Thoughts – Page 8 – Femdom Resource

Dana Kane

In the early years of this blog there was a fair amount of discussion, in both posts, links and comments, about the validity and authenticity of professional domination. Some maintained that the financial aspect always made the D/s dynamic inauthentic. A few people even held that pro-dommes were a significant negative influence on kink and femdom and the community would be better off without them.

Over time that kind of discussion seems to have faded. Possibly I’ve convinced people that while the professional aspect certainly makes a difference, it’s not the defining characteristic or necessarily a negative one. Possibly everyone who argued otherwise has got fed up and gone elsewhere. Maybe I’m just more sure of myself and therefore less likely to take offense and pick an argument.

If I was still regularly engaging in that kind of debate, then I’d certainly want to highlight a post (from 2015) by professional disciplinary Dana Kane on her relationship with one of her playmates Paul. It’s entitled ‘Can I come to your funeral?‘ and, as the title suggests, it’s both a powerful and emotional one. It covers both the development of their relationship and what happens when Paul becomes ill. It’s tricky one to summarize beyond that, so I’m not going to even try. Just go read it. I think it does show what a caring person Ms Kane is, how important kinky relationships can be to people, and also how complex and conflicted they can potentially be.

This image is of Dana Kane spanking Michael Darling for the Dreams of Spanking site.

The places you’ll go

Writing about Kink’s Armory space last week got me thinking about all the different play spaces I’ve experienced over the years. If you’ve never visited a professional BDSM space, you might be surprised where they pop up. Old industrial buildings in the cheaper parts of town are certainly common, but they’re not the only option. For example, over the years I’ve experienced:

A big McMansion in a rich suburb. A large chunk of the second floor had been converted to the play space. It was odd to experience being bound and beaten while chinks in the window blinds gave me glimpses of people watering their lawns or kids playing in the street.
An ultra-modern loft style condo. I was late to arrive, as I spent the first 10 minutes convinced that the play space must be in the old brick warehouse across the street. That seemed so much more likely than the trendy and expensive condos.
The top floor of a downtown office block. It was an incredibly well equipped space, and it must have been a nightmare to get all the big heavy dungeon furniture up the lifts and stairs without arousing suspicion.
A townhouse in the heart of San Francisco. I was banned from visiting during the day, as it was thought my screams would disturb the dot com company next door.

Most spaces adopt the functional but cliched black / red color schemes for the walls and equipment, but there are a few happy exceptions. Troy Orleans in NYC has a beautiful establishment with natural light, clean white walls and a very well thought out use of space (see a shot here). Similarly, Lucy Khan in LA has a luxurious and well composed space that actually looks like an interior designer was involved (see a shot here). Personally, I always prefer to play somewhere that feels like a beautiful space to be in, rather than in a dungeon cliche.

This image is by Natasha Gornik and was featured on her tumblr. It doesn’t say so on the post, but I believe that’s Miss Troy Orleans again. I think it’s a nice example of an intense scene but with still a clean and beautiful aesthetic.

Doubling up on dungeons

The closure of kink.com’s armory space got me wondering what’ll happen to all the fancy equipment they’ve built or collected over the years. I can’t imagine there’s another single place in the US with quite the depth and range of BDSM toys and furniture that they have. Losing it would be a great shame. Although maybe there’s a business opportunity here?

BDSM play spaces in the US are normally tucked away in odd corners of cities, with unclear rules about who can rent them and elaborate protocol for how to approach them inconspicuously. There’s always an understandable desire to avoid annoying the neighbors or drawing the attention of local authorities. Some have great equipment, but it’s often squeezed into a few small rooms, and the soundproofing can be less than ideal. If kink.com is going to spread filming to new locations in different cities, how about building out these facilities so they can be rented by others? That would allow them to get value from the space when they weren’t filming, and allow kinky people to play with the fancy equipment. Plus, any space already zoned for filming kinky porn with a cast+crew shouldn’t have an issue with 2 or 3 private people turning up to use it.

Obviously they’d need something a bit more permanent than a set that gets torn down between each shoot, but with some themed areas and equipment that can be moved easily, it should be possible to make it flexible enough. I can imagine pro-dommes would love to be able to offer clients a play experience in a setting they already know from watching kink’s movies. Alternatively, given the popularity of clip stores, they could rent it out to dommes wanting to do their own filming. It’d already have all the infrastructure in place ready for setting up lighting and sound.

When it comes to interesting play spaces, it’s hard to beat Germany. The photographs below are from Avalon Studios, and specifically their private residences. They offer a complete self-contained complex for rent, with multiple guest rooms, a dungeon, a clinic, a school room, a set of cells, etc. It’s can be rented by pro-dommes, BDSM film makers or just people wanting a kinky themed holiday. How many other dungeons out there boast a confessional for sharing all your naughtiest sins?

Tips for the talented

Adult content on the internet is in kind of an odd space right now, at least from an economic perspective. At one extreme there’s a handful of premium content creators (like Kink, Femme Fatale Films, Femdom Empire, etc.) and at the other extreme there are countless free sites (blogs, tumblrs, instagrams, etc.), often packed with content from the premium creators. In between there really isn’t much. If you’re not making expensive movies, or making ad revenue by stealing other people’s expensive movies, then it’s hard to see how money can be made. That strikes me as an unhealthy situation to be in.

Of course this isn’t unique to the adult area – as newspaper, magazine and encyclopedia companies will tell you. It’s the classic micropayment problem. There’s no good way to make quick, easy and small financial transactions for online products. It gets even trickier in the adult realm however, thanks to the persistent discrimination by banks and credit card companies against sex related industries. Engadget published a very depressing and eye-opening article on that back in 2015, and the situation certainly hasn’t improved since then.

One possible solution to this is the Patreon model. I’ve written about this briefly in the past. It’s a system that allows you to set up just a single account with a credit card and then give just a few bucks a month to content creators you like. They aggregate the payments together (minimizing the hidden credit card fees) and users don’t need to enter credit card details anytime they want to tip a content creator.

It’s an approach that seems to be gaining some traction. For example, Bacchus at ErosBlog has set up one to support more in depth writing and deep dives on his site. Violet Blue has one to support her work on her Tiny Nibbles site. Erika Moen has one for her excellent Oh Joy Sex Toy comics, and so on.

The challenge can be finding the interesting stuff. So what I’ll try and do in the future is periodically put up a post with some femdom and kink related Patreon creators. That’ll point readers at fun new stuff and hopefully send a few dollars towards the people who actually create all this great art. For today’s post I’ll take the chance to (again) feature something by one of my favorite artists – Yumine Guo. Her Patreon account can be found here.

This image is from her Storyland tumblr.

When no means yes

Ferns left me an interesting comment to my previous post on the use (or not) of safewords. You can read the whole thing here, but to excerpt a relevant part…

When I played, I pushed him to fall over into that space where his voice was unfiltered and when he was like that, he would say ‘no’ or ‘please stop’ or ‘I’ve had enough’. It was visceral and instinctual and he couldn’t stop it coming out, but he also *didn’t mean it*. He wasn’t role playing, everything in him was saying ‘no’, but he didn’t want me to stop.

I do think it is super hot when you get into that kind of space (as Ferns says), and her comment makes an excellent point, but I don’t think it changes my underlying idea. The goal is good communication, however that is achieved. If you’re role playing, or the kind of submissive who says no when you mean yes, then safewords are definitely for you. If you think you communicate more clearly without them, then I personally wouldn’t impose them unnecessarily.

Of course, in some ways it’s impossible not to have a safeword. If someone starts yelling ‘red’, ‘safeword’ or ‘vomit’ in the middle of a scene, I don’t think it really matters what you negotiated beforehand. The message is pretty clear. So in some ways picking a safeword is less about acquiring a way to stop the scene and more about negotiating away possible ways to stop it. Which is a kind of weird way to think about it.

This image has nothing to do with safewords. I just thought it was a hot and fun. I always love a happy domme. This is Miss Annalieza.

Priorities

A week or more back I put up a couple of posts on how to initially communicate with a dominant woman. Although strictly speaking I didn’t really do anything, other than posts some links to words from smarter people than myself. One post was on communication in a professional context and one was on initial communication in a lifestyle/regular context.

On the face of it the advice given in those two contexts is quite different. Much like an opening email to a doctor or a lawyer is very different to the opening email to a potential romantic partner. However, there was one commonality that struck me: In both cases kink and sex came a distant second. For a professional the first thing is figuring out are you a sane, reasonable person, with a sensible request, who isn’t going to waste the dommes time. For a lifestyle interaction, the first thing is much like regular dating. i.e. Will you add something positive to the domme’s life? What do you bring to the table? Are you interested in the her thoughts/opinions/feelings? Is their chemistry?

So I guess the lesson here is that if you want to get kinky with someone, start by deprioritizing kink. It’s a bit like wanting to have kids. That might be important to you, but if that’s the first and primary topic of conversation with any potential partner, most people are going to run the other way.

I’ve no idea what image best fits a post about not talking about kink. So here’s a somewhat random image I liked from the show The Americans.

americans I found this on the Submissive Proud tumblr.

Limits of consent

While writing yesterday’s post on the Folsom Street Fair, I came across this article on the issue of photographing participants in these kind of public events. I though the issues it raised and the article subsequent comments where interesting. The trigger for this was an Ask First campaign that wanted to raise awareness around consent. They used stickers to remind people to ask before touching or engaging with people. They also extended that to photographs. The first part sounds excellent to me, the last part I’m not so sure on.

Shared public spaces are for everyone to use. That means their for the kinky, the non-kinky and the occasionally curious. They shouldn’t be majority ruled or driven to the lowest common denominator of taste. As I’ve argued before, as long as the goal isn’t to piss people off, kinky people should be able to do their thing in public. However, at the same time, when the kinky people become the majority at somewhere like Folsom, they shouldn’t turn around and takes rights off others. It’s the photographers public space as much as theirs, and part of the social contract around public spaces is that you can be identified and photographed in them. That goes for the public, the police and the perverted. If being identified is such a big deal to you then either dress conventionally or wear some sort of mask or hood. You’re in a public space – that has consequences.

Of course if you want to combine photography with privacy, then the best way to go is the selfie. This lady seems to have mastered that pretty well, thanks to the help of a mirror and a handy doormat.

femdomselfie There’s no watermark on this, but my domme sense tells me that’s Empress Jennifer who has filmed for sites such as Men are Slaves and Asian Cruelty.

Information leakage

The nightmarish situation I described in my previous post – a work presentation featuring porn of yours truly – is (hopefully) unlikely to happen in real life. I keep a religious separation between my work laptop and my personal one that I use for posts like this. I also maintain very separate email identities, including one for work, one for my personal life and one for this blog. However, despite all that, it can sometimes be difficult to stop all information leakage. Technology companies have a vested interested in gathering information about you and connecting it together. The greater the number of datapoints they can correlate the more valuable that information is. Information = power = $1bn IPO.

I think the biggest risk at present is smart phones. They’re a nexus where many different streams of identities can meet. People may differentiate between work and home computers, but they don’t always do the same thing for the computer in their pocket. Which means software on it can potentially access your location, all your email accounts, all your phone records, all your text messages and all your social media. It’s typically possible to configure it not to do that, but technology companies have a vested interest in the information, so configuration defaults tend to be permissive in the data they expose.

My scariest information leak was due to my phone. I’d been using it to snap session photographs. It had also been set-up to access my personal email account and, unbeknownst to me, that meant it would also automatically upload photographs to a private storage space in the cloud. Nobody could see them, so in theory no big deal, right up to the moment I added that email account to a new work laptop. I didn’t think there was any danger because it wasn’t an account I used for anything blog, porn or BDSM related. It was just for chatting to friends and shopping online. But now there was a path for information to leak along. The final step in that path was a screensaver on the laptop that would rotate through photographs from your online photo albums. You can probably imagine what happened next. Luckily I was just chatting to a couple of people in my office when naked me appeared on the screen. I had chance to quickly shut the lid before anyone spotted anything. If I’d been projecting onto a big screen in a meeting it could have been a career limiting moment.

I’ll leave you with a couple capturing their own personal moment via their phone. Hopefully the leakage of this photograph onto the net was intentional.

Selfie

Objectification (of the bad sort)

In the last week the British press has been full of a story featuring John Whittingdale – a politician and member of the government – and a dominatrix who worked under the title Mistress Kate. Almost universally the coverage of it has been terrible and depressing. The facts seem fairly straightforward: They met via match.com in late 2013 and dated for six months. He allegedly had no idea what work she did until someone tried to sell the story in early 2014. When he found he broke off the relationship. In 2015 he was appointed to a more senior goverment position, one related to press regulation, and in 2016 the story broke in the newspapers.

The depressing element in most of the coverage (for example this) is how they objectify the woman involved. She is made to seem entirely ‘other’. Given they dated for 6 months, and attended a number of events together, they presumably had made a connection. Their meeting on a conventional dating site suggests it was just two people looking for a partner and a relationship. Yet in the articles she’s reduced to a purely sexual persona based on her job. She’s a chance for papers to list some titillating details about her dungeon or services while pointing at him for being so stupid as to date such a person. It’s taken as read that obviously he’d break off the relationship when he found out. Everyone involved, both him and the journalists, seem to treat her a non-person once her role as a sex-worker was revealed. It’s a horrible thing to see.

Even the more positive writers seem to miss the point. Articles like this and this use the story to make the point that seeing a dominatrix is a perfectly fine thing to do. Obviously I agree with that general point, but it once again objectifies the woman by equating her with her job. She’s a sex worker, and a pro-domme. Emphasis on work and pro. Maybe she’s kinky in her private life but maybe not. And if she is kinky at home, she might be a domme, a switch or a submissive. They met on match.com, not on fetlife and there’s no indication I’ve seen that they had a D/s relationship. It’s a bit like hearing somebody is dating a professional chef and exclaiming ‘Wow, you must really love food!’ Well perhaps the chef cooks at home and a passion for food is one of the elements that brought them together. But maybe they’ve many other things beside that in common, or perhaps the chef doesn’t like to cook at home, or it might just be a job to the chef. We can separate people from their professions in almost all other cases, yet not it seems when it comes to sex workers.

Given this post has been all about the unpleasant kind of objectification, let’s finish with something more cheerful. This is the sexy and more literal kind of objectification.

Stool

Food for thought (cont)

After that brief interlude, I’m back with a couple of final thoughts on the case of Gilberto Valle. If you missed the previous post then go read it from a couple of days ago. I’m not going to repeat myself, damn it.

One thing that repeatedly came up in the documentary on him was a variation on the slippery slope argument. Several people, including one of the jurors, expressed the idea that he was inevitably building up to committing a crime. Having started looking at sexually violent images, and moved onto discussion and chat, he’d feel ultimately compelled to up the stakes for bigger and bigger thrills. It’s an argument I’ve heard before about kink and it always strikes me as ridiculous.

In non-sexual areas we never assume people will lose all reason and control when exploring their passions. Imagine someone who is keen on flying. They start with buying a few magazines and video games on the subject. Then they begin visiting airshows and hanging out on pilot forums. Eventually they decide to get their private pilot license and fly for fun at weekends. Nobody is going to argue that the inevitable next step will be to sneak onto an military airbase and steal a fighter jet. That would certainly be a bigger thriller (and one guy even did it once), but we don’t assume the desire to fly will rob someone of their rationality. We typically explore an interest till we reach some sane limit based on cost, availability, legality, risk, etc.

Yet when it comes to sex a lot of people seem to believe that either you have a stable list of kinks and interests, or that you’re on one long slide into the abyss of depravity and illegality. I think it’s because people can only imagine two options. Either you’re satisfied with what you’ve got, or are never fully satisfied, and must therefore seek out stronger and edgier thrills. They have difficulty imagining more fluid and variable sexual interests that aren’t simply a constant escalation of sensation. Of course the situation isn’t helped by some crazy people who do escalate and go on to do horribly depraved things. But exception cases are always that – exceptional. It’s possible to explore non-consensual fantasies without ending up a rapist or cannibal, much as it’s possible to enjoy fantasies of medieval battles without hacking people to death with a sword.

I’ve no idea what was going on in Gilberto Valle’s head when he was chatting online. They were disturbing conversations, and I don’t think it was wise or ethical to feature his wife and friends in the chats. But much like free speech, it’s easy to defend something you agree with, harder and yet far more important to defend it when you don’t. In drawing a line between conspiracy and fantasy, we should always err towards giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt.

cat_and_spider_mouse
This image is from vore fan comics on DeviantArt and entitled Cat and Spider Mouse. Vorarephilia, as described by wikipedia, is the erotic desire to be consumed by, or sometimes to personally consume, another person or creature. Vore fantasies are separated from sexual cannibalism because the living victim is normally swallowed whole. Apologies if anyone is disturbed by the image, but vore does occasionally show up in femdom artwork, and it seemed appropriate given the original subject matter.