Tag: Mainstream

Masochistic Hook-ups.

I thought this was an interesting Guardian article: I spent years meeting strangers for masochistic hook-ups. Was I a sex addict?

It’s written by Leesa Morris, describing her experiences with the aforementioned hook-ups. She left a vanilla marriage and leaned in hard to her kinks and desires. In fact she leaned in so hard that it became a dominating (ahem) and unhealthy element of her life, leaving her unsatisfied and unhappy.

There’s a couple of obvious takeaways. One is that anything can be unhealthy when taken too excess and dependency. The other is that if kink is an important part of your makeup, a monogamous vanilla relationship is unlikely to be satisfying over the long-term.

I thought it also highlighted a couple of interesting gender differences. Firstly, she describes the lack of aftercare in her transactional encounters in this way…

A solid part of healthy BDSM play is the cuddles afterwards. The official term is “after-care”, and it’s when the dominant heaps affection on the partner who has taken the punishment. Closing the loop, if you will. But because I wasn’t making meaningful connections, the guys would usually leave afterwards, and I’d be alone with my bruises.

I’m all for aftercare but I don’t think I’ve ever had a post session cuddle from a domme. Aftercare in professional sessions is mostly just 5 minutes to unwind, chat about what happened and drink some water. While I’m sure a lot of guys wouldn’t object to a cuddle and a lot of affection, we’re also happy to leave with just a hug and a bunch of endorphins to process.

The other difference was simply how many masochistic hookups she could arrange. A male submissive, outside of hiring professionals, could never make those connections so quickly and easily. While the difference in numbers between male submissives and female dominants may be over-blown, there’s clearly a big difference between the available of dominant play partners for female versus male submissives. And equally clearly,  both dominant and submissive guys are more at ease with transactional encounters. That’s probably not going to make news at eleven.

I’m not sure if this is actually aftercare, but it certainly seems like a tender moment. I found this via tumblr, but I believe that’s French domme Mistress Ibicella.  You can find her Bluesky here.

Second Skin

Fans of fetish, in particular its history and meaning, might want to check out a new book called ‘Second Skin’ by Anastasiia Fedorova. I discovered it via this LA Times review. It also got positive coverage in places like Cosmo and Dazed. I’ve not yet got hold of a copy yet myself, but it seems interesting and worth checking out.

“Second Skin” is more sociological than sexy; more anthropological than animalistic. Its raison d’etre is not simply to convey the history, the mechanics, the meaning or even the sexual pleasures of fetishism.
(from the LA Times article)

Discussing such a book does give me the perfect excuse to feature some lovely fetish imagery. This is Dusseldorf based pro-domme Miss Kiara. This touches on at least 3 primary fetishistic themes – leather, smoking and that black/white smart dress style. Although I’m sure those are not the only fetishes Miss Kiara might be appealing to.

Banging Heads

Here’s Wonder Woman fulfilling a common fantasy – cracking some political heads together. I’m sure we’ve all dreamed of doing this. Particularly with the current bunch of criminals in power.

The artist is H. G. Peter. He’s credited as the co-creator of Wonder Woman, alongside William Marston. Having just looked up his details, I was astonished to learn he was born in 1880. I know Wonder Woman is from the Golden Age of comics, but it still feels relatively modern. Yet its creator was born in the Victorian era and was already 34 by the time World War I started!

I Want Your Sex

A film featuring Olivia Wilde as a domme who pegs, spanks and bullies her junior assistant sounds like a winner. That’s the premise of the erotic comedy ‘I Want Your Sex’ which recently premiered at the Sundance festival. Unfortunately, the reviews so far (Daily Beast here and Guardian here) are mid to poor, which is a shame. Still, any movie that features Wilde as a sociopath in revealing outfits of leather, latex, high heels and chainmail (as the Daily Beast puts it) can’t be all bad. Maybe worth a stream once it makes it to a wider distribution.

This is Olivia Wilde attending the Sundance Premier.

Cosmo Moment

Cosmopolitan Magazine has an article out celebrating femdom and male submission as the ‘hot new thing.’ It always makes me happy to see positive femdom coverage in mainstream media. Destigmatizing it for women who might want to give it a try is great. At the same time, these kind of articles tend to have their fair share of eye rolling comments and this is no exception.

I was particularly amused by this part…

For many, there isn’t a traditionally sexual element — Sarah’s submissives, for example, have their genitals locked in chastity cages.

I mean I guess it’s not traditional to lock your dick up, but it’s sure as hell a sexual element. Chastity is all about sex, even if there’s no actual sex being had.

The other annoying part of the article is the references to the ‘default’ of male domination and this new ‘trend’ changing things up. When I think of actual BDSM and kinky content creators over the years, femdom has always been a huge part of it. The centralizing of men in the default dominant role in kink came from societies stereotypes, filtering from there into conventional porn, not the other way around. As one of the submissives interview in the article puts it…

maybe we’re all more open about where the baseline of kinky sexuality has always been

The artwork is by the great Eric Stanton. A man celebrating femdom decades before American society decided it was safe for women to be in charge of their own credit.

Grief Encounter

This site gave me  bit of a scare this week. First I couldn’t update or create new posts. Then I couldn’t log in at all. Fortunately, the hosting company has efficient technical support and got it all sorted out. Normal service has been resumed.

I was actually a little surprised at how concerned I was. I’ve been blogging for a longtime now. When I started I had daily posts. Now it’s more like 3 or so a week. I occasionally wonder if/when I’ll stop. Based on my reaction to the technical gremlins, it probably will not be soon. Felt very weird not being able to log in and post.

Anyway, back to the Femdom salt mines, digging up imagery and links of interest. Here’s a nice case in point. The image is from a short film caused ‘Grief Encounter’.  It features a woman picking up people at funerals to take advantage of their ‘overwhelmed’ state.

The film was directed by Ellen Pearson and produced by Erika Lust. If the actress looks familiar, that’s because it is domme Eva Oh, who I’ve featured here before.

Down Boy

I’m a little behind on my internet culture. When I first spotted this on a tumblr I thought it was just a cute femdom drawing. However, apparently it’s a meme format based on a purported Archie comic from 1975. Redraws of it have been showing up over the last year or so with different characters. It’s not even clear if the original ever existed, although Archie certainly has form in this respect. Whatever the origins and the recent interpretations, I’m a fan.

I’m afraid I don’t know how created this redraw. I think it might be yet another weird internet culture mash-up of these two characters.

Getting Medieval

I wouldn’t have expected to find femdom content in an exhibition of medieval art, but I’d have been wrong. The NY Met is running an exhibition called Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages which has a few pieces that seem blog worthy. One is a bronze water pitcher depicting the story of Phyllis and Aristotle (as covered here previously). Another is the bronze ‘spanky’ plate show below. Titled ‘Plate with Wife Beating Husband‘ it dates to the Netherlands circa 1480.

If you’re interested in more background the NYT has an article on it (gift link). It runs at the Met Cloister till 29th of March.

The Bad Wife

My last post was a one-off ‘fetish or fashion?’ special. Thanks to those who commented and I hope it was a fun one to guess at. The answer is: Fetish! Although I think it would be perfectly at home in a fashion magazine. The source is Natalie Noir who posted it here. Using photographs from Natalie in these kind of posts is a bit of a cheat code. Almost anything she posts is beautiful with great fashion and fetish vibes (as previously featured).

I thought it’d be good to complement the last ‘fetish but could be fashion’ image with a reverse example. This is the actress Julianna Margulies as featured in Harpers Magazine in 2011 under the title ‘The Bad Wife’. That’s obviously a play on her TV show ‘The Good Wife‘. I’m sure for a lot of readers we’d happily swap the good for the bad here.