The Game Of Whipping While Looking Sexy
I have long been amused by the femdom trope of the sexy mistress who swings a long and complicated whip in a tight enclosed space while wearing nothing but a sexy leather harness consisting of seventeen leather straps with fourteen buckles, D rings, and snaps.
I’m not a dominatrix customer so I don’t know if they actually offer that sort of game as a service. Maybe they do. It’s nothing that couldn’t be practiced and learned as a skill. But they sure as hell do seem to like using that sort of imagery in their marketing — and to an even greater extent, the popular culture (movies and television) likes to represent them using those tropes.
Meanwhile, I’ve swung enough whips in my time to know this: the more complicated the whip, the more easily things go wrong. The more tails your whip has, and the longer they are, the greater the chance that somehow, you wind up whipping yourself in an unexpected place. Followed, inevitably, by a snicker from the person you were planning to to whip.
And that, in turn, means that if you’re a woman with generous breasts and you try to whip in a mostly naked condition for the dramatic visuals, your game of “I’m gonna swing this complicated whip while wearing not very much” very quickly turns into the game of “Oh, shit, I just whipped the hell out of my left nipple, ouch goddammit!”
As a dominant man, a minor sadist, and an avid consumer of male-gaze BDSM porn, you would be amazed at how much nominally F/f and F/m bdsm porn (notionally female-gaze, although much of this stuff is still marketed to dudes) is rescued for me by my recognition that the whip-woman wearing scanty fetish dress is in imminent peril of giving herself a painful welt in a very tender place.
As near as I can tell, this “fierce semi-naked whipping woman” trope began in the commercial dominatrix community, but it has evolved and spread, as pop culture tropes will, in several different directions. I’ve seen a lot of it in the light-hearted adult sex games community; if you’re not familiar with that world, you can find points of entry at sites like Best Sex Games and Best Porn Games. It probably came to that world via anime and hentai, where it flourishes, as evidenced by the artwork for this post.
Too, I suspect that computer game fan art, both erotic and not, plays a role in the spread of this trope. I’m not in position to cite a specific example, but I have reason to think that some of the bare-breasted fan art of female computer game characters posing with whips may not have much to do with the dominatrix tropes. Instead, it’s an outgrowth of decades of fantasy gaming in which certain characters wield whips as weapons. And then the erotic fan-service art arrives…
