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 DitaIf 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.

Kylie Jenner for Interview Magazine
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.

AtHerFeet
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.
PersonalServices

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.

5625250_orig

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.

Delilah

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.

StormTrooperI’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.

Satan in high heels

Yesterday’s post about a yodeling dominatrix got me thing about the idea of a singing domme. That inevitably led me to the rabbit hole that is web searching, which ultimately landed me at the wonderfully named 60’s movie Satan in High Heels. From scanning the description it’s a fairly standard 60’s morality tale of a woman using her vixenish sexuality to lure unwary males into depravity. There’s no dominatrix involved anywhere as far as I can tell. Fortunately, for the sake of this blog post, there is a scene featuring Stacey Kane (presumably channeling the spirit of Satan) wearing leather, brandishing a crop and singing that the female of the species is more deadly than the male. It’s not great cinema, but it is the kind of random pop culture I love stumbling across.

FemaleOfTheSpecies

The yodeling dominatrix

There are some words you never expect to see next to each other. For example, ‘joyful’ and ‘coroner’ or perhaps ‘Donald Trump’ and ‘modest’. Until today I would have put ‘yodeling’ and ‘dominatrix’ in that category, but thanks to a pointer from this article on Manuela Horn, I stand corrected. If you really want to blow your mind with unusual juxtapositions I give you the yodeling dominatrix singing AC/DC’s highway to hell.

If I’m going to be pedantic (and I usually am), then I might quibble about the dominatrix bit. She certainly has a fine line in fetishistic outfits, but I’m not sure I see any evidence of BDSM play or general sadism. Unless you count yodeling at people, which personally I would.

If you’re in Spokane in October then you can catch up with her at Oktoberfest. For those not in the Washington state area, I leave you with another image of unusual juxtapositions. If there’s someone out there who has been fantasizing about sitting in a paddling pool, wearing a panda suit, playing an accordion, while an attractive lady in an odd fetish outfit holds your leash, then today is your lucky day.

YodelingDominatrix

Lady with her man

I couldn’t really wrap up a sequence of posts on clothing without featuring a uniform of some kind. Although if anyone is arriving at this post after searching for ‘femdom uniform’ they’re probably feeling a bit disappointed.

The lovely lady in the boots is Cordelia Kuznetsova. I don’t know the gentleman, but I believe he’s wearing a French uniform from the First World War. In fact I should say from the start of the war, as the French military quickly figured out that wearing bright red pantalon was not the best plan when facing men armed with modern rifles and machine guns.

Couple
I found this on the he stoops to worship (aka Devoted Sub) tumblr.