Tag: Photograph

You Will Respect my Authority

I couldn’t do a sequence of bullying themed posts without featuring something from Servitor. While I sort of enjoy bullying in the abstract, he seems like someone who definitely enjoys it in the actuality. His site features a fair number of bullies, with these two ‘schoolgirls’ (from this post) being an excellent example.

The odd thing about school bullying fantasies is that – in my experience – there was very little cross gender bullying. I’ve seen a lot of dommes post about how they bullied guys as teenagers, but I think that must reflect a tiny fraction of the actual bullying that goes on. The cute girls were sadly too busy being mean to each other to pick on me.

Rope + Face

This is one of those images that doesn’t need any color commentary from me. It’s amazing face bondage scene created by Mistress Chiaki. You can see a side shot here. It looks she’s used a small footstool as the base for the bondage. That’s practical and effective but also very appropriate in a metaphorical sense.

I found this image via this tweet.  You can find Mistress Chiaki’s professional site here.

Time Killers

One of my guilty pleasures during quarantine has been reading the Reddits Relationships and Am I the Asshole. They’re very moreish, alternately amusing and enraging, particularly when consumed via the twitter versions @redditships and @AITA_reddit. They offer a filtered ‘best of’, with quick and easily browsed postings.

My favorite in recent days was this story featuring a bride with a bizarre wedding night ritual. While most newly married couples simply depart for their honeymoon after the wedding, this bride’s family expects them to consummate the marriage while the clan gathers outside the bedroom door. Then they all cheer when the happy and slightly sweaty couple emerge. Some of the bed linen is kept to add to what can only be described as a family fuck blanket.

It’s an insane tradition that nobody should ever follow, but it does make me wish the bride and groom would take the chance to turn the tables on their nosy relatives. They could arrive at the door with bags bulging with rope, coiled leather implements and jiggly rubber outfits. Make the relatives wait for an hour or two outside while creating lots of strange and disturbing noises. Then, just when they think it’s all over, have the bride pop her head out the door and say – “Sorry. We’re totally in the zone here. Killer scene. Could one of you pop down to the kitchen and bring me some clothespins and the big wooden spoon? Also, maybe the big bottle of Crisco?” That should clear the corridor of her parents and cousins pretty quickly.

I’m guessing this image has been cropped to remove the watermark, but I’m fairly certain it’s originally from The English Mansion.

Teddy Girls

I’d guess that the phrase ‘Teddy Boy’ doesn’t mean much to most of my readers. Despite the name, it’s not a furry thing, or a niche kink for gay guys into teddy bears. It was actually one of the very first UK youth subcultures. It started in the 1950’s and leaned heavily on Edwardian fashion cues from the turn of the century. It’s particularly meaningful to me because I’ve seen old photographs of my father and his friends from the late 1950’s dressed in the Teddy Boy style.

What I hadn’t realized was that there were Teddy Girls as well. This twitter thread has some great photographs of them, along with a modern fashion shoot that was inspired by that subculture. The images below are two examples taken from the thread. Obviously, none of this is really related to femdom at all, but I just love the confidence, style and dash of the girls involved.

What’s particularly fascinating is that these images were all shot by Ken Russell, who’d later go on to direct films such as Tommy, Women In Love, The Devils and (particularly relevant to this blog) The Lair of the White Worm.  He took a whole series of striking black and white photographs of teenagers in 1950’s London, capturing both the destruction of the war and the postwar exuberance of youth. You can find more of his work and the background to it in articles here, here and here.

History Repeats Itself

Mainstream tech companies being hostile to kink and sex – as I mentioned in  my last post – is nothing new. Some start off friendly and become hostile over time (like tumblr), some are hostile right out of the gate (like Apple). Whatever the route, the end result has been the same for many years.

What I have found surprising is the recent negative feedback on a site created explicitly for adult content –  OnlyFans.  Like Zoom, they’ve been another winner out of the Coronavirus, with a lot of sex workers moving to offering content online. At the same time there have been a lot of threads like this and this highlighting problems content creators have had with it. Rolling Stone followed up on that feedback with an article on the problems here. Apparently this is one of those things baked into the universe like the laws of thermodynamics or planck’s constant. Online platform’s hostility to sex and sex workers grows in proportion to their mainstream success and their corresponding access to conventional funding sources.

Having said all that, I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage people from subscribing. There are a lot of awesome dommes making content on OnlyFans. So if someone you like is publishing on it, then go for it. The majority of the issues seem to be on the creator side, not the consumer side.

On the flipside, if you’re thinking of setting up an OnlyFans site, then it might be worth looking at all the options. I’ve recently seen a significant movement towards the AVN Stars site. I’ve no personal experience of that, but anecdotally there seem to be less complaints from content creators.

This is a shot from the always amazing Domina Yuki. She’s a domme with great content published on both an OnlyFans account and an AVN Stars account. Based on this tweet it seems like her bias is toward AVN Stars.

Sex is Bad, Mkay?

There aren’t many winners when it comes to the Coronavirus, but Zoom is undoubtedly one of them. They went from nothing to being a household name. It’s therefore both depressing and inevitable to see articles like this one – ‘Zoom says it uses machine-learning to detect nudity as virtual sex parties spread‘.  Obviously ensuring people can get dragged into boring business meetings all day is vital, but God forbid anyone actually uses their product for sexy fun. It’d be particularly bad to allow that when a lot of people are alone and frustrated.

Can you imagine if phone companies adopted a similar policy? There’d be a national outcry if they monitored calls and cut off cell service for anyone having an intimate conversation with a partner. Yet apparently tech startups from liberal California have pretty much the same attitude to sex as Mike Pence. Good job guys.

Of course kinky people have a secret workaround. They can combine a boring office meeting with hot femdom activity. I’d like to see the machine learning algorithm that could figure out what was going on here.

This is the amazing Mistress T shooting for The English Mansion. I found the image this post from Mistress Sidonia.

Contact

This week gave me my first physical contact with another human being in almost three months. On the plus side, it was with a woman, unusual outfits were involved and she hurt me. On the downside, it was with my dental hygienist and getting my teeth scraped wasn’t exactly the kind of physical contact I was craving.

It also wasn’t the kind of in-person conversation I was looking forward to after many months of isolation. She wanted to know how my quarantine had been. I wanted to know why she was asking me questions while she had her fingers in my mouth and was repeatedly jabbing me with a metal spiky thing.

If you have a fetish people dressed like extras from the movie Outbreak, then I suspect the next few months are going to be quite fun for you. It really felt like I was potential Ebola patient, rather than someone who might have occasionally exaggerated his flossing habits. Personally I’m more old school when it comes to medical outfits.

This is of course Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver in Kill Bill.

Honor Blackman Throws Down

Last month I put up a post commemorating the passing of Honor Blackman. While I knew she had trained in self-defense, I hadn’t realized quite how seriously she’d taken it. That was until Phil, one of my awesome readers and commenters, shared that she’d actually published a book on the subject. More importantly, he had a copy and was willing to share scans of it with me.

I’ve no way to gauge how well the book holds up today. I’m guessing that it’s probably pretty dated. However, as this article makes clear, it was unusual for its time and, as one of the first books targeted at self-defense for women, it struck a chord with its intended audience. The same article highlights the fact that she shot the Avengers with no stunt artists. She just packed her week with Judo training, stunt choreography and shooting scenes. Quite a woman.

These are two of the images are from her self-defense book. My thanks to Phil for taking the time and effort to share them with me.

Telling Tales

This is one of those images that instantly makes me start spinning story lines in my head. Is she the daughter of the house, humiliating but maybe also secretly delighting one of their older servants? Is it a newly married couple? He’s the the foolish older man who has been ensnared by his lust for a young attractive bride. Or is she perhaps a college friend of the man’s daughter? She spotted his sidelong glances during a visit over the summer break, and now she’s returned to wreck havoc in his life and take everything from him. It’s a real choose your own adventure of an image.

I believe that is Lady Fatale, a pro-domme based out of Amsterdam. You can find her professional site here and twitter feed here.

Not Like That, Like This

My post from last week entitled Mood Killer triggered some thoughtful comments on the subject of feedback after sessions. It’s an interesting topic that rarely seems to get discussed. Pro-domme websites will often feature lots of positive comments and praise from grateful clients. Femdom sites will host review forums of highly variable quality and value. Yet it’s very rare to see feedback built into the 1 on 1 scene negotiation process. I’ve done a fair number of sessions over the years with different dommes. In all that time I think I’ve been explicitly asked for feedback just twice.

I should make it clear that my thoughts in this post are primarily about professional domination. The lifestyle dynamic, where kink is just a part of a bigger relationship picture, is obviously very different. In that case the motivation for working through issues and trying to solve mismatched desires via feedback is obviously much higher than a purely kink focused professional relationship.

My default approach when I’m playing with someone new and the scene doesn’t click is simply to not see them again. With little invested on either side, walking away is the obvious answer. I think volunteering feedback in that situation would be as pointless as writing feedback after a failed first date. Nobody needs that kind of nonsense in their life. Chalk it up to experience and move on.

It’s trickier with someone where I do feel a spark, but some parts of our scenes don’t quite work. Even with someone I know very well, I’m very reluctant to give negative feedback after a scene. However, there are a few approaches that I think work pretty well in these situations.

Emphasize the positive. This is an obvious move. Emphasize the bits you really enjoyed and make them a focus of your next pre-scene discussion.

Avoid pink elephants. This is the flipside to the above. I’ve found it’s better to totally avoid vaguely negative things in pre-scene discussion. Saying X didn’t really work last time or you’re not fond of Y makes some dommes instantly start thinking about they could fix that problem for you. Now they want to try them! You’ve mentioned the pink elephant and they can’t stop thinking about it.

Use your limits. There’s no reason to have the same set of limits for everyone you play with. They’re a function of trust and negotiation between two people, not a global declaration of your submissive capabilities. Make an activity a limit if it’s really not working for you. This is different to a pink elephant because you’re putting something very clearly out of scope rather than making it sound like a problem to be fixed.

Optimize for the dynamic. It can be tempting to focus on a favorite activity or kinky desire of the moment, but I often find it’s better to go with what works well for the two of you. Better to have an amazing spin on your 2nd favorite thing rather than an average one on your 1st.

Take a hint. Sometimes, despite using all of the above approaches, I’ll still find a domme repeatedly comes back to something that doesn’t really work for me. It might be an emotional response, an activity, an attitude or even just a practical thing around scheduling. Whatever it is, I’ve found the trick is to either make peace with it or walk away. If you’re getting frustrated by a predictable thing, then you can only blame yourself.

When it comes to dommes providing feedback to submissives the options are a little broader. Here’s one who looks pretty happy with the feedback she’s about to deliver. Hopefully he’ll take it in the constructive way it’s intended.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image. As usual, if you can help me out with that then please let me know via a comment.