Tag: Photograph

Blogroll Updated

I’ve done some long overdue blogroll housekeeping. Dead links have been purged and I’ve added a few new sites. Additions to the front page’s dynamic blogroll and my links page include:

Hopefully there’s something of interest in there for all my readers. Thanks to social media there are a lot less kinky bloggers around than there used to be, so I always appreciate those that do write and post. If anyone knows of established femdom or kinky blogs that are regularly updated then feel free to point me in there direction via comment or  email.

This playful image is from one of the new links – Bastienne Cross. She’s a Toronto based pro-domme. I like the fact that her galleries include a mixture of styles, including a lot of her laughing. It’s not all latex, leather and snarls.

Stare to Nowhere

A final post in a trio featuring eye contact and gaze. Having featured mismatched gazes and intense eye contact, I couldn’t finish without an example of what’s a high fashion classic. Not to mention album covers. That’s the stare in random directions while appearing to think deep thoughts about life, the universe and everything. In this case there’s even the bonus of a huge sculptured head in the background joining in the random staring fun.

Caught in her Gaze

Because I’m a man who loves symmetry, here’s the flip-side to yesterday’s post. Rather than the the averted look, it’s the highly focused stare. The helpless prey caught in the glare of the predator. I particularly like the hand to the face – forcing his gaze where she wants it.

This is Miss Velour – a London based pro-domme – shooting for Femme Fatale Films in  a scene called ‘Caught in the Act‘.

Look Away

I’ve written many times in the past about the pleasure I take in eye contact while playing (for example here). It’s a way to communicate both intimacy and vulnerability. A sense of acknowledging the presence and validity of the domme and myself in the moment. The truth of what’s happening. We’re playing but not hiding.

However, there are also times where I have to look away. Little moments of turning inward and accepting. It’s almost animalistic. The domme is reinforcing her place as the pack leader. She’s both playful and serious: Know your place, avert your gaze and show your submission. Don’t make me have to hurt you to remind you.

The shot below doesn’t look like the most intense scene in the world, but their respective gazes put me in mind of the above dynamic. She’s teasing and challenging him, while he doesn’t want to meet her gaze.

This is obviously from the CBT and Ballbusting site.

Cuck Jr.

About one hundred years ago I wrote a post on how the kink of cuckolding had been co-opted by the right wing as a form of insult. Given the hypocrisy and projection that emanates from that group, it was inevitable that one of their own would be caught in a real cuckolding scandal. That’s now happened with Jerry Falwell Jr, as reported here by Reuters. Allegedly Jerry liked to watch while his wife had sex with a much younger and more virile man named Giancarlo Granda.

The media and late night comedians obviously saw this story as manna from heaven. A place that, based on his own beliefs, Jerry will presumably now struggle to qualify for. What struck me as surprising was how keen comedians were to emphasize they were not kink shaming. Colbert did a very fun bit on the story, but repeatedly stopped to emphasize he was attacking the hypocrisy, not the sex. I think ten or fifteen years ago the story would have been much more about laughing at the weird freaks and their strange kinks. So, progress?

While the story coverage has been extensive, with the inevitable links to the grifter-in-chief, I do think the media are missing a major piece of it. Namely, what exactly is Jerry’s kink? Is it a genuine cuckold scene? A hotwife scenario? A voyeurism kink? I hope for his sake that humiliation is at least part of it, because he’s getting no shortage of that right now.

This shot is from the Subby Hubby site, specialists in cuckold material. I’m sure the handsome and viral pool boy is just about to enter from stage left.

Horny

It’s inevitable that when I have a handful of posts bouncing around in my head, I’ll start several of them and finish none of them. Too many ideas is almost as bad as no ideas.

By way of apology for my failure to complete my thoughts, here’s a horny lady with a big weapon. I’ve no idea who she is, why she’s got a sword or what the deal with the helmet it. I’ll just say that I’m a fan of the entire look. If Halloween had more of these outfits and less of the sexy <insert profession here> costumes, I’d be far less of a grouch about the whole thing.

Updated: Thanks to my super helpful readers I can attribute this image to Mistress Verushka who was active in San Francisco scene through the 70’s and 80s’s. I actually featured her in a post last year.

Riding the Sybian

It’s not often you see a Sybian in femdom porn. This looks to be a particularly intense use of it, given the dual Hitachi magic wands also being applied.

I’ve actually ridden a Sybian during a scene. It was fun for a short while but too much for extended play. It started with “Oh wow, that’s intense”, moved through  “Mmmm. That’s good” and finished with “OK. It feels like a small evil demon is punching me repeatedly in the prostate. We need to stop that little fucker.” Admittedly, I am a bit of a lightweight when it comes to anal play, so YMMV.

There’s no watermark on this image, but I’m fairly certain it’s from one of the kink.com sites.

Update: The good news is that I was right. It’s a kink.com image. Specifically from Men In Pain. The bad news is that I already featured this image a few years back and got the attribution right then. So apparently I’m going senile.

Mistress Antoinette

I’m going to close this series of vintage themed posts by returning to the first one in it. Several readers reached out via comments and emails to say that the domme in the photograph was a Mistress Antoinette. I’d not been aware of her until now, but by all accounts she was an amazing person.

This Rialto Report article provides some interesting background, with tributes from the likes of Dita Von Teese and Annie Sprinkle. Among her many accomplishments was publishing the fetish and femdom Reflections Magazine and creating the fashion company Versatile Fashions. You can hear from Mistress Antoinette as well as see some of her creations in this 1997 video of the Dressed To Thrill Ball.

One reader was kind enough to send me a lovely story of his interaction with her back in the 80’s. I’m sharing it below with his permission.

Way back In 1983, while driving back to San Diego after a few days of climbing in Yosemite National Park, I visited her fetish clothing store, Versatile Fashions Boutique. To my delight she was in the store that day, and was very kind when I told her that I was a longtime fan who loved being submissive to women. She had a reporter coming in for an interview, and for his benefit I was allowed to play her slave, footstool, bootlicker, and errandboy while she chatted merrily and casually with the reporter. It was a wonderful experience for me, exercising my macho rock climber persona on one day, and my worshipful slave persona the next. Plus she was just such a decent person with a big heart and a wonderful sense of humor.

She’s now retired and, based on this article, is sadly suffering from some health problems. She was clearly a kinky pioneer with a great personality. I’m sure we all wish her well in retirement.

Although Ms Antoinette has retired, the fashion company continues today under the brand Versatile Corsets.

Jutka and Jamie

I always enjoy posting and gently poking fun at the fashions and tropes of vintage fetish shots. However, I should make clear that I’ve the utmost respect for the people who created them. They were operating at great legal risk, with very limited funds and no easy way to distribute their material. They had no blueprint for what BDSM material should look like and no easy way to get customer feedback. Sex workers today complain – with total justification – about the limits credit card companies and social media impose. Yet the idea of being able to simply snap and tweet an image would blow the mind of a 60’s fetish photographer. They had to deal with printing physical magazines, postal inspectors keen to sieze their material, paper mailing lists of nervous customers and the mob money that funded a lot of pornography.

If, like me, you love reading stories about the early days of kinky porn, then I’d highly recommend this Rialto article on Leonard Burtman and his wife/model Jutka Goz (aka Jennifer Jordan).  Using a photograph of Jutka dominating Jamie Gillis as jumping off point, it tells the story of Leonard Burtman, one of the pioneers of kink and femdom porn. Along the way it touches on such famous names as Weegee, Bettie Page, Irving Klaw, Rene Bond and of course Jamie Gillis. I found it fascinating and touching. I particularly loved the 2018 interview with Jutka, who seems like she’s living her best life in Beverly Hills.

These two images are of Jutka and Jamie Gillis, both taken from the Rialto article. For anyone wondering if she was really dominant, I’m afraid the answer is no.

Jutka remembers the modeling work as entertaining and enjoyable: “It was fun to get dressed up and be outrageous,” she says. As for whether she had a personal interest in spanking, leather, or domination, she laughs: “It was only a role. I’m a good bullshit artist.”

My thanks to DrewP for point me to the article via a comment.

Vintage Pegging

I’m continuing my theme of vintage femdom imagery with another unusual image. This time it’s not the outfits or setting which are odd – they look pretty standard for 70’s kinky porn – but the activity. Whips, leather outfits and bad bondage are common in vintage shots, but you almost never find pegging scenes like this one. Until the last decade or so it was very risky in the US to combine sex with BDSM in pornography and anal penetration fell under that categorization. I’d therefore guess that this is from a European publication. Of course they wouldn’t have called it pegging at the time – that term wasn’t coined until Dan Savage came along in 2001.

Updated: Bacchus of ErosBlog added an amazing comment with some detailed research on this image. It looks like it came from Candy Films, a forerunner of Color Climax Corporation. Almost certainly it was published in the early 70’s, and probably in a magazine called Man Servant.