Photograph – Page 133 – Femdom Resource

Fancy Steel

I’ve featured beautiful metal chastity devices in the past, mostly from the Steelwerks team. The device below is the first one I’ve encountered from the appropriately named Fancy Steel company. I know very little about the practicality of various chastity devices (Thumper is your man for that), but I do like the aesthetics of this one. With the waist belt it reminds me of the old fashioned medieval designs, but brought beautifully up to do date.

At $1,049 AUD it’s not exactly cheap, but that’s not out of line with similar devices. You can see it from a couple of different angles here and here.

Face-sitting explained

The recent British face-sitting protests (covered in my previous post) gave Salon a chance to publish an article explaining exactly what face-sitting is. Hopefully for most of my readers that’s a fairly superfluous explanation. What caught my eye was the comments. The article described face-sitting as being typically about domination and a lot of the comments were along the lines of ‘I never realized I was being dominant/submissive doing this’.

As I’ve argued before, there’s no such thing as an inherently dominant or submissive act. Intent and context is key. The act of sitting on someone’s face can be dominant, submissive or just squishy moist sexy fun times. The same holds true of pretty much any sexual act, yet this kind of simplistic labeling often crops up. People will claim a domme can’t give a blowjob, or have PIV sex with a submissive, or that anal sex is inherently homosexual.

It’s weird because that kind of simple labeling doesn’t crop up elsewhere. A hug can be a greeting, a sign of affection, a consolation or a celebration of success. An arm around the shoulders can be aggressive when trying to convince someone of something or a protective shielding act. Everyone understands these actions in terms of their context and intent. Yet that’s not the case with sexual acts. I wonder if it’s down to inherent insecurity about sex. When people are unsure of themselves they like to simplify and follow simple rules. They don’t want to be caught out by hidden social conventions and therefore reduce everything to context free labels.

Image is from the Brutal Face-Sitting site.

Face sitting protest

Regular readers will know that I like to seek out and post mainstream articles with a link (occasionally of a tenuous nature) to femdom. Typically I’ll spend time explaining why I think it’s femdom related, and then even more time hunting through tumblrs looking for a suitable sexy image to accompany the posts.

I was therefore very happy to spot a Guardian article titled ‘Face-sitting protest outside parliament against new porn rules’. Even better was the fact that it came with some great face sitting photographs. This kind of thing makes a bloggers life very easy. I particularly liked the protestor chanting described in the article…

“What do we want? Face-sitting! When do we want it? Now!”

That’s the kind of civil disobedience I could really get behind. Or under.

I’ve covered the new UK laws in previous posts here and here. You can read more articles on the protest (along with more photographs) here, here and here.

Putting the boot on

Here’s a third and final post on my recent shoe theme. It’s another fashion one, but this time showing a little love to practical footwear rather than fancy heels. Short boots like this are a very different kind of aesthetic, almost the exact flip side to fancy heels. Their aggressive, utilitarian, with a possible hint of punk. As is so often in kink and fetish, the big visual appeal exists on the extreme ends of the spectrum of choices.

The models are Meghan Collison and Yuri Pleskun, in a shoot by Michael Donovan for Vision China magazine. This was from a series of outtakes. You can see more here.

Most men appreciate a few more inches

The French have apparently scientifically proven that men are attracted to women in high heels. This study wasn’t done by the Institute of the Incredibly Bleeding Obvious, but by the Universite de Bretagne-Sud for the journal “Archives of Sexual Behaviour”. They used female volunteers with a variety of heel heights to see how ‘helpful’ male strangers were in different situations.

One situation involved a woman asking passers-by: “Excuse me, sir. We are currently conducting a survey on gender equality. Would you agree to answer our questionnaire?” Flat heels got a 46.7% answer rate, medium heels a 63% rate and the highest heels a whopping 83% success rate from the men.

The overall results don’t surprise me at all, although I hope the experimental set-up was more thoughtful than that simply description suggests. The aspect of high heels that does always surprise me is how many men complain about their women wearing them. Specifically, how many complain about having to drive or take cabs because their partners don’t feel like walking miles through dark badly maintained urban streets on them. I think if you’re heading out for drinks and dinner, the least you can do is spring for a few dollars cab fare.

The most amusing example of this I saw was waiting in the taxi line at the Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas. The couple in front of me were heading to the MGM Grand, which is a 10-15 minute walk in flats, and the man was complaining to the valet about the fact he had to take a cab because of his wife. She ripped off what looked like a very expensive high heeled shoe and brandished it in his face. Then, speaking loudly enough for the entire line to here, told him if he wanted to swap shoes with her she’d be happy to walk. Sadly she didn’t force him to take her heels, but he was quiet for the next few minutes until their cab arrived.

I found this on the Domination on My Terms tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution.

Stupidity in the UK

I no longer live in England, but I am still fond of my country of birth. It can be a great place to live and work. Unfortunately it does do some bloody stupid things at times. This is sadly one of those times.

The goverment there has just changed the law to significantly limit the type of sexual content that can be sold online. Pandora Blake (of the Dreams of Spanking site) has put up an excellent post on the subject. As she rightly observes, not only is it a huge blow for freedom of expression, it is also unequal in its rules. As this blog post by stavvers points out, something like facefucking is allowed where facesitting isn’t. So forcefully fucking a woman’s mouth with a penis is fine, but God help you if the woman wants to gently rest her derrière on his face in return. With a similar line of ‘logic’, swallowing semen is allowed, but swallowing female ejaculate isn’t.

If you want to see the full list of banned practices then the ObscenityLawyer has put together an informative post. The mental image of a bunch of goverment bureaucrats sitting around a meeting room debating where to draw the line on enemas and buttplugs would be amusing if the end results weren’t so goddam infuriating.

Under the new rules anything that creates welts, blood or bruising is not allowed. So presumably this kind of heavy paddling would be illegal to show. Ironic that a country known for its love of kinky corporal punishment – the English Vice – would be one of the only ones in the Western world to outlaw showing it.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image. If anyone can help me with that then please leave a comment with the details.

Rope and Cane

While I’m on the subject of caning, here’s an interesting shot featuring said implement. It’s kind of abstract and hot all at the same time. The heavy bondage combined with the cane stripes is pretty sexy. I think I’d enjoy being in that position. At the same time the simple geometric nature of the image, with segments of white flesh against the dark background, create a sense of disconnection from a real human scene. If you stare at it long enough it almost becomes an abstract piece of art.

I’m afraid I haven’t tracked down an original attribution for this. If anyone can help me with that then please let me know via the comments.

Brandishing the implement

Mistress Scarlet recently published a post musing on the classic shot of a domme demonstrating that her cane is indeed bendy. I’m sure you’ve all seen the shot – she’s typically glaring into the camera and flexing the cane with both hands. Something like this or this. In her opinion it’s an odd pose that’s not typically seen in actual kinky play.

I have to admit that as a neophyte kinkster, that pose did push my buttons. I have no idea why. I’ve never been caned outside of consensual play, so I’ve got no particular framework for it. There was just something about the visual tension of the shot and the sense of purpose that made it work. I think I mentally categorized it as the standard warm-up position before taking a swing, much as a tennis player positions themselves to serve or a runner limbers up in front of the blocks.

Now I’ve had few cane stripes quite literally under my belt, I tend to agree with Mistress Scarlet. It’s not a pose that I really see people ever do. The most common resting position is with the cane straight down parallel to the domme’s leg, possible accompanied by a gentle tapping against ankle or her boot. Now what pushes my buttons is to see a domme purposely move into position behind me, cane pointing down but just swishing sideways oh so slightly. It’s like a conductor loosening her wrist before launching the orchestra into the symphony.

The artwork above is by the artist Yumine Guo. She has a wonderful collection of her artwork available on her tumblr. She also has a deviant art site and a blog worth visiting. The photograph was the original inspiration for the artwork as mentioned in her tumblr post. I’m afraid I haven’t managed to track down an original attribution for the photograph.

Happy Thanskgiving

It’s Thanksgiving here in America. I always enjoy the holiday, but as an Englishman it doesn’t have the meaning for me that it does for my American friends. They grew up with the idea of turkey in November, where for me that month always meant fireworks and sausages on Guy Fawkes night.

However, I am keen to support the local traditions. For a femdom blog on Thanksgiving I think that means either a kinky pun on the idea of stuffing or a domestic scene featuring a domme dealing with a naked kitchen slave. This year, courtesy of Femme Fatale Films I’ve gone with a combination of both. I’m not exactly sure what’s going on in the first shot, but it does look like he’s about to get stuffed with something. I can only hope they keep their kitchen pervertibles in a clearly labelled draw and don’t mix them in with other utensils in the dishwasher.

The images comes from a shoot called Sticky Fingers. The domestic goddess featured is Miss Severity Myers, a London based pro-domme.

Win, Win, Win

I made it back to a damp and cold Seattle all in one piece. Unfortunately I came down with some stupid bug the day I flew back. I guess it’s better than getting sick on the flight there, but it still sucks to arrive home feeling terrible. Before I head back to my sickbed I want to do a bit of signal boosting for a very worthy blog post.

Mistress T is offering free access to her excellent members site in return for supporting a charitable organization named Kiva that specializes in microfinancing. She’s not asking you to give money – just loan it. You deposit some money with Kiva and pick individuals to receive it. They then repay you over time. In the meantime, as Mistress T describes in her post, she’ll give you access to her top quality femdom porn, with the access period determined by the amount loaned. So you get to help a worthy cause, generate some positive karma, get free porn and get your money back! It’s a win, win, win.

I’ve always been very impressed with Mistress T and the way she conducts herself. Both in her professional and personal life she appears to act with great integrity and thoughtfulness. It’s posts like this one, which’ll clearly cost her time and money to support, that really bring home those qualities. Not to mention that she has a truly beautiful bottom!

Image of Mistress T’s beautiful butt comes from this blog post. Should you wish to see a preview of what her members site offers then check it out here.