Splash of Color

Surveys tell us that January and February are considered people’s least favorite month. That means we’re currently deep in the heart of gloom town. As a minor pick-me-up I therefore bring you this splash of color. It’s a nice reminder of happier, warmer and kinkier days to come.

There’s a subtle twitter handler woven into the image, but unfortunately it’s a suspended account. Poking around makes me think the image creator is Princess Honey now operating from this twitter feed.

Dealing with Ambiguity

I’m returning here to my prior post on the question of what is owed when ending a relationship between a pro-domme and a client. What’s a respectful way to navigate that transition?

The obvious response is that it depends on the history. If you’ve played together intermittently and just a handful of times, then the answer is likely nothing. It’d be ruder to reach out to announce you’ll not be requesting another session than silently moving on. If you’ve developed a deep and personal relationship, where the financial aspect is only part of the arrangement, then the answer will be very context dependent and impossible to generalize about here. But how about the middle ground? What about an ongoing relationship, with regular encounters over an extended period? The sessions wouldn’t happen if the client wasn’t paying, yet there’s also a shared understanding and familiarity that has developed over time. What then?

I think this situation can be awkward for clients to navigate for a number of reasons. Firstly, pro-dommes all have very different ways they approach things. That’s not just in style of domination, but also protocols, approach to sessions, communication, expectations, etc. For some, reaching out to explain would be a form of time wasting. For others, it’d be common courtesy. It might be hard to judge which scenario applies to your case. It’s not exactly a question you can easily ask!

Another challenge is the fact that pro-dommes can and do retire with little to no notice. Or decide to move and practice their profession elsewhere. I’ve had both happen to me and it can be quite disconcerting. Obviously, a domme can manage her career however she wants, but the possibility of a sudden departure is now always at the back of my mind.

Ultimately, I think what we owe each other should be the same thing. If I’d expect unusual consideration from a pro-domme if she moved on, then I should extend the same courtesy if I choose end the relationship. Outside of that very rare situation, I think a thoughtful email is a very reasonable approach between long term professional play partners.

In this gentleman’s case, moving on doesn’t appear to be one of his current options, although hypothermia might be. I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for the image.

Update: Thanks to my awesome readers I can now attribute this. It’s Princess Amber shooting for Brat Princess.

Taking It Literally

I was planning to post some follow-up thoughts to my last post, but the night is late and time has run short. Instead, consider this post as a humorous intermission between serious musing. It features a couple who really decided to run with the golden shower concept. I suspect that – as is always the way with makeshift outdoor showers – the warm ‘water’ will run out before he can soap off properly.

I’ve no idea where this is from. Reverse image search doesn’t link to anything useful sadly.

Why not both?

One final comment on the recent ‘Fetish or Fashion’ pop-quiz I’ve been running. Servitor posed the very reasonable question: Why not both?

That’s a fair point. As far as the resulting images go, they contain significant elements of both fetish and fashion. I guess I should frame the question around the image creators and their primary industry. Is it a pro-domme / fetish producer or a model being paid for a shoot with a (relatively) mainstream publication. Is it someone who spends more time in dungeons and playspaces than they do strutting a catwalk? What kind of animal do they usually have at the end of a leash? Petite Pomeranian or a perky puppy boy?

There’s clearly a healthy interchange between the fashion and fetish worlds. However, I’m not sure it’s always a equally balanced exchange. A lot of pro-dommes are extremely fashion aware. Unfortunately, on the flipside, fashion editors and photographers often seem confused about kink. A charitable take would be that they’re deliberately re-interpreting and re-contextualizing kink to tell their own stories. After all, their ultimate goal is different to someone creating material for a kink or fetish market. A less charitable interpretation would be they’re raiding kink for easy shock value and then haphazardly mashing its elements together without any really understanding.

I think the distinction between fashion or fetish often doesn’t come down to the clothes, styling, make-up or beauty of the subjects. It’s down to their understanding and intelligent use of the kinky elements. Or not.

This mainstream fashion shot is from Vice Serbia, features rapper Sajsi Mc and was photographed by Alek Živković.

Fashion or Fetish?

Somebody should really do a site where you have to guess if a shot is from a pro-domme gallery page or an arty fashion magazine. For example, take this image. Is it from a tweet by a rising star in the LA pro-domme scene? Or NYC’s latest supermodel shooting a cover story? Is she involved in a sordid world of drugs, money and older men taking advantage of younger women? Or is she beating men up for a living?

Answer: In this case it’s fashion, not fetish. Specifically, it’s Lindsey Wilson shooting for ODDA Magazine. I believe the latex was supplied by Vex Clothing.

Cocking a Leg

I’m all for finding creative angles to shoot femdom imagery, but I’m not sure they thought this image through properly. Her look is a very attractive one, but it doesn’t seem entirely appropriate to the high street shopping she’s clearly partaking in. A leashed man in a suit is a fine thing, but how is he going to pee against that flower pot with his pants still on? He’ll just get a wet leg and damp pants. Which is a kink in itself, but probably not the one they’re shooting for here. Basically she’s got too few clothes for the setting and he’s got way too many.

I’m afraid I don’t know the source for this. It’s from an old tumblr and all my reverse image searches show up empty. If you’ve any idea of who originally shot it then please help me attribute via a comment.

Update: Thanks to a helpful comment, I now know this is from the site of Lady Asmodina. Sadly she doesn’t appear to have a web presence anymore, so I’m assuming she has retired.

The Agony of Choice

Choosing images for this site can be an erratic process. Sometimes I can scroll through endless pages of tumblr’s, tweets and my personal image trove and not find anything that catches my eye. On the other hand, there are some content creators where why challenge is not simply reposting everything they do. I could happily re-post all of Sardax’s work or every image that Mistress Iris shares.

Elise Graves is another of those kinky content creators whose work I could happily feature on any or every day of the week. This shot for her Bondage Liberation site is a great example of why. It’s got a beautiful blend of heavy bondage and emotional tenderness. Just the kind of mix that pushes my buttons.

This was sourced from a tweet that has some more great shots from the same scene. It features Elise with Heavy, photographed by Kino Payne. You can get this film and more like on the Bondage Liberation site.

Ear Leash

A final post on the leash theme, with a somewhat puzzling drawing. I’ve seen nose leashes before – which I imagine would be very painful – but never an ear leash. Was this actually someone’s kink? Or was the artist just making stuff up for fun?

Talking of the artist, I don’t have an official attribution for this, but I wonder if it’s the work of Joe Shuster. For those that don’t know the name, he was a comic book artist famous for co-creating Superman in the 1930’s. As I covered in a previous post, he did some fetish and femdom art in the 50’s, and this looks to be a similar style and era. Clark Kent on his knees perhaps?

Pulled On His Knees

I’m continuing the leash artwork theme with this post, although with a pretty significant change of tone. This one is a lot more serious and painful looking. His cute little furry ears are clearly not earning him much sympathy from his owner.

Unfortunately I don’t know who the artist is or if it’s part of an image series. I’d guess it is, but reverse image searching took me nowhere. Momiji refers to red tinted maple leaves, but that doesn’t really help narrow it down.

Thanks to Sardax I believe I now can give an attribution: Koyo who posts under the @KouYou177 twitter handle. As Sardax says in his comment, his work is intense, but definitely worth exploring if you enjoy heavier femdom artwork.

New Augustine Artwork

I’ve featured Augustine’s artwork in a fair number of posts over the years, dating right back to my very first post. His blend of tenderness and vicious sadism is always appealing.  Unfortunately, his primary site was wiped out in the great tumblr fire of ’18. There’s various unofficial archives around, but I’ve not see any new work for years. Until now that is.

Augustine dropped me an email a month or so back with a rebooted version of an old series called ‘The Babysitter’.  It’s very much in his classic style – lots of predicament bondage, enemas and sweet sadism – but with updated artwork and text. I don’t normally host images here, given I’m on the hook for bandwidth usage, but I figure this set is worth making an exception for. The image highlighted below is actually the second in a series of seven pages. It’s been scaled down for quick loading, but you can find the full size version, along with all the other images in the series, in the links below it.

Entire images series is available here: Page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4, page 5, page 6 and page 7.

If you’re interested in the original series then you can find a copy here.