Tag: Mainstream

Why not both?

One final comment on the recent ‘Fetish or Fashion’ pop-quiz I’ve been running. Servitor posed the very reasonable question: Why not both?

That’s a fair point. As far as the resulting images go, they contain significant elements of both fetish and fashion. I guess I should frame the question around the image creators and their primary industry. Is it a pro-domme / fetish producer or a model being paid for a shoot with a (relatively) mainstream publication. Is it someone who spends more time in dungeons and playspaces than they do strutting a catwalk? What kind of animal do they usually have at the end of a leash? Petite Pomeranian or a perky puppy boy?

There’s clearly a healthy interchange between the fashion and fetish worlds. However, I’m not sure it’s always a equally balanced exchange. A lot of pro-dommes are extremely fashion aware. Unfortunately, on the flipside, fashion editors and photographers often seem confused about kink. A charitable take would be that they’re deliberately re-interpreting and re-contextualizing kink to tell their own stories. After all, their ultimate goal is different to someone creating material for a kink or fetish market. A less charitable interpretation would be they’re raiding kink for easy shock value and then haphazardly mashing its elements together without any really understanding.

I think the distinction between fashion or fetish often doesn’t come down to the clothes, styling, make-up or beauty of the subjects. It’s down to their understanding and intelligent use of the kinky elements. Or not.

This mainstream fashion shot is from Vice Serbia, features rapper Sajsi Mc and was photographed by Alek Živković.

Fashion or Fetish? Part III

Here’s the third and final part of my fetish or fashion game. This time it’s a two-for-one deal, with an image from each category. But which one is from the world of fashion and which from the world of fetish? I suspect regular readers may find it a little easy given who is featured, but it’s an image I couldn’t resist.

If you guessed the first was fashion and the second was fetish then congratulations. Have a gold star. Or maybe, more appropriately, a shiny leather one. The first image is Carmen Electra, shot by  Josef Jasso for Nylon magazine. You can see more images from the shoot here. The second one is, as I’m sure many readers might have recognized, the incomparable Mistress Iris. This was from her twitter feed.

Hot Advice

I’m always a fan of mainstream magazines running positive articles on BDSM and ideas for kinky play. Getting more people to explore their sexual interests is great. However, the media have a tendency to lead with the high risk stuff, which is pretty much the last thing new kinksters should be trying in their bedroom.

Take for example this Vice article on temperature play. It’s titled a beginners guide, but in the first half dives into topics like making fire torches with alcohol and dropping flammable propane bubbles on people’s skin. Admittedly they add a bunch of caveats about not trying it without training, but why start there in a beginners guide? There’s a ton of fun temperature stuff you can do with hot wax and ice cubes that isn’t likely to land you in the ER. Pretty much by definition, if you’re learning about temperature play for the first time from a Vice article, there’s nothing you should be doing in the nude with flammable gases or liquids. Leave it to the professionals.

This is the striking Lady Lola, someone who is very much a professional. She is a London based pro-domme who lists fire play as one of her specialties. You can find her professional site here and her twitter feed here.

Pleasing Aubrey

One of my longstanding celebrity crushes has been Aubrey Plaza. She has – at least in her public persona – a fun mix of intensity and playfulness. Not to mention the obvious hotness. I’m crushing all the more having seen this video comparing Jessica Chastain and Aubrey’s reactions to ‘thirst tweets.‘ Ms Chastain seems somewhat horrified, while Ms Plaza leans into it hard. Totally worth a watch or ten.

If you’d like to see more of her then I’d recommend the show Legion (currently on Hulu). The first season is excellent and, while the next two seasons aren’t as strong, I never grow bored of watching Ms Plaza tear up a scene. You can see the kind of thing I mean in this Season 3 trailer.

This shot of Aubrey Plaza as Lenny is from Season 1 of Legion.

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.