Here's an old piece, possibly around a decade old or more. Why am I uploading this image to my rocketXpert account when there's nothing inherently shameful about it? Because the story behind it is what's embarrassing.

A number of years ago now, I was subscribed to this Yahoo femdom art group and spotted a post from some woman who was looking for "art slaves" to contribute art to her website. Being the obliging sort I am, I contacted her and volunteered my services. I think i was partly hoping to find wider exposure for my art. Also, I confess that there was probably a part of me that thought of someone considering me as their "slave" might be kind of exciting, but the reality was that there was nothing thrilling or kinky about our association. It merely turned into an opportunity for me to practice some of my fine art skills.

I don't think I could have taken the whole Mistress/slave thing seriously anyway; I'm not good at pretend. And the more I got to know about this woman (who I shall refrain from naming), the less I felt that I was the sort of person that I could see myself "worshipping."

For one thing, she had some extremely loopy religious beliefs that I couldn't even begin to decipher. Any religious beliefs are loopy, but she had concocted her own hodgepodge or various philosophies mixed in with a little bit of sci-fi, which she explained in a long rambling essay that I found a little disturbing, particularly if she actually had convinced herself that any of that crap was true. She wrote every feminine pronoun in capital letters, which made anything she wrote a headache to read. Because she'd posed in a photo with a peacock feather hairpiece and Christina Aguilera had done the same thing, she insisted that Christina Aguilera must have stolen the idea from her.

The point where I definitely should have severed ties with this woman was when I learned that she was a raging homophobe. But she had always been perfectly pleasant with me and I've never had a lot of friends. I wouldn't even presume to label this as a friendship, but I think part of the reason I stayed in contact with this homophobic pseudo-dominatrix with the crappy website for as long as I did was out of loneliness, which I realized even at the time was über pathetic. I'm stupid.

Clearly, my interest had been waning almost from the start, but the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when, at her request, I did a painting of her, modeled after another famous painting. I worked really hard at it and I think I emulated the original piece rather well. The one part I couldn't get right was the likeness. I tried to fix it a couple times, then said "good enough" and mailed it off to her. The image never appeared in her website's gallery. Sometime later, I clicked on the "pic of the week" on her site and found that someone had photoshopped her head onto the body of a preexisting photo of a model posing in the style of that aforementioned famous painting. How hard it is to just steal someone else's photo and copy/paste a new head onto it? If that's all the effort that was required, why was I even bothering?

When I began my association with this woman, she claimed she was hoping to raise enough money to start her own little female dominant society, I guess in the style of the OWK or something, which I thought was a long-shot, and in fact, by the time I lost touch with her, she'd admitted that that pipe dream was likely never to come to fruition. It actually made me feel a little better about myself that I wasn't the only one with dreams that never panned out.

So, ultimately, I had the point hammered home that dominant women can be just as screwed up and human as anyone else. At least some interesting art came out of the experience.