Mainstream – Page 55 – Femdom Resource

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.

Organic bondage

I’ve featured Catwoman in the past (here and here for example), and now here’s another of Batman’s female foes, Poison Ivy. I’m no expert on the Batman backstory, but according to her wikipedia page she’s a powerful villainess who prefers to kill her enemies with a poisonous kiss. As a fan of blending the sensuous with the sadistic I kind of like that. Much better than riddles or freeze rays.

This image is by the Italian artist Gabriele Dell’Otto. In a nice kinky crossover the original Poison Ivy was apparently modeled on fetish star Bettie Page. This rendering doesn’t really carry that across, but it’s still a very beautiful sexy image.

I found this via the XombieDIRGE tumblr.

Guns, girls and sex

Jean-Luc Godard famously said that all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. Of course he was making a broader point about the motive force of sex and violence (or potential violence), but in some sense the expression also used to have some literal truth. When I watch something from the 40’s or the 50’s, particularly film noir, there’s always a frisson of excitement and danger when those two things are combined. A woman pulling out a gun was often the pivotal moment in a film, even when it happened off camera. In modern movies that has been lost. Under the influence of video games, comic books and CGI, there’s an endless succession of big breasted girls wielding enormous firearms at the slightest provocation. It still can be fun, Trinity helping to trash the building lobby springs to mind, but the edge has gone.

Arguably that loss might be a good thing. A lot of the tension in those old movies comes from the fact that a woman wasn’t expected to wield a gun. So when she did it was a deviation from the norm, and always came at a moment of great tension. Movies allow equal opportunity murder and mayhem these days. On a personal level however, I do mourn the decline of the deadly femme fatale.

The first image below is one of the greatest femme fatale roles every committed to celluloid, Jane Greer as Kathie in Out of the Past. It’s a brilliant movie and she’s mesmerizing in it. I came across this image on this film noir tumblr. Slave domnei also blogged about it earlier this year.

The second image has a more vague provenience. I think it’s an actress called Naike Rivelli, but I’m not sure where I found it or what the context for the shot is. I just liked it for her expression and body language (and body). There’s definitely a suggestion of something nefarious going on. She’s just been caught doing something, or about to do something, and isn’t sure how you might react.

Oddly I find the first image actually pushes more of my internal buttons than the second. I’m not really sure why, but there’s something about that buttoned up sexuality that seems more dangerous, and hence more appealing.

A Sole Kiss

As a major change of pace from heavy whipping shots, here’s someone appreciating a freshly washed pair of feet. I’m personally not much of a foot guy, unless they happen to be kicking or trampling me, but this was unusual enough to catch my eye. It’s not often I get to feature an image of someone in a sari. They look like a couple having fun.

I originally found this on the femdom section in reddit. My internet detective skills, honed by many years of ~~tracking down porn~~ productively blogging, led me to the mainstream Indian movie 1940 Lo Oka Gramam from 2008. According to the plot synopsis they end up being declared outcasts and having their heads shaved for this happy frolicking on the sea shore. So a sad context to a happy looking shot.

Small and cute

Automobile manufacturers are always happy to use a pretty woman to help sell a car. This latest one from Fiat is no different, but it is at least for a very cute small fun car. Apparently its got a sexy Italian accent and is capable of slapping me around before teasing me with foamy milk. Or something. I’m not really sure what the ad was trying to tell me. Perhaps the car is prone to sudden mood swings? It’s Italian, so it will probably break down a lot. However, it did make me want to buy the car, so I guess that’s pretty much the definition of success for an ad.

Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist

I recently watched Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. It’s a documentary detailing Bob’s life as a writer, performance artist and sexual submissive masochist. What made him particularly extraordinary was that he suffered from cystic fibrosis, a disease that normally kills people before they reach their mid 20’s. He died age 43, making him one of the worlds longest lived suffers from it.

If you’ve never seen it I’d urge you to rush out and get a copy. I thought it was an extraordinarily moving film. I’m not ashamed to say I cried a little at the end. I also think it captures some aspects of masochism, submission and D/s better than any other film I’ve seen. Using a fairly standard documentary format, cutting interviews of friends and family into home movie footage, it paints a very frank and honest picture of his life with his partner and mistress Sheree Rose.

This is actually the second time I’ve seen the film. I first saw it over 10 years ago, before I’d gotten physically involved in BDSM, and I remember being fairly horrified at some of the SM activities they did. Now I look at the footage and think “Yes, done that. Loved that. Oh play piercing, that’s fun. Drinking piss, done that…..” I’ve never actually nailed my cock to a board as Bob does at one point in the film, but my sense of ‘normal’ has clearly shifted.

There’s some attempt in the film, particularly by his parents, to tie his early childhood experiences with his illness to his kinkiness. I understand that desire to look for a cause and effect, but it seems to be misplaced. The vast majority of kinky guys don’t have major childhood trauma and medical procedures. I think he was someone with cystic fibrosis who happened to be kinky. The one clearly influences the other, but it seems misplaced to think of it as a cause.

Two quotes really stuck with me. The first from Bob was near the start of the movie. The second is from Sheree and was towards the end when he was getting very sick.

People don’t think of the masochist as being a strong person. The stereotype that the masochist is sniveling and weak is actually not true. The masochist has to know his or her own body perfectly well and be in full control of their body, in order to give control to somebody else or to give control to pain. So the masochist is actually a very strong person.
Bob Flanagan

I don’t even think he’s a masochist anymore. I think life has beaten him down too much. The pain he lives with every day is so intense that there isn’t any other kind of pain that he can even think about right now.
Sheree Rose

I certainly agree with the first quote, and I think the second helps emphasize the same point. Being a masochist (or submissive) doesn’t mean being a needy person or someone who has no control over their life. You need control and a strong sense of self in order to successfully gift that to another. By the end he’d lost that, the disease was taking over and he could no longer give away power. His body and its sickness had already stolen it.

The movie is available on DVD from amazon. You can read Roger Ebert’s review of it here.

Update: Scott of Mrs Kelly’s Playhouse was actually friends with Bob in the early 90’s. He’s left a lengthy comment on this post describing some of his memories of Bob. My thanks to Scott for that additional information.