Shifting the Blame

In the ‘food for thought’ category of articles comes this one from the Guardian – Rough sex excuse in women’s deaths is variation of ‘crime of passion’. It addresses the growing use of BDSM as an excuse/defense by men when tried for killing women, based on a study by Prof Elizabeth Yardley. It’s not exactly the kind of BDSM article I usually feature here, but I think it’s an important issue for all kinky people to be aware of.

My limited reading of a few of the cases involved suggested a couple of things to me. Firstly, that the men involved were all monsters and deserved to be jailed for a very long time. Secondly, what they were doing looked nothing like BDSM as practiced by regular kinky people. It seems like violent abuse with rough sex gone wrong tacked on at the end as an excuse. I therefore found this somewhat odd…

She concluded that the normalisation of BDSM “has enabled abusers to justify and excuse fatal violence against women using formal sex equality and women’s liberation against them”.

The problem to me doesn’t look like the normalization of BDSM, but the acceptance by the courts that this behavior is a form of it and that this in turn acts as mitigation. BDSM wasn’t a gateway to their behavior. It appears to be a fig leaf hastily grabbed after the fact. Consensual kink has always been with us. So, sadly, has domestic violence. We clearly shouldn’t let the recognition of the former be twisted into an excuse for the assholes guilty of the latter. By way of analogy, the normalization of motor sports doesn’t provide an excuse for someone causing a fatal accident when driving at 90mph through a school zone.

Long prison sentences are clearly deserved for anyone guilty of domestic violence. Although another potential direction to adopt would be shorten a few things.

I’m not sure who the artist of this piece is. It has some similarities with work by Juan Payal and Stig, but I don’t believe it’s either of them.

Lockdown (updated)

The rogue chastity device story was such a big one it feels like I should do a follow-up. It popped up all over the place. Something that the unfortunately trapped men will presumably not be doing anytime soon.

I may have been too optimistic about the ease of escaping the device, as I saw numerous online comments from people reporting being trapped for days. I guess in some ways that could be seen as selling point. Buy our device and you’ll be doing #locktober whether you like it or not.

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy escape route. Freddie Clegg’s humorous post on the subject linked me to this BBC article which suggests a screwdriver might be all that’s needed to escape. There’s a video for that trick on the companies site. The people who discovered the original flaws have another suggestion for escaping, described towards the bottom of this page.

As seems inevitable in any hacking story, Russians and bitcoin were also involved. Estelle Sinclair described an attempt to extort money from one of her submissives using the device. I guess if you imagine the Russian hacker as a icy cruel blonde Slavic lady, then that’d actually be kind of a hot scene. It’s just lucky the device didn’t come with a punishment setting capable of delivering electric shocks. That could have led to a few guys learning all about crypto-currencies in record time.

Finally, for anyone wanting a more serious deep dive into the issues here, the buttplug.io twitter feed has put up some lengthy threads on the topic. Worth checking out it you’re still intrigued by this kind of tech.

This is clearly a much more low-tech device that’s being inspected. I feel I should totally know the name of the two dommes in the image, but my brain is failing me. Hopefully a reader can help with the correct attribution.

Updated: Thanks to my ever knowledgeable readers I can attribute this to Lady Sophia Black and Ms Morrigan Hel.  I think it’s from a shoot for The English Mansion. 

Riding the Sybian

It’s not often you see a Sybian in femdom porn. This looks to be a particularly intense use of it, given the dual Hitachi magic wands also being applied.

I’ve actually ridden a Sybian during a scene. It was fun for a short while but too much for extended play. It started with “Oh wow, that’s intense”, moved through  “Mmmm. That’s good” and finished with “OK. It feels like a small evil demon is punching me repeatedly in the prostate. We need to stop that little fucker.” Admittedly, I am a bit of a lightweight when it comes to anal play, so YMMV.

There’s no watermark on this image, but I’m fairly certain it’s from one of the kink.com sites.

Update: The good news is that I was right. It’s a kink.com image. Specifically from Men In Pain. The bad news is that I already featured this image a few years back and got the attribution right then. So apparently I’m going senile.

Troupe of Slaves

A helpful comment from a post earlier this month pointed me at  Troupe of Slaves. It’s a fun site, with a lot of interesting images, although I’m not exactly clear on who or what is behind it. Is it the artistic spin-off of a local kinky group? A bunch of friends having fun? A one man art project?

Regardless of what it is, there’s definitely a lot of great sexy images to enjoy. I particularly liked this one entitled ‘Polka Dots‘.

 

Wighead

This drawing is by the artist Wighead for a 1930’s novel entitled ‘A Genoux Esclave’. You can see more from the book here and there’s an article on the potential identity of the artist here. I discovered the art and its background via this tweet.

These days the idea of a French maid in a sexy black and white outfit with stockings and a little cap exists almost entirely in fetish scenes and silly Halloween outfits. It has become purely a sexual trope. Yet black and white maid outfits in the 19th and early 20th century were a real thing. They were just far more practical. Here’s a picture of one I found from the same era. So what we’re looking at here is a fetishistic interpretation of what was a contemporary uniform of the time. I find it interesting to look at the artwork from that angle. It has a different feel when you consider it from the perspective of a 1930’s kinkster.

Helping Out

This story about the UK based medical fetish company MedFet donating their sets of disposable scrubs to the NHS has popped up on a lot of my feeds recently. It’s one of those situations where you’re not sure whether to laugh or cry. At least they carry sensible serious medical gear. I’d imagine the last thing a hospitalized coronavirus victim wants to see would be someone coming to take a blood sample dressed in a Halloween style naughty nurse outfit.

I also spotted this tweet from Lady Annisa, volunteering to help at her previous hospital. Appropriately for someone who offers serious medical play, she was a nursing sister before becoming a pro-domme. Not all heroes where capes. Sometimes they wear scrubs and sensible shoes.

This is Lady Annisa and Mistress Miranda tackling a particularly difficult case. Obviously his nipples have been troubling him and a series of injections have been prescribed.

Medical Myths

The story of how the vibrator was invented by Victorian doctors to cure women of hysteria is a well known one. There are plenty of online articles that refer to it. I’ve even referenced it in past posts. It has an obvious appeal. Who doesn’t like the idea of a Victorian lady telling her staid husband that she feels a burst of hysteria coming on and she needs to schedule a trip to Dr. NimbleFingers to relieve the tension?

Unfortunately – and you can probably guess where this was going – it turns out not to be true. As this NYTimes article by Hallie Lieberman makes clear, it was invented as a general device for health. Doctors did know there was a risk of sexual excitement, but were very keen to steer away from that usage. It was only thanks to women recognizing its potential that the vibrator gained its sexual usage and benefits.

I particularly enjoyed Hallie Lieberman’s gender swapped example of how unbelievable the hysteria story is.

Imagine arguing that at the turn of the 20th century, female nurses were giving hand jobs to male patients to treat them for psychological problems; that men didn’t realize anything sexual was going on; that because female nurses’ wrists got tired from all the hand jobs, they invented a device called a penis pump to help speed up the process. Then imagine claiming nobody thought any of this was sexual, because it was a century ago.

While that doesn’t sound likely, it does sound like a great scenario for a femdom roleplay. I would happily be a hysterical Victorian man who needs to be restrained  by nurses  and cured via mechanically assisted means. Obviously it’d all be done for my own good.

This is Lady Annisa and Mistress Miranda, two pro-dommes from the UK who are both brilliant at medical scenes. I’m sure that they’d be up for adding a historical twist to them.

Mechanophilia

I’ve heard plenty of dommes complain about slaves slobbering all over their feet or shiny boots. The human tongue is rarely an effective mechanism to polish leather or clean a leg. However, I’ve never heard of a domme complaining about a slave ignoring her and licking the grill of the car she arrived in. Are they expecting him to lick the whole thing clean? Or did he take one look at the attractive ladies in fetish gear and decide that a fly splattered BMW grill was more his cup of tea? Also, at least one of the people there in very confused about how handcuffs work.

The image is from the classic British femdom magazine Cruella. This is one of their odder examples, but their magazine and site in the 90’s was very formative for the young paltego.

Dating Skills

This New York Post article on a domme class for Manhattan women to up their dating game is a strange one. On one hand I’m all in favor of encouraging more interest in femdom and people learning new kinky skills. On the other, it seems very mercenary and calculating, and not in deliberate findom type way. Learning to top so you can match the fantasies of a rich guy and hence convince him to marry you seems like the opposite of female empowerment. But maybe I’m being too sensitive about the whole thing.

This is a screen shot from the show Billions (mentioned here previously). With Maggie Siff playing the partner and domme to Paul Giamatti’s Manhattan power player, it’s cited in the Post article as inspiration for the kinky curious.

Nobody Cares

My random thought of the day: Never stress about walking up to a BDSM playspace. As long as you’re dressed like conventionally – which you absolutely should be – then nobody knows or cares what you’re doing. Passersby will just assume you’re a regular person doing regular person things.

I’ve done a lot of sessions at a lot of different spaces in many different cities. I’ve never once had a random stranger shout “Hey everyone – look at that pervert! He’s off to do weird freaky stuff in that building.” From the outside playspaces look anonymous. 99.9% of people will walk past and have no idea they’re there. Over the years I’ve personally had exactly zero awkward moments getting into and out of playspaces.

It’s also important to keep in mind that the domme is highly incentivized to keep the entrance routine under the radar. After all, she is the one regularly in the space and dealing with a constant stream of clients. No domme is going to appear at the doorway in full fetish gear and loudly command her clients to get to their knees in full view of the street. Instead the traditional entrance routine is the sideways slide, slipping through a door held only slight ajar, concealing both the domme and the hallway decorations from any random passersby.

The discrepancy between the outside of playspaces and the inside is always something that brings a smile to my face. I love that the outside can be a regular townhouse on a regular street, and inside a scene like this one can be unfolding….

This is Domina Yuki and Lucy Sweetkill playing earlier this year in a lovely San Francisco space I know well.