Tag: Photograph

Letsby Avenue

My Twitter feed has been full of this image today – a police station converted into apartments, where they left a holding cell as a ‘decorative’ feature. The Daily Mail featured it a few days ago.

The cell itself would be fun to have. I’m sure we can all think of a lot of uses for it. However, there are a couple of major drawbacks. Firstly, the horrible grey floor they’ve chosen. A nice brown parquet would have been much more fitting. Secondly, it’s in Dudley in the West Midlands. No offense to any readers from Dudley but – despite its long and rich history – that’s not a particularly desirable location. And I say that as someone who grew up not a million miles from there.

If you’re  into cages, it’s probably better to stick to the portable kind. Something like the one Juniper Dolor is playing with below.

Image sourced via this tweet.

Sociopaths

Interesting article here from the Guardian on Patric Gagne, a sociopath who has written a book on her condition and her life.

I think if you asked the general public what professions lend themselves to sociopaths then, alongside the obvious things like CEO and politician, there’d be a good chance of pro-domme coming up. After all, tying people up and hurting them does align with the cliched media portrayal of sociopaths as sadistic serial killers. Both tend to have secret dungeons and cages to lock people in.

However, if you read the article, I think it’s pretty clear a sociopath would be a terrible fit for a pro-domme. They’re typically impulsive, risk taking, lie easily and have very low empathy. Where a successful pro-domme needs to plan ahead, be risk aware and have a very high degree of empathy. A lot of what makes a great session with a domme goes on inside the submissive’s head. If the domme doesn’t understand that inner life then they’ll have great difficulty creating the desired experience. It’s easy to hurt someone, but hard to do it exactly the right way, both physically and mentally.

Of course, while you might not what to find yourself in a dungeon with a sociopath, the fictional versions can still be fun. This is Jodie Comer, who plays Villanelle in Killing Eve.

Choking

The NY Times has an opinion piece (free link) on the widespread trend of choking in otherwise non-kinky sexual relationships. As you might expect, it’s not a healthy trend, with both short and long term risks. It highlights that a lot of experienced BDSM players think choking is too dangerous, so it’s weird to find it spreading among the vanilla folk.

One part that initially caught my eye was this:

Sexual strangulation, nearly always of women in heterosexual pornography, has long been a staple on free sites…

My initial reaction was annoyance at the usual femdom erasure. We F/m types can do stupid dangerous stuff as well! But on second thoughts, it actually isn’t common in Femdom material at all. You see breathplay pretty often, often smothering with bums on faces, but rarely dommes putting hands around necks. Yay for sensible kinky folk!

I’m not entirely sure where this is from, but I’d guess it’s a mainstream fashion shoot rather than kinky porn.

Anne Hathaway

Ms. Hathaway was the cover story for a recent edition of Vanity Fair. There was even a kinky slant, with some very fetishistic outfits. While I’m a fan of her work and have featured her in past posts, but I’m not entirely sure about this photoshoot. I know I risk Servitor never speaking to me again,  but it does seem to waste her talents with odd shots like this one. How do you combine someone as iconic as Anne Hathaway with latex fashion and not produce an amazing photoshoot?

In better news, she’s also the face of new Versace Icons campaign. I think this shot and the other’s from that campaign are a lot more complementary and capture the fashion fetish aesthetic better.

This one time at Orchestra Practice

Writing the previous post on a minor wardrobe malfunction reminded me of a far more traumatic event many years back.

I was a teenager and attending school orchestra practice for my first and – with hindsight – only time. My given instrument was the cello, which I played really, really badly. However, the music teacher must have been particularly desperate for warm bodies and had invited me to join. I was surprised and intimidated to discover that the majority of the orchestra members were girls, mostly from the year or two above mine. This was not a crowd I was used to hanging with.

As I lurked around the edge of the music room I began to wonder if this could be an exciting new world for me. I was shy and terribly nervous about approaching girls. Was orchestra was the way in? Maybe if I actually started practicing, rather than trying to jam a week’s worth of work into the hour before each lesson, I could make a place for myself here. Could the hated cello turn out to be my path to romantic bliss?

As I contemplated these new possibilities a tall older girl detached herself from her group of friends and walked over to me.

“Tell me,” she said, loud enough for all to hear. “Do you often walk around with your trousers undone?”

Glancing down I realized that my zip had chosen the perfect moment to fail. My trousers were agape and my briefs on display to the school’s brass and string sections. Romantic bliss suddenly looked very unlikely. I fled to the washroom to effect some repairs and somehow made it through the practice. A few days later I had stroke of luck – I broke my arm. That wasn’t exactly pleasant, but it got me out of playing the cello, the orchestra and my scene of shame. Every cloud has a silver lining.

That all  happened 30+ years ago and I still die inside when I think about it now. It sadly never transmuted itself into a kink. At least not for humiliation. If anyone wants to pull on a school uniform and beat me up, well that might be a different story.

Image is from Team Rinryu, the folks behind the Yapoo Market series.

More Hood

A lot of shots featuring hoods look terrible because they’re obviously just being used to conceal the submissive’s face. I get the logic of that but it typically ruins the image for me. It’s hard to enjoy  a kinky scene if one of the participants is embarrassed to be seen doing it.

This lovely image from Natalie Noir shows how a hood can be used whilst still making the shot work aesthetically and erotically. There’s a cohesive design to it that makes sense of the hood. I particularly love the little locks on the chin strap.

Natalie Noir is a Zurich based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here and her twitter feed here.

Making Plans

I’m planning a trip for later this year. That can mean only one thing: Endlessly scrolling though my social media feeds to remember/locate the pro-dommes I wanted to see in that city. If there was a definitive pro-domme directory then this wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately there isn’t and I’m stuck clicking through Twitter bio’s trying to figure out who is based where.

One other thing I’ve noticed about my planning process these days – I’m a lot more selective. Not that I did sessions with just anyone in the past. As I’ve written previously, I think my hit rate (ahem) in sessions with new domme’s is pretty good. But now I finding myself eliminating possibilities based on wacky capitalization or how high protocol someone seems to be. Makes me wonder if I’m increasing my chance of session success at the risk of missing interesting new experiences.

The image is Contessa Klaudia Keys, a pro-domme based in Montreal. Sadly, that’s nowhere near where I’m going. I think she’d be a fabulous person to play with.

Image was sourced via Contessa Keys Twitter feed.

A Murder of Dommes

I thought I was done with art themed posts for the moment, but then this popped up on my twitter feed and I couldn’t resist. Technically, it’s not a painting and it’s not hanging in a gallery, but it really should be. It has a lovely rich baroque feel to it.

You may recognize some of the domme’s involved. Based on the twitter comments I believe the primary instigator was Dia Dynasty, who stands center left. Other famous domme faces include Domina Yuki, Lucy Sweetkill, Neena De Ville, Goddess Aviva, Mistress Shayla Lange, Mistress Amalia Valentine, Mistress Victoria Robinson and Julia Flowerbomb.

I stole the post title from Domina Yuki’s retweet of the image. Although she also added that it include ‘one little goblin’, which I assume refers to Pain Puppy. Photograph was taken by Adrian Buckmaster.

Potent Female

One final post on the theme of British museums and collections. This time it’s from the Tate Modern that’s running an exhibition entitled Women in Revolt! It covers Art and Activism from 1970 to 1990 and based on the reviews, seems well worth a visit.

Unfortunately, the part most relevant for this blog has already been and gone. Earlier this month they ran a panel titled ‘Let’s talk about the Erotic Self‘, covering topics like ‘power dynamics, authorship, and the commodification of pleasure.’

The image was the cover image for the panel. It’s by Jill Westwood and titled ‘Potent Female.’ According to this Guardian article it was based on the famous painting by Whistler of his mother.

Westwood had first started making wearable latex sculptures as an art student and later explored the transgressive power of “dom” personas and London’s rubber fetish scene. This photo mimics the pose of James McNeill Whistler’s painting Whistler’s Mother, and was staged at home, which was “a shared short-life housing co-op with other artists”, she explains.

More from the Fetish Archive

Technically I’ve no idea if this particular image is actually in the UK’s Leather and Fetish Archive. It’s by the photographer Natasha Gornik, who has contributed an archived collection to them. If it’s not part of that collection then they’re missing out, as it’s a lovely image. It really captures the mood of playful afternoon session.

I believe the domme is NYC’s Mistress Blunt. If you’d like to see more of Natasha Gornik’s fabulous photographs – with lots of the NYC kink scene – they’re available at her site. In particularly check out Good Soup and Community. It’s fun spotting a lot of well known NYC faces (or hands in some cases), a good number of whom have now retired.