Tag: Fm

Taboo

It’s often said that taboo subjects are a great source of kinks. Making something forbidden or secret gives it power, which in turn makes it alluring to our sexual subconsciousness. It’s a view that I’m skeptical of. There’s probably some truth in it, but it seems overstated.

The fact that kinks often involve taboo subjects doesn’t necessarily mean that the taboo is the cause of them. Correlation is not causation. For example, using mommy/daddy terms in quasi-incest roleplay is clearly a socially taboo area, but maybe people are simply kinking on the power differential between adult authority figures and youngsters. Or on the contrast between expected relationship and the distorted kinky version of it.

To show that the allure of the forbidden is the underlying cause of a kink, you’d need to show how changing the social perception of a subject also changed how people kink on it. I really struggle to come up with an example of that. A few weeks ago I wrote about the lure of the ankle in Victorian Britain. It’s clear that over the last 100 or so years, women’s fashion has changed enormously. What was taboo to reveal is now commonplace. Yet I haven’t seen any sign that kinks around clothes and bodies has diminished at all. Women in very visible boots or high heels no longer scandalize society, but the footwear fetish isn’t going away.

Toilet play is another area where the taboo is often cited as causative. If that were the case, you’d expect kinky interest in it to vary in inverse proportion to the social stigma. Yet Japan has a mainstream museum of poo, complete with poo themed video games and souvenir poo on a stick. At the same time their pornography has no shortage of scatological content. It certainly seems a lot more common than in US porn, a country far more uptight about the who/how/when of its toilets. Rather than repression creating kinks, it almost seems the other way around.

This image is from Team Rinryu, creators of the Yapoo series. Their content is fairly extreme and often scatological in nature. This scene is obviously just a simple face sitting one – and absolutely nothing more than that.

Cue the Worlds Smallest Violin

I’ve already written about my upcoming UK trip and my ability to pick dates that don’t quite align with people I’d like to see. The flip side to that is also managing to pick dates so I miss kinky visitors to Seattle. Apparently the Pacific Northwest is at its most appealing when I’m not in it.

Two in particular caught my eye. Mistress Iris will be here Aug. 19th to the 21st. Lady Grace will be here from Aug. 14th to 17th. Mistress Iris I’ve played with multiple times in the past (e.g. here and here). Lady Grace is someone I’ve wanted to connect with for a while now. If you’re a submissive in Seattle then I’d urge you to set up time with them. Partly because I think you’ll have a lot of fun. Mostly because I want their Seattle trips to be a success so they come back again when I’m actually in town. So schedule a session and it’ll be a win-win-win situation.

This is from Lady Grace’s twitter feed. When she’s not visiting Seattle, she’s based in SF. Her professional site is here.  Mistress Iris is based out of LA and her professional site is here.

The Warrior Princess

I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Katherine Hepburn ever since seeing her in the African Queen as a young boy. Much as I enjoyed watching Bogart as the cranky captain, it was the spunky and bossy Hepburn character that really caught my eye. Much like the late great Lauren Bacall in her movies opposite Bogart.

This image is Katharine Hepburn as Amazon warrior princess Antiope in a stage production of The Warrior’s Husband (1932). The set might look a little shoddy, and their shin guards fake, but her pose and body language is all kinds of hotness. The lucky man whose hair she’s grabbing is Colin Keith-Johnston.

The Forgotten Man

There really should be a genre name for the type of porn when it looks the domme has forgotten there’s a submissive in the room. It’s a small and somewhat odd niche in Femdom. I’ve never seen it in maledom material. It’d probably classify as a sub-genre of objectification and forniphilia, but at least in those the domme is typically aware of and making use of the submissive. In shots like this you get the impression she’d be surprised to look down and discover what she’s been resting her foot on. You can see another similar shot from the same scene here.

Based on the watermark I believe the original site for this has ceased to exist.

Bound by Troy

After my last post featuring bondage by a virtuoso of the art, I thought I’d keep the theme going with another equally accomplished rigger. This is a scene featuring Troy Orleans, sourced from her twitter feed. It was actually Troy who connected Elise and myself, so it seems particularly appropriate as a follow-up post.

I love the contrast in this image between the heavily bound naked man and Troy carefully contemplating what to introduce into the scene next. Oddly enough the man is @for_heavy, who was also the man in yesterday’s photograph with Elise. That’s a total coincidence – I picked the image out before I realized that – but it does speak to his excellent taste in the tops he plays with. Photograph was shot by @marcuslikesit.

Troy Orleans is a pro-domme based out of NYC. If you’d like to see more of her beautiful bondage material, then she has an OnlyFans site here. If you’re like to see her in person, then her professional site is here. You can also see more bondage material from @for_heavy at his site here.

Bound by Elise

Elise Graves was shooting for House of Gord in Seattle this week, and I was lucky enough to have the chance to session with her before she returned to the Bay area. Rope bondage, electricity, clamps and tickling were all the agenda, and much fun was had by all.

One of the great things about playing with different dommes is getting to observe many different styles of play. For the majority of dommes I play with, bondage is a complement to the main activity rather than a focus in itself. They want to make sure I’m not going to wriggle away, but once that’s achieved the emphasis shifts to hitting, poking and prodding. Elise tends to switch that up, where the bondage is the main focus, and the additional activities used to emphasize and highlight the restraint. Often in sessions I can almost forget I’m  bound, but there’s zero danger of that happening when Elise in charge. I’m always very aware of my own body and its interaction with the space around it.

Personally I find these kind of sessions very challenging but also very rewarding. It’s easy to lie back in a comfortable position and simply soak up intense sensations. In contrast, when bondage is used to stress and control the body, it forces me to think a lot more and to be very aware of how my body is reacting to it. I recently wrote about in session communication (post one and two), and I think bondage focused sessions really lean on that skill set for the submissive, even for the relatively easy positions I was put into. Awareness of your physical limits and tolerances becomes particularly important.

This is from Elise’s twitter feed and taken from a shoot for her excellent Bondage Liberation site. Elise is typically very gleeful and happy when topping and I think this image really captures that. The male model is @for_heavy. If you’d like to play with Elise in person, then her professional site is here.

Love of the Visual

There’s an old stereotype that men respond far more strongly to sexual imagery than women do. It’s an idea I’ve always been skeptical of. Partly because as a man I’ve always enjoyed the written word just as much as the visual image. Partly because it has a suspiciously neat fit with an old fashioned view of sexuality, where men are decadent pleasure seekers and women the gatekeepers of pleasure, rather than active participants. Mostly because women’s magazines are packed with sexual imagery via their advertisements. I’m pretty certain those ads don’t exist just for men in waiting rooms browsing old copies of Cosmo and Vogue.

According to this article in the Guardian I’m right to be suspicious. A study of studies has shown that men and women’s brains respond in the same way to pornography. Basically the same bits of circuitry light up, whatever your gender. The studies authors go on to say that it’s more likely social pressures and stigma are the reason for the stereotype, rather than fundamental biological differences.

Hopefully all my readers, whatever their gender, can enjoy this image. It’s by Mistress Iris, creator of a great deal of sexy imagery.

Beautiful Button Pusher

I blogged a few months back that my primary kink wasn’t a specific BDSM activity or look, but a contrast in dynamics. This image from Mistress An Li is one of the best examples I’ve seen of capturing contrasts. There’s his exposed white flesh against the black restraints and her dark outfit. The tenderness of the embrace against the severity of the humbler. The comfort of the bed against the tightness of the single arm. I picture him twisting and quivering while she strokes him gently. His moans against her murmured encouragement. It’s one of the hottest images I’ve stumbled on in a good long while.

This was from Daddy An Li’s twitter feed.

The lure of the ankle

There’s an old myth that women in Victorian Britain were so uptight that they’d dress the legs of their furniture in small skirts to save them from the lascivious gaze of men. It is of course bullshit. Unless you’ve got a very unusual kink for carved wooden furniture, nobody is getting off on piano or table legs.

I’ve also heard it said that Victorian men were inordinately attracted to the lower legs and feet of ladies, because being covered by long skirts made them all the more enticing. It’s true that something being forbidden or taboo can be a natural for kinks, but this view seems equally unlikely to me. Almost nobody wears very long skirts these days, with feet, ankles and lower legs regularly on full display. Yet despite that, foot and shoe fetishism is still a huge kinky niche. Femdom porn is packed with it. Clearly it’s just a common kink that some people have. So while I’m sure there were plenty of Victorian men who enjoyed admiring a shapely ankle, it wasn’t a function of their fashion and prudish social values, but just kinky people being kinky.

I’m not sure when or where this image was originally shot. In the original tweet I sourced it from (by @mrunderheel), it’s labelled as coming from the 1920’s (about 20 years after the Victorian era). Personally I’d suspect a scene from an early movie, but a reverse image search doesn’t give me anything to go on.

Update: Thanks to Bacchus at ErosBlog I can now attribute this to a 1925 play called The Grand Duchess and the Waiter starring Basil Rathbone. Fans of early British cinema may recognize that name, as he played one of the most famous incarnations of Sherlock Holmes in the 30’s and 40’s. So in a strange twist, if you’ve got Amazon Prime, you can actually watch the man in this image from the 20’s in several movies streamed digitally to your home. They’re pretty entertaining even today.

Never Fails

One constant of any trip I arrange is that I’ll always just miss somebody that I’d really like to have intersected with. It doesn’t matter when or where, I’m guaranteed to buy tickets, arrange hotels and then realize I should have picked slightly different dates. It’s one of those immutable rules of life, like toast landing butter side down and USB plugs never going in the first way round you try them.

For my upcoming UK trip in August, my big miss will be Mistress Natsukiss who is going to be in London doing a Club Pedestal show in September. I’ve featured Mistress Natsukiss in past posts (for example here and here). She’s someone whose style and approach to femdom has always caught my eye, but I never thought I’d ever be lucky enough to watch her in action. It turns out I was actually right about that, but only just. For anyone lucky enough to actually be in London in September, then I think it’d be a show well worth attending.

These two beautiful shots are both from the twitter feed of Mistress Natsukiss. Her main web site is here. Check out the Club Pedestal site or follow their twitter feed for event tickets.