Slave – Page 31 – Femdom Resource

An Englishman’s home…

I’m on the record in past posts of disliking the fake stone dungeon effect that often crops up as a background for BDSM scenes. It’s particularly galling in American, as this is not a country that has ever possessed a castle with a dungeon. Anything built in Las Vegas or Disney World really doesn’t count. Not to mention some of the monstrosities that a realtor over here would claim as a castle.

I actually grew up a couple of miles from this place. That’s the still occupied Maxstoke castle in Warwickshire (home of other great castles). I am prepared to concede that if your house has a moat, was built in 1345 and once garrisoned troops during the English Civil War, then a dungeon setting would be perfectly fitting for a scene. I’ll be the first onto the rack in that situation. Until then, can we not find some more interesting settings to use?

Aside from the silly setting, I do like this shot. Kneeling on someone’s chest is an interesting position. You can create pain with the knees, or restrict breathing with weight, and maintain a strong psychological edge by looking directly down on the submissive. I found this on the forBABALON tumblr. It’s originally from Men in Pain.

The importance of posture

I sessioned with Lydia tonight, so right now I’m feeling very happy and buzzed. Many photographs were snapped, so hopefully I can share in a forthcoming post. Although I still need to publish some of the photographs I grabbed with Ms Troy Orleans last week. As problems go, excessive kinky imagery to sort through is not a bad one to have.

In the meantime, let me highlight a particular porn bugbear of mine: Awkward postures for dommes. The D/s dynamic suggests that a scene should always be focused around what the dominant wants. So anytime I see a dominant looking uncomfortable or in a non-ideal posture for them, it screws with any fantasy I might want to create around an image. It suggests the cameraman or the submissive is in charge and the dominant is subordinate to them.

Take the two images below. I kind of like the head in a box idea. I’ve got to think it’d be a real mindfuck to have you head isolated and immobile in that way. But her position looks so awkward. On tiptoes right at the edge of a table isn’t a great place to be. Not to mention the muscle effort needed to ride him from that kind of posture. In contrast the second image, while less visually dynamic, looks a far more reasonable position. I can enjoy that picture without some annoying bit of my brain niggling me with “That looks uncomfortable. Why would she do it like that? Does she not have a cushion to use?”

I found these images on Lash Kisser and X Ray Ted respectively. I believe the first is from Divine Bitches and the second from Men Are Slaves.

PDS

I was going to follow-up my previous post with some comments on my personal feelings about PDS (Public Displays of Dominance and Submission). However, as I started to write it, I realized I really wasn’t adding much to the debate. The rules on how a shared public space should be used are endlessly debatable and mutable.

So instead let me make a meta-point: Everyone stands on a slope. By which I mean there is no fixed point and stable surface from which to cast other opinions down. If you read the comments on the two articles I previously linked to (here and here) you’ll see a lot of de facto assumptions about what is appropriate behavior in public and what should be reserved for private spaces. The comment writers don’t seem aware that their universal truths are not universal at all. Unfortunately, if you hang out on BDSM forums and blogs, you’ll often see much the same attitude coming from the opposite direction.

This isn’t to say that there’s no right or wrong. Just that whatever position you adopt on any subject, be aware that you’re on a continuum. It’s still possible to draw lines and acceptable limits. Just don’t try and pretend that what you’ve chosen is somehow God given or universally accepted. Anyone arguing from that perspective instantly loses credibility.

After all that pontificating, let me make amends to my readers with some more leash shots. In this case they’re from The Properly Leashed Male tumblr and feature gentlemen being pulled by something a little more sensitive than a neck.

Leash laws

Earlier in the week I came across this story on a public display of D/s. It’s an advice column, and featured the story of a woman taking her leashed partner for walks in a residential area. The letter writer was a concerned neighbor who wanted to know how to handle it. While the ultimate advice given was good (be friendly and don’t worry about it), the tone it was couched in was obnoxious. It seemed to have no understanding of why somebody might do it and attributed it entirely to a juvenile desire to shock.

I was pondering writing about this when, courtesy of a post from Mistress T, I was pointed to a follow-up article. The domme in question, a woman named Kai’enne, had seen the article and contacted the columnist. It’s a much more positive piece and puts across their D/s lifestyle in an understanding manner. It reflects well on all involved, although the reader comments are depressingly full of the usual hateful rubbish you might expect.

Then, just minutes after I’d read that article, I came across this post by Mistress Alex. It features leashes, public exhibitionism, bootblacking and the photograph below. I wonder what the original letter writer would have said to this scene in her neighborhood?

Mistress Alex is a NYC based pro-domme. Her blog is available here and her professional site is here.

The good old days

After mentioning the bad femdom porn of yesteryear in my previous post, it seemed a shame not to share some. This struck me as a particularly brilliant example. It’s so bad I think it actually becomes good again, by virtue of making me laugh.

The lady on the left is brandishing her flogger like it’s a long dead skunk that she wants to keep as far from her as possible. The lady on the right is falling out of her strange outfit, while expressing a strong revulsion to the idea of actually hitting the gentleman’s bottom. And for a man about to be trained by two wicked bitches in leather, he looks remarkably cheerful. He’s no doubt justifiably confident that he’s unlikely to need his safeword in the scene. What I find particularly amazing is that judging by the titling, this was the lead image for the magazine or the photo-spread. They must have looked at all the other shots and gone – “That’s it! That’s the one to lead with! This really sets the scene for the air of powerful dominance and complex sensuality that we’re trying to put across here.”

There’s a lot of justifiable complaining about bad femdom porn. I can’t deny that there’s a lot of it out there. But in an hour on tumblr you can find more good BDSM porn today than you could have found in a month of hunting in the 90’s. And I dread to think what it must have been like for kinksters prior to the spread of the internet.

I found this in a collection of vintage shots at Femdom Times.

Glimpses of the past

I’ve been enjoying dipping and diving around the links on this page. It’s a collection of interviews, articles and photographs from old BDSM publications. To be frank the site itself is a bit of a mess. There’s very little context given and the presentation is horribly jumbled and confusing. However, there’s some interesting stuff there if you’re willing to dig around. For example, this article on Cynthia Slater covers background on the San Francisco SM scene and the formation of the society of Janus in the early 70’s.

The image below, of Empress Kat Prowles, is one that brings back some memories for me. There were several shots of this domme regularly recycled on usenet in the 90’s. I didn’t know anything about her, but the pictures stuck in my mind. It was an era of really bad femdom porn. Typically it consisted of conventional glamor models pulling on a pair of boots and waving a limp flogger towards a camera. It cemented in my mind a sense of unreality around BDSM. That it was all just a fantasy that people didn’t really do. Then I stumbled across the shots of the lady below. She looked real. Like she actually might want to hit me. And that she might even enjoy it. It was one of the first times I imagined myself interacting with a domme, rather than simply jerking off to a leather clad porn model. Those sexy sneering models have all long faded from my mind, but the shot below has stuck with me for well over a decade now.

Escape

Tomorrow I flee the freezing NYC region to return to the warmer and wetter state of Washington. It has been a fun trip, and it ended on a very high note. I spent a good portion of today with the brilliant Miss Troy Orleans. We had a great session and snapped a lot of photographs. Hopefully, when I’ve had chance to sort through them, there will be a detailed session post.

Given I enjoyed some heavy bondage and restraints today, it seems fitting to finish the post with a pointer to an interesting article I read on Harry Houdini. I’m not sure he could be described as a femdom aficionado, but he certainly seemed to have a strong interest in bondage, masochism, exhibitionism and edge play. Given his skill, I’ve no doubt he could have emerged from the ropes in the photograph below in a matter of seconds. For the rest of us submissive types, even if we had the skill, I’m not sure escape would be our first choice…

I found this on the darksehnsucht tumblr. I don’t know the original source, but I’d guess it’s from one of the kink.com sites.

Depressed

I’ve followed the 49ers since I was a young boy in the UK. The first game of American Football I watched and actually understood featured Joe Montana and Jerry Rice destroying some hapless opposing team. At the time I didn’t realize I was watching two of the greatest players to ever play the game, but I did realize I was seeing something special, and I’ve followed the team ever since. I’m therefore feeling pretty grumpy right now, after watching them lose a Superbowl for the first time ever.

I’ve got nowhere I’m really going with this. I just wanted to share my grumpiness. As for the image, I stumbled across it earlier tonight and it put a smile on my face, despite the circumstances. I loved her tie and glove combo. Hopefully it’ll have an equally positive effect on my readers.

I’m afraid I don’t know the original source for this image. I found it on Ms Roxanne’s tumblr.

The mirror shot genre

Using a camera phone to snap a reflected mirror shot is one of the new genres in candid porn. There are entire web sites dedicated to it, typically involving young women. It often hits the news when celebrities do it, or when the girls involved are teenagers and inadvertently create completely ridiculous legal problems for themselves and their friends.

Here’s a fun variation on the theme – showing your bound, gagged and cock locked slave off. Personally I’d say that it’s the best version yet.

I found this on the Fuck Yeah Femdom tumblr.

The boyfriend trainer

For those looking to enjoy some virtual domestic violence, I have just the app for you. As this yahoo post describes, an Apple app called ‘The Boyfriend Trainer’ let’s you lead a guy around on a leash and slap/zap/mace him as you desire.

“Crack that whip and teach your guy a thing or two about being the Perfect Boyfriend!” reads the game’s description. “When scolding doesn’t work, just zap him, whack him and train him to be your ideal man!”

It sounds like a fairly stupid and obnoxious digital toy, but that’s not what annoys me about it. What really bugs me is what I’m sure would happen if this got tweaked into a BDSM app. After all, a lot of the actions described are things some men (including this one) enjoy immensely in the right circumstances. With some minor changes to the game scripts, and a new marketing campaign to cast it as a consensual D/s interaction, much of the criticism would be mollified. Of course if that was the application in question, Apple would undoubtedly ban it from the app store. They don’t allow sexual applications.

Jezebel points it out as a double standard between men and women. What annoys me far more than that is the double standard on sex and violence. Media featuring non-consensual sex and violence is a big part of mainstream culture. This application is a good example, along with movies available on iTunes like The Last House on the Left or I Spit on Your Grave. Yet mix sex and consensual violence together and you’re instantly confined to the porn ghetto.

Luckily there are better ways to train a boyfriend than swiping your iPhone screen. From the smile on the lady below, I’d guess she’s pretty happy with the progress from her training regime to date.

I found this image on the Mujeres Dominantes tumblr. It’s originally from the Strapon Dreamer site.