Complex Theological Issues

Here’s a final vintage pulp novel cover to complete my trio of posts featuring them. I’m definitely not a religious man, but even an atheist like myself can see this book clearly raises some challenging theological issues.

Firstly, there’s the whole Satan as a gay woman thing. Is that actually a progressive view? As John Oliver might say – #satanism #feminism. And then there’s the past tense aspect of the title. Is Satan now dead? Or still a woman but no longer gay? Or maybe trans? She’s definitely looking pretty masculine in the background of the cover drawing. For all the sexual and gender confusion, at least Satan is maintaining the tradition of villains with an evil goatee. It’s important to have standards.

Two Runners

Regular readers will know that I occasionally feature a post on women who aren’t necessarily dominant in the femdom sense (as far as I know), but who perform impressive feats and set an example in their field. Today’s example of such a post is a twofer, featuring a pair or runners.

Firstly, there’s this feelgood story of Susan Sellers, who just finished second in the Boston Marathon. It was only her second marathon, and she was a complete unknown, with no sponsors or agents. After a promising junior career, she picked up a major injury, causing her to quit running and take up a nursing job. Now, at age 26, she’s found quite a way to make a comeback with a second place in Boston.

That story put me in mind of Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon in 1967. It seems incredible now, but women weren’t allowed to enter the race because organizers thought women were too ‘fragile’ to handle it. So she entered under the gender neutral name of K. V. Switzer and then relied on her boyfriend and her coach to block officials who tried to physically pull her out the race. Impressively, aged 70, she came back to run it again last year.

It wasn’t until 1972 that women were officially allowed to enter the race. The Boston Athletics Association director said of the 20 year old Switzer – “If that girl were my daughter, I would spank her.” I can only guess his bookshelves were filled with novels like the one below, and he considered himself in the front line of the fight against those evil feminists.

This book came out in 1971, and while the cover suggests it might fall into the ‘so bad it’s good’ category, this review suggests otherwise.

Witches & Bitches

There are many things to like about this awesome vintage femdom magazine cover. My favorite is probably the line about “Here are sex witches; sex bitches; dominas; slaves of Satan.” Is it just me or is one of those things slightly out of place? It’s like opening a true crime magazine with “Here are serial killers, psychopaths, jaywalkers, murders…” Could they not think of four insanely over the top labels to use? How about freaky femdoms? The devils devious dominants? Lethal ladies of love? Sex crazed harlots from hell? If you’re going for trashy, you might as well go all out.

Keep in on the hush-hush

This autostraddle article has some good tips on how to subtly soundproof a room for kinky sex. Handy if you have children, roommates or thin walls between you and the neighbors. It’s particularly important for that last one, as explaining strange noises to a house guest can be embarrassing, but explaining that they’re not a sign of domestic abuse to the police is infinitely worse.

Even in professional spaces noise can be a problem. As I covered previously, I was banned from a San Francisco playspace during office hours for fear my vocalizations would disturb the surrounding tech start ups. I was also recently amused when arranging a first session with a new domme to be told, totally out of the blue, that my screams wouldn’t be a problem in her space.  Apparently my references had been particularly descriptive in their feedback!

The two standard approaches to excess noise are either soundproofing the room or gagging the submissive. Lady Chiaki appears to have come up with an interesting alternative here – provide the submissive with his own little soundproofed private room just for his head. There’s even a handy front door on it.

This is from this tweet in Lady Chiaki’s twitter feed. I believe the creator of the box is OSM Works.

Absence of Activity

Sorry for the posting gap. I picked up some bug over the weekend and have spent the last few days curled up under a blanket. I haven’t felt like I could do much of anything, other than watch bad television and sleep. Hopefully, normally service should be resumed from this point on.

Talking of guys unable to do much of anything, here’s one in a similar bind. Although I guess if looking stylish counts, he’s definitely managing to pull that off.

This is from the instagram of kinkbaku (also on twitter). It’s not exactly femdom, but if you like images of bound men, then it’s worth checking out.

Naughty Nicki

I’ve mostly stopped clicking on links that purport to show me celebrities in dominatrix gear. Normally these links just lead me to someone wearing knee high boots or a leather jacket with a couple of extra buckles. Happily Nicki Minaj didn’t get that particular fashion memo, as she went for a full on dominatrix cliche. The only thing that’s missing here is a haughty stare down at a camera shooting from a lower angle.

Frankly, if I booked a session at a dungeon and the mistress turned up wearing this outfit, I’d think she was compensating for something. It’d look OTT even surrounded by chains, whips and a sex swing. It’s kind of surreal court side at a basketball game at the Staples center. I just hope she got to beat someone after the game.

Switter

His Trumpiness – that paragon of sexual morality – signed the FOSTA bill into law this week. Backpage has already been taken offline, and I suspect we’ll continue to see shockwaves spreading out from this new bill for years to come. There’s a good twitter thread here if you want background context and information to share with others.

If you’re feeling as pissed off as I am by the whole situation, then one action you can take is talk about the problems of the bill with people outside the bubble of sex work discussion and kinky blogs like this one. It really hasn’t got the coverage it should have done, partly thanks to the overwhelming number of Trump related stories in the news every day. I’m out to some of my friends, so can talk about it to them directly, but if you’d rather take a more circumspect route, then just use the example of craiglists personals being taken offline. There will be similar mainstream sites taking equivalent steps in the months to come.

As sex workers get organized, I’m predicting we’ll see a lot of new platforms springing up to support them from outside the US. One of the first examples of that is Switter – a twitter style service (based on Mastodon) set-up by sex workers in Australia. Anyone can join – I’m there as @paltego@switter.at – and it has both iOS and  Android clients. I found it a little temperamental when joining, with a couple of tries needed before I got past an error screen, but it seems to be OK once you’re on it. A fair number of pro-dommes have already created accounts there. If you got to my profile and look at who I follow, you’ll get some good starting points for kinky peoples profiles.

I’ve really no idea what a suitable image for this kind of post would be. So I’ll pick something totally at random – a young Russian lady (Mistress Irina) peeing on a man. Just happens to be the first thing I found in my image folder.

This is from the Russian Mistress site.

A Double Dose

I’m fortunate that most of the feedback I receive for this blog is positive and appreciative. That said, there is one singular and common complaint that I find regularly jamming up my inbox. It generally follows the form of – ‘I love your witty writing and insight into kink. But why can’t we have more of it? One blog just isn’t enough! Can you please give us more of paltego?’

I find these kind of complaints somewhat annoying, but I also hate to disappoint anyone. So for this group of totally genuine and not at all imaginary people,  I give you a lengthy interview with me on the blog of the fabulous Miss Ava Zhang.

In all seriousness, it was an interesting and enjoyable process to think through the questions Miss Zhang posed, as well as pleasure to hear her feedback. While I have this site as my personal soapbox, I try and keep posts here short and to the point. Writing in more detail forced me to clarify my thoughts and do a degree of self-analysis. That’s probably an exercise I could do with repeating more often.

Miss Zhang is based in NYC, but also tours regularly. I’ve not been lucky enough to session with her (yet!), but based on my interactions for this interview, I think she’d be an amazing person to know and submit to.

I love the blend of elegance, composure and just a touch of fetish in this shot. It’s from Miss Zhang’s gallery page.

Why would you do that?

My previous post, featuring a brief description of a mouth suturing scene I did, generated a very reasonable comment. The gist of it was – and I’m paraphrasing here – why on earth would you do that? Isn’t this stuff supposed to be sexy?

So I should start by saying it wasn’t actually my suggestion. Like I lot of the things I do in scenes, it was the domme’s idea. However, I was certainly eager to  be the guinea pig. She wanted to play around with controlling my mouth and doing a quite invasive scene. The reason it was ultimately enjoyable was for the same reasons a lot of my D/s scenes are. It’s about giving up control, being objectified, accepting pain, handling the intensity, placing trust in the domme and allowing her to take me on a journey. So while I don’t find mouth suturing a turn on per se, it is a turn on in that specific context.

One general observation I’d make is that I think there are some people who enjoy very specific activities and others for who enjoy the dynamic a variety of activities can produce. I used to be the former and over the years have transitioned to the latter. I don’t think it’s a binary categorization – you can certainly be a bit of both – but I think people tend to fall into one camp or the other.  Some submissives are into feet, or leather, or corporal scenes, or bondage, etc. That’s the thing that turns them on and the activity is the goal. Others are into control, or humiliation, or objectification, or pain. The activity is just a means to get there, and so the form it takes has different requirements.

For anyone else out there finding all this talk of weird mouth stuff equally strange, here’s something a little more traditional. Hopefully this shot has a little bit in it for everyone.

I’m afraid I don’t have an original source for this. Please leave a comment if you can help me attribute it.

Updated: Thanks to a helpful comment I can attribute this to Nikki Next shooting for the Men Are Slaves site.

How will I explain this?

There’s one thought I regularly have when doing a particularly unusual or extreme activity. It’s not about how much it’ll hurt or if I’ll be able to handle the pain or not. The thought is – ‘If this goes wrong, how am I going to explain it to an ER nurse?’

It’s not stuff like bondage or whipping that triggers this thought. I figure BDSM has penetrated mainstream culture to the point where regular kinky activities will be par for the course in ER. It’s when things like electrified urethral sounds and needles through the scrotum come into the picture that I envision nurses reaching for the emergency straitjacket and number of the hospital psychiatrist.

When I was last down in LA I did a scene with Cynthia Stone where she sutured the inside of my mouth and ran surgical thread between the insides of my cheeks. There was even a shot of it on her twitter feed. Should the worst have happened, I wonder how an ER nurse would have reacted ? She spends all day stitching up people who have injured themselves in accidents, and then gets stuck with this muppet who has injured himself purposefully stitching up a healthy body part.

There’s no watermark on this, but I’d guess it’s from one of the kink.com sites.