Tag: Photograph

Christmas Decorations

One kinky tradition I always enjoy around this time of year is the decoration of a sub. Not every domme partakes, but there’s always a few who share photographs of their submissives festivally attired in holiday decorations. I even got to try it myself many years ago.

The shot below from Mistress Petra Hunter is probably the best example I’ve seen online this year. It’s very sparkly and the star hat is a particularly nice touch. If you look carefully you can see a line of needles at the top of the stomach and at the hip level, so it’s a bit more intense that it looks at first glance. The ‘tree’ seems to be enjoying the experience however.

This was sourced via this tweet. Mistress Petra Hunter is a Dallas based pro-domme. You can find her twitter feed here and her professional web site here.

She’s Got the Look

If you asked 100 random people to describe the the look of a domme or dominatrix, what do you think they’d say? I’d guess a lot of their descriptions would mention accessories like leather, boots, whips, corsets, etc. Or they might bring up attitudes and expressions like being cold, cruel, aloof, icy, etc. However, what if you forced them to leave out anything about clothing, accessories and attitude? Is there a particular classic look or specific physical characteristics that would be frequently mentioned in our theoretical survey? Also, would it matter if the people surveyed were drawn from the general population or from the kink community?

I should add at this point that this question is nothing to do with how a domme should look. There’s obviously no right way for anyone to look, regardless of kinks, gender or sexual preference. I’m just curious about the stereotypes and cultural expectations we get implanted with. It was a topic that came up in a recent twitter thread with Miss Pearl and I thought I’d revisit it via the blog.

I’ll save my opinion on the question for the next post. For an image I wanted something that wouldn’t bias any comments, so here’s something with the submissive as the focus. I love the contrast between the tender kiss and the squeeze.

I’m afraid I don’t have the source for this image.

Porta Potty

While I’m on the theme of playspaces, here’s a particularly unique example from the yapoo folk. As far as I can tell from the images, it’s a toilet set-up inside a van. That’s certainly one way to get rid of your new car smell.

I’m intrigued to know who thought this up. Was it the sub? Were they thinking – ‘Getting pooped on is great, but you know what’d make it really hot? Doing it in traffic.’ Or was it a domme? Did they wait in line for a club bathroom one too many times and decide they’d create their own they could park outside? And can you valet it? If so, I hope they at least remember to crack a window.

Image sourced via this tweet. You can see more shots from the scene on the Yapoo site.

The Hits Keep on Coming

Last week Germany’s Studio Avalon announced it was closing after nearly 23 years. I’ve featured the space in past posts and visiting it was high on my kinky bucket list. Sadly for me and kinksters all over the world, it seems our opportunity has gone.

This week it’s the turn of NYC’s Parthenon. Queen Ariana Chevalier has announced that it’ll be closing at the end of the year. It has been a fixture of the BDSM scene in NYC for 17 years. I think the comments on the twitter thread and posts like this one from Vinyl Queen testify how widely used and appreciated the space was. I played their just once, visiting last year with Empress Wu, and would have loved to return.

I covered a fundraiser back in June for the Parthenon. Given its location in Manhattan, home to some of the richest people in the world, I find its closure particularly depressing. How many wealthy Wall St. types have had the balls crushed or backsides blistered inside that space? With the markets hitting record highs, could none of them step up to help out until the Covid vaccines come through next year? We’re going to return to ‘normal’ in 2021 and discover it’s going to take years to rebuild we lost in 2020.

This is Mistress Ariana Chevalier in an image sourced via this tweet.

Professor and Dominatrix

The Daily Beast has put up an interesting if somewhat depressing interview with a Mistress Snow. If that name is familiar, you might have seen an article she wrote last year in The Chronicle of Higher Education. That detailed her experience of working in academia as an adjunct professor while earning money as a pro-domme and what happened when she told her academic mentor about her sex work side gig. In short, her mentor reacted with horror and vindictively withdrew critical letters of recommendation. The Daily Beast article is a follow-up that provides more details on what happened and why a professor would need to earn money swinging a whip.

I initially described it as interesting but depressing, and re-reading it again only deepens that impression. It costs a ridiculous amount to go to college in the US and as a result there’s a terrible student debt problem. Yet adjunct professors, who make up over 50% of all US college professors, are earning an average of a little less than $24K a year. That’s less than a Starbucks barista and with much worse benefits. Yet when Mistress Snow supplements her income with a pro-domme gig, the tenured academic world reacts with horror and tries to screw her career. It takes a really special kind of system to rip-off both students and their teachers while punishing anyone who won’t conform to it. I think this quote from the article really highlights the craziness…

I make way more money per hour playing a professor in the dungeon than being one in real life.

Note this image is not of Mistress Snow. I don’t have an attribution, but I’d suspect it’s from one of the UK School Mistress themed sites.

Also I should point out that Mistress Snow of academia (twitter here) is not the same as Goddess Alexandra Snow (twitter and pro-site) or Snow Mercy (twitter and pro-site).

Tis the Season

In the US we just celebrated Thanksgiving. It’s an important event on the calendar. Reaching it can mean only one thing – time to start shopping for Christmas! While the turkey roasting pan is still soaking in the sink, people are already hitting the (online) stores for gifts.

For kinksters looking for gift ideas then let me steer you in the direction of this post by Miss Pearl. She has a number of fine suggestions from the domme perspective.

Alternatively, for fans of corporal play, I’d suggest a perusal of the London Tanners site. Daddy An Li recently received a number of their toys and enthused at length about them in this video stream. Their equipment looks to be particularly fearsome and of a high quality.

This is Daddy An Li with a heavy leather cane from the London Tanners. Image sourced via this tweet.

Note: Anything I mention or link to comes with zero benefit to me and zero guarantees. I don’t carry ads and I don’t use affiliate links. I’m just sharing what I find interesting.

Leading the Pack

This stylish dog walking shot is of Ms Aerys, as found via her twitter feed. It’s not immediately obvious at first glance, but there’s two ‘dogs’ at the end of the chain.

It reminds me a little of another of my favorite dog walking shots – this one with Mistress LucySweetKill. That also has a highly anonymized pupper, an elegant fetish attired domme and an abstract background. In Mistress Lucy’s case it’s obviously a photographers set, where I think this is the TD Centre building in Toronto. Both images present a great combination of glamour, fetish and objectification.

The photograph itself was taken by @TinyTaylorOakes and the submissives are @MrDexParker and @buttplugart. You can find more from Ms Aerys at her main site here. 

Ariel on OnlyFans

My friends have occasionally accused me of being lazy. I like to say I’m not lazy, I’m just an efficient time optimizer. Put off a task for long enough and it’ll often naturally resolve itself or cease to be important. Anything that does make it past a good healthy period of procrastination is probably important.

As an illustration of my method, I give you this rather silly article on OnlyFans by Louise Perry in the New Statesman. It was in my backlog to post about and throw stones at. Fortunately, while I was putting off doing that, Ariel Anderssen wrote this excellent response to it. She’s not only a smarter and a better writer than me but, as an OnlyFans creator, she can speak from a position of authority. So I saved time and my readers got a link to a much better analysis than the rubbish I was planning on writing.

The only thing I’ll tack on is a comment about the politics of the original piece. For those that have never heard of it, the New Stateman is a politically left magazine from the UK. I expect the right to be negative about sex work but I find it depressing how often it’s also attacked by the left.

The right’s objections are predictably based around morality, religion and enforcing social standards. They focus on the sex part, which should obviously be between a man and his wife, preferably in the missionary position with the lights out. The left typically object to the work part, suggesting that sex work is inherently exploitative, both for the seller and the buyer. There are no grey area for them. Formerly moderate lefties in other areas will turn into Marxists when sex enters the marketplace.

There also seems to be an underlying streak of puritanism in the left’s objections. Not the fake morality of the right, but more a sense that people enjoying themselves is somehow unfair. When reading the New Statesman article I couldn’t help thinking of the H. L. Mencken famous definition of puritanism  as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”. In this particular case it seems to be a fear that someone might be happy and someone else might make a living from that fact. A truly terrible set of circumstances.


Ariel Anderssen is a  sub BDSM model, so most of her images aren’t well suited to this blog. However, I did think my foot loving readers might appreciate this one I found on her twitter feed. For anyone who does appreciate some beautifully done female submission, then her OnlyFans is available here.

One More Snap

Here’s a final post in my kinky micro-niche theme of ‘Women photographing men from positions of power.’ Although, having said it’s a micro-niche, it was actually surprisingly easy to find images for it. For example, here’s another one I posted a few years back. I suspect the reason for that is the same reason that lots of books feature authors as a leading character. It’s easy to portray what you know, so photographers create images of people creating images.

This is Mischa Barton shot for Genlux magazine in 2009. The actual photographer was Marc Baptiste. You can see more from the shoot here.

Snapping Her Shot

I’m continuing the theme of ‘Women photographing men in poses of power.’ It’s a niche kink I’ll admit, but when you’re ten years and a few thousand posts into kinky blogging, then getting around to micro-niche kinks is inevitable at some point. This one even has a little suggestion of bondage thrown in.

This is Uma Thurman with Marcus Schenkenberg, as shot by Ellen Von Unwerth for Vs Magazine. You can see more shots from the session here. Sadly none of the others have quite the same vibe as this one.