Mainstream – Page 31 – Femdom Resource

Food for thought (cont)

After that brief interlude, I’m back with a couple of final thoughts on the case of Gilberto Valle. If you missed the previous post then go read it from a couple of days ago. I’m not going to repeat myself, damn it.

One thing that repeatedly came up in the documentary on him was a variation on the slippery slope argument. Several people, including one of the jurors, expressed the idea that he was inevitably building up to committing a crime. Having started looking at sexually violent images, and moved onto discussion and chat, he’d feel ultimately compelled to up the stakes for bigger and bigger thrills. It’s an argument I’ve heard before about kink and it always strikes me as ridiculous.

In non-sexual areas we never assume people will lose all reason and control when exploring their passions. Imagine someone who is keen on flying. They start with buying a few magazines and video games on the subject. Then they begin visiting airshows and hanging out on pilot forums. Eventually they decide to get their private pilot license and fly for fun at weekends. Nobody is going to argue that the inevitable next step will be to sneak onto an military airbase and steal a fighter jet. That would certainly be a bigger thriller (and one guy even did it once), but we don’t assume the desire to fly will rob someone of their rationality. We typically explore an interest till we reach some sane limit based on cost, availability, legality, risk, etc.

Yet when it comes to sex a lot of people seem to believe that either you have a stable list of kinks and interests, or that you’re on one long slide into the abyss of depravity and illegality. I think it’s because people can only imagine two options. Either you’re satisfied with what you’ve got, or are never fully satisfied, and must therefore seek out stronger and edgier thrills. They have difficulty imagining more fluid and variable sexual interests that aren’t simply a constant escalation of sensation. Of course the situation isn’t helped by some crazy people who do escalate and go on to do horribly depraved things. But exception cases are always that – exceptional. It’s possible to explore non-consensual fantasies without ending up a rapist or cannibal, much as it’s possible to enjoy fantasies of medieval battles without hacking people to death with a sword.

I’ve no idea what was going on in Gilberto Valle’s head when he was chatting online. They were disturbing conversations, and I don’t think it was wise or ethical to feature his wife and friends in the chats. But much like free speech, it’s easy to defend something you agree with, harder and yet far more important to defend it when you don’t. In drawing a line between conspiracy and fantasy, we should always err towards giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt.

cat_and_spider_mouse
This image is from vore fan comics on DeviantArt and entitled Cat and Spider Mouse. Vorarephilia, as described by wikipedia, is the erotic desire to be consumed by, or sometimes to personally consume, another person or creature. Vore fantasies are separated from sexual cannibalism because the living victim is normally swallowed whole. Apologies if anyone is disturbed by the image, but vore does occasionally show up in femdom artwork, and it seemed appropriate given the original subject matter.

Food for thought

A new year of femdom blogging is opening up before me. So what better way to get going than with some articles on a man who fantasies about killing and eating women? Not exactly femdom I know. If fact, about as far from femdom as you can get. However, the story does raise some important issues around fantasies and on-line behavior that are worth pondering.

The man in question is Gilberto Valle, a former NYC cop. He frequented fetish websites and chat rooms where he shared some very dark discussions around torture, murder and cannibalism. More problematically he used the names and photographs of his wife and female friends in these discussions. When his wife found out she was understandably horrified and told the police. He claimed the discussions were all fantasies. They claimed they were a conspiracy to commit a heinous crime. The jury believed the police and found him guilty. That conviction was then overturned by the judge who said he couldn’t be found guilty for a ‘thought crime’.

There’s a good article on the case, written just after his conviction, available from the New York Magazine. Slate has a follow-up interview with him after he was released. What prompted this post was a fascinating HBO documentary on the case called ‘Though Crimes’. I watched it last week and it raises some really interesting issues around how lines can be drawn between fantasy and reality. If you’re in the US and have HBO on-demand, it’s currently available there.

A key part of the goverment case centered on his Google searches. For a crime to take place there has to be intent – a substantial step taken towards committing it. In this case, lacking hard physical evidence, his searches were taken as evidence of intent. That’s a pretty scary jump to make. The barrier between having a thought and expressing it to a search engine is almost non-existent. How do you distinguish between the intent of someone trying to create a realistic fantasy and the intent to carry out that fantasy? How many of us would like to explain our search histories to the world? Or to defend them to a prosecutor trying to cast them in the worst possible light?

The law has evolved based on the physical world, where actions have costs in time/money/effort. That tells us more about intent. I don’t have much sympathy for the conviction of Chris Asch, one of the people involved in the online discussion, who amassed a very scary collection of tools. You don’t need to own a stun gun to write a good fantasy about using one. But the online would has essentially zero barrier to actions like searching, typing or clicking. One can only hope the law can evolve to incorporate this fact. An online search is much more like a thought than an action.

I generally think that incorporating real people into sexual or violent stories without their knowledge is pretty unpleasant and unethical. But if my opinion doesn’t sway you, and you write about dark non-consensual fantasies online, then keep this case in mind. If you end up as next weeks headlines, it might suck to be thought sick and weird, but that’s definitely better than adding dangerous and criminal into the mix.

– Image Removed by Request –

Happy 2016

I hope all my readers enjoyed the last evening of 2015 and didn’t wake up too hungover for the start of 2016. Champagne is the traditional way to greet midnight on New Years eve, and I always used to try and stash a bottle of good champagne away for that moment. However, experience has taught me that the time to drink the good champagne is at the start of the evening, when everyone will appreciate it. By the time midnight rolls around then anything the right color with a few bubbles in it will do.

The image below is from an advertising campaign for Dom Perignon champage. It was shot by Karl Lagerfeld and features Claudia Schiffer. I’m not really sure what the connection between the champagne and the fetish gear is, but that’s often the case with these kind of ‘artistic’ ads. I certainly wouldn’t object if my 2016 featured several bottles of Dom and a whip wielding Claudia Schiffer.

Dom Perignon campaign featuring Claudia Schiffer

Lending a helping hand

This news article on a Hull based dominatrix helping to feed the homeless om Christmas day put a smile on my face for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s obviously a very very nice thing for Hull’s Mistress Dita to have done. From reading the article it’s also not her first efforts in this area, so she’s clearly someone to be applauded. The second thing I like was the way the article itself was written. The word dominatrix was used in much the same way you might say ‘local business owner’ or ‘entrepreneur’. It’s rare for the press to resit the urge to make stupid comments about kink or BDSM or sex work whenever the chance arises. To see it treated with such a neutral tone makes a pleasant change.

Mistress Dita If you’re looking for a pro-domme in the Hull area of the UK, then Mistres Dita certainly seems like a great person to connect with. Her site isn’t responding to me right now, but her twitter feed is very active and has contact info in it.

What a dummy

Somebody really needs to start sponsoring pro-domme sessions for editors of gossip and celebrity web sites. I’m not sure they really understand the concept of domination or femdom, but perhaps it’d be possible to beat it into them.

The latest idiocy I’ve seen in this vein was triggered by this Interview Magazine photo spread with Kylie Jenner (photographed by Steven Klein). In it she appears to be pretending to be some sort of mannequin or blank posed doll. They are admittedly fetish shots, but she captures no element of a dominatrix in any of them. Carrying a serving tray with a glass of wine and wearing ass-less pants is not a very domme thing to do. Yet every damn gossip/fashion/news site (for example here, here and here) describes her as going for a full on dominatrix look. Most of them even lead with the picture of her being picked up and carried by a man, right under the word dominatrix.

To be fair the original article doesn’t use that expression. It’s just every idiot who links to it does. Somebody needs to inform these people that a domme is about power, control and domination. Not slipping on a tight latex outfit and doing what you’re told.

For my featured image I’ve picked the one shot that almost works as a femdom shot, if you don’t see it in the context of the other images in the shoot.

Wistful Desire

After yesterday’s depressing post, here’s something a little more positive. It features an image that gives me odd sensations in the stomach region. The sort of flip flop sensation I’d get when I was a young boy and saw a girl I secretly liked on the playground. In those days I’d have punched her on the arm and then ran away. Now I write blog posts. I guess that’s progress of a sort.

Much like then, I can’t explain why this affects me the way it does. Maybe it’s her poise and elegance. Maybe it’s the overall pose. Maybe it’s the look on his face. Whatever it is, it works. It’s not an image that provokes a lustful response in me, so much as a mix of longing and wistful desire.

I believe this is from a TV show called Verliebt in Berlin, which is a comedy-drama. The episode in question is a wedding special, so presumably this is a proposal. Probably if I watched the show itself I might have had a very different reaction to this image, but shorn of the original context I like it a lot.

Cynthia Payne

I was sad to read of the death of Cynthia Payne, who died on November 15th aged 82. As this obituary makes clear she had a rich and complicated life, and was a famous advocate for sex work. Despite having a great name for a dominatrix, she wasn’t strictly that. Instead she worked as an escort, brothel manager, sex party organizer and general provider of both kinky and non-kinky experiences. Maybe it says something about the English that she started as a general sex worker, but became known for all the kinky activities she was asked to help organize.

Two different films were shot based on her life. The early years were portrayed in Wish You Were Here. However, the more relevant one for this blog is Personal Services. Directed by Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) and starring Julie Walters (from films such as Educating Rita and Billy Elliot), it told the story of her later life and sex work. It’s pretty tame by today’s standards, but I think worth seeking out. I think this quote gives a flavor for the very British humor involved…

[Wing Commander Morten, dressed in a French maid’s uniform, is dragged along the corridor to the cells after a police raid on the brothel]

Morten: [yells] I am retired officer of the RAF, twice decorated. I flew two hundred and seven missions over occupied territory – in bra and panties!
Policeman: You’re a disgrace.
[the cell door slams shut]
Morten: [yells, with hands on hips] This is no way to treat a lady!

I don’t have a picture of that scene, but here’s another one from the movie featuring another particularly British kink.

Observational bias

Jezebel has a fairly silly article on the increase in young tech workers visiting pro-dommes. Like a lot of similar articles it suffers from the problem of observational bias.

Pro-dommes are often the face of kink, as they’re easy to find and (in some cases) happy to advertise. Unfortunately they’re also expensive to visit. On the West coast that means $200 to $300 per hour, which is a lot for the average household. That means the clientele skews to the well off. And since well off men tend to be older, we end up with the cliche of the middle aged banker or lawyer who needs to blow off steam between doing million dollar deals. Now the booming tech economy in some parts of the US has landed a bunch of cash on a small number of software developers, and we get stories about them visiting pro-dommes. The key issue here isn’t kink or sexuality, it’s opportunity. I’m pretty certain if all pro-dommes universally reduced prices to $10 per hour, we’d be seeing articles on the incredibly variety of different people who visit them.

On the plus side, the article does give me an excuse to feature a photograph of one of the dommes interviewed – the lovely Mistress Morgana of San Francisco.

Hedy Lamarr

Google used one of their doodles to pay a nice tribute to the actress Hedy Lamarr this week. She combined two very unusual careers – Hollywood leading lady and inventor. There have been many attractive femme fatales in movie history, but I’m unaware of any others who held a patent on frequency hopping wireless communication. That’s an idea that forms the basis for modern WiFi and cellphone signals.

As an actress one of her more famous roles was as the biblical Delilah in the 1949 movie. I’ve always thought that Delilah’s reputation for betrayal and deceit was somewhat undeserved. The biblical verses in question say that Samson loved her, but they don’t say how she felt about the issue. It would be one thing if she betrayed the love of her life, but maybe he was just an annoying jerk who wouldn’t take no for an answer. More importantly, every time he claimed to tell her the secret of his strength, she immediately betrayed him to the Philistines in a very obvious fashion. Yet despite three separate betrayals, Samson still went on to tell her the truth about his hair. The lesson from this shouldn’t be that Delilah was deceitful. It’s that Samson was a colossal moron.

Dress up games

For some kinky people any night of the week is a good one to put on a fun costume and go to a party as another character. The rest of the world tends to reserve that kind of behavior for special occasions. In the US that means Halloween. Traditionally that’s the time for occult decorations, kids stuffing themselves with candy and articles debating or decrying how sexualized costumes are these days.

With the new Star Wars movie coming out this year, I’m expecting that’ll be a popular theme. In that line, my favorite really terrible costume to date is this one for Darth Vader. Clearly literally seconds of thought went into that design. They didn’t even bother to give her a light saber. By contrast, I think the outfit in the image below is brilliant. It’s sexy, grimy, accurate and she has a kick ass sparkly storm trooper helmet. Plus, they’ve got a vacuum bed for the carbonite frozen Hans Solo. Admittedly, that’s probably hard to take to a party, but it’d work great if you were hosting.

I’d love to know where this is from, but reverse image searching gives me absolutely nothing. If anyone can help me attribute it, then please leave a comment.

Updated: Thanks to VirtuaFunBR I have the right link to Kink Engineering and this specific post.