Photograph – Page 208 – Femdom Resource

The doministrix in action

Mistress T recently published a post containing an entertaining description of a trip home to see her family. They have some idea of what she does, which I think is great, but she does have deal with a few awkward conversations. The most cringeworthy one that she describes was with a friend of her father…

….an older man with no teeth who started the conversation with: “So you do that dancing up and down the pole, eh?”. I carefully explained that I spent about a year dancing 5-6 years ago but I haven’t done that for awhile…hoping we could move the conversation to something else but no. He then said leeringly: “So you’re into the pictures now?” Fuck.
Mistress T

Personally, while I’d like to certainly avoid anything as painful as that sounds, I would enjoy being more open with my family. Or even being open at all. Keeping a big important chunk of my life separate from them isn’t pleasant. Unfortunately, while I have very caring supportive parents, I just can’t see how the conversation would work out well. Gay would be no problem. That’s genetic and there wouldn’t be an issue. But BDSM? And a submissive masochist? They’d blame themselves, and then I’d have to deal with hours of how they should have punished me differently, or potty trained me differently, or just done everything differently. Nobody wins in that scenario.

The ‘doministrix’ title comes courtesy of Mistress T’s mother conflating mistress with dominatrix. I like it a lot. Although it does sound a little like a monster that Perseus would have fought in Greek mythology. I can imagine it as a Ray Harryhausen movie – ‘Perseus versus the deadly doministrix’.

There’s always endless blogsphere debate about labels. Dom vs Domme vs Dominant is a perennial favorite. Or how to distinguish between pro-domme and non-pro-domme. Lifestyle domme is common but doesn’t find favor everywhere. Perhaps we should just start mashing a few words together and come up with some new ones. Lets say Dominatrix can be exclusively a pro-domme thing, and doministrix can be lifestyle. Problem solved (for about 30 seconds).

Anyway, here’s the doministrix herself in action, getting a polished posterior from a lucky slave. You can find similar material, along with all her excellent videos, at her commercial site.

An unhappy twist in the tale

This post started like most of my posts do. I spotted an interesting image somewhere online, probably on a tumblr site, and saved it for a future post. I initially like the shot below for the two expressions, her focus on the book and his focus on her. He reminded me a little of a dog sitting patiently, staring at its owner. That sense of rapt attention and the hope that just maybe there’s a treat in store. It wasn’t until I came back to look at it later that I noticed she was treading on his cock. For some people that’s probably the focal point of the picture, but for me that was just a nice bonus.

However, when I came to post the picture I had bit of a shock. It’s clearly from the Young Goddess site, but as I went to create the attribution link I discovered the site no longer exists. It has been around for years, and has produced some interesting and enjoyable content. I’ve featured it in pasts post, for example here and here, but sadly it’s now gone. Instead, there’s just a message thanking its members and a statement about the evils of stealing content and reposting it on forum sites. As someone about to repost one of their images, that was an unpleasant and disturbing thing to read.

I always try and operated on the principle of ‘do no harm’. Ideally I drive traffic and value to content providers, but at a minimum I shouldn’t cost them anything. I don’t feel I’m in any kind of competition with content producers, as this really isn’t a blog designed to get people off. If that happens then great, but I envision the images I post as more of an amuse-bouche for the libido rather a full meal. Hopefully it inspires people to go and look at the sites of the original creators, rather than heading off to the torrent and file sharing sites. But I might just be fooling myself about that.

Tumblr sites, which I list and promote, operate in even more murky waters. They carry a huge amount of copyright material (often minus the attribution) and most, outside the curation and aggregation of the pictures, don’t add a huge amount of extra value. Arguably that whole tumblr ecosystem is in very direct competition with content producers. If someone wants to masturbate to a particular type of porn, odds are they’ll find a number of tumblr sites dedicated to whatever they’re lusting for. For mainly video producers (like kink.com) I suspect it doesn’t matter, but for professional artists like Sardax and Nanshakh, I do wonder what impact it has.

Unfortunately there are no easy answers here (although there are certainly some bad ones). In the meantime I’d encourage all my readers to support original content producers and purchase the porn they enjoy. Otherwise they may find that one day it just doesn’t exist anymore.

Site Updates

I’ve added three new blogs to the blogroll on the right.

From Vanilla to Kinky features Cleo and Marc writing about the gradual evolution of their vanilla marriage into a female led relationship.

Lady Anna List is a professional and lifestyle Mistress based in Bradford, UK. She writes about both her personal and professional life in a candid, straightforward and humorous style. She’s also got one of the most impressive medical set-ups I’ve seen (although Lady Annisa could perhaps give her a run for her money).

Mistress Keene’s Dominant Thoughts is pretty much exactly what it says it is. Mistress Keene is a dominant woman based in Norfolk UK (not a million miles from where I used to live), who works as a pro-domme. Like Lady Anna she’s not someone to pander to the traditional ice-queen femdom stereotype, or the submissive men are worthless worms approach.

I am a PD who also really likes submissive men. I don’t want to belittle them, degrade them, emasculate them and treat them as children, animals or anything but grown men who I do respect. However, like and respect them as I may I do want to control them and I often want to hurt them.
Mistress Keene

That’s my favorite kind of domination. I always want to be treated me like a mature, intelligent adult. But that doesn’t preclude restraining me and making me scream in pain.

In other site updates, I’ve also cleaned up the Femdom Image page, dropping dead links and re-categorizing some sites. I’ve added two new tumblr links, to In a Humbler and the minimally named Me.

The image for this post comes courtesy of the In a Humbler tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t have an original attribution.

Tasting Menu

In a comment to my previous post ‘Masochist vs Fetishist vs Submissive‘ Saratoga asked an interesting question.

Do you think your feelings of submission, as distinct from masochism or fetish, are different for you, than, say, for me, because yours involved Pro Dommes with whom you don’t have a non-professional attachment, whereas all of mine, save one instance, were lifestyle, relationship- or association-based FemDom experiences?
Saratoga

In many ways this is an impossible question to answer, given I don’t know know what his feelings of submission are. I’ve also only had vanilla relationships prior to getting involved physically involved in BDSM, so I don’t even have a good comparison to make in my own life. However, it did seem an interesting thing to think about in general terms. What are some of the potential difference between professional and non-professional play?

In a follow-up comment Saratoga likened pro-play to an unhealthy snack as compared to a good balanced meal. I don’t like that analogy at all. An unhealthy snack suggests something bad for you, a guilty weakness that you’d be better off resisting. That doesn’t align at all with how I feel about my sessions. Despite that, the food analogy, always a popular one in this kind of context, does have some merit.

I’d liken a professional session to a tasting menu in a high end restaurant. It’ll probably showcases techniques and ingredients you might find it difficult to replicate at home. With the right kind of chef in the kitchen it’ll probably be designed and prepared with intensity and passion. It can deliver an out-of-the world experience for a few hours. I’ve had some restaurant meals that have almost been spiritual experiences the food was so good. But it’s a context free, self-contained experience. It stands alone as a very pure event. There’s not all the shared emotional history and deeper connection that you might get with a specially prepared home cooked meal.

The purity of a professional session is a mixed blessing. On the downside it means dealing with a very disconnected world. There’s a session and there’s normal life. If you can’t deal with that kind of discontinuity then professional play probably isn’t a good idea. It also limits the evolution of the D/s dynamic. Even when you session regularly with the same pro-domme (as I do), it’s hard to create a sense of continuity between sessions. On the upside, there’s no emotional baggage to interfere with the dynamic. No residual tension, unspoken issues or unresolved arguments. There’s just a dominant woman, a bunch of equipment design to fuck someone up and a naked willing submissive.

It would be a mistake to confuse this purity with emotional simplicity. I think it’s instructive to compare a pro-domme session with a casual, just for fun, sexual encounter. To the outside observer these might look like very similar things. The activities are different, but they both involve people outside a relationship engaging each other in intense physical sensations. Neither of them feature any kind of emotional commitment or a broader context. And yet, in my experience, they are very different. The fun sexual encounter is just that, fun. It’s an emotionally light, physically pleasant way to pass the time. In contrast I’ve experienced incredibly intense emotions in sessions. I’ve been pushed into places I never knew existed, and headspaces that left me buzzed and happy for days. There’s an intensity to BDSM play that can work well even without the richer emotional context of a deep relationship.

Given a lot of this post featured pro-dommes along with a food metaphor, I thought this would be a particularly apt image to use. This is Mona Rogers, a pro-domme from NYC, feeding dinner to one of her slaves. I don’t think he’s getting a tasting menu. If you’d like to try that rather cool doggy helmet our for yourself, her contact information is here.

The London Dungeon (for hire)

I’ve posted on interesting playspaces in the past (for example here and here). The one I’m featuring in this post sounds like it should be a popular tourist attraction, and in fact there actually is a London Dungeon attraction. I suspect any innocent American families who got them mixed up would be far more shocked by the modern day BDSM version than the genuine historical torture on display in the tourist version.

The photographs below show the two of the three main rooms, along with the sin bin, a pretty intense looking enclosed cell. There’s all sorts of other good stuff, including a head cage and head box, a pony beam, a vac bed, a dog cage and (one of my favorite bits of furniture) a bondage chair. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a playspace with quite so much fun stuff packed into it. If I still lived in the UK I’d pay it a visit for sure.

I came across the site via this post by Mz Jane Wild. In it she writes about taking tea with the Dungeon Keeper, and his experiences of looking for a Mistress in the pre-internet days…

He had described the process of scanning magazine and newspaper advertisements, of having to decipher the ambiguous wording to decide on the possibility of whether this was indeed a Mistress advertising. And then to apply by handwriting a letter and sending it off in the post!! If one was lucky a reply might be forthcoming, most likely something as terse as a phone number scrawled on the top of your own handwritten letter and the words ‘Call Me’.

When I bring up this topic there is some whistfulness as he speaks of the mystery and anticipation of those times, when things were so much more hidden and unexplored…
Ms Jane Wild

I can understand a little of the appeal of the mystery element. There’s always something a little more exciting about stepping into the unknown, that anticipation edged with fear and nervousness. But I for one am very grateful those days of scanning ambiguous newspaper advertisements are now gone. I’d have never got up the nerve to do my first session if that were still the case. These days people complain if a Mistress doesn’t show her face in her photographs. It’s hard to imagine writing a letter to an unknown person on the basis of a small and obscure advertisement.

Evil Twin

This image made me laugh. I don’t think it’s at all hot, but it does make me smile. I’m not sure if that’s because of his glare at the camera, his package peaking out like a swollen sausage or his evil twin (from an alternate universe) beard. She’s also contributing a jaunty sailor salute to the humorous ensemble. On the plus side, she does at least have the figure to pull off that tight latex number (although silly boots in my opinion).

I found this on the In a Humbler tumblr site.

I call the big one bitey

I always enjoy biting, and being bitten on the scrotum seems a particularly fiendishly fun place to do it. There are so many different sensations that could be created via pinching, tugging and nipping. She certainly seems to be enjoying it. Also that’s a kind of cool metal thing he has on. Not quite sure what you’d call it, but I assume it acts a bit like a cock ring.

I found this on The New Bootblack’s Oubliette tumblr site.

Serenity

After all the long, argumentative and wordy recent posts, I thought a return to a little visual loveliness might be in order.

These three images caught my eye for a number of reasons. She’s obviously very beautiful. I love the contrasting black of the lingerie and hair, with her delicate skin tone and slash of red lips. I also like the setting. Warm woods and fabrics make a nice change from dungeon drabness. But that really grabbed me was her serene expression. She’s not aloof or cold, just calm, composed and in control.

I found these on the Gorean Karirus tumblr site.

Masochist vs Fetishist vs Submissive

My recent couple of posts on pro-dommes and D/s dynamics (here and here) got me thinking once again about categorization. I’ve posted on this in the past, most recently here, but the pro-domme angle got me thinking about it in a slightly different way. As the post title suggests, I’m defining three basic groupings.

Masochists are internal. They’re focused on their own sensations and headspace. In an activity like a caning they enjoy the sharp impact against their flesh, the imperceptibly delayed rush of pain and the flood of endorphins that result. They find their fulfillment by looking inwards.

In contrast fetishists are external. They find satisfaction in physical objects, materials and activities. Typically people think of a fetish as targeting a material like leather or an object like high heels, but I think an activity can be equally fetishized. To continue the caning example, a fetishist might enjoy the ceremony of it. The click of the mistresses high heels as she circles behind him. The cut-off view of the her legs and feet as she takes positions. The warm-up swish. The rhythmic delivery of each strike. He find fulfillment in experiencing the external thing he fetishizes.

Submissives are all about taking the internal and making it external. They want to take things they normally control, key parts of their self-autonomy, and put them into the hands of someone else. Kinky acts or equipment are just tools to aid or emphasize this exchange. For a submissive a caning isn’t simply about the act or the pain. It’s about the dominant taking over his internal sensorium. Using pain to block even his internal thought processes. It’s that moment when the dominant pauses and then says with a smile “I think maybe 6 more.” That beautiful moment of decision about the submissive but not by the submissive.

There three groups are of course overlapping. I think a lot of non-dominant kinky males would identify to some degree with all of them. I’d typically not describe myself as a fetishist, but I still appreciate an exciting latex outfit or a striking pair of shiny leather boots. I think they key to figuring our your primary kinky wiring is to contemplate which of them you could do without. That really help crystallize the “nice bonus to have” against the “this is fundamentally who I am”. Personally, when I think about it in those terms, it’s clear that I’m primarily submissive. I could be dominated painlessly by a woman in sweatpants and still find it hot. Conversely, extreme sensations and a dungeon full of kinky gear would be no fun at all without the added element of control.

The reason I started thinking about these groupings in connection with pro-dommes is that these three categories represent three different types of client. That fact becomes self-evident when you look at posts on pro-domme discussion forums. Some people fixate on their internal sensations, some on the appearance or activities they enjoy and some on the dynamic they’re looking for.

This leads to a lot of confusion. For one thing they’re all called professional dominants, where in some specific cases professional sadist or professional fetish fantasy fulfiller might be a more appropriate title. For another thing their clients don’t typically make these kind of distinctions either. Both a pain junky and a foot fetishist might call themselves submissive, keying off the ‘domme’ part of the name. I guess it’s therefore not surprising that discussions of power, control and desire get particularly complicated in this area.

As a final comment, I will note that the key to my own understand of where I fall in the above categories has come from playing with pro-dommes. If you’d asked me five years ago about my sexual wiring I’d have never described myself as a submissive. Instead, once I’d finished blushing, I’d have described the external fetish elements – kinky clothes and activities. The things I saw in traditional BDSM images and videos. It was only when I started playing for real that I started understanding and appreciating the critical importance of the D/s dynamic. That’s something that I think is very hard to grasp when your relationships are vanilla and all your kink comes via porn.

Once again, this is yet another post where I’m somewhat at a loss to think of an appropriate illustrating image. So I’ll just go with one I happened to find recently and like.

I came across this one on the Finally & Finally tumblr site.

D/s dynamics in a pro-domme session

This post is really a continuation of the one I published yesterday. Before I started writing about attitudes towards D/s dynamics, power exchange and pro-dommes I went off to hunt for a blog post illustrating what I felt was the opposing point of view. Luckily, I didn’t have to go too far on my blogroll to find this one by the Dishevelled Domina. It’s not exactly recent (May 2011) but I think it captures a fairly common viewpoint (both Dev and Stabbity commented on it favorably). As yesterday’s post was getting a bit long and unwieldy, I decided to create a new one just to tackle DD’s original post in more depth. I’d suggest reading her thoughts before proceeding, as everything will make a lot more sense that way.

Let me start off with where we agree, as it’s always good to start on a positive note.

It has been suggested to me, more than once, that since I like dominating men I should do it professionally. I am almost invariably annoyed by the suggestion
Dishevelled Domina

No arguments here. I can see why that would be annoying. It’s a very presumptuous statement. Now setting that justifiable response aside, let’s move onto the stuff I don’t agree with….

The librarian analogy the post opens with seems very tortured, but not in the fun way. I’m not the President of the United States (with all the baggage that come with that). I don’t session in a space honoring me. I’m not putting together my memorial for the future. A domme isn’t my indirect employee. It’s very clear in that example the man has all the power. It’s not at all clear to me why anyone would think that analogy maps closely to a pro-domme dynamic.

A better analogy, if we want to try and stick to the library idea, would be something like: An expert and highly regarded librarian has assembled her private library over several years. If she likes you (based on manners, attitude, past behavior, etc.), and your interests overlap and you make a sizable donation, she’ll give you access to the library and her expertise for a limited time. She’ll also take into consideration your ideas about new books to get or particular genres the library is lacking. Now who has the power in that situation? Sure as hell doesn’t seem like it’s the guy browsing the shelves occasionally.

When I play, I do something TO my eager fucktoy. If I am being paid to perform that act though, I am now doing it FOR him.
Dishevelled Domina

Actually I’d suggest you’re doing it WITH him. No matter how great a dominant you may be, at the end of the day if the submissive doesn’t get something out of the play at some level, it’s not going to work. Whatever the circumstances, all parties are trying to fulfill mutual needs, with varying degrees alignment between them. In a consensual dynamic, no domme gets to do whatever she wants to do irrespective of any other opinion.

I’ll skip over the inflammatory Taco Bell comment (cheap, nasty, fast food is the culinary equivalent of pro-dommes apparently), and get to what I think is the crux of the matter.

…one glorious day, you manage to talk her into dousing herself in baby powder and fighting her way into a tube of latex, or some other equally hideous getup that you’ve been fantasizing about, and then you have her spank you, assfuck you, and generally get you off exactly the way you pictured it, well, ya know what?

You have all the power, and you are running the fuck. She is not dominating you.
……
What are you doing there is called role playing, and it can be awesome, but it is not femdom.
Dishevelled Domina

Absolutely agree. Sounds like fun, but doesn’t sound like femdom. It also doesn’t sound anything like the way I play. I strongly suspect I’m not unique in that.

My pre-scene negotiation normally consists of one sentence, where I suggest a general theme or direction. It might say “Let’s try piercing”, or “Maybe some rope bondage”, or “How about breathplay?” From that I leave it to the domme (Lady Lydia) to riff on that theme anyway she likes. We’ve played enough together that she knows that I’m very much the kinky omnivore, and where my hard limits lie (no scat, no drowning, no spiders). She can spin things however she wants over the 2 to 3 hours of the session. I never make clothing suggestions, I don’t have options once we start playing and I never know what she’s decided. Sometimes the theme becomes the major part of our play. Sometimes it goes in a different direction, we end up doing entirely different activities, and the suggested theme ends up as a very minor part. Sometimes she ignores it all-together. For example, the scrotal inflation scene we did was a completely out of the blue suggestion. I’ve no idea what I’d originally suggested for that session, but it certainly wasn’t that. However, Lydia had just purchased some sterile saline and was keen to inflate something with it. I was happy to oblige and a few hours later I had a sack the size of a cantaloupe.

I’ve never made suggestions during a session about what to do next or how to change an activity. It’d seem very weird to do so. The only time I’ve stepped back out of it is when I’ve had physical issues like cramps or numbness. I’d actually be happy dropping even my single sentence theme suggestion, but Lydia likes it as a jumping off point for her ideas. And who am I to tell the domme how to run her sessions?

It’s clearly true that some pro-domme sessions involve choreographed activities directed by the bottom. But exactly the same could be said for lifestyle play. After all, people want to be seen as GGG. So to try and define ‘true’ power exchange based on a pro/lifestyle divide is false dichotomy. It can work or not work in both situations. And I get a little fed up of people telling me ‘I am not trying to say that unless you do femdom the way I do femdom yer doin’ it wrong…..[but you are]‘

I wasn’t really sure what image would be suitable to highlight this post. So I thought I’d simply go with one of my favorites from the Dishevelled Domina’s tumblr site.