The 1980s called

and they want their femdom… no that doesn’t work.

OK, look, I’ve put up some posts before that I know are likely only to appeal to a small group of people, but this one really takes the dog biscuit, if you know what I mean. So please don’t go commenting that you don’t get it: unless you were born in the UK in the 1960s or before, you almost certainly won’t.

It’s about the British magazines of the late 80s and early 90s. Pre-Internet, in effect, even if some geeks were already hunched over thick glass cathode ray tube screens, downloading ‘threads’ from ‘messageboards’ to the sound of an irritating whine from the modem (and occasional whines too from other household members about hogging the phone line). Yes, that long ago. No, I’m not even talking about Cruella and Goddess: before them, there were Vixen and Mistress. This is British femdom pre-history.

Vixen and Mistress featured femdom stories with some fairly high production value photos, at least in the earlier editions, and a reasonable attempt to use those photos to illustrate the stories. Otherwise, femdom magazines available mostly consisted of American stuff with not much story but lots of garish pictures of women dressed in very fetishy clothing brandishing whips – I’m not saying I objected to that, but it never quite did it for me in the same way. In Britain, there was also Madame in a World of Fantasy, with much lower production values and an obsession with the more, shall we say, maternal and matronly end of femdom (Mistress Scarlet’s site and her publications today have a similar vibe and often refer to Madame). And cross-dressing. Nothing wrong with any of that either, but it was Vixen and Mistress which exploded into my just-old-enough-to-buy-them young psyche.

Then, a couple of years later, came Cruella and Goddess, with better quality pictures and excitingly violent stories, then OWK produced a few magazines with simply astonishing photos and articles and then… well, then there was the Internet, wasn’t there, and that was that. Nothing wrong with that either. At least I no longer had to drop into several pubs around Tottenham Court Road, to get my nerve up to walk into Lovejoys or Janus, to hand over cash for magazines that were carefully placed into a plain paper wrapper for me to place inside my bag with trembling hands and somehow resist looking at on the train ride home. We have it easy today. But something was lost, too.

(Sardax has written – and obviously drawn beautifully – about this too).

Maybe that’s just nostalgia on my part. Our earliest porn is always the most exciting, right? Found femdom in the Two Ronnies, the Pink Panther or Space 1999 – I could hardly breathe for excitement when watching those scenes, while today (old, jaded and less potent as I am) I might skip impatiently through some Internet video showing much more. Nonetheless, having thrown out (and destroyed) all of my physical porn collection decades ago, I have long searched for scans of these wonderful old mags online.

And then I found them. Here: https://swishpublications.wixsite.com/swish/magazine-scans. I contacted the guy who runs the site, and received PDF scans of all of the Vixens and Mistresses he has, which is most of them, for a very reasonable price. Extraordinarily reasonable, given how much I had longed for them over the years… I would genuinely have paid ten times what he asked (but I didn’t: sorry!). Before you ask I am NOT going to post the PDFs here. You can buy them for yourself by emailing swish.publications@gmail.com: he is very nice and helpful, they’re cheap, they arrive quickly and the scans are excellent quality. Go for it. And he has lots of other stuff too. Not Cruella, alas, presumably because Andy Rogue-Hagen is still going (but hasn’t posted anything lately) and is protecting copyright and quite right too. But, Andy, there’s no point in hoarding copyright without monetising it… I’d pay very good money for scans of Cruella, Goddess and even Victoria, especially the early ones. Come on, mate.

Back to Vixen and Mistress. I won’t copy here any of the content, but I will republish here some of the cover pages, as the seller has made those available and I hope some of you will follow through and buy stuff from him. Again: don’t ask me for the PDFs; you’ll have to buy them from Swish Publications.

So here are the Vixen cover pages: https://swishpublications.wixsite.com/swish/vixen

And Mistress: https://swishpublications.wixsite.com/swish/mistress

So… did the mags live up to my memories? Well, yes and no. ‘No’ because maybe that was an impossibly high bar to meet. We never get to recapture fully that first excitement. But they were still very good – at least the earlier ones. You can just about tell from looking at the cover pages in the two links above: the earlier ones are much classier than the later materials. The same was true of the content: the articles were much the same, but in the later issues there was no real attempt to match the pictures in any way to the words, it all had a sense of being more thrown together. Oh, and I had never noticed as a young lad buying them one at a time how similar many of the stories were: whoever wrote it was obsessed with males committing crimes, then being blackmailed into non-consensual service to a woman, usually in some remote country cottage. Which is indeed a lovely femdom fantasy, but should be one among many rather than (I’d say) about 70% of all the stories. But up to – say – issue 15-20 of each… pure femdom gold, at least for us chaps of a certain age.

The two issues below, for example, and the two ladies featured on the cover of each… I’d remembered them from 30 years before and they are still wonderful.

And they had letters pages. I suspect most of the letters were genuinely sent, even if what they described was obviously almost entirely made up. The letters were addressed to equally fictitious editors, who were supposed to be dominant ladies, whose brief and haughty responses to the letters were in character with their supposed personas. (Cruella did the same thing when it started, by the way, its editor notionally being Victoria – a strikingly dominant-looking lady as seen here – whom Cruella‘s creator has cheerfully admitted was a barmaid in whom he saw femdom potential. And Madame too, some of the letters from which are available on Mistress Scarlet’s site.)

I don’t imagine anyone truly believed in the contents of the letters or in the editors. But it was all part of the fun.

So much part of the fun, in fact, that after reading all of the letters to the editor in the scans that I bought, I found myself hankering for more. So I wrote some. Mine are to the editor of a magazine that I will call Empress, which never existed but if it had would have published from some P. O. Box between the years 1985 and 1992 or so. Its editor (although she prefers ‘editrix’) is Goddess-Lady Lucia, and heaven help any male creatures daring to write in to her august journal who fail to show her the respect due by using her proper title.

So here we go: a selection of letters to Empress magazine, from an alternative universe about thirty-five years ago. Illustrated with artificially aged pictures from various places (some from the defunct Young Goddess site) that seem roughly in keeping with the style.

Empress Vol 2, Issue 3. Letters to The Editrix

Superior Goddess-Lady Lucia

The giggling schoolgirls featured in Caught in the Shower in your July 1985 issue reminded me of an episode from my own schooldays in the early 1960s.  I grew up in a small country town and my route to and from school took me along reed-lined country paths on the outskirts of town, past several small lakes and ponds.  One hot summer day, I was on my way home when – passing the cool water of one of the secluded ponds and wishing to delay starting my homework as long as possible – I decided to take a dip.  I quickly stripped off, leaving my clothes of a wooden platform jutting over the water, and dived in.  On finishing my swim and reluctantly hauling myself out, however, I became aware of a mischievous pair of eyes watching me, and quickly ducked back down to preserve my modesty, as trill of mocking girlish laughter rang out.  It was a girl from school called – well, I suppose she is a respectable married woman now, so I will preserve her anonymity by calling her ‘Gloria’ and during the school day, she would never normally address a word to me. But here she was – grinning in triumph, with my pile of clothes behind her.

Well, of course I threatened to ‘tell on her’, which made her cross and she picked up my shorts and hurled them into a stand of nettles.  “There you are – get them yourself!” she spat.  But of course, I could not run past her with nothing covering my private regions, even if I were to brave the stings on my shivering wet legs – or more sensitive parts!  I begged for my pants but she just laughed again, picked them up carefully holding the seam between the tips of two fingers and hurled those so far into the foliage that I knew they would never be found.

“Do you want some underwear, then?” she asked, mockingly.  I agreed that I did, in a humbler tone, I was beginning to imagine myself traipsing hither and yon among the nettles, chasing up each item in turn.  I cannot have been thinking straight because I somehow seized upon the wild hope that she had a ‘spare’ pair of y-fronts with her, or had some plan to recover mine – but of course it was nothing like that.  Instead, she reached under her skirt and pulled down her own knickers, then held them out to me.  “Come on, then, poof.  Put your knickers on.”

I was mortified, but I saw little alternative, so I reached out for the shameful garment and was just about to reach it when with a flick of her wrist, she tossed it into the water.

I had had enough. I saw red and started to haul myself out of the water – if she was going to see my privates, so be it!  She had chosen for herself and I was not going to pull a pair of soaking wet girl’s knickers over them!  But seeing my intention, she called out as if to someone else “Malcolm showed me his willy, Mum!  He shouldn’t have done that should he?” and for a second time I sank back down, defeated.

Eventually, with red face and a pair of soaking cotton girls’ pants barely covering my modesty, I dashed past her into the foliage where I was able, with a few nettle stings to the legs, to recover my shorts.  Sadly, even after a few minutes’ searching (and many more encounters with the nettles), I never found the underpants. When I came back to the shore of the pond and my clothes were there – although she had tossed them into a muddy puddle, leaving them in a state which got me into trouble when I got home.  As she no doubt intended.

The next day – and for ever after – she reverted to the silent treatment and never spoke to me again.  But I did get a note from her pointing out that she had graciously given me a pair of her knickers, so it was up to me to buy her a new pair: she specified the size. Two weeks pocket money gone in five minutes of utter embarrassment at Marks & Spencers… I was terrified I might run across someone I knew.

At the time I burned with resentment and shame and spent nights plotting over more complicated revenges on my tormentor.  But girls were out of reach – they could always ‘tell’ and would be believed over boys.  So I kept the resentment bottled up.  But oddly, I also felt a powerful thrill, a fascination with the idea of being bullied and mistreated by a female, which has led to… well, Goddess Lady Lucia, as you can see I am an avid reader of your journal. Perhaps that says it all.  I believe I have ‘Gloria’ to thank for that. 

I wonder whether Gloria occasionally thinks of that day, too?

Knickerboy, Bishop’s Stortford

From your pen-name, Knickerboy, it seems a fair bet that Gloria’s actions that day have shaped your life.  I wonder: do you pay professional ‘ladies’ to make you pull on soaking wet items of female underwear?  Do they send you home with the cold water dripping down your thighs, and a face burning red with the shame both of what you had to do and the fact that you secretly enjoyed it? As for ‘Gloria’, on the other hand, she is probably happily married to a proper man and enjoying a healthy, normal sex life. I expect she’s forgotten all about you. G-L L.

Dear Ms Lucia

Your magazine is always wonderful but it was delightful to see some ‘larger’ ladies featured.  I myself believe that some folds and curves only add to the attractiveness of the female form and I deplore the modern cult of the stick-thin so-called ‘supermodel’.  Hoping to see some more lovely ladies of this type – or even more substantial – featured soon!

Curvelover

How dare you!  Do you think that a woman’s weight is to be judged by how attractive it makes her to a member of the inferior sex?  We women have had quite enough of that.  If I had you in my grip, ‘Curvelover’ it would be YOU whose diet and shape would be made to appeal to someone else – specifically, to ME, as I believe that looking starved and miserably hungry ‘only adds to the attractiveness of the male form’.  You would spend a week or two on a starvation diet, I would gag you tightly and eat cream patisseries in front of your mutely pleading face! And (once and for all) I am not to be addressed as ‘Dear’! G-L L.

Respected Editrix

I wonder whether you or your readers might be able to weigh in on a little discussion I have been having with one of my fellow dominant wives? We both like to use both the wooden paddle and the cane on our good-for-nothing, lazy husbands.  However, I prefer to paddle first, creating a hot and sensitive bottom on which to apply the agony of the cane, while my friend Frieda prefers to cane first (leaving distinct cane weals like footprints across newly-fallen snow, as she so poetically puts it), then paddle the resulting mass of weals until she is satisfied the lesson has been learnt.

We decided to try an experiment, to resolve the matter.  Her husband was secured tightly (he is a bit of a wimp) and we applied my method to the left buttock and Frieda’s to the right one.  It took a while, but eventually with twenty slaps of the paddle and six of the best with the cane on each, we were done.  The left buttock appears rather more savagely welted, the right more bruised but both are pleasantly purple.  We shall see how they develop over the next few days.  Each resulted in very gratifying shrieks and sobs, so both methods are obviously highly effective, but it was by no means clear which was better.

We are planning to repeat the experiment on my husband this weekend, once he has had a few days to dread it, but we wondered whether you had any suggestions or views on the matter?

Madame Rita

Dear Madame Rita.  I was inspired by this to try out the paddle and the cane in sequence on a few of my own slaves.  I can particularly recommend not informing the target of how many times the two implements will be swapped in session – let him think he is ‘over the caning’ before coming back after the paddling for another go!  As to which sequence is more effective, I think it is down to individual taste.  As the simple opinion of a lying male cannot be trusted, I suggest two possible tests. First, after you have subjected your husband to the two methods, have him write 300 lines each day, for a week or so, sitting on a hard wooden stool.  If you do not have one high enough to keep his feet off the floor, you can tie them back: it is important that all the weight should be borne by his sore backside. Then observe which side he seems to favour, as he shifts around trying to find the least uncomfortable position.  Alternatively, simply announce that next time he can choose between your and your friend’s approach.  He will be sure to choose the one he finds least agonising.  Then give him the other one of course, in double dose!  Perhaps whichever lady turned out to be wrong should be the one to administer it, to work off any feelings of disappointment she might experience.  My best wishes to both of you.  G-L L.

Sublime and all-powerful Lady Lucia

Do you think it might be possible for some of the stories in your wonderful magazine to feature castration?  This has always been a huge fantasy of mine.

Snippy

I’d love to, but it’s hard to find the male models for the accompanying photoshoots! In the mean time, why not do the human gene pool a favour by turning your fantasy into reality, creep?  G-L L.

Goddess-Lady Lucia commands you to buy the the next issue of Empress, which will feature:

• The continuing Trials of Steven, under the watchful eye and vicious lash of Miss Judy!
• Distance Domination: a ‘phone dominatrix’ shares her secrets.
• The saga of Miss Taverstock’s crusade against male masturbation in nineteenth-century London continues, with our heroine taking on and triumphing over a leading West End Club for English gentlemen.
• Slave exercise routines.
• A new series: Martin’s downfall. A successful businessman takes on a new housekeeper – and soon finds himself the one in domestic service!
• Readers’ letters and a special message from the Editrix Herself.

So there you have it, for now (there may well be more). Self-indulgent twaddle? Yes, obviously. Only of interest to British femdom-obsessed men in their mid-fifties or above? Perhaps. But since one of them writes the blog, and does so primarily for his own amusement rather than any other reason, that’s all the audience that is needed. Possibly right now, I’m just talking to myself but if there are one or two others of a similar vintage who made it down here and recognise what I have done, I hope you enjoyed it. There may be more. There may not.

To the others: you missed out, back in 1988, but not to worry. There’s still plenty of modern femdom around and I’ll be adding to it, at least twice a week, every week.