Photograph – Page 177 – Femdom Resource

Ed Lee

I was sad to read that Ed Lee, founder of Nu-West/Leda productions, had recently passed away. In an earlier era of really bad BDSM porn, he produced some of the most authentic and exciting corporal material around. As he describes in this interview, he was taking a big risk by doing so. The legal situation was very unclear and even if you won in court you could still end up bankrupt.

As a young femdom aficionado in the late 90’s I remember travelling down to London’s Soho specifically to hunt for Leda videos. I’d seen some of the still shots on-line and wanted to get my hands on some high quality VHS. There was only one shop that sold them (as they were illegal in England) and unfortunately they had a very loose approach to labeling their tapes. You’d buy 3 tapes and hope at least one of them was what it claimed to be. I suspect they were all pirate tapes, which no doubt would have infuriated Ed had he known. Being young and very nervous I never had the guts to go back and complain. After several trips and a dozen random tapes of all sorts of random porn (mostly rubbish), I’d managed to accumulate just 3 Leda ones. It was worth it though. The production values weren’t great, but the authenticity was never in doubt.

I’ll leave you with two shots from the short-lived Ma’am magazine he produced. Thanks for everything Ed.

Phrases of dread

There are any number of ominous phrases that I dread to hear. For example – “I’m not racist, but…” You can guarantee that something horribly racist always follows that. Another ominous one is – “We need to talk.” In my experience, nothing enjoyable or pleasant has ever followed that statement. “Please don’t be angry” is also a sign that happy fun times are not ahead. But perhaps the scariest one of all is – “For the sake of the children.” This phrase is a clear indication that provable harm to adults is about to be done in an effort to avoid nebulous and ill-defined harm to theoretical children.

The latest example of this comes from the beautiful country of Iceland. According to this and this article in the British press they’re thinking of banning online pornography to protect their children. The articles are full of weasel words and unsupported claims, with the usual suspects (such as the reliably overwrought Gail Dines) bringing along their axes to grind. The headlines would lead you to think they’re just targeting violent porn, which would be bad enough. However, in a nice bit of double-speak, it appears they’re defining all pornography as violent, so they get to ban it all.

I could pull any number of quotes out of the articles to mock, but I think my favorite was – “A strong consensus has been building, with people agreeing that something has to be done.” Which reminds me of the old expression: Something has to be done. This is something. Therefore, we have to do this.

I’m not sure how big the BDSM scene is in Iceland. I do know there are least a couple of pro-dommes there (Mistress Freyja and Mistress Dont U Dare). Last month I had around 700 page views from Iceland, which might only be 0.1% of the US total, but still indicates a non-trivial number of readers. So for all my Icelandic readers, I’ll share some horribly violent pornography with you before my site gets banned. I hope this doesn’t send your children off on a murderous rampage.

The obviously obscene and dangerous image is called Romance and is by Reraizure (free deviant art login required).

Dine and Domme NYC: Conclusion

This is a fairly belated conclusion, as my NYC trip ended almost 2 week ago. I’ve been sadly slacking on sorting through my session photographs, but I’m happy to say I had the time to fix that this weekend.

On the domme front I had two fantastic sessions with Miss Troy Orleans. We grabbed a lot of photographs and I’ve post the results on a separate page: Bondage with Miss Troy Orleans. I should warn my readers that there’s a lot of bound naked me in those shots. So if you’re just here for the pictures of hot dominant women (who in this case was holding the camera), I suggest scrolling on.

On the dining front, I’m not sure anyone comes to my blog for restaurant tips. However, just for completeness I’ll say that the three stand out meals were Le Bernardin (lunch), Jean George (lunch) and Eleven Madison Park (dinner). If you’re looking for a great meal in NYC I’d recommend those three wholeheartedly. Per Se was flawless but somehow unexciting. I can’t criticize any element, but nothing really wowed me. Del Posto, WD-50 and Kyo Ya were interesting in their own way, but all suffered from a few missteps. I did have a lot of fun browsing and eating at Eataly, so that’s another food spot I’d recommend.

The image is me suspended in a sleepsack at Salon d’Orleans. For those of you looking for the blogs tagline of ‘The beauty of dominant women’, I direct your attention to the elbow in the mirror.

Facebook fun

I was pleasantly surprised by my facebook feed today. Normally it’s full of random rubbish. Either it’s family snaps from relatives I barely know or blurry shots of bars featuring inebriated friends. Today when I looked there was a photograph I could have easily blogged here.

I’ve a friend who’s an amateur photographer and he often posts semi-posed pictures of his tall and rather attractive blonde wife. Normally these are pretty conventional shots that you’d see in any family album. Lots of pictures of her cooking, heading out for dinner, having cocktails, etc. Today he posted one that nailed every aspect of the cliched icy domme sneering down at the viewer. For some reason he decided to shoot from low down, looking up at her. They were heading out for dinner so she was fashionably dressed and wearing knee high black leather boots. And to cap it all her expression was one of aloof disdain. I suspect this was matched with the thought “What the hell are you doing down there and why are you shooting me from that angle you muppet?” I doubt my friends are kinky, but should she ever wish to moonlight as a pro-domme, I’d say she has one shot for her gallery ready to go.

I’m obviously not going to share the image in question. I’m sure my friend didn’t intend for his wife to be letched over by a random bunch of submissive guys. However, I will post a couple of shots that it remind me of.

I found both of these on the Dominant Ladies tumbr.

The holy trinity

I always enjoy analyzing the dynamics of BDSM play. How it works and how actions map into emotions. It’s an infinitely complex space and I’m sure everyone reacts to it differently. However, after playing earlier this week, it struck me that there are three main styles of interaction in the majority of my sessions: Pain, pleasure and comfort.

Pain is an expected part of BDSM. It’s the needle to the nipple, the cane to the inner thigh. Pleasure is also an easily understandable aspect. It’s the pressure of a vibrator or a gentle pegging. The third and final component, comfort, is the hardest to describe. It’s the soothing hand to the cheek or a murmured word of praise. It’s what calms me down when the pain begins to build and helps anchor me when my stress levels rise.

The dynamic can shift rapidly between these three themes, and I find it particularly interesting how that affects the connection between myself and the domme. I think most non-kinky people would assume that pleasure would bring you closer to someone and pain would push you away. Yet for me it’s very much the opposite. The pain elevates the domme in my eyes, making her the center of my world, and the comfort draws me to her. The interplay between the two is a very powerful and attractive one. In contrast the pleasure sends me into myself and weakens our connection. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy it or appreciate it. Just that it has a simpler, baser appeal, that’s much more about me than it is about us.

When it comes to femdom porn, it’s normally big on the pain and pleasure, less on the comfort. This shot seems a happy exception. Judging by his red marks he’s certainly experienced the pain part.

I found this one the adore femdom tumblr. The originally site has sadly ceased to exist.

An Englishman’s home…

I’m on the record in past posts of disliking the fake stone dungeon effect that often crops up as a background for BDSM scenes. It’s particularly galling in American, as this is not a country that has ever possessed a castle with a dungeon. Anything built in Las Vegas or Disney World really doesn’t count. Not to mention some of the monstrosities that a realtor over here would claim as a castle.

I actually grew up a couple of miles from this place. That’s the still occupied Maxstoke castle in Warwickshire (home of other great castles). I am prepared to concede that if your house has a moat, was built in 1345 and once garrisoned troops during the English Civil War, then a dungeon setting would be perfectly fitting for a scene. I’ll be the first onto the rack in that situation. Until then, can we not find some more interesting settings to use?

Aside from the silly setting, I do like this shot. Kneeling on someone’s chest is an interesting position. You can create pain with the knees, or restrict breathing with weight, and maintain a strong psychological edge by looking directly down on the submissive. I found this on the forBABALON tumblr. It’s originally from Men in Pain.

PDS revisited

After my posts earlier this week (here and here) on PDS (Public Display of D/S) I thought I was done with the topic. Then I stumbled on the image below and felt like riffing on it a little more.

Personally I don’t kink on humiliation and I have a very low embarrassment threshold. I can get embarrassed just watching television on my own. Some people hide behind the couch when watching horror movies. I do it when watching comedies like Fraiser or Seinfeld. All this means that I’m not big on being leashed and led through the local shopping mall in a pink tutu.

On a more general philosophical note, I’m also not a fan of dragging innocent bystanders into a scene they’ve not consented to. However, when it comes to public spaces a little bit of my libertarian side does tend to leak out. A shared space means it should be for everyone. The fact I may not appreciate a couple making out, or practicing their fetch/sit/stay commands, doesn’t mean they should automatically be prevented from doing so. It’s their space as much as it is mine. After all, if it was left to me, I’d ban Ugg boots and Cargo pants from public display. Aesthetically I think I’d be right, but it’s hard to argue from a provable harm point of view.

For me the deciding factor for a lot of these ambiguous situation lies in intent. If you’re trying to piss people off and get off on their shock factor, then that’s obnoxious and out of line. But if you’re genuinely immersed in your thing, and trying to do it in the least confrontational way, then you should get a lot of leeway.

All of which brings me to the picture below, which I thought was very sweet. It made me smile. For all my fear of embarrassment, I’d be very happy to be this gentleman. And anybody complaining about it could go and kiss some other part of my anatomy.

I found this on the appropriately named Kiss the Feet tumblr.

The importance of posture

I sessioned with Lydia tonight, so right now I’m feeling very happy and buzzed. Many photographs were snapped, so hopefully I can share in a forthcoming post. Although I still need to publish some of the photographs I grabbed with Ms Troy Orleans last week. As problems go, excessive kinky imagery to sort through is not a bad one to have.

In the meantime, let me highlight a particular porn bugbear of mine: Awkward postures for dommes. The D/s dynamic suggests that a scene should always be focused around what the dominant wants. So anytime I see a dominant looking uncomfortable or in a non-ideal posture for them, it screws with any fantasy I might want to create around an image. It suggests the cameraman or the submissive is in charge and the dominant is subordinate to them.

Take the two images below. I kind of like the head in a box idea. I’ve got to think it’d be a real mindfuck to have you head isolated and immobile in that way. But her position looks so awkward. On tiptoes right at the edge of a table isn’t a great place to be. Not to mention the muscle effort needed to ride him from that kind of posture. In contrast the second image, while less visually dynamic, looks a far more reasonable position. I can enjoy that picture without some annoying bit of my brain niggling me with “That looks uncomfortable. Why would she do it like that? Does she not have a cushion to use?”

I found these images on Lash Kisser and X Ray Ted respectively. I believe the first is from Divine Bitches and the second from Men Are Slaves.

The cutting edge of gender issues (beware of icebergs)

I was amused to read this gawker article on an ironic Fox News snafu. The original Fox article was all about the benefits of traditional marriage and traditional gender models. Unfortunately for them the picture they picked to illustrate it was of the first same-sex couple to get married at the Empire State Building. Sadly they eventually spotted their faux-pas and changed the picture.

Although the picture problem was funny, the article itself is also pretty amusing. My favorite section is …

Prior to the 1970s, people viewed gender roles as as equally valuable. Many would argue women had the better end of the deal! It’s hard to claim women were oppressed in a nation in which men were expected to stand up when a lady enters the room or to lay down their lives to spare women life. When the Titanic went down in 1912, its sinking took 1,450 lives. Only 103 were women. One-hundred three.

Now I’m a man. Far be it from me to dictate when life was best for 50% of the world’s population. But I have to say that as general measure of happiness and liberty, the “chances of dying in a cruise ship disaster” test doesn’t strike me as the most representative one. If I had to pick between early access to lifeboats and say the right to vote (8 years after the Titanic sank), equal pay (<50% in 1912, and still only around 75%) and protection from workplace discrimination (not introduced till the 60’s), then I’m taking my chances in the icy waters. Although if I have to also listen to that God awful Celine Dione song then it might be a trickier decision.

While it’s idiotic to use simple gender based social conventions as markers for oppression, that doesn’t mean the social niceties themselves aren’t worth preserving. I enjoy the opportunity to display some old fashioned manners. Sadly, while standing for a lady is common enough, someone asking me to adjust their garter is a touch rarer. While this shot has an older feel to it, but is actually from 1981. It’s by Helmut Newton for Vogue.

PDS

I was going to follow-up my previous post with some comments on my personal feelings about PDS (Public Displays of Dominance and Submission). However, as I started to write it, I realized I really wasn’t adding much to the debate. The rules on how a shared public space should be used are endlessly debatable and mutable.

So instead let me make a meta-point: Everyone stands on a slope. By which I mean there is no fixed point and stable surface from which to cast other opinions down. If you read the comments on the two articles I previously linked to (here and here) you’ll see a lot of de facto assumptions about what is appropriate behavior in public and what should be reserved for private spaces. The comment writers don’t seem aware that their universal truths are not universal at all. Unfortunately, if you hang out on BDSM forums and blogs, you’ll often see much the same attitude coming from the opposite direction.

This isn’t to say that there’s no right or wrong. Just that whatever position you adopt on any subject, be aware that you’re on a continuum. It’s still possible to draw lines and acceptable limits. Just don’t try and pretend that what you’ve chosen is somehow God given or universally accepted. Anyone arguing from that perspective instantly loses credibility.

After all that pontificating, let me make amends to my readers with some more leash shots. In this case they’re from The Properly Leashed Male tumblr and feature gentlemen being pulled by something a little more sensitive than a neck.