Tag: Mainstream

You’re Late

This interview with Margaret Cho contains a lovely anecdote that gave my heart a momentary pitter pat.

Once I was with my friend, the late director John Schlesinger, when suddenly he panicked. Without explaining, we sprinted to a gay bar. A tall woman slowly spun around on a stool, as John grovelled. “You are late,” she drawled. It was Lauren Bacall. She was mad, and I was starstruck.

I’m not sure if this counts as found femdom, but it’s certainly an image to treasure. John Schlesinger – an Oscar winner for Midnight Cowboy – certainly knew who was calling the shots.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Lauren Bacall. She was obviously beautiful and glamorous, like a lot of her contemporary stars, but she had a style and attitude that I think few matched. If you image search for her, almost any of the shots wouldn’t look at of place on a femdom blog, but I’m a particular fond of this one. Oh, and this one.

If you’d like to see more of her amazing style, then this Cut article has a good collection of images.

Professor and Dominatrix

The Daily Beast has put up an interesting if somewhat depressing interview with a Mistress Snow. If that name is familiar, you might have seen an article she wrote last year in The Chronicle of Higher Education. That detailed her experience of working in academia as an adjunct professor while earning money as a pro-domme and what happened when she told her academic mentor about her sex work side gig. In short, her mentor reacted with horror and vindictively withdrew critical letters of recommendation. The Daily Beast article is a follow-up that provides more details on what happened and why a professor would need to earn money swinging a whip.

I initially described it as interesting but depressing, and re-reading it again only deepens that impression. It costs a ridiculous amount to go to college in the US and as a result there’s a terrible student debt problem. Yet adjunct professors, who make up over 50% of all US college professors, are earning an average of a little less than $24K a year. That’s less than a Starbucks barista and with much worse benefits. Yet when Mistress Snow supplements her income with a pro-domme gig, the tenured academic world reacts with horror and tries to screw her career. It takes a really special kind of system to rip-off both students and their teachers while punishing anyone who won’t conform to it. I think this quote from the article really highlights the craziness…

I make way more money per hour playing a professor in the dungeon than being one in real life.

Note this image is not of Mistress Snow. I don’t have an attribution, but I’d suspect it’s from one of the UK School Mistress themed sites.

Also I should point out that Mistress Snow of academia (twitter here) is not the same as Goddess Alexandra Snow (twitter and pro-site) or Snow Mercy (twitter and pro-site).

Ariel on OnlyFans

My friends have occasionally accused me of being lazy. I like to say I’m not lazy, I’m just an efficient time optimizer. Put off a task for long enough and it’ll often naturally resolve itself or cease to be important. Anything that does make it past a good healthy period of procrastination is probably important.

As an illustration of my method, I give you this rather silly article on OnlyFans by Louise Perry in the New Statesman. It was in my backlog to post about and throw stones at. Fortunately, while I was putting off doing that, Ariel Anderssen wrote this excellent response to it. She’s not only a smarter and a better writer than me but, as an OnlyFans creator, she can speak from a position of authority. So I saved time and my readers got a link to a much better analysis than the rubbish I was planning on writing.

The only thing I’ll tack on is a comment about the politics of the original piece. For those that have never heard of it, the New Stateman is a politically left magazine from the UK. I expect the right to be negative about sex work but I find it depressing how often it’s also attacked by the left.

The right’s objections are predictably based around morality, religion and enforcing social standards. They focus on the sex part, which should obviously be between a man and his wife, preferably in the missionary position with the lights out. The left typically object to the work part, suggesting that sex work is inherently exploitative, both for the seller and the buyer. There are no grey area for them. Formerly moderate lefties in other areas will turn into Marxists when sex enters the marketplace.

There also seems to be an underlying streak of puritanism in the left’s objections. Not the fake morality of the right, but more a sense that people enjoying themselves is somehow unfair. When reading the New Statesman article I couldn’t help thinking of the H. L. Mencken famous definition of puritanism  as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”. In this particular case it seems to be a fear that someone might be happy and someone else might make a living from that fact. A truly terrible set of circumstances.


Ariel Anderssen is a  sub BDSM model, so most of her images aren’t well suited to this blog. However, I did think my foot loving readers might appreciate this one I found on her twitter feed. For anyone who does appreciate some beautifully done female submission, then her OnlyFans is available here.

Stress

I probably didn’t pick the best week to schedule a bunch of job interviews. Combining those with the US elections has put some major pressure on my stress level. Hopefully I can make it to the weekend without a cardiac arrest.

As a stress reliever, I did enjoy some audiovisual candy in the form of a video – My Bloody Valentine by Machine Gun Kelly. It’s silly pop nonsense, with attractive people bouncing around and indulging in some light kinky fun. It features Megan Fox doing some tease and denial, which is just what I needed to get my mind off Wisconsin voting and questions about intra-team conflict resolution.

My thanks to blog reader Gary for the pointer to this.

Looking Forward

A ten year anniversary seems like the perfect moment to a cast an eye to the future. What should I do with this site for the next decade? What exciting developments will be heading your way? Sadly, I have absolutely no idea.

Most blogs seem to peter out when their creators feel they’ve nothing new to say. The mixture of posts I use tends to reduce the risk of that. Occasionally personal posts are greatly outnumbered by those focusing on hot images, site links, funny articles, mainstream kinky coverage, etc. If I’d stuck to purely personal material I think I’d have been lucky to make it to year one, let alone year ten.

Given that flexibility of format and the vastness of the kinky world, I’m unlikely to run out of material. That makes my free time and interest level the primary limiting factors. The future of those two is hard to predict. I’m hoping that in the next few years I can retire early and create space for personal projects and travel. Maybe that’ll free up more time for kinky adventures and provide much blogging inspiration. Alternatively, maybe new projects will suck up my time and force me to make some hard choices about where I spend it. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find a good balance.

In the meantime, barring technical disasters or unexpected life events, I’ve no plans to change what I’m doing here. However, if reader’s have any great suggestions or things they’d like to see, then feel free to let me know via a comment. I make no promises to adopt anything suggested, but I’m always open to new ideas or possible improvements.

I’ll leave you with a vision of the future from the movie Starcrash. This is Stellar Star – the best astro-pilot in the whole universe – as played by Caroline Munro. She’s the one on the right, sporting the standard pilot outfit of the future.

Diana Rigg

I was sad to read of the recent passing of Diana Rigg. I’m sure a lot of my more mature readers will know her from her iconic role as Emma Peel in the Avengers. She was a 60’s fashion icon, bringing an edge of fetish into the mainstream. Her career was long and varied, with roles ranging from the gun toting Emma Peel to Shakespeare, and from marrying James Bond to hanging out with Kermit. More recently she was Emmy nominated for playing Olenna Tyrell in GoT.

There was no shortage of images I could have used for this post. There’s the iconic catsuit, the minimal super spy look, the 70’s jumpsuit and whatever the hell is going on here. In the end I went with a publicity shot from the movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It might not have been the best Bond movie, but this shot is beautiful. Thanks for everything Diana.

Cuck Jr.

About one hundred years ago I wrote a post on how the kink of cuckolding had been co-opted by the right wing as a form of insult. Given the hypocrisy and projection that emanates from that group, it was inevitable that one of their own would be caught in a real cuckolding scandal. That’s now happened with Jerry Falwell Jr, as reported here by Reuters. Allegedly Jerry liked to watch while his wife had sex with a much younger and more virile man named Giancarlo Granda.

The media and late night comedians obviously saw this story as manna from heaven. A place that, based on his own beliefs, Jerry will presumably now struggle to qualify for. What struck me as surprising was how keen comedians were to emphasize they were not kink shaming. Colbert did a very fun bit on the story, but repeatedly stopped to emphasize he was attacking the hypocrisy, not the sex. I think ten or fifteen years ago the story would have been much more about laughing at the weird freaks and their strange kinks. So, progress?

While the story coverage has been extensive, with the inevitable links to the grifter-in-chief, I do think the media are missing a major piece of it. Namely, what exactly is Jerry’s kink? Is it a genuine cuckold scene? A hotwife scenario? A voyeurism kink? I hope for his sake that humiliation is at least part of it, because he’s getting no shortage of that right now.

This shot is from the Subby Hubby site, specialists in cuckold material. I’m sure the handsome and viral pool boy is just about to enter from stage left.

Twinkle Toes

Just after writing my previous post on the subject of kink and shame, I stumbled across this Savage Love column. I think the first letter there is a good grounding point for those of us who spend a lot of time on BDSM sites and following like minded people on social media. It’s easy to get blase about kinks and forget that for a lot of people they can come as a shock.

The letter in question features a guy whose boyfriend is into feet and has a thing for painting toe nails. As kinks go, I can’t really think of a more harmless one. A foot fetish is very common and painting a partners toenails seems kind of cute whatever the gender combination. Yet the letter writer – someone who regularly read Savage Love and claimed to be GGG – seemed weirdly freaked by the idea. I think Dan nails the answer, but the fact the writer felt the need to pose the question is a good data point in itself.

When it comes to foot lovers, Quentin Tarantino is an obvious go to. This is him in a publicity shoot with Diane Kruger for his movie Inglorious Bastards. It was shot for the NY Time Magazine.

Valerie Leon

I’m moving on from C S Lewis, but sticking with kinky button pushing moments from childhood. This image is Valerie Leon with Peter Sellers from the movie ‘Revenge of the Pink Panther‘.

The original scene – viewable on youtube here – now comes across as horribly dated. It leans into all sorts of uncomfortable stereotypes. However, back when I first saw it in the mid 80’s, it was my first awareness of the dominatrix role. There were plenty of screen characters who’d pushed my buttons already (like Catwoman and Miss Peel), but nothing as sexually overt as Valerie Leon’s role here. For all its cliches, it helped me connect some of the dots around sex and kink. This whip wielding dominatrix might be played for laughs, but the fact that type of character actually existed was a big part of putting together my kinky puzzle.

The Silver Chair

I’m going to continue the C S Lewis theme for one more post. That’s probably not an opening sentence you’d expect to find on a kinky sex blog. However, as one of the comments on the previous post attested, Lewis did have form in the kinky realm. He signed some of his letters ‘Philomastix’, meaning lover of the whip, and at age 19 wrote this to a friend…

Across my knee” of course makes one think of positions for Whipping: or rather not for whipping (you couldn’t get any swing) but for that torture with brushes. This position, with its childish, nursery associations would have something beautifully intimate and also very humiliating for the victim.

That definitely reads as someone with a kinky and most likely submissive side.

Another commenter suggested his book The Magician’s Nephew contains hints of a Female Led Relationship. I don’t remember enough about the story to comment on that. However, I do remember the plot of his book ‘The Sliver Chair‘, and in hindsight the fact that particular plot stuck with me isn’t too surprising. It features another powerful and seductive witch, who captures and entrances a prince, and then has him tightly bound every night to an ornate silver chair. Admittedly, once he’s bound in place, at no point does the witch turn up for some cock-and-ball torture or nipple play. Yet even with that (sad) omission, I think the femdom elements are fairly clear.

This is one of the original illustrations of the Silver Chair by Pauline Baynes. The prince is tied in place and about to be ‘rescued’ by the heroes. That chair definitely would not look out of place in a BDSM dungeon.