Mainstream – Page 39 – Femdom Resource

A cappuccino with a kick

Getting charged a ridiculous amount for a poorly made coffee in one of the major American coffee chains can sometimes feel like a metaphorical kick in the nuts. A Japanese coffee house has taken that a step further with the option of a literal kick in the ass. On top of that they’ll throw in some publication humiliation and verbal abuse, all for the bargain price of $15. That’s expensive for coffee, but an absolute steal compared to what a pro-domme will charge.

I have to admit that the idea of young women dressing as maids is kind of creepy to me, but that’s very much a function of my cultural background. There’s no shortage of different fetishized outfits used in America to sell products (including coffee and chicken wings). Japan even has an option for those men desiring to wear the skirt rather than admire it, as there’s a cross-dressing equivalent of the maid cafe. It can only be a matter of time before someone combines the two and caters to the niche who’d like to get kicked in the ass by a cross dressing maid.

Running the numbers

The study of sexual fantasies that I talked about in yesterday’s post contained some interesting percentages for D/s scenarios. It was simultaneously predictable and surprising.

The predictable bit was the breakdown across the genders. More men fantasize about dominating than being dominated (60% vs 53%). More women fantasize about being dominated than dominating someone else (65% vs 47%). One can argue about the reasons for that split, but it doesn’t surprise me. What did was the absolute value of the percentages. I wouldn’t have guessed that over 50% of men had fantasized about submitting and that almost 50% of women had fantasized about dominating. I’d have predicted much lower numbers.

Of course, as is always the case with these surveys, the devil is in the detail. There’s a big difference between a question framed as ‘Have you ever…” versus ‘Do you sometimes…’ The term dominated is also a very broad one. I suspect if I surveyed my male readers and asked them what being dominated meant, their minds would turn to leather, whips, chains, thigh high boots and Amazonian goddesses wielding enormous strap-ons. You know – all the usual everyday stuff. I don’t know what was in the minds of the 47% of women in this study who fantasized about dominating, but it probably didn’t match up too closely with that. Some of them might simply have meant cunnilingus that lasts as long as they want and great sex with them on top.

Image is from the Classy Femdom tumblr. I don’t have an original source.

What’s in a number?

There’s a new sex study popping up on a variety of news sites. It contains an analysis of sexual fantasies divided by gender, detailing what percentages fantasize about what activities. It’s always hard to know just how reliable or well researched these kind of surveys are, but given this one was by the University of Montreal and appeared in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s vaguely meaningful.

The Daily Dot article on it gets the underling message of it right. There’s really no such thing as ‘normal’ and no matter what you like, there’s doubtless a bunch of other people out there that share your fantasy. The Business Insider article is a little more judgmental and focuses more on the normal/unusual/rare categorizing. Those seem like unfortunate and inaccurate labels to me.

Let’s take for example the fantasy of being urinated on. I know that’s one that has appeal to at least some of my readers. It’s classed as unusual in the survey, with 10% of men and 3.5% of women claiming it. With around 300M people in the US, a naive extrapolation and some basic maths tells me that around 20M people in the US have fantasized about being peed on. That doesn’t sound all that rare or unusual to me.

Let’s put that number in context. That 20M is more than the population of New York, LA and Chicago combined (15M). It’s more than the average of 14M people who watched the 2014 World Series – the cliffhanging finale to America’s national pastime. It’s more than the highest rated sporting event last week (Monday night football at 18.8M) and the highest rate scripted show on cable (the Walking Dead at 14.5M). The biggest selling track of last year was Robin Thicke’s blurred Lines at 6.5M. So more people would rather get pissed on than buy a track from Robin Thicke. Remind me what’s unusual here again?

Some sexual activities are a little less common that others. Fucking automobiles for example. But if a fantasy is shared by the same number of people that attend Disneyland every year, I’m going to go ahead and say it can’t be called uncommon.

After using the example of watersports I really have to follow-up with a suitable image. This isn’t actually the act itself, but it’s pretty clearly a build up to a liquid lunch.

I believe this is another image from the Rinryu site (warning strong content including some scat).

Bayonetta

Having touched on gaming in my previous post, that does give me an excuse to segue onto a game related topic. Specifically the game Bayonetta, which features a tall, aggressive leather clad female protagonist. It clearly draws on BDSM culture (as alluded to here by one of the designers), but I’d always dismissed it as an example of the typical adolescent dominatrix fantasy that crops up fairly often in video games. Maddy Myers, writing in Paste magazine, thinks otherwise. It’s an interesting article, and she clearly identifies with both the dominant role and the leading character.

We don’t just get invited to watch Bayonetta, we also inhabit her. When I play, Bayonetta is me, and the camera’s glances are just the “sub gaze”—the male submissive’s gaze. Bayonetta holds all the cards.
Maddy Myers in Paste

It’s rare to read such a thoughtful commentary on a video game. It’s even rarer to have a woman come out as a dominant in a non-professional BDSM setting. Pro-domme tell-all articles are a dime a dozen, but I can’t remember the last time I encountered a woman identifying that way in the context of her professional non-kinky life. You can read more from her at her site.

While I head off to Amazon to order a copy of the first version of the game, I’ll leave you with some Bayonetta cosplay by TraumaticCandy. The original character design is deliberately freakishly long-limbed, and this costume does an amazing job of capturing that.

Gamergate and Wonder Woman

The Colbert Report finishes its run later this year. That makes me sad. Not just because it’s one of the funniest and cleverest shows on television, but also because Stephen has featured a lot of smart, assertive female guests who can happily trade shots with him. I’ve long harbored a crush on Emily Bazelon, who has covered a lot of legal issues with him. On Wednesday’s show he gave us a duo of brilliant guests.

First there was Anita Sarkeesian who educated him on the toxic clusterfuck that is Gamergate (other good coverage of that here and here). She has done a whole series of thought provoking articles on Tropes vs Women in Video Games, which is well worth checking out for anyone interested in gaming. Then he talked to Jill Lepore, a history professor from Harvard University who has just written a book on ‘The Secret History of Wonder Woman‘. I can’t say I’ve ever been a big Wonder Woman fan (apart from enjoy the TV show as a kid), but apparently her creation had links to the woman’s suffragette movement, early supporters of birth control and the political activism of the 1920’s. Despite being the first and most famous female superhero, I’ve never really thought of her as a feminist icon, but that’s what the book apparently claims. I’m looking forward to getting a copy to review.

Of course all this talk of Wonder Woman and feminism is really just an excuse to feature some fun femdom artwork. This is entitled ‘WHAP!’ and is by the artist godstaff.

Enthusiastic consent

Gawker has published one of the better articles I’ve seen recently in the mainstream press on sex and kink. Entitled ‘Vanilla Sex: A Perfectly Fine Way to Fuck‘ its message was to avoid trying to categorize sex and instead concentrate on discussion. What matters is what you and your partner(s) want, not some arbitrary definition of normality. It finishes with fine advice applicable to almost any sexual situation…

And that, I think, is what’s missing from vanilla sex. Rather than trying to “spice up” your love life with imported sexual practices that don’t fit your tastes, why not borrow kink culture’s emphasis on dialogue and enthusiastic consent? The hottest move your sex life can steal from kink isn’t handcuffs, it’s discussion
From a Gawker article by Monica Heisey

It’s tricky to pick an image to represent the concept of enthusiastic consent, so here’s a couple who at least look happy and enthusiastic about what they’re doing. Plus, if you’re going to do breathplay like this, consent is pretty important.

This is from the Hom Smother site. I found it on the Felm Cyber tumblr.

Pulling him close

Here’s another happy man wrapped in some rope. Admittedly I can’t actually see his expression, so unlike yesterday’s shot, I can’t definitely say he’s happy. But I’m willing to wager that he’s feeling pretty good about his situation.

The image is oddly entitled ‘Brutal‘ (free deviant art login needed). Not quite sure about the title, but I do like the image. It’s by Pavel Ryzhenkov, known on Deviant Art as West-Kis, a photographer based in Belarus. I found it on the Femdom Delights tumblr.

The Duke of Burgundy

As far as film titles go, The Duke of Burgundy isn’t an obvious one to use for a period piece movie focusing on a lesbian D/s relationship. It is also rare to see this kind of opening statement in a mainstream newspaper’s film review…

The Duke of Burgundy is the most tender love story you’ll see in which a woman forcefully urinates in her lover’s mouth

While it might be unusual, the majority of the reviews seem to love it. There’s that one in the Guardian, another in the Austin Chronicle and this one in the IndieWire. From their descriptions it seems to be a movie that really has an understanding of the dynamics of BDSM and some of inherent contradictions in a Dom/Sub relationship.

It’s not released until October 10th, but I’ll certainly be looking out for it after that. In the meantime it gives me an excuse to feature a fun vintage shot. These two ladies seem to be enjoying both nautical dress-up and spanking.

Songbird in leather

Celebrities strutting their stuff in fetish gear pop up constantly in the gossip rags (example case in point). The shot below is a little different. Eagle eyed readers may recognize the lady on the right. Yes, it’s Barbra Streisand in leather and brandishing (well limply holding) a whip.

You can see more shots from the same sequence in this article. It was taken in 1970 and was shot for a prop used in a movie called The Owl and the Pussycat. According to the article the prop was only used briefly, but they still seem to have shot an awful lot of images of Barbara posed a ‘cycle slut’. I guess I might have done the same given the chance.

The million eyes of Sumuru

Based on its imdb page, the million eyes of Sumuru was a pretty terrible movie. Despite that, I have a soft spot for these kind of cheesy 60’s exploitation flicks. They’re impossible to defend on an artistic, cultural or political level, yet hard for me to resist when I stumble across them late at night with a drink in my hand. I love the over-the-top poster below, and I’m guessing that a lot of my readers might enjoy this clip from the movie.

You can see the trailer for the movie here. In typically culturally sensitive fashion, the ‘asian’ Sumuru was played by the wonderful but very non-asian Shirley Eaton (famous for her role in Goldfinger)