May 212021
 

Growing Up Femdom: Mass Media Reflections I

By TammyJo Eckhart, PhD

When I was a little girl, I was already dominant leaning. TV shows, books, movies, and even the stories I made up, that were girl-led, woman-led, or populated by Amazon-like societies, were filtered by my mind, so I only remember what strongly appealed to me. Today I’m a published kink author who has a PhD minor in the History of Gender and Sexuality. I know that I will still filter what I see and hear through a personal lens, but I have the tools to try to be objective. I’m glad that I’m finally able to write about some of the mainstream images of kink I remember liking when I first encountered them. I’m going to talk about some of the TV shows, TV clips, and TV movies from the tape you see a photo of, though this is an artificial limit for this post and not even close to everything I could write about. It has been over two decades since I last recorded on this tape. Do I think these are still examples of woman-led relationships, or do they play into stereotypes that harm women, relationships, and kink in general?

Continue reading »
Oct 242017
 

Still from the film. Central is Bella Heathcote as Olive Byrne. In the background is JJ Field as Charles Guyette.

Still from the film. Central is Bella Heathcote as Olive Byrne. In the background is JJ Field as Charles Guyette.

[The film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017, dir. Angela Robinson) is a “based on true events” story of William Moulton Marston, the two women he lived with, his interest in bondage, and how all of that influenced his superheroine creation, Wonder Woman. The film includes scenes in the 1930s in which Marston meets Charles Guyette, an early pioneer of fetish/BDSM media in the USA. While Marston definitely had an interest in bondage and fetishes, I was skeptical that meeting had actually occurred. I asked Richard Pérez Seves, a fellow kinky historian, and author of a biography and photo collection of Guyette, if this had happened.]

Continue reading »

Oct 242012
 

(I’ve been ragging pretty hard on the Fifty Shades trilogy and related phenomenon. At more than a few social events for kinky people, I’ve gone on rants about my opinion of it to anyone who will listen, and a few who won’t. One friend called me on this and made a spirited defence of the series. I asked her if she wanted to do a guest post on the subject, and she obliged.)

So being a kinky person myself, enjoying and learning in my own journey of BDSM, I of course heard all kinds of negative comments about the 50 Shades books. I heard so much negativity in fact that I had no intention of reading the books. A friend of mine though had bought the books and so I decided to borrow at least the first one and see what I thought.

Continue reading »