Mainstream – Page 54 – Femdom Resource

The usual lengthy visit

A few days ago I was waffling about image context, and how it can make a difference in how I respond to an image. Surround an image with other femdom material and I’ll suddenly see D/s elements that weren’t there originally. Well this is the post where I provide a counter-example to that theory.

I first came across the image below on the Alternative Femdom tumblr. Given that source my immediate thought was “Cuckold shot.” There’s a couple making out and a solo male looking unhappy. In femdom porn that combination always equals cuckold. Yet the more I looked at it, the less right that felt. It doesn’t seem to depict jealousy, tension or arousal. The overriding feeling I get is of loneliness and depression. I don’t think it’s his partner with her bra strap showing. I think it’s his roommates, and there lies the pain. If anything it’s thoughtless sadism and self-inflicted masochism.

The painting is called ‘The usual lengthy visit‘ and is by the Vancouver artist Andrew Young. I love his work, and this piece in particular. You can see some of the ‘in progress’ shots for it here, here and here. It’s not femdom, but I think it beautiful captures an experience and emotions many of us have felt at some stage in our lives.

Context is king

I’ve often observed that the context for an image is very important. Put an image in a fashion magazine and I’ll think of it as a sales pitch for a brand or a designer. My instinct will be to look at the clothes and the model from an intellectual, not emotional, point of view. Advertisements are about selling things, so there’s an inherent degree of mistrust in the interaction. Put the same image in a femdom tumblr stream and it changes how I perceive it quite dramatically. I’ll start looking for and projecting D/s elements. I might spin little stories about the scene in my head. I may think of myself in the scene, or how I’d interact with the model. It’s exactly the same image I’d flip past in a copy of Vogue, but somehow somebody else labeling it as erotic and kinky gives me permission to do the same. It creates a far more emotional reaction.

The two shots below are examples of the kind of images I’m thinking about. I found them both on the Strangely Compelling tumblr. The first was a shot for Numero magazine by Greg Kadel. You can see more images from the shoot here. The second is from a sequence titled Orchidee Noir by the photographer Jose Herrera for Oxxo Magazine.

Glorious

In this case the post title is also the title the artist gave this photograph. I originally found it on the Real Dominant Women tumblr, but some internet sleuthing led me to the original copy taken by Allison Redner. It’s interesting to read the comments which generally describe it as a cute, beautiful and romantic shot. I certainly agree with that, but I’m surprised nobody commented on the pose and the dynamic. Some ‘mainstream’ shot can have a femdom vibe in the context of a femdom tumblr, but seem very normal and vanilla when seen in their original context. For me, this one still retains an element of that vibe even when viewing it in its original and non-kinky flickr home.

Awaiting her moment

The cane flexing shot is a femdom porn cliche. It pops up all over the place, particularly with mistresses dressed in sexy authoritarian but non-fetish outfits (for example this, or this, or this, …) That’s not to say it doesn’t work. It’s a cliche for a reason. For a lot of submissive guys (including this one) it pushes buttons. However, I normally try and steer clear of the obvious femdom tropes on this blog. They are too easy to find in a hundred other places.

I liked this shot for doing something a little different with the idea. She’s not sneering down the camera lense, but looks to be lost in thought, flexing the cane as a reflex as she ponders the moment. There’s a nice ambiguity to it and it’s possible to imagine any number of storylines to accompany it.

I found it on the Poe’s Mistress (aka French Twist) tumblr. I believe it’s a shot by Ellen von Unwerth. She’s a fashion photographer who started life as a model before moving behind the camera. I suspect the image is therefore from a mainstream fashion shot of some sort.

Holy single tail batman!

I know there are a lot of catwoman fans out there, so here’s a couple of enjoyable images of her. They’re stylistically different but both feature a very happy looking catwoman . The first is by BatgirlOfGotham (free deviant login required), and has a nice big single tail with a stoic (as ever) batman. Hopefully she’ll soon whip a smile onto his face. The second image is by Stephanie Buscema and is based on the Julie Newmar catwoman character. It’s not exactly a kinky shot, but it a very cheerful one, which gives it a great deal of appeal to me. If you like it, she has a number of similar images featuring female superheros on her site. And while I’m on the batman topic, just to finish, here’s a link to great batgirl shot by the artist Houston Sharp.

O Canada!

You’ll have to excuse this post. Or not, your call. Either way, it’s going to be a non-femdom focused one. Instead it’s a couple of random things that caught my eye from north of the border.

The first amused me. It’s a series of commercials for a Canadian porn channel that play with the traditional porn stereotypes. There’s a pool boy, pizza guy and a cop ticketing an attractive young lady. They must have had the only casting call where bad acting was a prerequisite.

The second annoyed me. The beautiful woman below is Jenna Talackova, who was disqualified last week from the Miss Universe Canada competition for being born male. She had gender re-assignment surgery in 2010, but apparently didn’t meet the competition requirements of being born a ‘natural woman’. She’d already made it through to the finals, so clearly the earlier judges must have thought she was a suitably attractive competitor.

Miss World and Miss Universe pageants aren’t exactly at the cultural or intellectual cutting edge, but this struck me as particularly dumb even by their standards. In some circumstances qualifying requirements are obviously necessary. For example, this kind of issue can be a thorny one in the area of sports, where genetic men may have a natural advantage. But in a beauty competition? It’s not like being born male offers any kind of advantage. In fact it’s quite the opposite. Are they worried a flood of guys are going to be inspired to try pulling on a frock and entering? If she can overcome the issues of being born with the wrong body and still end up looking this amazing then good luck to her. They don’t ban cosmetic surgery for the other competitors. It seems hypocritical to ban it for her.

Incidentally, if you happen on a news article covering this story I’d advise you to stop reading before you get to the readers comments. Otherwise you may feel like taking a bath afterwards. When you spend a lot of time hanging out on blogs written and frequented by open minded LGBT positive people, you tend to forget just how many hateful people there are out there.

A dangerous image

Having mentioned Mitt Romney in a post last week, in the interests of being fair and balanced, I thought I should also devote a post to the other leading light of the GOP – Rick Santorum. Apologies to my readers from outside the US for whom this may not be all that interesting. I know the US primaries get a fair amount of coverage in the world press, so at least this shouldn’t be completely devoid of context for most people.

It turns out that Rick is not a big fan of pornography. That isn’t much of a shocker given his position on other social and sexual issues. He’s also not big on gay marriage, sodomy, contraception, pre-marital sex or abortion. His website contains the following:

America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography.
…
Pornography is toxic to marriages and relationships. It contributes to misogyny and violence against women. It is a contributing factor to prostitution and sex trafficking.
Rick Santorum

That first sentence is a sly one. At first I read it as ‘a pandemic of pornography’, which given porns prevalence on the Internet isn’t too extreme a position. But he’s actually saying a ‘pandemic of harm’, which is far less obvious and calls for a much greater burden of proof. Unsurprisingly that proof is not supplied. He believes in a far stricter enforcement of the US obscenity laws. This old interview with ex-federal prosecutor Bruce Taylor should give you some idea of what is meant by that approach (I’ve linked to this interview before). This blog and pretty much every tumblr site on my images page would be in the firing line as obscene.

I wonder how they feel about images like the one below? It definitely causes me to have prurient sexual thoughts, and I’m publishing it with the intent of creating the same effect on others. I’m also not sure I can make a case for it having redeeming social value. It’s beautiful, but I’m not sure simple aesthetics really count in these matters. Otherwise that’d be a obvious get-out-of-jail card to always play. So, from my perspective at least, this is pornography.

It would seem that this is therefore causing me harm. And possibly creating misogyny, violence to women and sex trafficking. After all it can’t simply be the sight of naked flesh that causes harm. Otherwise it’d be dangerous to look in the mirror when getting changed. Similarly sex itself can’t be toxic to relationships, otherwise the human race would be extinct by now. So it must be something special about the sexual thoughts created when looking at images or movies. This ladies elegant profile, her piercing gaze and her strict governess style outfit are destroying my brain and/or morals as I type. Damn.

If later tonight you find that your relationship has been destroyed and you’ve been forced into prostitution as a result of this image I do apologize. I promise not to post such filth again. At least until tomorrow anyway.

This is by the photographer Ilya Kokorev. I found it on the Continuous State of Desire tumblr.

Making a good first impression

In the last few days I’ve been enjoying the autobiographical writing of Stephen Fry in his book The Fry Chronicles. He’s well known as a writer, actor and comedian in the UK, although in the US he’s probably best known for his role as Dietrich (the TV host character) in V for Vendetta. I believe he’s also going to be in the upcoming film of Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

He has a great collection of anecdotes, including this one from when he first met Miriam Margolyes. She’s another well known face in Britain, a celebrated character actress who has featured in many significant productions, and was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire) for her work. They meet for the very first time at the read through for a play.

…Miriam Margolyes had burst in like a beaming pinball just in time for the start of the read. When is was over she approached me.
‘How do you do? I’m Mir…’ She stopped and plucked at her tongue with her thumb and forefinger, ‘…Miriam Margolyes. Sorry about that, I was licking my girlfriend out last night and I’ve still got some of her cunt hairs in my mouth.’
From ‘The Fry Chronicles’

That’s an introduction you are unlikely to forgot. Of course with the the modern mania for shaving this situation is now far less likely to present itself as an opening conversational gambit. I was going to feature this image originally, which I liked for her expression but not for inappropriate absence of hair. Then I stumbled across the shot below which struck me as very beautiful and very appropriate. Not strictly femdom but a view I’m sure most submissive men will appreciate.

I found this on the Gorean Kajirus tumblr.

Making a play for the femdom vote

I try and avoid party politics on this blog. I’m very happy to share my general comments on stupid laws and their intersection with the sexual realm, but I don’t see a big upside to dragging specific policies and personalities into it. I’ve observed that people who agree with you just think you’re stating the obvious – “Well of course, what idiot would think otherwise?” – and people who disagree are unpleasantly surprised – “You seemed so smart, how can you be so dumb about this?” Over a cocktail or two it can be interesting to debate with that second group, but in the asynchronous and low bandwidth communication channel of an unrelated blog it’s a losing proposition.

All that said, I did have to laugh today over a Washington Post article I saw on the Romney family. It’s a very dull article, but this bit on Ann Romney and her love of horses did fire my imagination up.

Her son Josh told another New York Times reporter in 2007 that he had given his dad a rubber horse mask so that if he wore it, “maybe Mom will pay as much attention to you as she does to the horses.”

Now I’m stuck with an entertaining but not particularly appealing mental picture of Mitt in pony gear while Ann leads him through his dressage steps. Feel free to leave jokes about what his safeword might be via the comments.

Of course they can afford top end equipment, so I hope Josh got him something like the incredible horse mask below. It’s from Bob Basset, whose work seems to exist at the intersection between art, fetish and fashion. I’m personally a big fan of his steampunk style gas masks, although more from a geeky sci-fi perspective than anything kinky. You can see more shots of the horse mask in this gallery. There’s also an equally beautiful feminine version currently on sale on ebay. Ideal for female submissives or, if you want to push all the kinky stops out, for cross dressing pony boys.

What do I owe you?

The Dishevelled Domina put up a post a few days ago that got me thinking about the process of sex blogging and image sharing. The post was entitled ‘Yer not the boss of me!‘ and was a good rant about tumblr’s that accompany their images with very broad sweeping statements about the right way to behave. For example, captions of the form “a real mistress will lock her husband up, throw away the key, and fuck other men” or “inspections are one of the things that a true Mistress knows how to do correctly.” DD was, to put it mildly, not a fan of such things.

To a large extent I’m with her on this one. I find the best image+commentary blogs are the ones that concentrate on their personal reactions to an image. They supply background, point out details or add a little humor. Spanking blog and bondage blog are two good examples of this approach, and it’s one I’ve always tried to follow. I don’t want to reinterpret an image, or interpose myself between it and the viewer, I just want to share my feelings about what I see. As soon as you start adding specific context to an image then you’re no longer sharing the image, but instead you’re sharing your personal modification of it. You create something new, text that imposes its own preferences, which may well clash with your reader’s.

Where I depart ways with DD is in her reaction to this phenomena. I have to ask myself, what does a blogger (or tumblr) owe his audience? Who are they posting for? In her post DD puts an open letter to tumblrs…

…if you try to fucking boss people around or tell us what we ought to like or do I am going to want to stab you in the jimmy, or vajayjay, respectively.
Please stop this deeply annoying shit and try to grow an awareness of something other than your own wank-bank.
Dishevelled Domina

But is there anything wrong with a tumblr being someone’s personal wank-bank? People blog for a lot of different reasons. I don’t write this one to get off, but that approach doesn’t have to be a universal one.

When I see an image and caption like this one, I don’t see it as an instruction for 50% of the planet’s population. Or even for the smaller fraction of dominant females. I see it as someone creating their own new little piece of erotica. It’s a fantasy snippet that, along with the image, tells a story they enjoy. It’s not particularly a story I care for, but the same could be said for a lot of the erotica out there.

I think in many ways the problem is actually a technical one. Tumblr makes it trivially easy to share and reblog images, but it drags all the comments along with it. It really needs better tools to slice, dice and mash the content as it flows between sites.

I’ll leave you with an image from the Superior Femme tumblr (originally by Frank Herholdt). This is a tumblr site whose images I like, but the captions often clash with my personal preferences. In this case the caption was “She’s taken his money, his family, his house. Now she’s working on his dignity.” That really doesn’t do much for me. We could go with “A real mistress will get her cuckold to paint her nails before she heads out for a night of fucking”, but then DD might come and stab me in the jimmy. So I’ll just say I like the coloration of the image, and his look of concentration. I’ll leave further interpretation to the viewer’s preferences.