Tag: Vintage

Vintage Breathplay

It’s rare to see this activity in a vintage shot. Corporal punishment and bondage is fairly common in older shots, and medical play not unheard of, but I can’t recall seeing breathplay before.

It makes me smile, as it’s an activity I love. I particularly like the eye contact they are making, as that’s a key part of any breathplay scene for me. People talk about power exchange as an abstract D/s concept, but breathplay creates a focus that crystallizes that exchange. The power over someone’s breath is literally life and death. If I’m giving that up then I want that other person to be very much in that moment with me.

I found this image via this tweet.

Jennifer Brooks

A final image in this vintage themed series of posts. Miss Brooks below is Jennifer Brooks who started out as a spanking model and gradually shifted into playing primarily dominant roles over time. I knew her from her work in the Leda videos from Ed Lee. I hadn’t realized until I start researching this post that she actually went on to start her own company for spanking films called Brooks Applications and also published the Femdom magazine Behind the Scene. You can see an example cover from Issue 4 (1993) of that here. 

I’m pretty certain I’ve browsed examples of her latter work, without actually realizing it wasn’t associated with Leda. My bad. She shut down her company just over 10 years ago in 2009. Whatever you’re doing now Miss Brooks, thanks for all the great magazines and videos you created over the years.

I feel I can’t complete this post without a callout to the text alongside the cane image above. It’s not often that kinky porn will include a phrase like “Guaranteed to break the will of the most wretched curmudgeon…” Kudos to whoever wrote that caption. As a man who sees curmudgeon in his future, I’d agree the cane is an excellent implement to break that particular affliction. 

Name that Toy

Today’s vintage shot features a rather strange toy. It looks like a feather duster that got attacked by moths or a device for scrubbing out boiler pipes. I’m not sure if it’s a tickly thing, a slappy thing or a hitty thing. A softer way to cane someone maybe?

I’ve seen similar toys in other old kinky shots, so it was clearly a thing you could buy back then. I’ve never encountered it in a modern playspace or seen one for sale online, so presumably it wasn’t a lot of fun to use. Any ideas from readers on what exactly this strange thing is and how it’s used?

Doggishness

Continuing the vintage theme, here is what looks like an early example of public humiliation and/or puppy play. I say ‘looks like’, because it turns out that this isn’t a D/s or porn shot, but is in fact Art. I originally guessed it was a domme in 60’s London, but it was actually shot in Vienna in 1968 as a piece called “From the Portfolio of Doggishness.” Clearly I don’t have to explain to my highly educated readers what makes this art rather than a couple of kinksters screwing with the locals for giggles, as I’m sure it’s self-evident.

The woman holding the leash is Valie Export and I have to say I do like her slightly disinterested pose and expression here. I would say it’s hot, but that obviously wouldn’t be appropriate for a serious artistic piece of this nature. 

As a slightly random observation, I do think it’s funny that the image of Lucy SweetKill I featured recently appears to capture the idea of Doggishness far more accurately than this image does. Almost all dogs are way more enthusiastic about going for a walk than the man (Peter Weibel) is here.

Vintage Tech. Timeless Kink.

I feel a series of old vintage femdom photographs coming on. We’ll start with a slightly unusual example. Normally it’s the fashion choices or badly performed kink activities that identify an image as vintage. In this case the fashion choice and the kink is fairly timeless. It’s the technology in the background that really gives it away.

For any of my readers under 30, that’s a TV with an aerial on top of it. You’d have to go and wiggle the aerial to get a decent signal on the channel you’d chosen. Fortunately, you’d have already walked across the room to change the channel anyway, so you were perfectly placed to mess with the aerial at the same time.  That’s efficiency for you. 

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.

Nubian Nympho Anna Amore’s Encore Pee-formance!

Despite the cesspool that is social media and the dangers of SESTA/FOSTA, I think it’s fair to suggest that the internet has generally been good for sex workers and pornography. The explosion in both the creation and consumption of porn would tend to confirm that. However, there have been causalities. One of them is the coverline writers for pornographic magazines. For example, take this copy of Nugget magazine from Dec ’98. Twitter, blogs and clipstores just don’t deliver writing like “Sommer Rain! Public pisser gushes gold on her front porch!” That’s a writer who obviously grew up reading the British tabloid press.

I’d never heard of Nugget magazine, but apparently it ran from 1956 to 2006. Over that time covers changed from examples like this one from 1959 featuring a new story by Jack Kerouac to the one above. I’m guessing that the article on Mistress Paris, the Big Titted Terror, isn’t quite up to to the same writing standards as the ’59 piece by Kerouac.

Use Your Words

Cosmo has an article out on picking and using a safeword. I’m going to go ahead and say that if you need help to pick a safeword, then BDSM probably isn’t for you. It’s only going to get a lot more complicated from that point onward. Maybe start with a good therapist to address your chronic indecisiveness and/or lack of imagination before getting the rope and whips out.

I also think it’s strange how all these articles assume beginners are starting off with heavy consensual non-consent scenes or  elaborate roleplay scenarios.

The minute you’re starting to feel uncomfy is the exact moment when you should go ahead and holler whatever safe word you and your partner chose to go with.

Obviously you could do that, but how about using your words? I’ve done hundreds of scenes, some of them pretty intense, and I don’t think I’ve used a safeword a single time. That has never stopped me communicating a wide variety of issues. In fact I think it’s quicker to say something like “I’m feeling faint” than it would be yell a safeword and then explain what’s going on.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a safeword. It’s good to have a single unambiguous stop button that brings everything immediate to a halt. But that’s not necessary for most scenes and most problems. Common issues that make people uncomfortable are pinching bondage, awkward positions, tingly fingers, anxiety, a bad fantasy headspace or just too much intensity in the sensations. It’s a lot easier to adjust for these as the scene progresses by communicating as you go rather than by simply stopping everything. Plus, it saves your safeword for those times when something is seriously awry and you want that to be communicated entirely unambiguously.

Let’s hope that these two negotiated a non-verbal safeword before starting this scene. He’s not going to be able to yell ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ with that funnel in place.

Artwork is of course by the famous Jim.

The Joy of Slaves

Dommes have it easy. For most people getting a clean glass is a major challenge involving dishwashers. Not so for your average domme. She just has to pull on some tight, impractical and possibly chilly fetish wear. Then she whistles up her nearest naked slave and stands over him during the cleaning process to ensure he does it properly. A well practiced disdainful look can be helpful at this stage. Possibly he might screw-up on purpose to get a beating. Possibly he might decide halfway through that this isn’t his kind of scene and he wants to re-negotiate it. But, those pitfalls safely dodged, in just a few short hours she’ll have a clean glass. She is then just two slaves and one whipping away from getting that glass of Chardonnay she’s after.

This vintage image come courtesy of a tweet by mrunderheel.