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Book Club: Dominatrix on Trial

Welcome to a new series of occasional posts featuring femdom or kink related literature. The plan is to review and recommend books I think might be interesting to my readers. The reality will probably consist of me blathering about whatever caught my eye recently in the kindle store.

First up is Terri-Jean Bedford’s Dominatrix on Trial : Bedford v’s Canada. She’s the retired pro-domme who was recently in the news for taking on the Canadian prostitution laws. This is her autobiography and it splices the drama of her legal entanglements into her life story and work as a pro-domme. She had a troubled upbringing, and an early life that featured drugs, prostitution and low paid jobs. She eventually found stability and a profitably career working as a pro-domme in a dungeon space she designed and created. That is until the police raided it in a very public fashion and splashed her name across the front pages. Rather than take the easy plea bargain she fought back, and the book describes how and who helped do so.

I’ll get the negative stuff out of the way first. Bedford is a solid writer, and communicates the who/what/why information clearly. However, she doesn’t bring it vividly to life in the way a professional writer might have done. I believe she wrote the book over a number of years as the cases progressed, and it’s a shame it couldn’t have been as a collaboration with someone with more literary experience. She also writes a fair amount about her dungeon and the interests of the people who visited, which might be shocking to vanilla readers, but will probably be old news to regularly visitors to this blog. Finally, in several spots she makes sweeping statements about BDSM and why people, particularly submissive men, are kinky. She may be accurately describing her experiences, but I don’t think they can be extended universally, given how complex and varied the world of kink is.

All that said, I did enjoy the book. Some righteous anger at the broken legal system and those who enforce it can be cathartic. Her life has been a turbulent one, and it was inspiring to hear how she kept fighting and about the people who rallied around to help, contributing time and money to her cause. A lot of the lawyers worked pro bono, but the court expenses still racked up quickly, and she was in no position to pay them. The lawyer Alan Young comes across as particularly heroic, leading her original defense to the charges, and then leading the constitution challenge that was eventually successful. The book itself stops just before the recent Supreme Court announcement, but watching that final chapter play out on the news made for a particularly satisfying conclusion all of its own.

You can pick the book up at a variety of online locations – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Google, etc. Given she’s now retired with health issues I’m sure she’d be very grateful for every copy sold.

Fuel for the creative storyteller

Here’s a picture that’s worth much more than a thousand words. I can imagine many interesting storylines that could be spun from it. Who are they? What’s their relationship? Where are they? Is this post-sex, pre-sex or a no sex situation? Why on earth did she not tell him to take those socks off?

Personally I like to think it’s her bedroom and it’s a bosses wife/employee situation. He’s not measuring up in any department, and she’s going to fix that no matter what the time and cost (to him). I’m sure fans of CFNM and of older women with younger men can conjure up many more fantasies from this particular image.

This is originally from a photoset for V Magazine shot by Donald McPherson. Sadly all the other images in the photoset have a very different vibe to this. I found it on the Her Butler tumblr.

Tis the season

This is the time of year when Christmas themed images start appearing on blogs. It’s also normally the time of year when I start cursing my lack of suitable material. I’m a fairly ad-hoc blogger, tracking down images as and when I need them for a post. The problem is that Christmas themed femdom is rare, and hunting for it on an as needed doesn’t really work. Fortunately, having encountered this problem twice before, I’ve got a bit more organized in advance this year. I at least have 2 or 3 suitable images saved, so brace yourself for a (very) short series of festive posts.

This first one features Ida Lupino, a pioneering female director and star of such classic movies as They Drive by Night and High Sierra. According to this blog post the image was shot at a Warner Brothers holiday party in 1942.

News from north of the border

A professional dominatrix made a little bit of history in Canada yesterday. Terri-Jean Bedford (actually a retired pro-domme), along with Amy Lebovitch and Valerie Scott, won their case in front of the Canadian Supreme Court to strike down the countries anti-prostitution laws. This Tits and Sass post has a round-up of various links on the news. You can see some of the positive reaction from pro-dommes and other sex workers in twitter comments like this, this and this.

Some of you might be wondering why a pro-domme is involved in anti-prostitution laws. After all, don’t pro-dommes abstain from sex with clients? The reality is that when it comes to sexual matters the law is frequently an ass. In this case Terri-Jean Bedford was legally working in her own space as a pro-domme in 1994 when the Toronto police raided and arrested her. The confiscated all her equipment, splashed her name across the papers and ultimately (in 1998) convicted her of keeping a bawdy house. Since then, with the help of a dozen anonymous backers, she’s been fighting the legal system. And, as it turns out, winning.

The confluence of sex, commerce, morality and law is always going to be a complex one. I’ve therefore adopted a simple rule I always start with in these matters – listen to the voices of the people involved. It’s fine to debate with academics* and politicians, but not all opinions are equal. And in this case the opinions of sex workers are both far more important and (as far as I can tell) unequivocally in favor of this ruling. So a big congratulations to Ms Bedford, someone who can certainly rock a leather jacket and riding crop look.

I’m actually in the process of reading her book Dominatrix on Trial. I’ll put a review of it up at some point soon.

* The exception to debating academics would be people like Gail Dines and Melissa Farley. Their twisting of facts and obvious bias disqualifies them instantly from any sensible debate.

Gangs of New York

One look at their footwear tells you these are not people who actually ride motorcycles. Yet I still like this shot. The old school British motorbikes are very stylish, as are the leather outfits. As an image it’s almost a double cliche. It was shot for Vogue by Peter Lindbergh in 1991, and obviously apes the biker iconography of the 50’s. Yet looking at it now, it is also a great example of the kind of supermodel photo shoots that were so common in the 80’s and 90’s.

The models featured are Naomi Campbell, Karen Mulder and Helena Christensen. The photographer was Peter Lindbergh. You can see more images from the shoot here.

Never interview naked

I thought this was an interesting article on how we intellectually react to an image of someone naked. The simplistic view is that we objectify them, treating them as less than human. The article claims that it’s more complicated than that, and that while we do consider them less intelligent, we also think they’re more sensitive.

In one experiment … the photo showed either just the head or also the shirtless torso. When presented shirtless, targets were seen as having less competence. This is just what you might expect from research on objectification: we’re easily induced to see others as mere objects, pieces of meat without thoughts of their own. But it wasn’t that simple. Shirtless targets weren’t seen as devoid of all thought. They were actually seen as being more capable of emotions and sensations than their less exposed selves. They didn’t have less mental life but a different mental life.

They even used Timothy Greenfield-Sanders Porn-Star Portraits book in one experiment and found that varying the sexuality of the pose simply moved people along the lower-competence/higher-sensitivity curve. True objectification never actually occurred.

Given that all the personal images posted on this blog feature a naked me, I can only assume my readers think I’m a delicate and emotional creature, who is thicker than a whale omelette. This also has interesting implications for the CFNM fetish. Often that’s treated as a power dynamic or a humiliation scene. I now wonder if there’s also a degree of subconscious role reversal in it for some men. Cultural cliches categorize women as emotional and men as intellectual. Based on the above finding, CFNM images would reverse that broken stereotype.

I thought this image (found on homer’s blog) was an appropriate one to use for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s obviously a CFNM shot. But it’s also an animal roleplay, and that seems to align with the intellectual/sensitive split. We don’t think of animals as competent. Nobody expects their dog to balance the household accounts or fix that leaky tap in the guest bathroom. But we do assign a lot of emotional attributes to pets. Dogs are seen as particularly dumb but sensitive, which is apparently much like our views on naked humans.

Fashion victim

I’m back in freezing Seattle after my jaunt down the coast to California. From a food and friends perspective the trip was a storming success. If you’re in LA and looking for great restaurants I’d strongly recommend Scratch Bar, Ink and hinoki & the bird. They were the three standouts of all those I tried.

From a kinky perspective it wasn’t quite as successful. The original person I planned to see had a scheduling conflict and we never could quite align our calendars. Then my alternative choice turned out to be sick and unable to play. At that point, rather than ringing around for a last minute beating, I decided it simply wasn’t meant to be. Instead I went clothes shopping in Beverly Hills. That’s an entirely different level of masochism. The sales assistants might not dress in leather, but they can certainly inflict punishment. I got a figurative screwing that was more expensive than a literal one. Although at least I ended up taking more home than a sore bottom.

The topic of clothes and fashion does give me an excuse to feature some fashion based femdom. This is for voodoo hosiery and taken from their 2010 ad campaign.

Talking over a bear

This rather intriguing artwork is by the artist Waldemar-Kazak. It’s called ‘Talking over a bear’ and you can see the original full size version over on his Deviant Art page. I’m not exactly sure what the story is behind it. There’s a very 50’s feel to it, an edge of melancholy created by his expression and a weird sexy vibe (at least in my strange brain). It looks like it should be an illustration for a twisted short story in something like the New Yorker.

I originally came across this in the Femdomarts tumblr.

Airline femdom

After this post Servitor quite rightly took me to task for having no good examples of airline femdom. He cited the NOFX track S&M airlines (great band, but not their best track), the artwork of the brilliant Sardax and his own particular riffs on the theme.

All these are fine examples, but I think he’s missing one of the best, albeit most subtle ones. That would be the Delta safety video featuring the stewardess who is definitely not a fan of smoking. I’m sure that many a submissive flyer felt a delightful inner quiver when she did her finger wag (around 1:50 in the video).

I’d always assumed she was an actress hired to film the video, but it turns out she’s a Delta flight attendant who has continued to work as one. That’s particularly impressive given how many delta flyers must have asked her for a personal reprise of her starring role.

Beauty of my dish

Japan has a rich tradition of erotic artwork. Shunga prints have recently become well known and admired in the West. This piece is of a more recent vintage and is by the artist Ryoko Kimura. It’s entitled ‘Beauty of My Dish – My man’s body dish for L’opera gateau au chocolat’ and if you’re interested in purchasing it or similar works it sold for around $32,000 US dollars back in 2005.