Tag: Photograph

Hot Advice

I’m always a fan of mainstream magazines running positive articles on BDSM and ideas for kinky play. Getting more people to explore their sexual interests is great. However, the media have a tendency to lead with the high risk stuff, which is pretty much the last thing new kinksters should be trying in their bedroom.

Take for example this Vice article on temperature play. It’s titled a beginners guide, but in the first half dives into topics like making fire torches with alcohol and dropping flammable propane bubbles on people’s skin. Admittedly they add a bunch of caveats about not trying it without training, but why start there in a beginners guide? There’s a ton of fun temperature stuff you can do with hot wax and ice cubes that isn’t likely to land you in the ER. Pretty much by definition, if you’re learning about temperature play for the first time from a Vice article, there’s nothing you should be doing in the nude with flammable gases or liquids. Leave it to the professionals.

This is the striking Lady Lola, someone who is very much a professional. She is a London based pro-domme who lists fire play as one of her specialties. You can find her professional site here and her twitter feed here.

Cocking a Leg

I’m all for finding creative angles to shoot femdom imagery, but I’m not sure they thought this image through properly. Her look is a very attractive one, but it doesn’t seem entirely appropriate to the high street shopping she’s clearly partaking in. A leashed man in a suit is a fine thing, but how is he going to pee against that flower pot with his pants still on? He’ll just get a wet leg and damp pants. Which is a kink in itself, but probably not the one they’re shooting for here. Basically she’s got too few clothes for the setting and he’s got way too many.

I’m afraid I don’t know the source for this. It’s from an old tumblr and all my reverse image searches show up empty. If you’ve any idea of who originally shot it then please help me attribute via a comment.

Update: Thanks to a helpful comment, I now know this is from the site of Lady Asmodina. Sadly she doesn’t appear to have a web presence anymore, so I’m assuming she has retired.

Pleasing Aubrey

One of my longstanding celebrity crushes has been Aubrey Plaza. She has – at least in her public persona – a fun mix of intensity and playfulness. Not to mention the obvious hotness. I’m crushing all the more having seen this video comparing Jessica Chastain and Aubrey’s reactions to ‘thirst tweets.‘ Ms Chastain seems somewhat horrified, while Ms Plaza leans into it hard. Totally worth a watch or ten.

If you’d like to see more of her then I’d recommend the show Legion (currently on Hulu). The first season is excellent and, while the next two seasons aren’t as strong, I never grow bored of watching Ms Plaza tear up a scene. You can see the kind of thing I mean in this Season 3 trailer.

This shot of Aubrey Plaza as Lenny is from Season 1 of Legion.

You’re Late

This interview with Margaret Cho contains a lovely anecdote that gave my heart a momentary pitter pat.

Once I was with my friend, the late director John Schlesinger, when suddenly he panicked. Without explaining, we sprinted to a gay bar. A tall woman slowly spun around on a stool, as John grovelled. “You are late,” she drawled. It was Lauren Bacall. She was mad, and I was starstruck.

I’m not sure if this counts as found femdom, but it’s certainly an image to treasure. John Schlesinger – an Oscar winner for Midnight Cowboy – certainly knew who was calling the shots.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Lauren Bacall. She was obviously beautiful and glamorous, like a lot of her contemporary stars, but she had a style and attitude that I think few matched. If you image search for her, almost any of the shots wouldn’t look at of place on a femdom blog, but I’m a particular fond of this one. Oh, and this one.

If you’d like to see more of her amazing style, then this Cut article has a good collection of images.

Happy 2023!

Another circuit of the Sun is completed. Well done everyone. We couldn’t have done it without you. I wish all my readers a fabulous 2023. Hopefully it’ll be filled with much kinky fun.

If one of your New Year goals concerns working on yourself with therapy – and after the craziness of the last few years, that’s probably a popular resolution – then I’d direct my readers to this post by Katherine Control. It gives a lot of really great advice on finding a sex positive therapist and how to screen to ensure you’ve got a good one. While therapy can be an invaluable tool for mental health, not all therapists are created equal – as this thread makes clear. Katherine’s advice will hopefully minimize your chances on posting to future versions of that thread.

This lovely shot of Katherine is sourced from her twitter feed. She’s a Seattle based pro-domme whose professional site can be found here.

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).