Mainstream – Page 52 – Femdom Resource

The root of all evil

Given the number of external links I include in my posts and across the site, I should probably post my policy on monetizing web traffic, affiliate links and advertising. I’d hate people to get the wrong impression of why I link to what I do.

The short answer is that I make no money from anything here. You’ll never see links to commercial sites that benefit me financially. If I link to pro-domme, shopping or porn sites it’s because I think they’re relevant to the post. I’d like to say this comes from a purity of purpose and some sort of blogging ethos. There is a little bit of that but, realistically, if someone offered me one million dollars to post lolcat pictures, right now you’d all be looking at a lot of felines demanding cheeseburgers.

Quite honestly it’s mostly an effort versus reward trade-off. I like the freedom of being able to write about and link to anything, rather than trying to work posts around something that might make me a few bucks. I’ve nothing against sites that do try to make money, but for me this is a labor of love, and I intend to keep it that way.

I do get a fair number of requests for advertising, and some of them are actual readers rather than marketing spam. However, I like the clean look of the site and really don’t want to spoil it with ads. So if you’ve got a porn site you’d like me to send traffic to, then simply share some of your content with me. If it’s interesting and relevant, I’ll feature it and link to you. That’ll get way more clicks than some small ad on the side.

Given the commercial theme of the post, it seems fitting to feature an image using femdom in a commercial context. This is from a shoot for Loewe clothes by Xevi Muntane featured in ponystep magazine. You can see more of the images from the shoot here. I did not get a cut from of any of them.

Kinky Kevin Bacon

Before I get sued, I should start by saying I have no idea if Kevin Bacon is kinky or not. Instead I had in mind the game named after the eponymous actor, where you try and connect actors and actresses via movies to him. What got me started on this was research for yesterday’s post.

The post itself featured The Spirit, in some artwork created by the artist Darwyn Cooke. Looking him up I discovered that he’d created a series of graphic novels based on Donald Westlake’s (aka Richard Stark) Parker series. I’m a big fan of these books. They’re classic hard boiled American fiction. Raw, exciting and blunt. The first novel, called The Hunter, has been turned into two movies. The rather excellent Point Blank with Lee Marvin and the less good but still entertaining Payback with Mel Gibson. And in that second version, Lucy Liu plays a vicious dominatrix, bringing me all the way back around to femdom again. You can see her longest scene in this clip or a compilation of her scenes here.

Admittedly that’s more a circular connection than anything, but it got me wondering, who would be the kinky equivalent of Kevin Bacon? Who would you pick as the ideal center of the kinky scene to connect everyone to? According to wikipedia Kevin Bacon is himself not the ideal person for the most optimal actor graph. The easiest person to connect changes over time as movies are made, and right now it’s Dennis Hopper, which sounds about right. You want someone who worked with a lot of stars, was around a longtime, and did a wide range of material. So who would you pick for that from the BDSM porn or kink community?

A trapped spirit

I often like to have continuation between blog posts. Some theme or idea in one goes onto inform what I put up next. As soon as I saw this today I realized I could pull off a 2 into 1 continuation. There’s the superhero theme from yesterday’s post and the inverted suspension from the day before. I think that’s a first for me. Never let it be said I’m not pushing the creative boundaries of blogging.

The trapped hero here is the Spirit and I believe the femme fatale, with the nice line in evening wear and shackles, is Madame P’Gell. The original Spirit series was done by the famous Will Eisner, but this beautiful update was created by Darwyn Cooke. I’m afraid I’ve not read his version (or the original for that matter), but by all accounts Darwyn did a great job with it and I think I’ll be adding it to my shopping list.

Domestic bliss at Wayne Manor

Catwoman with a whip is not an unusual sight. At least not for anyone hanging out in the kind of tumblr’s I frequent. But Batman knitting? That was a new one to me. He looks pretty happy about it as well.

A little research led me to this post, which says this is from Bemused Magazine (BEM) a comic fanzine from the 70’s and 80’s. It was drawn by Brian Bolland, a very well known and talented British comic book artist.

I found this on the Submissive Geek tumblr. Fans of the great Julie Newmar as catwoman may also enjoy this post on that same site. It features her in a selection of animated gifs.

A useless shower of bastards

I noticed today that the US Senate has been doing its usual fine job of legislating. With the nations finances in a mess, and a lot of spending cuts and tax rises that nobody wants about to take effect, they took the time to pass a resolution condemning the Village Voice for its adults classified service backpage.com. Apparently it has become “frighteningly simple to order a child prostitute” according to ~~idiot~~ Senator Mark Kirk. The more logical thinkers amongst us might therefore question why, if that incredibly unlikely statement were true, it isn’t equally frighteningly simple to find and arrest the people involved. Unfortunately I suspect logical thinking never entered into this debate.

It has been a bad year for sex work legislation, with California’s proposition 35 being the standout example. The New Statesman recently published a good article on it and similar legislation, attacking the drafting of laws without proper consultation with the ‘victims’ they’re allegedly trying to help. In theory pro-dommes shouldn’t be affected, given that BDSM is legal. However, there’s always a lot of grey area involved in this kind of work. You might be technically completely legal, but do you trust the cops, DA and judge to all agree? Now it only needs one asshole with a loose interpretation of the truth or the law to get a CA sex worker branded as a sex offender for life. And since prop 35 also targets people supported by the proceeds of sex work, her family could also be in the firing line. What a truly terrible piece of legislation.

I’ll leave you with an image of Natassia Dream doing to CJ what the average politician does to the electorate. The shot is from this scene on TS Seduction. You can see here really working her sizable majority in another shot here.

The Dark Knight Confuses

I finally got around to watching the The Dark Knight Rises last week. On the plus side, Anne Hathaway made a fantastic catwoman. The character was well crafted and she was very stylish in the role. On the minus side, the plot of the movie made almost no sense. It was fun to watch, with some great set pieces, but logic clearly took a holiday when it came to writing the script. Bond villains are notorious for giving James a chance to escape and foil their plot rather than simply shooting him in the head. Bane spending 5 months hanging out in Gotham while Bruce goes through a training montage takes that approach to a whole new level of ridiculousness.

Anyway, after yesterdays long post, a little visual loveliness seemed in order. So here’s the delightful Ms Hathaway as catwoman, as found on the Badkitty Kat tumblr.

The internet is not for porn (so says Google)

Google has been messing with their search algorithms again. Specifically image search. The change has not been for the better in my opinion.

Adult bloggers and content providers have long had issues with their approach to sexually explicit content. For example, here’s Bacchus back in 2008 and then again in 2011 highlighting the strangeness of the auto-suggest feature. Now they’ve changed their image search to make it far more reluctant to display sexual images. The algorithm used to be based on classification of the content and your ‘safe search’ settings. With safe search on it filtered porn, with safe search off it didn’t filter. Seemed sensible enough. Now they’re also classifying the query you use. Unless the query shows specific intent to search for porn, they still suppress those images, no matter what your safe search settings. This leads to some pretty bad results.

For, example try image searching for one of my favorite female bloggers and adult stars, Mistress T. Here’s the search on Google and the same search on Bing (you need safe search off in both cases). The Google results are basically garbage, with John Edwards and even Mitt Romney featuring for some bizarre reason. The Bing ones are pretty much what you’d expect for a popular porn star/producer. Or try the famous bondage model Ashley Renee on Google and on Bing. One gives you what you’d expect and one gives you a bunch of police mugshots.

Searching for site names is equally weird. For example, searching for ‘captive male’ gives you a bunch of animal pictures, rather than shots from the site itself. Searching for ‘men in pain’ gives you men with migraines, and the query ‘whipped ass‘ returns random junk. Of course you can always refine your query to really make it clear what you’re after. For example, searching ‘men in pain bdsm‘ does return shots from the kink.com site. However, that refinement is going to change the results returned. Now it’s not giving me the top ranked men in pain images. It’s giving the top ranked ones that also feature the word BDSM near them. Before I could always filter out porn by simply changing my safe search settings to be stricter. Now I have to try and force it to show up by guessing the right query to use. What a stupid change.

Here’s an image from someone else affected by the change. That’s Mistress Madeline, who now barely features in her own image search result page.

Girls with slingshots

I recently stumbled across the Girls with Slingshots comic and have been enjoying catching up with it. And by ‘catching up’ I mean reading from first to last in consecutive evenings over several glasses of wine. It’s funny, smart and beautifully drawn. It also manages to treat sex as a normal part of life, rather than ignoring it or using it purely for shock value.

It helps that one of the characters, Clarice, is a dominant woman. In fact a geeky, smart, dominant librarian, which is a combination I wouldn’t describe myself as averse to. I also like the fact that her sexuality is treated seriously, in that it’s the basis for jokes but not the butt of them. However, it is a bit unfortunate that the artist chose to make her work as a part time pro-domme. As regularly readers of this blog are no doubt aware, I’m a big fan of pro-dommes, but the stereotype that dominant woman equals pro-domme does get a little old. It’d be nice to see a woman portrayed who can simply enjoy her dominant nature without feeling the need to turn it into a money spinner.

The BDSM lingo and protocols are pretty accurately depicted, but I do have to quibble with the first comic below. Either he’s a bad submissive and using his safeword incorrectly, or he’s wrong about her skills. Being a good dominant is not about how quickly you can get the submissive to cry uncle!

These three comics come from a short sequence featuring Clarice starting here. You can see the sequence where her friends discover her secret life starting here. There’s a few comics on her dating life starting here, and a storyline here where she deals with a very unsuitable suitor. However, I highly recommend browsing the entire comic. It’s a very well executed piece of art.

Obviously you’re not a golfer

Because I’m sure those shoes don’t have the regulation spikes.

The image is of Sophie Horn who, ironically, is actually a very good golfer. I found it on the Alternative Femdom tumblr. And for anyone unaware of the title reference, shame on you.

The bad sex awards can go fuck themselves

I flew in to a wet Seattle from sunny Las Vegas today, minus lots of dollars (due to food/drink not gambling), and plus a stuffy head cold. Not my most fun flight ever. Matters didn’t improve when I booted up my laptop and spotted a bunch of articles on the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. I can’t express how much I hate that prize and the attitude of those associated with it.

It doesn’t get a lot of play in the US, but it’s widely covered in certain segments of the UK press. They love the excuse to publish sexually explicit quotes from the nominees and snigger about them. If you’ve never heard of it before the stated rationale is…

to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it

As far as I can tell this means picking on writing that actually tries to detail the physical act of sex, rather than coyly drifting the camera towards the bedroom curtains as the lovers embrace on the bed. There’s certainly an excess of amusing metaphors, strained similes and overly ornate prose in some of the nominees, but little that matches their stated criteria. You can read a sample from this years winner here. I’m not particularly a fan, but really? That’s the best bad sex writing they could find? They should get out more.

The whole exercise strikes me as puritanical and condescending. If they had any guts they’d publish a Good Sex in Fiction Award for particularly interesting, stimulating and relevant sexual descriptions. That would at least be constructive. Unfortunately praising something as complex and revealing as sexual writing is personally exposing, so I doubt these prudish jackasses will ever do something that risky.

I’ve no idea what the appropriate image to accompany this post should be. So I’ll switch it around and publish something that looks like particularly good sex. Or at least something very clearly being enjoyed by at least one of the participants.

I found this on the Desire and Devotion tumblr.