Tag: Mainstream

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.

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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.

She can’t be all bad

It would be remiss of me to do clothing themed posts and omit the era of classic film noir. I love the movies themselves and the fashions of the time. The dames are all elegantly dressed, silver tongued seductresses, with pistols in the purses and hearts like a lump of coal.

The first image below is from the 1950 movie D.O.A (poorly remade in 1988). The second is from the classic Out of the Past – widely regarded as one of the finest of the genre – staring Jane Greer as the deadly femme fatale.

DOA
OutOfThePast

For anyone wondering about the post title, it’s a partial quote from Out of the Past.

Ann Miller: She can’t be all bad. No one is.
Jeff Bailey: Well, she comes the closest.

Rope tie

Continuing my clothing themed post sequence with this striking shot. It’s posted all over the web under the title ‘conceptual photograph’ but the attribution isn’t particularly clear. I think it’s by Polish photographer Michal Pedziwiatr, but I’m not 100% sure.

When it comes to clothes and female dominants there are millions of images I could feature. Not so much on the male submission side. The options there seem to be nudity, odd leather gimp attire or frilly cross-dressing. Personally I don’t have an issue with any of those, but they don’t fit into a stylish clothing themed post. I’d guess that the original photographer had a different concept in mind than femdom and male submission, but I’m happy to repurpose the shot.

RopeTie