Leash – Page 9 – Femdom Resource

Enjoying the sights

My solution to easy blogging while on vacation is to ~~shamelessly steal~~ promote other great blogs. In this case it’s the work of photographer Natasha Gornik.

This setting should be recognizable to anyone who has visited Central Park in NYC. The horse drawn carriages are the more famous means of viewing the park (and have drawn the ire of the new mayor), but this looks like one of the pedicabs. Typically they carry tourists, but in this case it’s Mistress Alex and Keith who are enjoying the sights.

I love the contrast between the formal and the fetish in the shot. You can read Natasha’s take on shooting it, along with other images from the scene, in her original post.

People tell me I’m white…

I really liked this image when I first stumbled across it. She has a beautiful smile, and their contrasting skin tone is aesthetically pleasing. I was less enamored of it when I dug into its source and discovered it came from a site called Black Girls White Slaves. Even though the photograph was unchanged, the fetishization of the racial elements spoiled it somewhat.

I don’t write about racial kinks here. I’m probably the least qualified person in the world to do so. I’m a white guy who grew up in a small English village, went to a very traditional homogeneous English university and now works in tech on the US West coast. That makes me both privileged and ignorant in this area. I have an instinctive discomfort when confronted with race based kinks, but I’ve never analyzed that deeply enough to figure out if it’s rooted in genuine intellectual problems with them or simple liberal squeamishness with the idea of making an issue of race.

That said, I will make one observation that’s very indirectly related to this area: When watching US television, you can always instantly tell the relationship pairings. It doesn’t matter if it’s an advertisement or a sitcom. There will always be a mix of races, and almost zero interracial couples. I didn’t set out to observe this, it was simply something that was obvious to me when I moved here and was surrounded by US culture. I don’t think it’s true for the actual people living here, but it’s certainly true for what they get to watch on television. I wouldn’t claim that as a causal factor in racial fetishes, but I suspect it’s symptomatic of the kind of cultural influences that create them.

For those that don’t recognize it, the post title is from a long running joke on the Colbert Report. Stephen will start with “I don’t see race. People tell me I’m white…” and then finish with some punchline featuring a white stereotype. For example – Now, I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because police officers call me “sir”. Or, check out this clip for another example.

A stroll in the city

This rather silly article popped into my inbox today. It features a smartly dressed man being led around London on a leash. Apparently it provoked a twitter thread with the hashtag #manonleash. I realize it’s not something you might see everyday, but for a cosmopolitanism city of over 8M people, I’m surprised it provoked that much interest. I’m pretty certain if you did it in San Francisco nobody would bat an eyelid.

It’s a good job it wasn’t this couple taking their daily exercise. It might have provoked a twitter meltdown and articles in the national papers.

This photograph is from Serious Bondage.

My mistress is good and smart

This is a continuation of the pet play theme. Arguably this image is simple D/s or CFNM, but something about their respective body language puts me in mind of dog and owner. I think it’s the way she seems engaged in an event or discussion off frame left, where he’s got that oddly fixated focus on some random thing that dogs do so well. Perhaps he just saw a squirrel?

I’m afraid I don’t know where this is originally from. I found it on the Male Pet tumblr.

Never interview naked

I thought this was an interesting article on how we intellectually react to an image of someone naked. The simplistic view is that we objectify them, treating them as less than human. The article claims that it’s more complicated than that, and that while we do consider them less intelligent, we also think they’re more sensitive.

In one experiment … the photo showed either just the head or also the shirtless torso. When presented shirtless, targets were seen as having less competence. This is just what you might expect from research on objectification: we’re easily induced to see others as mere objects, pieces of meat without thoughts of their own. But it wasn’t that simple. Shirtless targets weren’t seen as devoid of all thought. They were actually seen as being more capable of emotions and sensations than their less exposed selves. They didn’t have less mental life but a different mental life.

They even used Timothy Greenfield-Sanders Porn-Star Portraits book in one experiment and found that varying the sexuality of the pose simply moved people along the lower-competence/higher-sensitivity curve. True objectification never actually occurred.

Given that all the personal images posted on this blog feature a naked me, I can only assume my readers think I’m a delicate and emotional creature, who is thicker than a whale omelette. This also has interesting implications for the CFNM fetish. Often that’s treated as a power dynamic or a humiliation scene. I now wonder if there’s also a degree of subconscious role reversal in it for some men. Cultural cliches categorize women as emotional and men as intellectual. Based on the above finding, CFNM images would reverse that broken stereotype.

I thought this image (found on homer’s blog) was an appropriate one to use for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s obviously a CFNM shot. But it’s also an animal roleplay, and that seems to align with the intellectual/sensitive split. We don’t think of animals as competent. Nobody expects their dog to balance the household accounts or fix that leaky tap in the guest bathroom. But we do assign a lot of emotional attributes to pets. Dogs are seen as particularly dumb but sensitive, which is apparently much like our views on naked humans.

Kerfuffle in the blogs

One of the things I enjoy about blogs is watching opinions and discussions ripple out across them. As a medium they exist somewhere between a newsletter, a diary and a conversation. The dynamics are complex and I’m often surprised by what posts will sink without a trace and what will trigger a storm of discussion and controversy.

One recent example of this was a post by that well known troublemaker Ferns on the subject submission, consent and the D/s dynamic. That was followed by this post by kinkinexile taking issue with the definition of dominance used. That provoked maymay into a series of posts written with his usual tact and subtlety on the theme that ‘Dominants are Rapists’. You can read them in chronological order as post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6, post 7 and post 8. That’s a lot of posts, so if you’re short of time then 1 and 6 are probably the key ones to read. Spinning off from all that was this post by Tomio Black and this by gingernic, plus no doubt others I failed to spot.

I was planning to stick my nose into the debate, but for the moment I’ll play the role of the lazy college lecturer and simply throw it out there for discussion. I am, after all, a resource site. Possibly I’ll come back to it in a future post. It should also go without saying that a link here does not imply endorsement of any particular viewpoint. The set of things I find interesting includes many which annoy or infuriate me.

As a meta-comment on the debate itself, I will say that maymay’s case is not enhanced by his tendency to classify the emotional and angry responses generated as proof that he’s getting close to the truth. I could post that all submissives are sad losers who don’t deserve a real relationship and generate a lot of strong responses. That wouldn’t constitute proof that I’d hit a nerve and was onto something. It reminds me of the old joke – ‘Yes, it’s true they laughed at the Wright brothers, but it’s also true that they laughed at Bozo the clown’.

I wasn’t really sure what image to go with here, but seeing as Ferns mentioned chores, I’ll run with that particular theme.

Owner and pet

After a modern image and a funny image, here’s a pretty image to finish my trio of artwork posts. I think it’s kind of sweet. Other people go ‘ahhh, how cute’ at kittens and small children. I do it for pictures of leashed guys exchanging tender glances with dominants.

Based on the image’s distinctive style I believe it’s by the artist Kahori. I found it on the Elegant Femdom Art tumblr.

A cooling dip

It turns out that Hawaii is hot. Really hot compared to Seattle. Why wasn’t I warned about this? I was thinking it’d be a gentle warmth with a cooling ocean breeze. Instead it’s hot with a humid breeze. Many tall cold cocktails may be required to offset this.

When I first came across the image below a couple of days ago, it was the interesting opportunities for breathplay that caught my eye. The leash, piggback and breathplay combo is a rare one. Now I’m looking at it thinking ‘Wow, that looks like it’d be really refreshing.” The lady pushing my head under that cool water would just be a nice added bonus.

I found this via the Geek Domme tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution.

Battle of the brains

This is the kind of image that kicks off a fight between my lizard brain and my simian brain. It’s a nasty no holds barred affair that, unfortunately, is usually won by my simian brain.

The lizard brain always gets the first few shots in. It’s very shouty – “Naked Lady! Nice thick rope. Leashes are hot. Cute expression on him. Long legs! Butt! Boobs! BOOBS!” It does likes boobs.

While the simian brain is a little slower to start, it tends to finish stronger. There are less boobs and more – “Why are her legs shiny? Did she oil them? And, if so, why? Where did she get the oil from? They’re in some sort of derelict building or underpass. How would they end up naked there? Is she cold? That floor looks stony. I’ve got to think taking her shoes was an unwise move. His ripped jeans are a little dated. Although maybe they’re coming back. Did I give my ripped jeans to Goodwill? Am I too old for that look? I reckon I could still pull it off. Sorry, what was I looking at again?”

I found the image on the domina girl tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution for it.

Odds and Sods

I’m still sorting through the detritus of my vacation. Nothing coherent to blog yet, so this is a random collection of stuff that was accumulating in my brain.

I was hopefully on seeing the first few seconds of the Straightjacket Supermodel video that someone might have finally done a good femdom video. There are some nice tools on display and flashes of interesting imagery. Unfortunately it quickly turns to crap. There’s a stereotypical domme doing porny come-hither dance moves to the camera, right up to the point she axe murders her submissive. Obviously somebody didn’t tick the ‘not being axe murdered’ box as a hard limit.

This post on building a predicament bondage device out of a Mattel MindFlex toy is pretty interesting. Personally I’m skeptical it’ll work. I suspect if arousal was this easy to measure, scientists wouldn’t still be using these kind of crude devices. But I do love this kind of hacking and experimentation, so I really hope it leads to something cool.

A BDSM event had to be cancelled because some children may have been vaguely in the same zip code at some point. Clearly BDSM people should follow the same rules as those applied to sex offenders and always maintain a minimum safe radius from anyone under the age of 18. Which would actually suit me fine, provided it was the annoying kids that had to move.

I’ve finally caught up with my comment responses. Apologies for the delay on those. I always enjoy getting comments, but I’m frequently surprised by my inability to predict what will trigger them. I’ll write something that I think it’s interesting and provocative and get very little response. Then I’ll mention say nipple clamps in passing, and get a whole burst of comments. I’m certainly not complaining. As I said, I always enjoy feedback, whatever the subject. I’m just amused by how unpredictable it can be.

The image is by Sergej Medovikov. I found it on the Marquise tumblr.