Horseplay

Riding gear is a fairly common theme in femdom porn. It’s a natural fit. Leather boots. Tight jodhpurs. Riding crops. There’s also the idea of a woman controlling a big powerful dumb beast with a snapped command or a flick of her wrist. That has a certain resonance.

However, it’s pretty rare to see an actual horse involved in a shot. Normally the man plays that role. In this case the male in question has been forced one step lower in the hierarchy, from beast to inanimate footstool. The horse itself looks fairly bored by the proceedings. I just hope for the footstool’s sake that it doesn’t decide to take a pee at this point. I’m a fan of water sports, but horse piss lapping around the knees is definitely a deal breaker. And there’s a good entry to add to the list of sentences I never imagined myself typing.

Slave acting as foot stool while mistress mounts horseThis is taken from a set of images created by the femdom town site. I found it originally on the Whip Mistress blog.

The joy of sucks

I got to play with a latex vacuum bed a few nights ago. For those of you who have never seen one of these interesting toys, it’s essentially a big sealed latex bag hooked up to a vacuum cleaner. The submissive lies in the bag and as the air is sucked out it seals around him or her, holding them tightly in place. If you’ve never seen one before then I’d suggest browsing this kink engineering page, which gives a pretty good overview.

This was actually my first time in a latex bed, but not my first time in a vacuum bed. Lady Lydia also owns a neoprene model, which is the same material they make wetsuits out of. We tried that late last year and it was a very different experience. The neoprene version is heavy and opaque, very claustrophobic, and the thick material grips tightly around the body. It’s an extremely intense sensation, high on adrenalin and low on relaxation.

In contrast I found the latex model a far more floaty and trippy experience. The latex was thinner and lighter, feeling more like a tight second skin than a sack of imprisonment. It also let some light through, making the world an abstract pale blur, rather than an inky pit. It very quickly put me into subspace, where time seems wonky and my conscious thought processes go on vacation somewhere outside my head. Of course being sealed away in a latex bag wasn’t going to stop Lydia having some fun, and she layered on sensations, using electrical shocks to the genitals and clips on various delicate bits of flesh. I quickly discovered that anything that hurts a little when first applied to my body inside the bag, will soon hurt a hell of a lot once the latex is squeezing tightly down against my skin. Electrical contacts are particularly ‘fun’ in this respect.

I had a hunt around for some good latex vacbed images to illustrate this post, but sadly couldn’t find anything. Everyone just ends up looking like a fetishistic version of Han Solo encased in carbonite. So instead I just decided to riff on the latex theme, and use these two latex heavy images from Jim Weathers bondage cafe (found on the Lipstick & Latex tumblr). The first shot has a little bit of a flirty teasing air to it, which creates a nice contrast to the second. That has much more of a sense of “What the hell!” and “You thought I was joking?” about it.

Latex, femdom and bondage by Jim Weathers

Latex, femdom and bondage by Jim Weathers

The bad old days

Bondage blog pointed me at a long but fascinating interview with John Blakemore. He was one of the very early producers of bondage movies back in the 70’s, shooting stuff for HOM and Cal-Star. The original material was before my time, but various stills and fuzzy video clips have been floating around on usenet for years.

All his movies are M/f and a world away from any kind of female dominant aesthetic. However, for anyone interested in the history of porn and BDSM, it’s an informative glimpse behind the scenes and back in time. As he makes clear, he was operating in isolation, in very murky legal territory and with old fashioned technology.

At the time, the laws in the United States prohibited any form of penetration, or sex with bondage, or actual torture and so I made these films expressly for the European market, to be taken out of the country. They were not even edited here. I had to hand deliver the raw footage. It was never out of my possession. I put it in Barbara’s hands; she in turn put it in the hands of someone from Europe. And even then, it was probably risky, although the film had not yet even been developed. It was raw footage that had not yet been developed. And it went out of the country and it did not come back. I was rather shocked to find out a couple years ago that some of this stuff is available.

While I do find it fascinating, it’s not an interview that makes me warm to the man. His approach and attitude comes across as pretty disturbing. He’s not big on concepts like SSC (Safe, Sane and Consensual) and some of his views are fairly ludicrous.

The simple fact of the matter is that in the Western world for the last 2000 years, if you take a young man that’s full of testosterone…and you put him in a situation where he has the place, the equipment and the ability to do anything to a gorgeous young woman that he wants to, with absolutely no repercussions of any kind, he will torture her and rape her.

Clearly technical issues areas like picture quality and the production values aren’t the only things that have improved since the bad old days of BDSM porn.

Given his work is all male dominant, I’m not going to feature any shots from it here. Fortunately he mentions the artist Bishop in the interview, who also used to do work for HOM. That therefore gives me an excuse to feature some of his wonderful artwork.

Femdom by BishopFemdom by Bishop

What do I owe you?

The Dishevelled Domina put up a post a few days ago that got me thinking about the process of sex blogging and image sharing. The post was entitled ‘Yer not the boss of me!‘ and was a good rant about tumblr’s that accompany their images with very broad sweeping statements about the right way to behave. For example, captions of the form “a real mistress will lock her husband up, throw away the key, and fuck other men” or “inspections are one of the things that a true Mistress knows how to do correctly.” DD was, to put it mildly, not a fan of such things.

To a large extent I’m with her on this one. I find the best image+commentary blogs are the ones that concentrate on their personal reactions to an image. They supply background, point out details or add a little humor. Spanking blog and bondage blog are two good examples of this approach, and it’s one I’ve always tried to follow. I don’t want to reinterpret an image, or interpose myself between it and the viewer, I just want to share my feelings about what I see. As soon as you start adding specific context to an image then you’re no longer sharing the image, but instead you’re sharing your personal modification of it. You create something new, text that imposes its own preferences, which may well clash with your reader’s.

Where I depart ways with DD is in her reaction to this phenomena. I have to ask myself, what does a blogger (or tumblr) owe his audience? Who are they posting for? In her post DD puts an open letter to tumblrs…

…if you try to fucking boss people around or tell us what we ought to like or do I am going to want to stab you in the jimmy, or vajayjay, respectively.
Please stop this deeply annoying shit and try to grow an awareness of something other than your own wank-bank.
Dishevelled Domina

But is there anything wrong with a tumblr being someone’s personal wank-bank? People blog for a lot of different reasons. I don’t write this one to get off, but that approach doesn’t have to be a universal one.

When I see an image and caption like this one, I don’t see it as an instruction for 50% of the planet’s population. Or even for the smaller fraction of dominant females. I see it as someone creating their own new little piece of erotica. It’s a fantasy snippet that, along with the image, tells a story they enjoy. It’s not particularly a story I care for, but the same could be said for a lot of the erotica out there.

I think in many ways the problem is actually a technical one. Tumblr makes it trivially easy to share and reblog images, but it drags all the comments along with it. It really needs better tools to slice, dice and mash the content as it flows between sites.

I’ll leave you with an image from the Superior Femme tumblr (originally by Frank Herholdt). This is a tumblr site whose images I like, but the captions often clash with my personal preferences. In this case the caption was “She’s taken his money, his family, his house. Now she’s working on his dignity.” That really doesn’t do much for me. We could go with “A real mistress will get her cuckold to paint her nails before she heads out for a night of fucking”, but then DD might come and stab me in the jimmy. So I’ll just say I like the coloration of the image, and his look of concentration. I’ll leave further interpretation to the viewer’s preferences.

Women sits on bed while kneeling man paints her toenails

Fetish Density

There’s quite a lot of fetishes packed into this seemingly simply little picture. There’s bondage (he’s in stocks), forniphilia (treating him as a footstool), CFNM and obviously tease and denial. Cuckolding could also feature depending on the relationships between the three of them. Judging by the red marks on his body he has been beaten at some point in the recent past, so we can add general sadism into the mix as well. There’s even high heels for shoe fetishists, although that’s the bit of the picture I like least. Who’d wear ridiculous shoes like that in a garden setting?

By the well known fetishes per megapixel measure (invented 5 minutes ago by yours truly) that comes out as 20.2 palts (named after its brilliant and yet modest inventor). Lookout for this new standard spreading across internet porn sites near you. It’ll make it so much easier to find exactly the level of decadence and depravity you’re really after.

Naked man used as footstool while two women kiss behind his backI found this on the Mistress Anastasia tumblr. It’s originally from Planet Femdom.

Surrender v’s Submission

Troy Orleans has a new blog post up where she talks a little about her blogging history and what motivates her to write. It also includes an ask for interesting questions for her to answer via the blog. I’m kind of surprised that some readers see her blog as a source of wank material, and simply ask to have scenes described. Given the vast flood of porn available online, with an almost infinite supply of images and fiction, a pro-domme blog seems an odd place to try and elicit material to bash the bishop to. Clearly I have too high a respect for my fellow man. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

I didn’t realize she had had a formspring account for questions, and I enjoyed browsing back through it. One particular comment caught my eye.

I sorta think that most of my play partners are fairly submissive to me, but their submission is something that I’ve earned over time and not “submission” in a fetishistic sense. I’m rarely asking my play partners to do things they don’t want to do or “forcing” them to “submit” to anything. Rather, it’s that they give themselves over to me out of trust and respect and a passion for the journey that comes with good, intense, highly skilled play. Throughout my practice, I’ve always maintained that what I seek is not submission, but surrender.
Troy Orleans

If you look up the dictionary definitions of ‘surrender’ and ‘submission’ they’re almost identical, and yet surrender resonates with me and the way I play much more than the idea of submission. To surrender feels like a voluntary act. When I’m in a session the mistress doesn’t need to be overtly dominant. I cooperate. Encourage even. I enjoy being a partial instrument in my own demise. In contrast the concept of submission seems to suggest a response to a forceful act of domination. The other term often used in this context is ‘bottom’, but that never quite aligns with me either. That loses too much of the power exchange component. After all you can be a dominant bottom. Perhaps I need to coin a new word. Surrenderist? Surrendission? Surrmission?

My ugly neologistic musings aside, if you’ve got an interesting question for one of the top NYC dommes, then I suggest firing it in Troy Orlean’s direction. Just don’t try and use it to pad your wank bank. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an impressive image of heavy bondage from her Salon d’Orleans.

Heavy bondage with Miss Troy Orleans

Double your pleasure, double your agonizing torment

I’m safely back in Seattle after a fun few days in California. Normally blogging service (and email responses and comment replies) should now be resumed.

The night before I left San Francisco I had a very enjoyable but very intense double session with Domina Yuki and Domina Ai-Li. Like my earlier session with just Domina Yuki, we snapped a bunch of photographs, so hopefully I’ll have some good shots to share here. With any luck there might even be an attractive dominant woman in a few of them, rather than just my usual pale scrawny ass.

In the meantime here’s a nice photograph of a happy submissive and a couple of dominant women. Our session didn’t look a lot like this. There was a little less ear nibbling and little more vicious caning. Plus a fair amount of whimpering and non-macho screaming. A stoic silent masochist I am not. However, I do suspect at some points I had a similar happy dreamy smile to the man below.

Two women with handcuffed and blindfolded maleI found this shot on the Femdom Style Counsel tumblr.

Bruised

I’m feeling a little tender right now. I sessioned with Domina Yuki earlier today, and have collected a nice set of bruises, spread across various body parts. I’m going to see her along with Domina Ai-Li tomorrow, and therefore expect to extend my collection further.

We did get some photographs from today’s session, so expect some first hand evidence of said bruising in future posts. In the meantime here’s a nice shot of someone else’s bruised torso, along with a little high heel CBT. The only area lacking bruises looks like the inside of his thighs. That’s an area which, I can tell you from first hand experience, is really great / hideously painful / great and hideously painful (strike-out as applicable) to apply a tawse or single-tail.

Bruised TorsoI found this on the Rue Montorgueil tumblr. It’s originally from the sadly defunct Young Goddess site. I commented on the demise of this site in an earlier post. If you go and read the Young Goddess root page it’s now an odd rant on the evils of masturbation by (presumably) the former owner and maintainer of the site. It’s very …. peculiar, particularly given the context.

Relaxing on a bed

In yesterday’s post I talked a little about how much I enjoy playing on a bed. I like being able to relax into a scene, not having to worry about cramping from strange positions or numbness from extreme bondage. Being bound spread-eagled and have the domme lie alongside me – twisting, tweaking and pinching as she wants – is a great way to play. It creates a sense of intimacy, which I find particularly attractive when mixed with heavy sadism.

Thinking about this type of play sent me scurrying into my picture archives for illustrative shots. Here’s one I particularly like, even though I’m not sure it really shows the kind of intimate and sensual domination I originally had in mind. Maybe it’s the nipple clamps, maybe it’s the tight cock bondage, or maybe it’s the flogger being applied to his balls, but something tells me he’s not all that relaxed, despite the bed. On the other hand it does definitely check the heavy sadism box, so it’s at least partially what I was looking for.

Slave bound to bed being tortured by two dominant womenI found this on The Heart’s Dark Desire tumblr (aka women with whips).

A delightfully wrapped package

After yesterday’s rather tetchy post and extreme image, here’s something a little lighter. The rope bondage looks pretty but also seems effective. I like to imagine the dominant is about to lean in and bite some tender and enticing patch of exposed flesh.

This is from the beauty of submission tumblr. If you’re a fan of F/f images then it’s a tumblr well worth taking a look through.

Female submissive bound into a neat package