Tag: Photograph

A New Kind of Resolution

This is the time of year for making resolutions. Normally this means I pick some, fail to keep them, feel bad about that and finally forget them entirely. This year I’m going to try a new approach – giving everyone else in the world a resolution. Obviously this is unlikely to be entirely 100% successful, but the same is true for my usual resolutions and at least when this fails, it’ll be other peoples fault rather than mine. Genius.

The resolution I’m assigning is this: Resist the urge to share, re-tweet or forward stupid or ugly things on social media. Thinking that something is dumb and then simply moving on is a perfectly valid action. There’s no need to spread that shit around.

In theory this resolution should be an easy one, as it involves *not* doing something. It’ll actually save you time! Unfortunately, social media companies are very good at hacking our emotions and appealing to people’s innate sense of fairness. We want to punish wrongdoers and unite our tribe against them. Re-tweeting a slam on someone seems to achieve this. In reality it just triggers social media chain reactions, drives user clicks and makes the social media companies money.

I should qualify at this point that I’m not talking about situations where influential people or companies do or say something terrible. In that case social media actually helps balance the scales somewhat. Lots of quieter voices can unite to match a much louder one. I’m taking about the cases where some misogynistic / homophobic / anti-sexwork garbage shows up on my social feed from some random idiot with just a handful of followers. Inevitably in those cases it’s because someone I follow has shared it with comments explaining just how terrible and wrong it is. So an opinion which would normally have died quietly and alone in a dusty corner of the internet is now being broadcast to tens of thousands of people and generating all sorts of craziness.

If you’re re-tweeting a troll then you’re making them happy. If you’re arguing with an idiot then you’re wasting your time. If it’s just some random person who did a stupid thing, then leave them to their stupid thing and move on. There’s no need for to pile on and humiliate them over it. Jon Ronson has excellent book on the effects of social media on that last category of people, which I think is well worth reading.

I think we all like to imagine our social media selves as the lady below. Rather than a simple paddle we’ll deploy our cutting wit and re-tweet button to change the mind of the ignorant and punish the evil. In reality we’re more like someone who treads in dog shit on the way to a party and decides that rather than quietly scraping it off we should show all our friends just how nasty it is.

The caption is of course from Servitor over at Contemplating the Divine. Sadly, the School Mistress site that created the original image appears to have ceased to exist.

That’s Hedy!

Continuing the theme of vintage shots of women holding whips badly (it’s a very narrow fetish niche), here’s Hedy Lamarr in a shot from the 1946 movie ‘The Strange Woman‘.  I’ve blogged about the awesomeness of Hedy before, but even a fan like myself would have to admit, she doesn’t exactly look committed to the role of fearsome whip wielder in this shot. You get the impression she has no idea why she’s been given it in the first place.

The post title obviously derives from a certain well known comedy film. Amusingly, Hedy Lamarr actually sued for $10M over the use (or abuse) of her name and ended up accepting money (presumably a lot less) in an out of court settlement.

Happy New Decade!

I hope all my readers had an enjoyable end to their year and that the next decade will bring them many good things and new experiences. From a personal perspective the last ten years have been an amazing period of kinky experimentation and personal growth. I’m hoping I can continue that growth for at least another decade to come.

We’re now heading into the twenties, which means we’ve finally got a sensible name for our current period of history. It’s also an evocative one, given the huge cultural and social changes that happened in the previous twenties.  This image is from around that era and was a product of Studio Biederer. The clothing may be a touch more conservative than today’s typical femdom whipping scene, but clearly people’s kinky proclivities haven’t changed in a hundred years.

I find it impossible to post an image from Studio Biederer without also mentioning that the two brothers behind it were both Jewish, and killed by the Nazi’s in the holocaust. People’s kinks may not have changed in the last hundred years, but neither has their capacity for racism, violence and cruelty. Something we should all keep at the forefront of our minds as we move forward into the next decade.

Mistress Adrienne

I was very sad to hear of the recent passing of Mistress Adrienne of NYC. While our paths never cross in real life, I always admired her obvious creativity and talent. She had an amazing reputation as a domme and fetishist, as shown by the numerous tributes being paid on social media – Mistress Blunt, Daddy An Li,  Mistress Morgan, Lady Sophia Larou, Mistress Iris, Michelle Lacy and too many more to list.

This site has featured her images in past posts (for example here, here and here). While dommes in fetishistic outfits aren’t exactly an unusual thing, for Mistress Adrienne fetish and fashion was clearly a hugely important part of her identity, creativity and aesthetic. She had an amazing sense of style and the dedication to make it work, as described in this anecdote by Amikoland.

I’ll finish with an image and tweet she shared back in November. It makes me tear up a little reading it now. Rest in Peace Mistress Adrienne.

Although I’m a woman of #blackleather & dark fantasy, I’m a soul of LIGHT 🕯 Days get darker in winter months, but The light never goes out for inspired & content people. How will you make the most of your current reality? #leathergoddess #inspiration

Santa

It’s that time of year again. If you celebrate Christmas then I hope you have a good one. If you don’t, then I apologize for all the nonsense around it. If the holiday time is tough for you then I empathize and commiserate. Thankfully we’ll all be past it soon.

I found this article on the origin of Santa and Father Christmas interesting. I hadn’t realized that there were two separate figures involved and that Saint Nicholas was the patron saint of sex workers. On an entirely unrelated note, I’ve also enjoyed the #duvetknowitschristmas tag on twitter, which reminds me why I like staying at home over Christmas and not dealing with weird family arrangements.

Finally, here’s a nice bondage image from Thee Domasan to finish the post. What a well placed Santa hat.

Greta Garbo

I don’t think this really counts as femdom, but it is a lovely picture. It’s from 1929 and a movie called The Single Standard, with two of the A list stars of the time –Greta Garbo and Nils Asther. Given the positioning of her in the chair and him at her feet, you can definitely project a D/s vibe into there if you choose to.  However, while they both hid their sexuality during their film careers,  in reality he was gay and she either gay or bisexual. So it’s really just two beautiful people in a beautiful shot.

Heading Towards the Light

For anyone fed up with dark winter nights and holiday festivities, there is good news. In the Northern Hemisphere we just passed the Winter Solstice. That means we’ve turned the corner and are heading back towards lighter times. In just a few days all the holiday nonsense will be over and the days will slowly start getting longer.

Mistress Fox and her submissive marked the Solstice with this beautiful bondage scene. As you might guess, the petals were then beaten off him.

Mistress Fox is a NYC based pro-domme. I can’t find a website for her, but her twitter bio contains contact details for anyone interested in arranging a session.

Edging Changed My Life

That post title sounds like hyperbole, but it really isn’t. Edging did change my life. I don’t think I’ve shared this story here before, but it seems an appropriate time to do so. After all, it is a holiday tale, albeit one with a touch more masturbation than is traditional for that genre. It starts sadly, but in common with most holiday stories and self pleasuring, has a happy ending.

The year was 2009 and I was grumpy. It was the week of Christmas and my friends were all out of town or busy with their families. My dating life had been non-existent all year and I was stuck at home, bored, alone, watching the Seattle rain. My life wasn’t particularly bad, it just felt like I was spinning in place, achieving little.

These days I’d tackle the holiday blues by arranging some hot kinky play. Sadly, back then the idea of actually exploring my kinks with another real life person seemed impossibly scary. I knew dommes existed, I just couldn’t imagine myself interacting with one. So instead I whiled away my vacation hours wandering through some of the stranger areas of the internet. It was there, on some obscure femdom forum, that I found a link to a series of femdom audio hypnosis files.

Hypnosis isn’t my kink, but one of the titles caught my eye: The 12 days of Christmas. It was an edging challenge. 12 hypnosis tracks based around edging at the end of each day, with no orgasms allowed until the last track. The accompanying blurb promised that the final days orgasm would be the most spectacular one of your life. I can’t speak to the truth of that – I only made it to day 10 – but the week or so of edging leading up to that did crazy things to my brain chemistry. I don’t think I was ever hypnotized, but I was so pleasantly frustrated and happily horny it broke down all my natural shyness and fear of reaching out to a domme. With a brain awash in endorphins, I resolved to shake things up and actually do something about my desires. In January 20210 I scheduled a session with a local pro-domme. My kinky self was finally out and has been flying high ever since.

To my eternal shame I don’t remember who produced the audio tracks. I only used them that one time, the disk they were on has long since died and all the similar examples I’ve found online aren’t quite the same thing. The bits of the hypnosis that were supposed to enthrall and dedicate me to their creator clearly didn’t stick. But that singular 10 day edging experience really did trigger a change in my life.

I’m not sure this shot of Mistress Madeline is strictly edging, but given the look on Parker London’s face, the build up has been pretty tortuous.