Fm – Page 56 – Femdom Resource

Give him the finger

Writing about consent apps in yesterday’s post reminded me of a tweet that made me laugh. Unfortunately, age or possibly alcohol is muddying by brain tonight, so I can’t actually remember who wrote it or the exact words. I’ll have to go with just the gist of it here.

It was from an escort rather than a domme and was targeted at those vanilla guys who think it’s OK to operate in the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish” paradigm. She suggested sticking a finger in their asshole without prior warning and then seeing how long it took them to grasp the concept of continually negotiated consent and the option to stop and discuss boundaries at any time. Obviously I don’t encourage random anal exploration without discussion, but I do think it’s an amusing picture to paint to help some guys to understand consent a little better. Pretty certain most of the ‘Oh no, I can’t stop now’ vanilla crowd would quickly turn into the ‘What the hell! Get away from me and lets discuss this’ crowd.

Of course in the kinky world a finger sometimes isn’t enough. With the appropriate prior discussion, some people can even be persuaded to lose a whole hand in there.

I believe this is by the French artist Kevin Herault aka Kiwine.

The Cully Flaug’d

Stumbling across this picture on twitter sent me off hunting for some background details, which led me to this British Museum page. The curator’s lengthy comment on it (click to ‘More’ to expand) are fascinating and also very British. The caption reads….

What Drudgery’s here, what Bridewell-like Correction!
To bring an Old Man, to an Insurrection.
Firk on Fair Lady, Flaug the Fumblers Thighs,
Without such Conjuring th’ Devil will not rise

I think the description of a man having difficulty getting it up as a ‘fumbler’ is a poetic but cutting one. I’m also going to be temped to describe my future erections as the ‘Devil Rising’.

According to the curator, the setting indicates a brothel or ‘flogging school’ and the coins behind indicate a service being paid for. Which I think means that this image, created sometime between 1674 and 1702, is one of the earliest of a pro-domme at work in her playspace. I guess we can be grateful that the fashion for portraying the domme as haughtily staring down at the viewer hadn’t yet caught on in 17th century femdom porn.

Clamps in Cosmos

After the HuffPost’s 7 sex tips from dommes, Cosmo now brings us the 9 nipple clamps you should look into. Of course sex tips from Cosmos is nothing new – I’ve done my fair share of mocking them in the past. However, I think it’s indicative of how far BDSM has penetrated the mainstream that their nipple clamp article is a pretty straightforward and sane list of recommendations. A few years ago it would have been written in a giggly “Oh isn’t this so silly!’ style and given instructions for making your own with some sticky tape and an elastic band. I’m not holding my breath for a Cosmos article on urethral sounds or play piercing, but it’s still progress.

The article’s main fault is hiding something at the end that would be better called out right at the top.

Queen explains that when you remove the clamps and the blood starts rushing back to the nerves, it can be an even stronger sensation than when you first put them on. Damn!

Damn is about right. Taking them off can hurt a hell of a lot more than their initial application. In fact I find it’s often an inverse relationship. Spiky ones hurt a lot when applied, but they don’t cut the blood supply, so I don’t get that rush of pain at the end. The flatter, wider clamps numb nipples up quickly and lull me into a false sense of security. Then, when they come off, the rush of blood back to the nerves can be excruciating.

For his sake, let’s hope this gentleman doesn’t get distracted by his clamps and let the book drop. I suspect that would lead to more problems than sore nipples.

The watermark on the image has been cut off by someone, but I’m fairly certain this is from the CBT and Ballbusting site.

Araki

If you’re in the New York region and interested in photograph and bondage, then you might want to check out a new exhibit on Nobuyoshi Araki. The NY Times gave it a solid review here.

As I wrote in a post a few years ago, Nobuyoshi Araki was my introduction to bondage as art. Or even just the idea of bondage taken seriously. I stumbled across a documentary on British television on him and couldn’t get over how much effort he put into capturing these beautiful shots of bound women. Something that had always been portrayed as silly and slightly sleazy suddenly looked like fine art. Of course the fact he’s a tremendously talented photographer as well as being kinky as fuck helped with that.

I haven’t featured images of any of his work here because, as far as I know, all the bondage images of a bound women. Instead I’ll share something from Lady Chiaki and Lady Hinako from their LA trip.

I believe, based on the twitter post, the lucky submissive piggy is Stephen Elliot.

7 Sex Tips

Kinky sex tips from pro-dommes is a regular ‘go to’ for mainstream sites looking to attract clicks. They’re typically slapped together with little thought and I normally skip straight past them whenever they show up in my news feed. However, this one from the HuffPost, is actually pretty good. It features some of LA’s top pro-dommes, and the advice is both well written and well thought out.

I particularly like the suggestions by Mistress Iris to take orgasms off the table and not to be afraid to experiment and play around with roles. There’s no right way to explore kink and very little in life works out perfectly the first time you try it. Trial and error is part of life. Yet, with sex, we often get hung up on always achieving a specific sticky end result.

It might seem basic to some of my more jaded readers. But I find it’s often worth revisiting the basics. They’re important and easily forgotten.

This artwork, by the inimitable Sardax, is Mistress Georgia Payne, one of the dommes interviewed for the article.

It was different in my brain

The image below – courtesy of Mistress Evilyne’s twitter feed – made me laugh. I’ve seen many variations of the image on the left scattered across tumblr, but never stopped to think exactly how effective it might be. There is a reason why fingers and opposable thumbs conquered the world.

Of course fantasy and reality often don’t line up. I never fantasized about having plastic wrap draped over my face while someone squeezed my balls and shoved a metal rod down my urethra, but when it happened it was awesome. On the flipside, I did often fantasize about being trampled by two beautiful women in leather boots, and when it happened it was…fine…I guess. I mean, I’d do it again, but the reality didn’t match the fantasy. The floor was uncomfortable and hitting the sweet spot between good pain and the ‘I think you cracked my rib’ pain was tricky.

The life lesson is probably that you should explore your fantasies, but don’t get too attached to them. There’s a lot of stuff that’s way more awesome in reality than you’d ever guess. And a lot of stuff that’s best left in the mental spank bank.

Beware Hijackers

This is, for the moment at least, my last mainstream and political themed post. I promise that normal service of more explicit femdom topics will be resumed shortly. We thank you for your patience.

Writing yesterday’s post, featuring Ross Douthat subverting #MeToo for his own political agenda, reminded me of this New Yorker article from last year on sex and consent. I didn’t link to it when it was published because I thought it was problematic in some areas, but its underlying point is a sound one. It argues that while consent is a fundamental issue, the definition is often fought over. By way of example, it highlights the two sides in the feminist sex debate of the 70’s and 80’s…

One side argued that no consensual act should be punishable by either law or social sanction. The other side focussed on the limits of consent, arguing that consent was sometimes—or even most often—not entirely freely given, and that some things, like injury sustained during S & M sex, could not be the object of consent.

#MeToo has put the subject of consent front and center in the mainstream debate on sex. As kinksters we should be glad about that. It’s a topic we’re well versed in. Unfortunately, operating in the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste, political movements will inevitably try to subvert that discussion to their own ends. Mr Douthat is only the start of that.

One approach is to narrow the qualifications for consent so as to make it meaningless. Assert that any power imbalance renders consent meaningless. Given the endless variations of power through society – gender, race, wealth, culture, class – that quickly puts 99% of relationships outside the consensual boundary.

The other approach is to claim that consent can only be given by people of a sound mind, and that certain activities by definition indicate an unsound mind. This is the perfect catch-22. You’re free to do whatever you want, but if you agree to consent to BDSM, then you must be crazy, and therefore can’t consent.

If you want an active example of this kind of mentality in action, just look to the laws on sex work in Sweden. Sex work there is treated as a pathology that’s impossible to consent to. For example, Eva-Marree, an outspoken sex worker, lost her children because the system claimed she lacked insight and didn’t realize what she was doing was a form of self-harm. Consensual sex work was ruled to invalidate her ability to consent. Her children were placed with her ex, who then stabbed her to death when she went to visit them.

Consent is clearly a critical issue, but we need to be wary of people trying to redefine it or hijack it for their own political purposes. When a concept becomes powerful, it’s inevitable fuckheads will appear to try and exploit it.

This is Claire Adams and Eurosex shooting for kink.com. They’re clearly both crazy and need to be stopped for their own sake.

More Mainstream Porn stupidity

While I’m on the subject of stupidity and porn, as I was just a couple of posts ago, I should tip my hat in the direction of the NY Times. They’ve had a couple of recent articles that would fit under that umbrella.

To be fair to the first one – What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn – it’s hard to tell if the problem stems from the article itself or the porn education classes it’s reporting on. Possibly a little of both. It feels terribly dated, and that impression isn’t helped by the pictures that look like they’re taken from 80’s VHS tapes. Sexuality and pornography are incredibly complicated and interesting topics. Deconstructing porn and understanding how/why people use it and make it should be a fascinating area to dive into. Instead this turned it into ‘Porn isn’t real and can be bad, m-kay?’

The real stupidity comes with Ross Douthat’s column ‘Let’s Ban Porn‘. I might not agree with the title’s sentiment, but it’s a defensible one from a particular moral viewpoint. The stupidity comes when he tries to tie it to the #MeToo movement. Apparently widespread pornography has led to a lot of men who think it’s OK to sexually assault women because they’ve seen it in porn. It’s wrapped in a lot of bullshit and accompanied by much fact free hand waving, but that’s the heart of his point.

A slightly more fact based observer might note that men have being doing this shit for decades before the internet was invented. The key enablers appear to have been men in positions of power, with companies and social structures that covered for them, and a society that actively punished people for speaking up about assault. There have been some truly piss poor excuses offered by some of the men called out, but I haven’t seen any stoop so low as to blame internet porn. I’m sure they would if they thought they could get away with it.

A man trying to re-purpose #MeToo from a story about women speaking up about sexual assault into a way to push your personal politics is pretty obnoxious. And blaming internet porn for some men’s terrible behavior is a stupid as blaming comic books, rap music, movies or videogames for violence in society. Oh wait…

I guess if Ross Douthat was right, then publishing this kind of filthy pornography would actually be contributing to future sexual assaults. I guess it’s therefore a good job he’s got his head up his ass.

Updated: Thanks to a helpful comment, I can attribute this to Goddess Serena, a UK based pro-domme.

Comments Finally Fixed (again)

The relationship between webmaster and website should be a D/s one. I issue clear instructions, and it should quietly and efficiently comply. Unfortunately, if my site is a submissive, it’s an exceptionally bratty one. My instructions are mere suggestions, and it never misses a chance to test my patience. Given the amount of time I spend tending to its needs, it’s possible I’m actually the submissive here.

Back in May last year I thought I’d finally fixed the issue of comments containing ‘naughty’ words getting blocked or failing to post. It turns out that at some point in the last few months, my site decided it’d delete all the fixes I’d made and reset the relevant files. I’ve no idea when that happened, and I apologize if any comments got eaten. I’ve now re-applied the changes, hopefully for good. So please feel free to leave comments on posts. They should go through without issues now. If do run into problems please email me and I’ll give the site a damn good thrashing (Basil style) for its impertinence.

Talking of comments, I have to give a shout out to Bacchus at ErosBlog for this amazing comment. I sometimes play amateur detective when trying to track down an image attribution, but he’s doing some Sherlock Holmes level shit to track a random image I found on tumblr to the clip it came from. Check out his Patreon if you’d like to utilize his mad skills for tracing interesting content that you care about.

I’ll finish with some artwork that’s easy to attribute. This is from Yumine Guo, producer of much fine femdom art. After all my tinkering with it today, I’m just hoping my webserver isn’t quietly thinking the same thing this lady is.

The Nympho Librarian

It’s not often that researching an image for a post takes me to a high culture site, but this would be that rare exception. The culture in question would be this article in the Paris Review, the original source would be this book and the image in question would be the one below.

I’ve no idea if the book is any good, but I did enjoy the article it was featured in. And I definitely enjoyed the image. Heaven is being topped by a half naked librarian wearing glasses and falling out of her lingerie while I’m hanging onto a good book we can read together afterwards.