Image courtesy of fabbo Rope-topia.com via the beautiful and talented Kinky Clover .
I’ve been wondering for a while about writing a blog post about how you’d go about booking a BDSM model, if you wanted to. I get lots of emails from people interested in working with me, and while most of them are perfectly normal, business-like and unremarkable, the rest often fall interestingly into two types. The first (and favourite) type is from people who seem rather hesitant about asking me to do anything so vulgar as a photo shoot, and apologetic in advance in case their shoot concept doesn’t appeal to me. This is the sort of concern is something I’m entirely sympathetic about – I worry about offending people too and I understand that a photo shoot can seem like a very daunting thing to organise, especially if you haven’t done it before. Some of these tentative first contacts have turned into wonderful shoots, and long working relationships. Which is lovely. Some of them come to nothing of course, and that’s fine too (although I do hope I haven’t scared new photographers off too often).
The second type of email is mercifully less common, but can be rather startling. Emails requesting shoots and sessions of a type that are far beyond the limits of any of my existing work, requests for my services as a domme and occasional offers for mainstream pornographic work for example. Sometimes these emails make me feel a bit upset and offended, but more often than not I just feel baffled as to why the writer could have possibly thought I’d be a good choice for their project. Here are some examples of offers I almost wish I’d taken up, simply so that I could demonstrate the monstrously bad judgement casting me would have entailed;-
Last year, a polite-sounding gentleman contacted me, asking if perhaps he and his wife could hire me to dominate them both. How to begin? I pointed them in the direction of a couple of pro-dommes – surely a more obvious choice, I thought?
‘Would you dominate and suffocate me?’ enquired another gentleman. ‘Why, of course’; I thought to myself. ‘I did something very similar for www.spanked-in-uniform.com . Oh, no; actually I didn’t’.
‘Will you submit to me via email, even though you don’t know if I’m a man, woman or a child?’ enquired another. I thought I was probably safer staying home with the BDM.
‘Can I film you peeing? No? I thought you were a fetish model?’ Well, I am. But you know, there’s a world of fetish out there, and being a spanking model doesn’t mean that everything else is automatically ok too.
‘I’d like to shoot something fetishy – can you bring some fetish outfits?’ Indeed. Shall I just choose at random from the thousands of fetish options? Would you, perchance, like me to turn up wrapped entirely in cling film? Or as an adult baby? Or covered in fur? Encased in steel? Many of these would be fine, but a little precision would be welcome. And you might need to give me a budget.
I could continue, but I’m starting to feel a bit unkind. What’s needed, possibly, is a little education for people who are considering booking a model. So here’s my attempt to help; of course, I may not be representative of the modelling population but I hope this might be of some use to somebody.
Almost all models have limits related to the type of shoots they’re happy to do. In mainstream work, this often relates at least in part of levels of nudity. A catwalk model might be perfectly happy to wear a sheer top, but would be unwilling to pose topless. A Page 3 model would be likely to be super-comfortable topless, but might be insistent on keeping her knickers on at all times. A model who poses for artists would be likely to be brilliantly comfortable nude, but might feel exploited and offended by a photographer trying to get her into provocative or striptease type poses. And some models would be aghast at the idea of shooting video of any type (or they might charge more money and would want to negotiate a different rate in advance).
I’ve always been happy to work up to fully nude, but not explicitly ‘open leg’ as is the uncharming description of more sexual poses . For spanking work, this has sometimes been a bit hard to explain (though mercifully, many spanking producers have an almost magical instinct for not pushing nudity limits). It’s sometimes impossible to avoid glimpses of intimate areas in nude spanking videos, but I aim to avoid any deliberate attempts to focus specifically on genitalia either in BDSM or mainstream work.
I’ve been irritated for ages by my habit of not posting on my blog unless I have time to post an essay. This is hardly ever, so I’m having a go (and do bear with me if I fail) at posting shorter posts, more often.