Photograph – Page 155 – Femdom Resource

Gift wrapped and nicely decorated

Here’s my third and final Christmas themed image. It’s also my favorite of those I published and spotted on other blogs. Normally the festive elements are simply costumes or props. Here they’ve managed to work them into an actually scene. There’s mummification and bondage done in a gift wrapping style. There are lights adding a decorative and a predicament element, and her costume is both seasonal and sexy. It’s a winning situation all round.

If you celebrate Christmas then I hope you have a very happy one. If you don’t, then I apologize for all the seasonal blather, and normally service will be resumed shortly!

I found this on the Domination on My terms tumblr. I don’t have an original attribution. It reminds me of the kind of thing published on the Dudes in Distress tumblr, but that sadly seems to have lost all its content, so I can’t validate that thought. If anyone knows who created it then please leave a comment.

A cuckold at Christmas

This is a still from a Divine Bitches shoot entitled Cuckold Christmas. The lucky hubby has just received a CB-6000 device as a special Christmas gift, and his wife is enjoying tying and teasing him with it in place. After which she locks him into their prison cell under the stairs. I have to say that this plot development did give me a small problem with my suspension of disbelief. It seems an odd order of events to buy him his first chastity device after you’ve already fitted your living room out with a prison cell. Maybe he was stuck in the Christmas rush for an age and she had both time and power tools on her hands? Of course once he’s safely locked up, her boyfriend turns up for a festive fuck, leaving him with another gift to enjoy.

Plot mockery aside, I do like the images from this scene (although he needs to lose the socks). Jealousy and humiliation don’t do much for me in the cuckold dynamic, but I love the idea of tease and denial. The contrast of extreme pleasure with horrible frustration is an intriguing one. But while I think the images are good, the plot description on Divine Bitches is awful. This seems to be a common trait of a lot of kink sites. I’m not sure if they’re trying to cram as many porn-y search phrases as possible into the text, or this kind of description actually works to sell the material. Either way it’d make me keener to buy their movies if they weren’t all described by the porn-o-tron 2000 auto caption generator.

The scene features Felony, Maestro and David Chase. Available here from Divine Bitches.

Tis the season

This is the time of year when Christmas themed images start appearing on blogs. It’s also normally the time of year when I start cursing my lack of suitable material. I’m a fairly ad-hoc blogger, tracking down images as and when I need them for a post. The problem is that Christmas themed femdom is rare, and hunting for it on an as needed doesn’t really work. Fortunately, having encountered this problem twice before, I’ve got a bit more organized in advance this year. I at least have 2 or 3 suitable images saved, so brace yourself for a (very) short series of festive posts.

This first one features Ida Lupino, a pioneering female director and star of such classic movies as They Drive by Night and High Sierra. According to this blog post the image was shot at a Warner Brothers holiday party in 1942.

News from north of the border

A professional dominatrix made a little bit of history in Canada yesterday. Terri-Jean Bedford (actually a retired pro-domme), along with Amy Lebovitch and Valerie Scott, won their case in front of the Canadian Supreme Court to strike down the countries anti-prostitution laws. This Tits and Sass post has a round-up of various links on the news. You can see some of the positive reaction from pro-dommes and other sex workers in twitter comments like this, this and this.

Some of you might be wondering why a pro-domme is involved in anti-prostitution laws. After all, don’t pro-dommes abstain from sex with clients? The reality is that when it comes to sexual matters the law is frequently an ass. In this case Terri-Jean Bedford was legally working in her own space as a pro-domme in 1994 when the Toronto police raided and arrested her. The confiscated all her equipment, splashed her name across the papers and ultimately (in 1998) convicted her of keeping a bawdy house. Since then, with the help of a dozen anonymous backers, she’s been fighting the legal system. And, as it turns out, winning.

The confluence of sex, commerce, morality and law is always going to be a complex one. I’ve therefore adopted a simple rule I always start with in these matters – listen to the voices of the people involved. It’s fine to debate with academics* and politicians, but not all opinions are equal. And in this case the opinions of sex workers are both far more important and (as far as I can tell) unequivocally in favor of this ruling. So a big congratulations to Ms Bedford, someone who can certainly rock a leather jacket and riding crop look.

I’m actually in the process of reading her book Dominatrix on Trial. I’ll put a review of it up at some point soon.

* The exception to debating academics would be people like Gail Dines and Melissa Farley. Their twisting of facts and obvious bias disqualifies them instantly from any sensible debate.

Woof and Grrrr!

I normally find pet play shots kind of cute. I intellectually get role playing an eager but helpless puppy, even if it doesn’t work for me on an erotic level. However, this image scares the fuck out of me. It looks like a cute female domme and an evil male dog domme. I picture a quivering pink poodle just left of shot that he’s topping. No doubt Bronco is a softy deep down, but I’d want a muzzle and choke collar in place before going anywhere near him.

I found this on the Geek Domme tumblr. I think it originally came from the Pet Play site.

Decision time

This image reminded me of those lovely moments in a scene where I’m not sure exactly which way it’s going to go. Is she going to be nice? Or is she going to be nasty? And if she’s nasty, is it going to be the playful variety or the kind that’ll have me admiring the bruises for days? What makes those moments so lovely is that I’m never sure exactly what I really want. My brain and cock are normally pulling for team nice, but some deep dark part of me is usually in the background murmuring “Go on. Do it. Fuck him up. Make it hurt.”

I found the image on the Femdom Chronicles tumblr. It’s originally from the Men in Pain site.

Pigeonholing (sadly not a kinky technique)

I want to follow up yesterday’s post with a further point about variety in the sexual realm. Although it’s more of an observation on the perception of kink than a specific point.

In non-sexual situations everyone implicitly understands that what you enjoy is situational and variable. Sometimes I want a sandwich, other times I want a fancy meal with matching wines. Tonight I’m watching a moody existential French thriller, tomorrow I’ll catch up on my political comedy via some Colbert Report episodes. Nobody assumes that liking one thing precludes liking other things.

Yet in the sexual realm that assumption crops up all the time. If you like men you can’t like women. If you’re kinky you can’t enjoy conventional foreplay and sex. If you’re dominant you can’t enjoy giving oral sex. If you enjoy pain you can’t enjoy cuddling. Stating a sexual preference often seems to pigeonhole people in a way that other preferences don’t. I’ve been shocked by how many people assume that because I’m a male submissive that I always need a leather clad whip wielding dominatrix to get off.

Admittedly there are people out there who only respond to their very specific fetish. If the only way you can orgasm is by dressing as a penguin and having a large blonde lady in a viking outfit throws herring at your head, well you have my sympathies. But I suspect you’re in a minority, and not just because of that particular fetish. I think for most kinky people, their kinks expand their interests and options, not confine them. And that’s probably a fact we should talk more about. Doing so might encourage people to explore their sexual interests and not fear that they’re heading down a path of depravity that’ll ruin their lives and existing relationships.

I thought this image of some simple kissing and biting made a nice contrast to yesterday’s complex scene. I found this on the Fucking Cuddle tumblr.

Keep it complicated

There’s a class of people who see every activity as a competitive event. There’s a right way and a wrong way, and they’ll be very happy to loudly tell everyone which is which. These people are annoying. There’s a further sub-class of them who insist that only the simplest most straightforward things can be right. Dinner should be steak, drinks should be beer or unadulterated spirits and sex should be good old PIV fucking. Anyone making life more complicated than this is pretentious, weird and fussy. I find these people incredibly annoying.

Variety in life is a wonderful thing. Both simple and fancy have their place. I personally hate discovering that I don’t like something. I feel like I’m missing out on a pleasure others get to enjoy. Anytime I see some incredibly elaborate kinky set-up I don’t think ‘Wow, that’s so unnecessary.’ I think ‘Fuck yeah! Go for it.’ I’m always happy to see someone doing something above and beyond, even when it’s not my personal kink.

Take for example this article in Serious Bondage and the scene in the image below. This has Mumman trapped in a small cell set into a deck, wearing a leather armbinder, a chastity device and a tight gasmask. Mme Suzanne is blowing smoke into the breathing tube and pulling the string attached to the chastity device. That’s not a set-up that I’d personally enjoy or want to try, but I love the fact there are people passionate enough to set these kind of scenes up. Sex is a hugely important part of life, yet as a culture we often seem to frown on people who invest major effort and time into their fantasies. We should be celebrating their effort and inventiveness.

Gangs of New York

One look at their footwear tells you these are not people who actually ride motorcycles. Yet I still like this shot. The old school British motorbikes are very stylish, as are the leather outfits. As an image it’s almost a double cliche. It was shot for Vogue by Peter Lindbergh in 1991, and obviously apes the biker iconography of the 50’s. Yet looking at it now, it is also a great example of the kind of supermodel photo shoots that were so common in the 80’s and 90’s.

The models featured are Naomi Campbell, Karen Mulder and Helena Christensen. The photographer was Peter Lindbergh. You can see more images from the shoot here.

Never interview naked

I thought this was an interesting article on how we intellectually react to an image of someone naked. The simplistic view is that we objectify them, treating them as less than human. The article claims that it’s more complicated than that, and that while we do consider them less intelligent, we also think they’re more sensitive.

In one experiment … the photo showed either just the head or also the shirtless torso. When presented shirtless, targets were seen as having less competence. This is just what you might expect from research on objectification: we’re easily induced to see others as mere objects, pieces of meat without thoughts of their own. But it wasn’t that simple. Shirtless targets weren’t seen as devoid of all thought. They were actually seen as being more capable of emotions and sensations than their less exposed selves. They didn’t have less mental life but a different mental life.

They even used Timothy Greenfield-Sanders Porn-Star Portraits book in one experiment and found that varying the sexuality of the pose simply moved people along the lower-competence/higher-sensitivity curve. True objectification never actually occurred.

Given that all the personal images posted on this blog feature a naked me, I can only assume my readers think I’m a delicate and emotional creature, who is thicker than a whale omelette. This also has interesting implications for the CFNM fetish. Often that’s treated as a power dynamic or a humiliation scene. I now wonder if there’s also a degree of subconscious role reversal in it for some men. Cultural cliches categorize women as emotional and men as intellectual. Based on the above finding, CFNM images would reverse that broken stereotype.

I thought this image (found on homer’s blog) was an appropriate one to use for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s obviously a CFNM shot. But it’s also an animal roleplay, and that seems to align with the intellectual/sensitive split. We don’t think of animals as competent. Nobody expects their dog to balance the household accounts or fix that leaky tap in the guest bathroom. But we do assign a lot of emotional attributes to pets. Dogs are seen as particularly dumb but sensitive, which is apparently much like our views on naked humans.