Mainstream – Page 52 – Femdom Resource

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.

Sparkle free zone

My image search tells me that the first shot below (found on Mujeres Dominantes) is from a show called the The Vampire Diaries. I’ve never seen it, but I like the blood, knife and rather impractical manacles.

As an adolescent I loved vampire movies, particularly those from Hammer Films. They always had such a great blend of violence, control and sensuality. Dracula was an entertaining character, but my favorite moments came after he’d turned his first voluptuous and skimpily dressed victim to the dark side. While her family looked on in horror, she’d start seducing, biting and generally behaving like a outrageous hussy with anyone in cleavage range. I loved those sequences, and always hated it when some bible thumping puritan turned up and stuck a stake in her.

I was involved in a scene recently where, after tying me up, the dominant carefully bent back my head and then bit me hard on neck and shoulder. It was a great moment and gave me happy flashbacks to sitting in a dark bedroom watching the late great Ingrid Pitt snack on her latest victim.

TV Guide

I’m going to interpret my blog tagline – the beauty of dominant women – fairly liberally for this post. It’s not femdom related in the sexual sense, but it does relate very much to a strong dominant women. I’ve just spent an enjoyable evening re-watching the first few episodes of Prime Suspect starring Helen Mirren. It comes from a rich tradition of British crime series, which also includes such gems as Cracker and Wire in the Blood.

I have a love hate relationship with these kind of shows. I enjoy the genre and plot structure, but hate the sexual stereotypes they almost always portray. Sex workers are normally damaged powerless victims. The criminals are often sexually warped sadists whose only outlet is violent attacks. It’s certainly not a genre to look at for positive portrayals of BDSM. Despite that, the Prime Suspect series is redeemed by having the wonderful Helen Mirren in the leading role. She plays a strong no-nonsense female character who puts up with a lot of sexist bullshit from her colleagues while still figuring out the cases. It’s a real pleasure to watch such a talented actress sink her teeth into the role.

US TV has a tendency to remake and horribly screw-up British series. I’ve not seen the US version, but looking at some of the online video’s they seem to have repeated the trick here. What was a reserved and complex older female character, with a flinty inner core, has become a skirt-the-rules cop played by a conventionally attractive blonde with a classic in your face New York attitude. In other words, the same thing we’ve seen a million times before. The good news is that netflix has the original UK series available for streaming. I definitely recommend checking it out.

Photograph is of Helen Mirren from a Prime Suspect publicity shot. If you’re a fan of hers, then I also recommend watching Excalibur. It’s a brilliant version of the Arthurian legend featuring her in the role of Morgana.

Ignorance is bliss?

When you spend as long as I do hanging out on sex positive blogs, it’s easy to forget just how much attitudes can vary outside that bubble. I was intrigued to stumble across this post quoting a Mormon on the subject of sexual compatibility. He was a virgin when he married, as was his wife, and he looks on that fact as a plus…

If we had “shopped around” or experienced sex with many different people, it would have ruined the beauty and simplicity of what we have.

I’m going to guess most of my readers will react as I initially did to this, which was to laugh and wonder how ignorance can possibly be a good thing. How can he make any kind of informed judgement? Maybe they’re having really bad sex and have no idea it should be any different.

But then it got me thinking about the relative nature of happiness. There are few absolutes when it comes to assessing satisfaction and quality of life. For example, studies have shown that when it comes to wealth, happiness isn’t related to the amount you earn, but how much you earn relative to your social circle. Being the ‘poor’ person in your group makes you unhappy, even if your absolute income is high. Knowledge in that case makes you unhappier. So if a couple are happy having mediocre sex, is that a bad thing? Are you better off not knowing what you’re missing out on?

Obviously the ideal state is to know for sure you’re having great sex! And as an information junkie, I think I’d always rather be informed, even if it made me more aware of problems. But it’s an interesting angle to ponder, particularly when I reflect back on life and the ‘might have been’ situations. I often feel regretful that I waited until my 30’s to act on my kinky inclinations. I feel I lost a decade or more where I could have been enjoying all BDSM has to offer. Yet, the knowledge of the pleasure it brings me has undoubtedly complicated my life. It makes dating and finding a suitable partner a lot harder for a start. Would I have been better off not knowing? Leaving that side of myself alone? Most of my friends have married over the last few years and started families. Could I have been happy in a vanilla relationship? Will I ultimately look back on my exploration of kink as a curse rather than a blessing? I hope not, but as Einstein observed, knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

The image is by the Scottish painter Jack Vettriano. A lot of his work has a sexual and kinky vibe to it, and he’s obviously got a fetish for 50’s costumes and high heels, although not typically with a femdom slant. There’s more background on him available in this article.

Swinging the single-tail

I had my back and ass well and truly striped today by Mistress Cynthia Stone. She used one of the heaviest single tails I’ve yet experienced and the resulting marks are pretty special. We snapped photographs so hopefully in a future post I’ll be able to share some images.

Until that exciting moment (settle down at the back there), I’ll restrict myself to this shot (via Selina Minx’s tumblr) of a whipping from the movie The Million Eyes of Su-Muru. With an imdb rating of 2.6/10, it’s clearly not a forgotten classic. However, it does look like the kind of film I’d have watched as a teenager with rapt attention and a strange feeling in my underpants.

Invisible touch

Yesterday’s post triggered several interesting comments and prompted some further thoughts on the perception of a scene. One particular comment was by Mark on the touching hands in the image I featured.

Notice her hand gently resting on his. For me, an incredibly powerful element of the scene.

I wonder if that gentle, reassuring touch would mitigate, somewhat, the ramp up in intensity that you described when under the blindfold.

I had noticed (and enjoyed) that aspect of the image, but the post was getting so long I decided not to comment further on it. Mark’s observant comment got me thinking about touch, and what a great example of shifting perceptions it can be.

Simple caresses can play a huge part in a scene. Not everything has to be about extremes of pain or pleasure. Fingers skating across the skin, tracing the lines of muscle or caressing a limb. Each little contact plays a part in building the dynamic. When I can see them, touches to me are predominantly sensual. They’re about the pleasure in the contact of another body. They might be soothing after an intense pain, or promising of what’s to come, but the underlying message is a hedonistic one.

Yet take my sight away and a touch becomes quite different. Partially they’re reassuring. Little grounding moments that tell me I’m OK, she’s right here with me. Like an animal being petted, I relax into her hand. But this reassurance is a double edged sword. It can be taken away. Giving it subtly emphasizes its importance to me. So there’s now an element of fear. What if she takes it away? What if I need that emotional contact? Losing a sensual touch is disappointing, but losing a reassuring one can be scary. It moves the balance from pleasure to control, a shift of perception unrelated to the physical contact itself.

I’ll leave you with an image of what appears to be some very pleasurable touching, with a nice undercurrent of control. It was shot by Michele Block-Stuckens and is called Toy Boy.