Mainstream – Page 57 – Femdom Resource

Domme School

Vice magazine recently posted an article describing several days in the life of a NYC pro-domme. The purported set-up was one of their writers following the domme with a view to becoming a professional herself. But the actual format is much the same as it always is for these type of articles, offering readers a chance to look at someone else’s weird and twisted lifestyle.

I’m in two minds about the article itself. On one hand the writer seemed to enjoy herself, and it’s certainly not written from a negative point of view. Coming from something called ‘Vice magazine‘ that’s probably not unexpected. However, I find it hard to imagine a vanilla but potentially kinky person reading it and thinking “Yes, that sounds like something I want to get involved in.” There’s an undercurrent of sleaziness that comes through to me, although I struggle to put my finger on exactly why that is. Perhaps its comments like this one.

The whole scene makes me feel like I’m an actress in a really bad porno. It’s pretty cool.

Having a session that feels like a bad porno movie definitely doesn’t sound cool to me. And in fact, setting the tone of the article aside, the main thing that stood out for me was how incredibly different my sessions are from the ones described. I don’t role-play at all, and my interactions with the domme are both lighter (chatting and joking in early parts of the session) and darker (floating in subspace after some intense pain later on). I also tend to involve a lot more equipment and tools, utilizing everything from simple needles and clamps through to custom dungeon furniture. The type of play in the article sound like a kind of sexual community theater. Where I always feel mine are more like a cross between extreme sports and medieval torture.

That contrast led me to two different conclusions. The first was that it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming most people play in a way at least vaguely similar to your own preferences. I always get annoyed when non-kinky people pigeon-hole BDSM as simply leather, whips and chains, but I’m probably guilty of doing a similar thing at a different level. It’s easy to forget just how big the kink universe really is. The other conclusion was that a good pro-domme must posses an incredibly ability to shift quickly between different head spaces. I tend to think of the domme skill-set as being a highly technical one: How to do a rope suspension; how to wield a single tail; what’s a safe way to do cutting and piercing. I’m very aware of these kind of technical skills in each and every session. What I don’t see is the transition between sessions and the mental gymnastics needed to create new moods and session themes. Offhand it’s hard to think of another job that requires quite that level of versatility.

Image is taken from page 5 of Vice Magazine article.

Three new blogs

I’ve added the following three blogs to my blogroll over on the right.

Mistress160’s Abode is run by a lifestyle dominant and documents her ongoing D/s relationship with her husband Sol. There’s a wealth of information there, covering everything from getting started in BDSM to more extreme edge play. I particularly enjoyed her very lengthy description of a chemical play session she’d organized, which has inspired me to try something similar in the near future. That also happens to be the post that led me to Mistress160’s blog in the first place, thanks to the miracle of referral logs and her link to an old post of mine.

The Fetish Furniture Factory is managed by Vanessa Chaland and features a large amount of queening and cuckolding. She also describes the custom furniture that she designs and modifies specifically for those acts. The one based around a Sardax drawing looked fairly ingenious, and was even appreciated by the great man himself.

Finally, last but certainly not least, is Sexonomics, a new blog by Brooke Magnanti aka Belle de Jour. As its name suggests, she intends to focus on social and political issues relating to sex. It’s still early days for the blog, but given how much I enjoyed her writing as Belle, I have high hopes for this one. As I alluded to in my earlier post on ‘Women and porn‘, I’m very grateful to intelligent sex positive people who can reach out and confront some of the lazy stereotyping that passes for analysis of sexual issues in the mainstream media.

The image is of Billy Piper playing Belle de Jour in the television version of ‘The secret diary of a call girl’. Which I admit is a bit of a loose connection to the blogs themselves, but it seemed a shame to mention Belle and not take the chance to post it.

Vanessa Chaland

Women and porn

I think as blog post titles go, that’s got to rate as a pretty brave one. Half the world’s population and one of its most popular and controversial subjects, all covered in one post. Fortunately for any readers out there, I’m not going to venture many of my thoughts. Instead I’m going to link to a couple of articles I stumbled upon within a few hours of each other this evening. I should also point out this post is not related to female domination at all. If you’re looking for a post on that, then be patient and I’m sure one will be turning up very shortly. This is just me pointing towards a couple of articles on sex, women and pornography that I thought were intriguing to compare and contrast.

The first one is from the British paper the guardian, and is about women and pornography addiction. It annoyed the hell out of me. It’s a typical sex negative article, packed with underlying assumptions about pornography and the people who create and use it. The writer even manages to imply that masturbating to pornography is comparable to a heroin habit. Obviously any addictive behavior that negatively impacts your normal life is a bad things, but the clear agenda of this articles author tainted the entire piece.

The second one is from Miss Maggie Mayhem, a writer and porn performer, and describes how she found herself masturbating to Penn Jilette (of Penn and Teller fame). I was still grumpy from the porn addiction article when I read this, and it managed to cheer me up and put a big smile on my face. The positive, happy and unapologetic way she discussed her sexuality and pornography was a welcome breath of fresh air after the previous rubbish I’d read. It’s a long article, but well worth reading in my opinion.

I live so much of my virtual life on the Internet at sites that are kink and sex positive, that it’s sometimes easy to forget how many negative viewpoints are out there. The communities I inhabit consider a controversial topic to be if incorporating excrement into a scene is a safe or sane thing to do. Or what are sensible limits to adhere to when experimenting with breathplay. I try to imagine those topics being addressed in and coherent thoughtful manner by a mainstream publication and my brain starts threatening to explode. There’s a lot of ‘fertilizer feminism’ out there as Maggie amusingly puts it, and I’m grateful to her, and women like her, for speaking up with their alternative point of view.

And with that, I declare this minor deviation from the regular programming at an end. Normal femdom service will be resumed forthwith.

Kinky Installation Art

This made me laugh. It’s a short film that manages to depict trampling, bondage and spanking (among other kinky things), whilst also showing no naked people whatsoever. The umbrella towards the end looks particularly painful to be on the receiving end of. Note that there’s music that accompanies it (a rather well chosen European electro-pop number), so be prepared for that if you are viewing in a quiet environment.

Elektrotechnique from Lernert & Sander on Vimeo Link courtesy Bondage Blog

Tura Satana

I was sad to read of the death of Tura Satana earlier this week. She had roles in a number of TV shows and movies, but she’s most famous for her leading role in Russ Meyer’s movie Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! If you’ve never seen it, the title and tagline – Superwomen! Belted, buckled and booted! – should give you a pretty good idea of what it was all about. She played the role of Varla, a karate chopping go-go dancer, who dominates both the movie and every other character in it. I wouldn’t go as far as John Waters, who described it as “beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made”, but it’s certainly a classic movie that reaches out far beyond it’s exploitation roots. Her brilliance in it created an iconic image of a tough powerful female, and that character has been very influential in pop-culture ever since.

The Guardian published an obituary that gives some more background on her life. Apparently she became a nurse after she retired from acting. That must have made for some interesting medical appointments. I imagine it would have been quite a shock to go in for a routine checkup and find yourself in the hands of Nurse Satana!

Kink on G4

I came across this link on that favorite site of all procrastinators everywhere – fark.com. I’m not really sure what ‘Attack of the Show’ is, or who Candace Bailey is for that matter, but as far as mainstream representations of kink are concerned this one didn’t seem too terrible. It’s obviously mostly an excuse to show some attractive women in tight latex, but I can imagine at least a few people out there might have thought: “Hmmm, that looks kind of fun.” Which is better than the more usual: “Wow, what a bunch of freaks.”

The dominatrix in the clip is Mistress January Seraph. She does a pretty good job consider that the presenter looks great in latex but doesn’t know one end of a whip from another. And her playroom looks like a really fun place to session in. Here she is as ‘Nurse Seraph’.

Image shows Mistress January Seraph and was taken from this gallery page.