Photograph – Page 129 – Femdom Resource

Crossover

I believe the two images below are from a regular porn film, without a specific femdom slant. I found them via The New Superior Sex tumblr, and reverse image searching led me to this movie (warning youporn link that plays video with annoying music). I can’t say I’m a fan of the other tropes displayed on the youporn page (teen, thin, cutie, etc.) but I do like that it’s normalizing kinky play across regular porn. Blindfolds and bondage can be fun. It doesn’t have to be crazy cattleprods and whips on one side and random orifice stuffing on the other. Sex and sensuality works well with kink, and kink adds a nice edge to them in return.

Blogocalypse cancelled (for the moment)

Google has thankfully reversed course on their plan to eliminate all blogs featuring sexually explicit material. Bacchus does some detailed parsing of the retraction in posts here and here. I’m happy to see that some of my favorite blogs will be sticking around, but the bottom line remains the same. If you’re an adult blog on Google’s blogger, you’re on borrowed time. Move now or resign yourself to living with a digital Sword of Damocles.

It’s tempting to assign malicious intent in these situations, but I suspect it’s just another example of the the dynamics that exist in big tech companies when it comes to sexual material. To make good decisions you need data and debate. You need people to argue both sides of the discussion and play out scenarios based on the data. It’s no doubt easy for engineers to figure the cost of hosting lots of images, to determine the fraction of adult blogs and to point at sites using blogger as free hosting for advertising commercial porn sites. What’s needed on the other side is for people to dig into adult sites and point out their social value. Unfortunately it’s tough for the average tech person to stand up in a conference room and defend porn and explicit sexual material in front of their coworkers. Who wants to be the person telling their boss that the change might save the company millions of dollars, but it’s really important that Servitor’s femdom captions are shared with the world? I can just imagine the scene – “Yes, I know they’re pretty twisted. I’m sorry that castration one made you uncomfortable. And yes, I know Julie mentioned something about contacting HR after the meeting. And OK, so all the photographs are unlicensed. But dammit, it’s our ethical duty to publish them. It’s what our shareholders would want us to do.”

I’m being deliberately facetious, but I think it highlights the dynamics at play. That said, I think if you choose to work on an open blogging platform, you should be able to engage in these kind of arguments (although probably not in that exact form). If you’re not happy supporting forms of expression about subjects you’re not comfortable with, working with bloggers is not for you. Unfortunately the hiring processes for teams within large companies don’t filter all that well for that kind of criteria.
I had no idea what image I should feature with this post, so here’s something generally femdom-y and hot. It was featured on hmp’s blog, one of those that was in the firing line for closure.

I should add that I’ve absolute zero insider knowledge into Google’s decision making process on blogger. I’m just going by my knowledge of the dynamics of big tech companies. For all I know, they might decide everything by games of pin the tail on the intern. Or by having Sergey Brin throwing lawn darts into an organization chart after doing a dozen shots of Jägermeister. Either of those would at least account for Google+.

Keeping it real

After a vacation in the land of the rich, famous and ostentatious, a post featuring this article on financial domination seems appropriate. It’s one of the better ones I’ve seen from the mainstream press on the subject, involving interviews with both fin dommes and their clients.

The bit of this article that made me smile was about one of the clients – Dennis a 38 year old professor.

For him, the appeal of financial domination is that it’s a “very real” form of humiliation and power exchange. “BDSM role-play with whips, chains, bondage is one thing, but at the end of the day those are just games, which focus around male fantasy,” he says. “But handing over your hard-earned money to a beautiful woman while being denied any sexual and/or romantic reciprocation is about as real as female domination gets.”
…
Generally, he prefers Fin Doms between 18 and 27, athletic women who shop at stores like Lululemon, women with “pretty, innocent-looking faces and sparkling eyes that hide greedy, sadistic and narcissistic personalities.”

I spot a significant amount of self-delusion there. I’m all for Dennis getting his kicks in a consensual fashion. He’s clearly got a very particular interest and fantasy. But it makes me laugh to think that it’s ‘real femdom’ where all that stuff with bondage and whips is just games. At the end of the day it’s all fantasy and it’s all real. Nobody would bother with kink if it didn’t fulfill some sort of fantasy. And as long as cash is being handed over, welts are being raised and knots are being tied, then it’s all equally real.

I believe this is another image from the London based pro-domme Miss Antonia Davenshaw. I found it somewhere on tumblr, but detective works leads me back to her twitter feed.

The epicenter of heels

I was out shopping and dining in Beverly Hills today. It’s a shame I’m not a high heel fetishist, because I think the fashion district here might have more women wearing higher heels than anywhere else in the US. I’m used to seeing them worn at night in restaurants or outside clubs, but not so much by women popping out to get a quick coffee at the corner Starbucks. I’d also suggest that if you’ve a thing for well dressed women in heels looking bored and slightly disdainful while spending obscene amounts of money, then Rodeo Drive is your place to go.

Big tech and adult content

The recent decision by Google to ban blogs featuring sexually explicit images/video or graphic nudity continues to reverberate around the blogsphere. While in theory text only explicit blogs are safe, but how long would you like to bet on that lasting? If they can change the rules once, they can do it again and probably will.

Over time Google has clearly got more conservative and less idealistic. Their image search is another good example of that. For example, assuming you have safe search off, compare a search for the lovely Mistress T on Google and Bing. Google barely features her in the results where Bing features a bare her from every angle imaginable. CBT on Google is a lot of powerpoint slides, where on Bing it’s wall to wall penises. My favorite is probably Men in Pain. On Google it’s a lot of stock photos of guys with headaches where on Bing it’s all sorts of good femdom stuff. This kind of conservatism is an expression of Google’s current culture.

They’re not alone in this. Apple has consistently run into bad press for censorship. Facebook recently got into trouble for it’s policy of blocking drag performers from their platform, and has many previous censorship problems. Amazon seems to run into censorship questions every few months.

What I find fascinating (outside my annoyance at the outcome) is how these kind of decisions are taken. The external perception of large tech companies is of corporate monoliths, but the reality is that very few people will be involved with these kind of decisions. I’ll also bet that they’re not taken at a particularly high level. A few product managers get into a room and make a bad call based on very limited information. They end up affected millions of people, but they’re not some grand expression of corporate will taken by cigar smoking board members. They’re a corporate culture filtered through a few people.

I had difficulty picking an image for this post until I stumbled on the shot below. It seemed apt.

Blogocalypse

Users of Google’s Blogger service just received a rather nasty surprise. From March 23rd they’re going to eliminate all adult blogs. If you purely have text content you might escape the purge, but almost all blogs I know and enjoy feature the occasional photograph or video clip (hmp, servitor, Victoria Vista, RedRump, etc.). That puts them directly in Google’s firing line. As Bacchus has written in the past the pornocalypse comes for us all.

It’s a horrible act of vandalism. There’s millions of pages of pages out there that people have poured millions of hours of work and thought into. Some fraction of them might get relocated, but huge chunks will be lost and all the links that have been established between sites will be trashed. In the past I’ve written sympathetically about how adult content gets treated in large technology companies. I often think it’s a lot of small bad decisions and subtle social pressures that leads to adult content getting treated as a second class citizen of the web. However, in this case it seems to be a single and deliberate decision. A particularly poor, thoughtless and cruel decision.

Of course the important thing to remember when you’re using a service like blogspot (or facebook, or gmail, or yahoo or any ‘free’ offering) is that you’re not the customer. You’re the product. And companies kill product lines all the time.

I’m sure many bloggers will be cursing the person responsible for this over the coming months. Perhaps it’ll help to imagine it’s the gentleman in the image below and he gets a stripe for every blog killed. This image is particularly suitable to feature here as I found it on the Femdom Times site, which has now been suspended for violating the WordPress TOS. Originally it’s from the Femme Fatale Films site.

Marie Claire talk to Ms Mona Rogers

If I was ever thinking of introducing a regular weekly feature, it’d probably be an interview with a dominatrix. These wouldn’t be interviews given by me I hasten to add. Just random interviews I find in the press. I could easily dig one out a week. They seem to be a common way for a mainstream publication to combine a human interest story with some salacious sex talk.

Since a certain movie came out I’ve seen dozens of examples, most of which I’ve ignored. However, I did like this one in (all of places) Marie Claire with the NYC domme Ms Mona Rogers. It’s informative, interesting and approaches the subject in a very positive way. I can imagine somebody reading it and wanting to learn more. It also features some excellent photographs by Kathryn Wirsing.

The image below is Ms Rogers taking her ease on a suitably positioned male. I don’t believe it was taken by Kathryn Wirsing, but unfortunately I don’t have an attribution for the photographer. If you’d like to see more of Ms Roger her professional website is here.

Home Street Home

If you live in the Bay Area and are a fan of punk, you might want to check out a new musical entitled Home Street Home. As described in this SFWeekly article, it has been written by Fat Mike (of NOFX fame), Soma Snakeoil (his partner / domme) and Jeff Marx (compose of Avenue Q). As you might expect from a punk musical it features some challenging themes, including drug use, self-harm, prostitution and BDSM. On the musical side it’s blessed with members from punk bands like the Descendents, Lagwagon, No Use for a Name, Alkaline Trio, Dropkick Murphys, etc.

I’ve posted on Fat Mike previously, and commented positively on the refreshing and frank way he discusses his kinks. This article and the musical continue that trend. The chain that you can see Soma gripping in the image below is his collar, locked around his neck with a key that she carries.

The show runs at Z space in San Francisco from now until March 7th. I really hope it get’s an extended run so I can make it down there to see it myself.

Should your tastes not run to punk musicals but you’d like to see more of Soma Snakeoil, her professional site is here.

Stress and Submission

This is my last post (for a while at least) on the topic of the alpha submissive (previous posts are available here, here and here). I’m afraid I’m finishing with a bit of a rant.

You can guarantee that whenever this topic comes up somebody will start talking about powerful people having stressful jobs. They’ll talk about difficult decisions, the responsibility of power and how BDSM and submission is a way to temporarily escape from that. For example, here’s an Alternet article and a Psychology Today article making exactly that argument. This is, in my not particularly humble opinion, complete bullshit. Not the part about submission as escape, just all the rest of it.

You know what’s stressful? Juggling two minimum wage jobs to try and cover your rent. What’s a difficult decision? Trying to decide if you should wipe out your savings on a hospital visit. Responsibility is bringing up your children in a not so great neighborhood while your deadbeat ex stiffs you on child support payments. Forget the guy investing $100M for Goldman Sachs. Give him $100 in his personal checking account and see how he feels about that.

I’m lucky enough to have a well paid job now, but I grew up in a family with very little money. I remember the stress that any unexpected expense could generate. There was always an underlying anxiety that something would go wrong and we wouldn’t be able to deal with it. Money might not buy happiness, but it sure as hell takes the edge off unhappiness. It turns problems into inconveniences. And nobody needs a good beating to take their mind off an inconvenience.

I think society prefers to think about executive and finance jobs as being particularly stressful and responsible in order to justify their incredible salaries. In some cases they may well be worth those salaries. Steve Jobs probably was. Jeffrey Skilling probably wasn’t. But whatever their worth, when the biggest downside to a decision is that you might have to settle for a new Ferrari rather than that yacht you had your eye on, that’s not a stressful decision. If anyone needs BDSM to take a ‘breather from the growing burden on selfhood’ (to quote the Psychology Today article), it’s the guy trying to cheaply fix the transmission on the 13 year old Ford that he needs to get to work tomorrow.

This is Miss Davenshaw, a London based pro-domme. She specializes in roleplaying corporate scenarios. So if you fancy being taken in hand by a strict female executive, I suggest dropping her a line.

The alpha female submissive?

More ruminations follow on the often espoused theory that submissives are frequently thrusting, successful alpha types in daily life. I hadn’t intended to write quite so much about this, but the more I ponder it, the more flaws I see in it.

In my original post I used the expression ‘submissive people’, but that’s not really accurate. I almost never hear of female submissives described in this way. The powerful controlling person who needs to let go in the bedroom is always a man in a ‘stressful’ job. He needs to take a timeout and not be himself for a while. When it comes to female submissives the more common descriptions center around secret yearnings, a desire to be controlled and tapping into fantasies. It’s about giving in to her deep desire, rather than stepping outside of the self.

In other words male submission is being positioned as taking a break from the normal state of affairs, where female submission is about a desire to return to a more natural order. To me that says much more about the way society perceives gender and power dynamics than it does about the nature of submission. It’s fundamentally an inconsistent view motivated by the need to fit it into conventional structures.

The cute slave in this image is doubtless getting in touch with her inner desire for submission. Of course if she was a man then this would have been shot in between power lunches and organizing leveraged buy-outs on Wall Street.

The original source for this is the Everyday Slave site. I found it via the Alternative Femdom tumblr.