Tag Archives: bdsm

Boys on Film?

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There was a thread on IC today where someone asked why, after decades of Feminism, depictions of bondage in the mainstream market and elsewhere are still predominantly of women. Many people came up with excellent arguments as to whether this is the case, and if so, why it is. It got me thinking.

Amongst other things, Mistress Tytania wrote:

Most porn is run and managed by men. Most women in porn haven’t much say in the end product, of what kind of eroticism is represented and sold to the horny masses. While I’m all for porn as an important part of human expression, I have serious problems about the bullying often behind the sex industry, and the way it tends to prey on the vulnerable into its ranks. Many, many women in porn would much rather do anything else (if it paid so well), and when asked, have a lot of hang ups about sexual shame.

I agree wholeheartedly, though the internet is changing the industry. Over the past few years, I’ve met an increasing number of women who produce and sell quality porn online, especially within the Femdom genre, in a way that values and empowers the models involved. In the past, exploitation of women in porn was rife, and in far too many cases it still is, but I think that things in the industry are changing for the better.

The internet has proved that porn’s end-user demographic is no longer a heterosexual male who likes to see brainless big-titted bimbos, but something far more diverse and complex. Mainstream producers no longer have the monopoly, and so we now have the choice to purchase fair-trade wank fodder.

The majority of porn produced by either gender does feature women, in both dominant and submissive situations, but – and this is by no means an objective viewpoint, just my own opinion – they are much nicer to look at. Whether all bound up, or doing the binding, women are aesthetically pleasing. Men can be beautiful too, of course, but the market is driven by consumer demand, and more people who buy porn seem to like looking at ladies than looking at gents, and so there are more images out there of women, just as there always has been.

The thing is, the men are out there to see in all their glory too. The internet has given us the choice to see images that would have been too “niche” for financially viable publishing twenty years ago, and so ultimately there’s more variety now than there has ever been. Cyberspace is still young but, both for better and for worse, it’s changed the face of porn more in the past decade than anything else since the invention of the printing press. I suppose we should just wait and see what happens next.

Coffee Cravings

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Have you ever consciously retraced the steps your mind has taken to reach a certain conclusion? I wanted a cup of coffee. Really, really, really wanted a cup of coffee. Being more of a tea-drinker normally, this seemed uncharacteristic. After all, coffee gives me heartburn. If a drink hurts, why drink it? But today I wanted coffee, and I wondered where this unlikely craving had come from. Dismissing any nutritional reason (a caffeine deficiency?!), I searched for a psychological explanation for my sudden longing, and I realised that it started this morning with a forum discussion about the musical “Chicago”. Logically, my train of thought had instantly hurtled off in a straight line from Matron Mama Morton and the allure of the butch female detention officer, to Vinegar Tits, The Freak, and all the other leather-gloved ladies from Prisoner Cell Block H, and my interest somewhat inevitably led me here, to a collection of pictures at Inquisition World where (almost reminiscent of my Celestial Teapot article a week or two ago) “Reverend Mother” pours coffee over her bound femsub. And there it was. The root cause. When critics claim that viewers of violent porn are influenced to act on what they see, I’m not sure that this is quite what they mean, but I enjoyed my hot beverage all the same. Click here for the free Inquisition World photos.

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Violent Femme

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In an interview with the Independent on Sunday in late 2006, author Ian Rankin accused women, especially lesbians, of writing the most violent scenes in contemporary fiction. Despite the multitude of gents who construct scenes of unbridled butchery on their pages, Rankin insisted that most male crime writers would “flinch morally from over-describing an act of violence against a woman, a rape, murder or whatever.”

Yet I haven’t seen a lot of flinching in the works of men. I’ve read some detailed and often starkly beautiful depictions of violence in the works of Brett Easton Ellis, James Ellroy, Anthony Burgess, and even Rankin himself. Val McDermid, author of the popular “Wire In The Blood” series, listed Stuart MacBride, Allan Guthrie, Chris Simms, John Connor and John Connolly off the top of her head when confronted by Rankin’s theory that graphic violence in literature was the exclusive premise of women. It doesn’t seem the case that there are more women, lesbian or not, writing about the darker aspects of the human psyche – rather that it’s just expected of men, and the idea of such scenes emerging from the imaginations of women somehow disturbs us enough that we should notice them.

When a female commits a crime, fights a war, or reveals in any way that her mind is not the fallow, nurturing idyll we assumed it to be, then we are outraged. It just isn’t in the public perception that anyone but a man could even contemplate the factors surrounding an act of violence, let alone put them into words and publish them. “There’s a profound disassociation, it seems to me,” says McDermid, “as if somehow it’s wrong for us to be writing about violence against women, as though somehow we need permission to write about violence against woman.”

In BDSM role-play, male dominants don their leather waistcoats, slip executioners’ hoods over their faces, and merrily play the part of dangerous, predatory monsters without any questions asked. Whereas women aren’t taken nearly as seriously. The mainstream perception of the Dominatrix is that of a buxom female in a titillating catsuit, showing off her boobs and bum and indulging in a bit of gentle spanking whilst giggling inanely about naughtiness. Doms get to be sadists, while Dommes have to remain non-threatening, smutty, seaside postcards. I admit that I’ve been guilty of inadvertently reinforcing this stereotype as much as anyone, mostly for reasons of finance and personal insecurity: I couldn’t imagine turning up to a session without make up and heels; although I’ve enjoyed indulging in a bit of CBT and ballbusting, I often find myself editing this part out of my conversational patter for fear of being misconstrued as a man-hater; and, most of all, I admit to having used sexual allure to my own advantage on many occasions.

Yet I’m as twisted as anyone, male or female, and enjoy writing and behaving in a way that shouldn’t be censored by gender. And, like McDermid, I’m regularly confronted with other people’s horrified reactions when I do.

Male critics have often tried to dismiss women who are fascinated by the macabre. If a woman has short hair and wears flat shoes, the violence in her nature is dismissed as being some kind of angry lesbian thing. Well, as a female bisexual in lipstick and stilettos, I can confirm that it isn’t. It might be hard to believe, but even girly girls have the capacity for imagining, writing, or even committing violence, and being absolutely brilliant at it.

The way I feel about wonderfully-written violent prose, whether penned by boy or girl, can be summed up rather well in comparison to the gruesome yet exquisite items of medieval torture equipment that Val McDermid encountered when researching her novel “Mermaids Singing”:

“The thing that freaked me out,” she said, “was not the damage they could do but the fact that they were beautifully made. That is what made the hairs stand up on the back of my head – that people had taken the time to make these things beautiful.”

My sentiments exactly.

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