The beauty of dominant women
My San Francisco trip is coming to a close. Courtesy of Mistress Yuki I got to enjoy an intense clothespin zipper. Courtesy of Mistress Ai-Li I gained some vivid red whip marks across my torso. This image – featuring both those things – therefore seems like a good one to feature. I believe the lady is Aiden Starr and it was obviously shot for the Divine Bitches site.
Ferns has an interesting post up on the subject of ‘play acting’. By that she doesn’t mean traditional style role playing of the kind where the haughty Lady McFaddleshaw berates and beats Jack, her hapless but handsome stableboy. Instead she’s talking about the traditional dynamic of dominant and submissive and the activities that often go along with that (collars, bondage, kneeling, etc.)
I have some sympathy for the original comment that provoked her post. As an outsider looking in I used to think kink often looked strange. A hot and sexy strange, but still strange. I wondered if it would seem ridiculous in person, and imagined myself bursting into laughter. Luckily that proved not to be the case. Admittedly I have often laughed, but not because I thought we were play acting and it looked ridiculous.
One mistake I think we often make is to divide the world into real versus fake, when in fact what we really mean is familiar versus unfamiliar. In kinky and non-kinky situations we’re constantly projecting different elements of ourselves and censoring our external representation. Yet some situations are so familiar that we do this instinctively, and so begin to think about that as a real representation, when in fact it’s just one we’re very familiar with. Whether we’re at work or hanging out with friends we’re projecting a persona. That changes depends on circumstances and social dynamics, but it’s always there. The dynamics of kink are very different to the typical workplace or home, but that doesn’t make the kinky persona any less real. In fact one might suggest that most people play act their way through their work life, projecting someone quite different to have they actually feel. Yet that projection is so instinctive that it becomes the benchmark for what is ‘real’ and ‘normal’.
The artwork is by Francois Dubeau and you can see more from him on his site and in his store.
Excuse me for a moment while I rant. I doubt it’ll do much good, but it will make me feel better. Given the time I spend on this blog, I figure it owes me the occasional indulgence.
The recent Amnesty proposal to decriminalize sex work (covered in this past post) has generated a lot of column inches in the press and a lot of stupid generalizations. It’s has also frequently featured a phrase I absolutely despise – ‘selling their bodies’. Let me state clearly that the only time a news article should be discussing the selling of bodies is if the profession concerned is grave robbery. In any other situation it’s completely fucking obnoxious.
It’s strange that anti-sex workers insist on objectifying the people they profess to care about so much. It’s almost as if they care more about their personal beliefs and morality than the people they claim to be helping. Perhaps Cindy McCain now thinks John owns her body after having sex, but there’s no reason to inflict her screwed up reasoning on the rest of us.
As an aside, I suspect anyone using this phrase has some deep rooted issues around sex. It seems to stem from the same kind of thinking that considers sex as a reductive act that somehow devalues and ‘uses’ up women. In everything else in life practice makes you better, yet somehow something that gives great pleasure, and almost everyone does, is the exception. John Oliver touched on this mentality brilliantly in a recent show.
Anyone who talks about sex workers selling their bodies should have to explain their reasoning to someone like Mistress Natsukiss (below). Then they should spend an hour or two ‘enjoying’ their purchase, and see just how in charge of her body they feel. I’d like to think she could beat some sense into them, but that’s probably too optimistic.
I’ve featured Mistress Natsukiss in several previous posts, including here and here.
After writing yesterday’s post on the stupid British porn laws, I spotted this page by Megara Furie on the issue of minors accessing content. Apparently the issue is that the widely used Clips 4 Sale site accepts debit cards. Credit cards require proof of age, but anyone can get a prepaid debit card. That effectively means that no UK producer can use the number one clips site in the world. There are alternatives (for example Clips Fatale), but I suspect the other sites don’t see anywhere near the same volume of traffic.
I can see this is clearly a major problem. I’m sure that many minors are saving up their pocket money in order to sneakily acquire debit cards and then pay for pornography. There’s absolutely no way they’d be going off to the completely free and anonymous sites like redtube or xvideos or pornhub. Minors are also notoriously bad and nervous about using modern technology, so there’s no chance there’d be getting porn from one of the zillions of illegal but free torrent sites out there.
Quite frankly if anyone did find a minor paying for porn he (or she) should get an award for their honesty (after taking the porn away). I can only hope the idiots at ATVOD organization never stumble across any of the more potent Japanese femdom material. It might melt their tiny little brains. There’s all sorts of extreme whipping, breathplay and toilet scenes. None of which is now allowed in Britain. The image below is from the Rinryu site which (fair warning) containing heavy material featuring all three of those activities.
I’ve finally got around to do some tidying up on my blog page and blogroll. Dead blogs have been expunged, dormant blogs moved to the dormant section and tweaks made to any that moved. I’ve also added some new blogs both to the page and to the blog roll on the right.
Under the general femdom sections I’ve added…
Under the pro-domme section…
Under femdom art…
A couple of new non-English femdom blogs…
Finally, under general sex and kink…
If anyone has a blog they think I should consider then please leave a comment or fire me an email. I can’t guarantee I’ll include it or respond particularly promptly, but I’ll normally take the time to look at any interesting links I’m sent.
Adding Sardax’s blog gives me the perfect excuse to feature some more of his excellent artwork. This piece seems particularly appropriate as it features Mistress Sidonia, whose blog also occupies a popular spot on my blogroll. This is from a series of drawings called The Sardax Circus.
I’ll finish the sequence of posts on comic book artists and 50’s fetish with one of my favorite artists of that or any time – Eric Stanton. The image below is from a sequence called ‘Bruised and Battered‘. It’s not often you see a chamber pot and sock suspenders in fetish artwork. If the text is a little hard to read then let me reproduce his speech bubble – “Karin! Honestly! I don’t know how to boogie! I’m doing the very best that I can do!”
Stanton of course wasn’t a mainstream comic book artist, but in the late 50’s and early 60’s he shared a studio with Steve Ditko, the creator of Spiderman. It’ll never be known how much of a role Eric Stanton played in the creation of the famous wisecracking webslinger, but as this blogpost makes clear, he was definitely involved to some extent.
While I’m on the subject of 50’s erotic art (as I was), I recently stumbled across this fascinating article on Joe Shuster. If that name’s not familiar to you then you’re probably not a comic books fan. Along with Jerry Siegel he was the co-creator of Superman. The story of how DC comics paid them $130 for the character and made millions of dollars while leaving the creators destitute is a well known one. What I hadn’t realized was the Joe Shuster went on to do fetish illustrations for a series called Nights of Horror.
The article is a lengthy one but well worth reading if you’re interested in modern American pop culture. It touches on comics, censorship, pornography, murder and the moral culture panics that seem to regularly spasm across the US. There’s also a book which covers the topic in more depth. The illustration below is both Shuster’s work and the cover from this book.
No matter how long her whip, or how sternly she points, I don’t think I could take any scene seriously when surrounded by that decor. She’s undoubtedly an attractive lady in a hot outfit. And I’m all for getting away from cliched dungeon shots. But that carpet, floral wallpaper and short chaise lounge remind me too much of my grandmother’s parlor. I’d never be able to relax. I’d be naked, vulnerable and constantly expecting a small old lady to pop in and ask if we’d like a cup of tea and a slice of cake. Oh, and were we really sure that was hygienic? Well just as long as your nice new friend has washed her hands dear…
The image is originally from the Only Tease site. I found it via the darksehnsucht tumblr.
I’ll finish my trio of vintage themed posts with an obvious tribute to the famous Venus in Furs. This is from the 1930’s, but I’m afraid I don’t have any other background information on it. Despite the relatively poor reproduction quality, I do think it’s quite a beautiful image.
I’m continuing my equipment theme from yesterday’s post. That one was about beds and this one is on whips.
It was prompted by the the people over at Mojave Outliers dropped me a nice email asking if I’d list their site on my equipment page. I get a fair number of these kind of emails, typically for what look cookie cutter e-commerce sites with a random grab bag of cheap BDSM toys on them. However, the Mojave Outliers site is nicely put together and shows a real passion for the whips, floggers and general swingy things that they’re creating. They’ve got a wide variety of different custom made whips on offer and I was happy to list them.
I should be clear that I’ve no personal experience with their products, and I certainly don’t make any money from posting about them! I just enjoy discovering people who are passionate about what they do and have the skill to create beautiful equipment for others to enjoy. Plus, it gives me an excuse to feature the image below.
This is a Cat Woman Cosplay by Margie Cox, as photographed by Lou Raimondi. It’s almost certainly not a whip from the folks at Mojave Outliers. And given the Margie is a cosplayer rather than a BDSM enthusiast (at least as far as I know), she’s probably not about to whip anyone with it. But I like the image all the same.