Tag: Mainstream

House Boss

According to a study from China, attractive women wield more power in their households. Basically as their perceived attractiveness increased, so did the likelihood that they were the major decision maker.

It’s not too surprising a result. Repeated studies have shown that attractive people are generally treated better. Beauty helps if you’re trying to get a job or trying to get away with crime. It’s therefore not unreasonable that it’d also help you gain power in a household.

What I found interesting was this line at the end of the article.

It is also possible that interviewers saw wealthier women and those with more self-esteem as more beautiful.

The attractiveness rating was assigned by interviewers, so was obviously subjective. It might be the case that attractive people get more freedom to make decisions. But it also might be true that more forceful and dominant women are seen as more beautiful. What’s cause and what’s effect? Are bossy women perceived as more beautiful or do beautiful women get more opportunity to be bossy?

I’m not sure who this is or where the shot is from, but she certainly seems like someone who might be in charge of things. Or if not yet, soon will be.

The Cramps

From one rock band that didn’t want to associate with kink to another that very much did – The Cramps. Pioneers of the psychobilly genre, they were clearly lovers of fetish, horror, sex, B movies and pop culture kitsch. You know. All the good stuff. Their guitarist Poison Ivy had worked as a Dominatrix and clearly has a love for fetishwear.

They recently had a moment in the mainstream, thanks to the Netflix show Wednesday and Jenna Ortega dancing to their song “Goo Goo Muck”. If you like that then there are plenty of Cramps song guides online. I’m partial to the overtly kinky Ultra Twist, off the album Flamejob.

Alternative Kinks

This story about the classic band called The Kinks made me smile. Apparently they’re getting annoyed with Twitter tagging tweets about them as ‘sensitive content’. Presumably Elon can’t tell the difference between a sexual proclivity and a 60 year old English rock band. Kind of incredible to think the band formed 43 years before the birth of Twitter. Social Media SEO wasn’t much of a thing in 1963.

I had to smile because I always have the opposite problem. I keep a Google alert on a few different Femdom related keyworks and it’s amazing how often I get notified about something related to the band. For a group that hasn’t release an album in 30 years they show up in my inbox with a surprising frequency.

The image is of another British band. This one from a different era and with a very different back catalogue – The Spice Girls. Personally I’d prefer to listen to The Kinks, but I have to hand it to the Spice Girls when it comes to visuals.

I believe this was taken on their reunion tour in 2007.

Screen Icon

Raquel Welch sadly passed away last week. She was a screen icon, whose face and fame almost everyone knew, even if they’d not seen her movies.

Her most famous image was of a cavewoman whose haircare and bikini technology was far in advance of its time. However, for the purposes of this blog, I thought the images below were more fitting. These are from the 1969 movie ‘The Magic Christian‘, taken with one of the leads – Ringo Starr. As far as I can tell it’s a truly terrible movie, which is kind of amazing given the talent involved. As well as Raquel, the cast includes Peter Sellers, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. You can see a trailer here in all its 60s strangeness.

I’d say Ringo was either very brave or very foolish to let her try and whip a cigarette from his mouth. It doesn’t look like a fake movie whip. You can see a shot from the movie feature Raquel and the whip in action here.

Name of the Game

Do you know the names Margaret Hyra, Neta-Lee Hershlag or Demetria Guynes? Any ideas? How about Julie Smith or Robyn Fenty? You might know them better by their stage names of, respectively, Meg Ryan, Natalie Portman, Demi Moore, Julianne Moore and Rihanna. Does knowing their original names change the perception of their work? Outside of idle curiosity, I’m guessing the answer is no.

I’m writing about names because of this NYT article on sex work and working names. It’s written by a pro-domme named Mistress Natalie and details all the aggressive boundary pushing clients did to try and find her ‘real’ name. I’m sure its contents are no surprise to other sex workers. Clients who pay attention shouldn’t be too surprised either. It’s a common complaint on sex workers social media feeds.

It always struck me as a weird thing for clients to care about. I get why creepy boundary pushers do it, but what’s everyone else’s excuse? We’re accepting of professional names in all sorts of other situations. Isn’t the name that someone chose for themselves more interesting and meaningful than the one picked by their parents a few decades back? Nobody accuses Helen Mirren of being inauthentic just because she doesn’t go around calling herself Ilyena Lydia Mironoff. Although, frankly she probably should use that, because it’s an awesome name.

This is the great Dame Helen herself, shooting for US Vogue in 2013.

Eva’s Peasants

My subby fantasies were tickled by this news story on Eva Green. Apparently she had a falling out with the producers of a project she was working on and told them exactly what she thought. This included insults such as ‘peasants’, ‘arseholes’ and ‘fucking morons’. I’ve no idea if these barbs were justified or not, but I do have to agree with the article writer when he says…

She’s haughty and imperious. She knows exactly where she stands in the world, and she would rather die than hang around with the likes of us. Her contempt is tangible and, really, isn’t that exactly what we want in a movie star?

His conclusion is that we’d all like to aspire to this level of free expression. That might be true for the majority, but some of us would rather be on the receiving end of Ms Green’s acid tongue. Haughty and imperious are sexy attributes whatever someone’s profession. It also struck me that if she ever puts her face to a perfume then ‘Tangible Contempt’ would be an excellent name for it.

This is a shot of Eva from ‘A Dame To Die For‘, the follow-up to Sin City.

Why not both?

One final comment on the recent ‘Fetish or Fashion’ pop-quiz I’ve been running. Servitor posed the very reasonable question: Why not both?

That’s a fair point. As far as the resulting images go, they contain significant elements of both fetish and fashion. I guess I should frame the question around the image creators and their primary industry. Is it a pro-domme / fetish producer or a model being paid for a shoot with a (relatively) mainstream publication. Is it someone who spends more time in dungeons and playspaces than they do strutting a catwalk? What kind of animal do they usually have at the end of a leash? Petite Pomeranian or a perky puppy boy?

There’s clearly a healthy interchange between the fashion and fetish worlds. However, I’m not sure it’s always a equally balanced exchange. A lot of pro-dommes are extremely fashion aware. Unfortunately, on the flipside, fashion editors and photographers often seem confused about kink. A charitable take would be that they’re deliberately re-interpreting and re-contextualizing kink to tell their own stories. After all, their ultimate goal is different to someone creating material for a kink or fetish market. A less charitable interpretation would be they’re raiding kink for easy shock value and then haphazardly mashing its elements together without any really understanding.

I think the distinction between fashion or fetish often doesn’t come down to the clothes, styling, make-up or beauty of the subjects. It’s down to their understanding and intelligent use of the kinky elements. Or not.

This mainstream fashion shot is from Vice Serbia, features rapper Sajsi Mc and was photographed by Alek Živković.

Fashion or Fetish? Part III

Here’s the third and final part of my fetish or fashion game. This time it’s a two-for-one deal, with an image from each category. But which one is from the world of fashion and which from the world of fetish? I suspect regular readers may find it a little easy given who is featured, but it’s an image I couldn’t resist.

If you guessed the first was fashion and the second was fetish then congratulations. Have a gold star. Or maybe, more appropriately, a shiny leather one. The first image is Carmen Electra, shot by  Josef Jasso for Nylon magazine. You can see more images from the shoot here. The second one is, as I’m sure many readers might have recognized, the incomparable Mistress Iris. This was from her twitter feed.

Hot Advice

I’m always a fan of mainstream magazines running positive articles on BDSM and ideas for kinky play. Getting more people to explore their sexual interests is great. However, the media have a tendency to lead with the high risk stuff, which is pretty much the last thing new kinksters should be trying in their bedroom.

Take for example this Vice article on temperature play. It’s titled a beginners guide, but in the first half dives into topics like making fire torches with alcohol and dropping flammable propane bubbles on people’s skin. Admittedly they add a bunch of caveats about not trying it without training, but why start there in a beginners guide? There’s a ton of fun temperature stuff you can do with hot wax and ice cubes that isn’t likely to land you in the ER. Pretty much by definition, if you’re learning about temperature play for the first time from a Vice article, there’s nothing you should be doing in the nude with flammable gases or liquids. Leave it to the professionals.

This is the striking Lady Lola, someone who is very much a professional. She is a London based pro-domme who lists fire play as one of her specialties. You can find her professional site here and her twitter feed here.

Pleasing Aubrey

One of my longstanding celebrity crushes has been Aubrey Plaza. She has – at least in her public persona – a fun mix of intensity and playfulness. Not to mention the obvious hotness. I’m crushing all the more having seen this video comparing Jessica Chastain and Aubrey’s reactions to ‘thirst tweets.‘ Ms Chastain seems somewhat horrified, while Ms Plaza leans into it hard. Totally worth a watch or ten.

If you’d like to see more of her then I’d recommend the show Legion (currently on Hulu). The first season is excellent and, while the next two seasons aren’t as strong, I never grow bored of watching Ms Plaza tear up a scene. You can see the kind of thing I mean in this Season 3 trailer.

This shot of Aubrey Plaza as Lenny is from Season 1 of Legion.