Tea for Two

This is one of those strange fashion shots where I can think of only two explanations. Either the photographer isn’t kinky at all, but wanted to shoot something that was, and so just threw a bunch of random kinky stuff into a scene. Or the photographer is extremely kinky, with a very specialized niche taste, and is therefore shooting on a frequency I just can’t pick up on. Whichever of those it is, I do like the china and her beautiful red corset.

This was shot by Aleksandar Alek Živković for Vice Serbia. I found it on labstrakt’s tumblr.

Table for Two

I’ve eaten at many amazing restaurants, but I’ve sadly never enjoyed a table with this kind of backdrop. I think it’s worth a Michelin star all on its own.

Google translates the text as “I take my male in patience” while Bing translates it as “I’m taking my male patient”. Neither one really sounds right, so if I’ve any French speakers out there who can help with a better translation, please let me know via a comment.

Update: Thanks for the many helpful comments on this. I’ll quote Mlle Sadie who gave this description…

This is a play on words. “Prendre son MAL (instead of MÂLE) en patience” is a French expression meaning to endure, with resignation, some pain (physical or psychological), some uncomfortable circumstance (think “pain in the ass”!).

So, mal (pain) and mâle (gender) are homonyms the artist has interchanged. The Woman thus endures Her male as/with a “pain in the ass”.

I believe the artist is known as Ladamen Rouge and this was created in Saint Etienne.  Thanks to a helpful comment, this may also be be a collaborative piece with an street artist known as Miss Tic or Miss Trick.

 

Face Funnel

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m not a big fan of hoods. I have to make an exception in this case however, because this one is just so fucking hot. There’s something incredibly objectifying and utilitarian about it. I’m not sure I could cope with wearing it in reality, but I do love the idea of it.

This is from Mistress Natsumi’s twitter feed.

More thoughts on privacy

I thought I’d share a few more follow-up notes to my previous post on Protonmail and Gmail.

One discussion I’ve seen pop up multiple times on social media is the need for everyone to use encrypted email. The argument goes that if a client is on gmail, it doesn’t help if a sex worker is on Protonmail. The email thread will still end up stored on an unencrypted server, so what have you gained? And since getting everyone to use Protonmail is unrealistic, why bother using it at all?

I think that viewpoint somewhat misses the mark. Privacy online, much like in the physical world, is rarely about perfection. It’s about minimizing risk and guarding against the most likely routes of attack.

If a zealous prosecutor crawled the web for sex worker web sites, or got hold of the database from a forum site or advertising site for sex workers, it’d be pretty easy to compile a list of email addresses for workers who were based in his part of the world. I’d also assume (although I’m not a legal expert) that, given both the source of the email data and the current political climate, showing probably cause to get a warrant would be straightforward. Just throw around the magic word ‘trafficking’. For anyone on Gmail (or a similar unencrypted service) that’d result in exposing all their correspondence with all of their clients.

In contrast compiling a list of client email addresses is a lot trickier. Most people use entirely separate accounts that are isolated from their public presence. I certainly don’t email pro-dommes from my work email or as paltego. These random email addresses typically aren’t on the web and don’t have a lot of associated information. So it would seem to me that, even if you could find one, showing probably cause is now a lot harder. Finally, even if a prosecutor can jump through all those hoops, all he’d get would be the correspondence of one client. That’s a lot lower level of information leakage than all the emails from a sex worker to all her clients. That reduces the cost/benefit ratio for a prosecutor, and hence makes it a less likely route of attack.

It’s obviously better to push as many people as possible towards secure email. But I don’t think you have to insist that it’s all or nothing. A sex worker who uses Protonmail and communicates with people on a mixed collection of email platforms is, in my view, still better off (from a privacy perspective) than one who just uses Gmail.

Similarly, while a modern smartphone with encryption enabled isn’t perfectly safe, it’s certainly better than one without encryption. And tech companies are constantly working to identify and close security holes.  You can also enable encryption on modern Windows/Mac PCs and laptops. It’s not a magic bullet to give 100% security, but it’s better than not having it. Defense in depth is the key.

Of course, if you want to avoid online risk entirely, then the only way to be sure is to go old school like this office. Not a computer in sight. Just a pen and paper for her office boy. Hopefully she has a crosscut shredder to dispose of his work once it’s done.

This is of course the lovely Mistress Eleise in an old photograph from Femme Fatale Films.

Euphoria – Beauty In Pain

I’ve some follow-up thoughts from yesterdays post on Protonmail vs Gmail to share. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to get them down right now. So consider this an interlude, a little visual intermezzi, before returning to the more boring technical stuff.

The images below are from this Vice article on the photographer Carolin Auer  who is working to capture some of the authentic pain and emotions that go into BDSM play. The ultimate goal is a book entitled Euphoria – Beauty In Pain, which is currently still in the production stages. It looks like it’d be an interesting title for fans of the marks, cuts and bruises that kinky play often leaves behind.

Protonmail vs Gmail

When the FOSTA-SESTA bill was passed into law there was a rush of sex workers and clients moving from Gmail to the enhanced security of Protonmail. Since then I’ve noticed a backlash to Protonmail, with complaints about its reliability resulting in some people moving back to Gmail. At the same time I’ve also observed some confusion about the security issues involved, with comments like “Gmail uses encryption anyway” or “I’m on a VPN, so why does it matter?” Obviously, everyone can make their own judgement call about utility vs security, but I’d like that decision to be an informed one. Hence, this post to dig into the issues.

When it comes to encryption, Gmail does use an encrypted connection between you and their servers. That’s nothing unusual. So does pretty much every internet service that carries personal data (banking, shopping, email, etc). That’s necessary to stop people in your building, coffee shop or  IT department sneaking a look at what you’re sending and receiving. Obviously this is a good thing, but pretty much irrelevant when it comes to law enforcement. Even if they could do it (which they can’t), they’re not going to try and hack your internet connection and reconstruct your emails from the data you send.

Similarly, while a VPN (virtual private network) is generally a good thing for privacy, it’s irrelevant when it comes to law enforcement and email. Normally, even with encrypted connections, it’s still possible to see what sites someone is visiting. With a VPN, a remote computer (typically in another country) makes all those connections for you, and you just have a single encrypted connection to the VPN. That’s great if you don’t want someone to be able to trace your interactions with sites like eros or slixa, but kind of pointless when it comes to Gmail. If you’ve got a public web presence tied to a known email account, there’s absolutely no value trying to hide the fact you’re connecting to that email service. The fact you’ve got the email address on your website proves that you must be using the service.

The key difference between Protonmail and Gmail is how the data is stored on the email servers. In Protonmail the data is encrypted so that even the people running Protonmail can’t read it. That is absolutely not true for Gmail. Google’s entire business model is based on mining user data. In some cases it’s even possible for third parties to access the data. As Google describes here, they will produce the content of your Gmail account in response to a search warrant. And, as they document here, they produced user data for around 80% of the legal requests they receive each month. So if a prosecutor has your Gmail address and a search warrant, he can read your emails. The bar for obtaining a search warrant is simply showing probable cause. That is not a high bar. In contrast, even if US and Swiss law enforcement cooperated to get hold of Protonmail data, it would be a jumble of meaningless numbers. They’d need the account password to make sense of it.

One could argue that there are easier and more likely ways for law enforcement to hassle sex workers than trying to access their email accounts. Or that if an investigation has reached the point of getting search warrants, it’s unlikely to be stopped simply by a lack of email data. However, in the current climate, I tend to take the view that safer is always better. Would you want to bet against the possibility of a prosecutor going on a fishing expedition after scraping the web for pro-domme and escort email addresses? Or getting hold of the data from sites like eros or slixa and then using some bullshit sex trafficking story to get a load of warrants signed off? No tech company is going to want to be perceived to facilitate sex trafficking, even if the trafficking story is a fiction with zero relationship to reality.

As I said at the beginning of the post, the utility vs security trade-off is a matter for individual judgement. But nobody should assume that there isn’t a trade-off involved here. Gmail and Protonmail offer very different levels of privacy. Personally, even though pro-domination is legal and I only engage in non-sexual BDSM activities, I’ve switched to Protonmail for my personal account.

If anyone has questions about any of this feel free to leave a comment. I’m absolutely not a legal expert, but I do know a bit about computers and networks. I also added some follow-up thoughts in a subsequent post.

This domme certainly takes security seriously. She doesn’t ever turn her computer on. That’s hardcore security.

As far as I can tell the website originally associated with this image has ceased to exist.

Hush

This shot is a personal one from ‘The Worst Photographer Ever‘ tumblr. Clearly his tumblr is inaccurately titled, partly because there’s a far worse photographer writing this post, and partly because I think it’s a very sexy image. It’s interesting to have the man staring into the camera and the woman focused on the action, when the stereotypical shot is always the reverse of that.

Gagging On It

A final concluding post (for the moment) on combining different sexual activities with being a dominant woman. I hadn’t planned this one, but then I saw this tweet from the dominant Miss Pearl and it was too perfect not to feature.

Good: I got more time to gag on his cock, which is a major fetish of mine.

Bad: I gagged on his cock so hard I deposited two tablespoons of throat goop on his dick with a bad plumbing noise and now I am shy.

Hopefully for Miss Pearl and her partner Brick it was only a passing shyness.

As I’ve said many times, there are no dominant or submissive activities. Only dominant or submissive attitudes. You can be a domme who loves gagging on cock or a submissive who enjoys tying someone up. What matters is what you bring to the activity and the dynamic you create.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this artist.

More on Demarcation

This is a follow-up post to my one from yesterday. That tackled the perennial discussion of what sexual activities are acceptable for a domme and why the obvious answer of ‘all of them’ never somehow seems to stick. In that previous post I argued that a large number of pro-dommes are invested in defining domination in a legal safe way, which naturally puts certain activities outside the definition.  While I obviously think that’s true, it’s also only part of the picture. The other part is the out-sized influence that professional domination has on femdom in general.

In any sane world, femdom would be a generally recognized preference, and professional femdom a narrow subset of it that operates within certain legal boundaries. Actually, in any sane world, those legal boundaries wouldn’t exist and sex work would be decriminalized, but lets set that aside for the moment. The general point is that people’s sexual behavior shouldn’t be defined by the professional label. Nobody would take the escort definition of the girlfriend experience (GFE) to be how a man should actually interact with a girlfriend. Yet the pro-domme dynamic is often the lens used to view femdom in general. So any distortion created by the laws around sex work tend to distort how people see the bigger picture and the definition of female domination.

This blog is part of that problem. Over the years I’ve tried to link to and feature the blogs of many lifestyle female dominants. I’m sure I could have done a better job, but I try to share the broadest view of femdom that I can. However, for most femdom bloggers, sharing information is optional and secondary to their kinks. For most pro-dommes, sharing information is a key part of their marketing and essential to how they make money. That creates a public information imbalance. Most femdom blogger avoid sharing photographs for reasons of privacy. Pro-dommes hire professional photographers and take endless snaps of themselves between sessions. My social media feeds are full of them, and I love featuring them here. It makes it easy to create a visually interesting posts. But it’s a distorted view of femdom.

I’ve no idea how to resolve this problem. Pro-dommes have been a hugely important and positive part of my life. I’m happy when I encourage people to visit them. I also think that if I tried to create a blog that featured no professional content at all my readership would plunge. The images they share are undoubtedly striking. At the same time, I don’t think I present a balanced view of femdom. Or a view that leads people towards what I’d like femdom to be. Instead I reflect an information imbalance that’s detrimental to that vision, and I’m not sure what to do about that.

I’ll leave you with a shot that exemplifies my problem. This is of Mistress Iris as captured by Miss May. It’s a lovely image and Mistress Iris is a fabulous domme, but it’s also as relevant to femdom in general as the Noma cookbook is to the average home cook.

You can find Miss May’s professional site here. She offers bespoke web and graphic design services for the global Fetish, BDSM and erotic industry.

Mistress Iris is an LA based pro-domme, who travels extensively. You can find her professional site here.

Demarcation

There’s one topic of discussion in femdom communities that seems to repeat itself with the inevitability of elections, taxes and the return of pumpkin spice lattes. That topic is: What are the appropriate sexual activities for a domme?  The naive reader might assume that the answer is a simple one: Whatever the fuck she wants. After all, the clue is right there in the name ‘dominant’. As in the person in control who gets to make the decisions. Yet somehow that seemingly obvious answer never seems to stick.

This topic recently surfaced once again in a bunch of my social media feeds, and prompted a strong and well written response from Domina Victoria Rage. By coincidence, Mistress T also just published a good post on the topic as well, in that case prompted by a very confused sounding pro-domme client.

I think a big part of the problem here is to do with the laws around sex work in most countries. Pro-domination is typically legal, where any kind of paid sexual act isn’t. Torturing someone for money is A-OK, just don’t make them feel good with an orgasm. Most pro-dommes therefore want to draw very clear lines between their profession and anything that crosses that legal boundary. Hence, in their view, any domme blurring that line isn’t just making a personal choice, she’s challenging their legally safe but entirely arbitrary definition of what domination is. It’s almost seen as an attack on their very identity.

It’s a bit like an old fashion union – “Sorry mate. More than my jobs worth to touch that dick. I’m strictly rope and strap work. Whole different process if you need those pipes cleaning out. I’d love to help, I would, but my governor would be on me like a ton of bricks. Demarcation she’d say. Escort’s a totally different job code and time sheet. We don’t touch the dicks and they stay away from the ropes.”

Here’s someone indulging in all sorts of sexual and kinky acts. However, she’s also filming it, which makes it porn, so that’s legally fine. Presumably the pornographers have a great union, because they get to cross all sorts of lines that show up when no camera is involved.

I believe this is by the artist incase – tumblr here and patreon here.