend!” reads the game’s description. “When scolding doesn’t work, just zap him, whack him and train him to be your ideal man!”

It sounds like a fairly stupid and obnoxious digital toy, but that’s not what annoys me about it. What really bugs me is what I’m sure would happen if this got tweaked into a BDSM app. After all, a lot of the actions described are things some men (including this one) enjoy immensely in the right circumstances. With some minor changes to the game scripts, and a new marketing campaign to cast it as a consensual D/s interaction, much of the criticism would be mollified. Of course if that was the application in question, Apple would undoubtedly ban it from the app store. They don’t allow sexual applications.

Jezebel points it out as a double standard between men and women. What annoys me far more than that is the double standard on sex and violence. Media featuring non-consensual sex and violence is a big part of mainstream culture. This application is a good example, along with movies available on iTunes like The Last House on the Left or I Spit on Your Grave. Yet mix sex and consensual violence together and you’re instantly confined to the porn ghetto.

Luckily there are better ways to train a boyfriend than swiping your iPhone screen. From the smile on the lady below, I’d guess she’s pretty happy with the progress from her training regime to date.

I found this image on the Mujeres Dominantes tumblr. It’s originally from the Strapon Dreamer site.

Let me have just a little bit of peril?

I’m in NYC for the first time in several years, and I just got out of a very enjoyable session with the wonderful Miss Troy Orleans. There’s a lot I could write about, so the obvious topic to pick is an old children’s cartoon called The Perils Of Penelope Pitstop.

You can blame this strange selection on D from Dumb Domme and her post ‘damsel in distress‘. She’s clearly not a fan of the iconic ‘tied to the railroad tracks’ trope…

It angers me that she doesn’t fight the villain harder and that she doesn’t struggle more to escape her bonds. It disgusts me when I suspect she exerts more effort craning her neck to see if a hero is coming than she does in trying to free herself.

This particular post grabbed me, because that villain/heroine dynamic is one of my earliest recollections of being excited by restraint, control and dominance. Specifically in the aforementioned Perils of Penelope Pitstop. If you’ve never seen it then this clip should give you some idea of the plot. Based on a 1914 series called The Perils Of Pauline, the cartoon featured a dashing and attractive young lady who constantly finds herself tied up and threatened by deadly Rube Goldberg like devices. As a child I never knew why it excited me, or how I related to the roles, I just knew there was something very compelling about it.

I get where D is coming from with her dislike of the scene, but I think she misses the submissive’s perspective on it. It’s the victim’s job to be the object of the desire. With ‘object’ being a key word. The villain is charge and creates the danger. The hero is in charge and (hopefully) removes the danger. Both of them desire the victim, but in different ways. The victim gets to be desirable but, as an object, doesn’t get to have control. She looks for the hero because that’s his role and his choice, not hers. She fears her fate but doesn’t control it. And that’s hot. It turns me on just thinking about it.

Obviously as a child I didn’t want to see Penelope actually get bisected by a train. But the combination of danger and helplessness pushed some deep internal buttons. The powerless female and mustache twirling villain might not be great role models, but I’m not sure that matters. After all I grew up wanting to be the victim. Although I never did develop Penelope’s love of pink.

When it comes to pictures of peril, Augustine is always a reliable resource. His images always seem to be the missing the hero character however.

Minion required

I’ve spent the evening packing for my upcoming New York trip. Not a fun time. Traveling to LA or Vegas is easy. Neither the climate nor the restaurants demand any sort of significant planning in the wardrobe department. Throw a few short sleeved shirts and a sports coat in a carry-on and you’re good to go. Manhattan in January is quite a different packing proposition.

What I really need is a minion to take care of it. I think I’d suck as a dominant, but having a minion seems like it should be easier to deal with. You never see evil masterminds worrying if their minions are having their needs met. Or doing any aftercare post massacre. Or blackmailing world leaders just because their minions always had a thing for financial domination. They just stick them in a colored jumpsuit and tell them to guard the hollowed out volcano. Can we not create a D/s/_m hierarchy for lazy submissives like myself?

While I return to jumping up and down on my case, I’ll leave you with a shot of someone being looked after appropriately. I’ll bet she doesn’t have to worry about shlepping her overstuffed carry-on bag around icy streets.

I found this on the Domina Desires tumblr. It’s originally by Kajali on deviant art, and is entitled Venus In Furs I.