Funny Mummy

After some seriously depressing politics, I felt a touch of humor might be required. And I can’t think of anyone who can combine humor, playfulness and some seriously intense bondage quite like Lady Hinako. The mummification image below is from her twitter feed. It makes me smile each time I look at it. The second image, of Mistress Hinako herself, is from a different scene and taken from her blog post entitled Hinako Hospital. Even in medical play, she manages to inject (ahem) some fun decoration of her submissive.

Voters should have a safeword

So the grade A bullshit that is the FOSTA-SESTA bill (as covered previously here) was passed by the Senate this week. It’s a good indication of the level of dysfunction in American politics that while this dangerous bill was sailing through with no significant opposition, Senator Risch was holding up a one trillion dollar budget bill over the naming of a nature park after a political rival. Words fail me.

The effect was immediate. Craiglist dropped its entire personals section, reddit dropped sex related forums, CityVibe went dark, sex worker advertising forums vanished, etc. And that’s on day 1, before before the bill even becomes law.

It’s possible that you’re reading this and thinking ‘Why do I care? I don’t use any of those things.’ To you I’d firstly say ‘Don’t be such an asshole. Don’t you care about anyone other than yourself?’ This is a bill that’s going to cause active harm to many thousands of sex workers. Secondly, I’d say ‘Just wait. Stuff you do care about is going to follow closely behind.’

My prediction is that in the near future a grandstanding prosecutor is going to pick on some sex workers and claim (incorrectly) that they’ve been trafficked. Then he’ll use this law to go after whatever social media or online sites these workers have used or posted on. The facts won’t matter – just some juicy headlines about his crackdown on online filth and human misery. At which point all sorts of online platforms – twitter, tumblr, instagram, reddit, Google, etc. – will start to aggressively purge anything vaguely related to sex and kink. Or I guess I should say, ramp up their already aggressive efforts in that area. The effect on sex related speech will be chilling and widespread,

In theory the law shouldn’t affect sites like this one. In reality I rely hugely on those kind of platforms to provide interesting content and links. The majority of the images here feature sex workers of some form or another. This site literally wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for my experiences playing with Lady Lydia – a professional dominatrix I found online.

Hopefully the constitutionality of the bill will be challenged in the courts. In the meantime, I’d suggest doing whatever you can to support any sex workers you interact with, make yourself aware of their perspective on the issue  and donate to organizations like SWOP and EFF.

It’s a shame this lady wasn’t on the floor of the Senate to knock some sense into people.

Kinky Knees

Mistress Ayn has wise words to share for anyone who wants to avoid passing out while playing.

I can’t comment on the effect of erectile dysfunction drugs or eating erratically. I’ve not tried the former and my eating schedule is weird at the best of times. However, this part definitely resonates…

When placed in standing positions. like on the St. Andrews cross, don’t lock your knees.

I’ve come close to fainting a few times, and on every occasion I was in a vertical position, I was tense, my knees were locked and our play was intense. The end result was a classic Vasovagal Syncope response and a concerned domme, keen to get her suddenly ghost white submissive into a non-vertical position. It’s interesting to note that the causes listed for a vasovagal syncope response include standing for long periods, heat, fear of bodily injury, seeing blood and straining. Which clearly align with some types of BDSM play and the points Mistress Ayn makes.

My advice would be to avoid vertical positions for any new types of intense play. For example, always lie down for a first piercing. When standing is required, ensure knees can bend and are regularly flexed, focus on breathing deeply, try and relax into the pain and wiggle the torso and hands whenever you get the chance. From the domme side, a smooth escalation and deescalation of pain can help the submissive adapt to the rhythm, and regular physical contact can keep them grounded in the moment.

This gentleman clear has the right idea. He has a good knee bend going and it looks like he’s wiggling his torso. She should really be able to ratchet up the intensity.

This is from Djeki spanking artwork site and specifically this gallery. If you like their artwork, it appears they have originals available for sale.

Better Know a Lamp: Part 4

Welcome to another entry in my intermittent series of posts on submissives as lamps. The series has only had 4 entries in almost 7 years, but that is 3 more than I was expecting. Past examples are here, here and here.

It’s not a fetish I personally get, but it does make me smile. It’s both kinky and surreal. Clearly not widely popular (given that I don’t see many lampshades featured as equipment in play spaces) but it does seem to persistently pop up in kinky imagery. For those that do like it, standby for  another entry in the series sometime in 2019-2021.

This is from the instagram of latex.Jacqueline The-ripper.

Pie

Apparently it was Pi day last week. I’m slightly baffled as to why a mathematical constant gets its own day, but there we are. Can we look forward to the Euler number festival and the feast of the Lapace limit? Meanwhile, in Indiana, they presumably celebrate it on an entirely different day.

It’s tough to find a suitable image to connect femdom with π. Stern yet attractive ‘teachers’ brandishing a pointer in front of a bunch of blackboard equations don’t count. However, it’s a lot easier to connect pie with femdom. That’s a particular specialty of the artist Bakerman.

Bubbles of Intimacy

This Business Insider article describes a photographic project capturing couples in intimate moments. The twist in the tale is that they all feature the photographer Marie Hyld,  and a stranger she’s met for the first time just minutes before (as recorded in the corner of the photographs). Most of the shots are fairly conventional sweet/casual/romantic moments, but there’s one fun fetishistic one I’ve featured below.

Mistress Matisse made an insightful comment on the series via a tweet…

So, this photographer is basically tapping into the dynamic that many sex workers create, only she’s doing it in a performative way, instead of it being for the person she’s with.

I have to admit that when I started playing with pro-dommes I was puzzled by the nature of the dynamic. It felt genuine but was also in a sense artificial. Intimacy between relative strangers. Nobody was pretending, but we were also suspending disbelief. Was it real? Or fake?

In the end I decided that these were the wrong questions to ask. It was what it was. A little bubble in time and space. It was genuine of itself, and incomparable to anything else. I didn’t have to try and sort it into my existing categorizations. I could carve out an entirely new space for it.

The series of photographs is called lifeconstructions and can be seen on the photographers web site.

On the hook

Normally when I find or, as in this case, I’m sent an interesting image, I hang onto it until there’s a suitable article or post topic to associate it with. I’ve got a long backlog of images that I like but I’ve yet to find the perfect post to drop them into.

In this case, I’m just going to put the image out there and let it stand alone. I love it. Their expressions are perfect. I just can’t imagine any kind of kinky rant, sexual politics, scene dynamics or mainstream kink story I’ll be able to fit it into. It’s just a thing all of its own.

This is by the artist Miles Aldridge and was shot for the German Stern Magazine. Thanks to Marga and Titia for pointing me at it.

Making an Entrance

This image, featuring the beautiful Mistress Alice, has a great evil doctor or sexy mad scientist vibe going on. Words like splayed, clamps, insertion and orifice all spring to mind. The submissive should ideally be brought in by a pair of helpful assistants using one of those Hannibal Lecter vertical wheeled trolleys. Unable to either escape or avoid seeing what’s about to happen to him.

I’ve often thought that entrances to scenes are an underdeveloped part of kinky play. There might be some leashing, or pulling by a body part or CFNM dynamic, but that’s about it for most scenes. The problem with doing something dramatic – like being delivered in a dog crate or bound on a hospital trolley – is you need a big space and multiple dommes. To really make it work you’d need a packing scene to happen with one domme – turning the submissive from  a person to an experimental object – and then a delivery to another domme in a different location for the pain and torment. Ideally with a period of waiting and watching in between to heighten the tension and emphasis the sense of objectification.

It’s hard to see how to make that kind of opening act work in most playspaces I’ve seen in the US. Maybe if I get chance to ever play somewhere like Studio Avalon, with its extensive facilities and large team of dommes, it’d be an idea to try.

Give him the finger

Writing about consent apps in yesterday’s post reminded me of a tweet that made me laugh. Unfortunately, age or possibly alcohol is muddying by brain tonight, so I can’t actually remember who wrote it or the exact words. I’ll have to go with just the gist of it here.

It was from an escort rather than a domme and was targeted at those vanilla  guys who think it’s OK to operate in the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish” paradigm.  She suggested sticking a finger in their asshole without prior warning and then seeing how long it took them to grasp the concept of continually negotiated consent and the option to stop and discuss boundaries at any time. Obviously I don’t encourage random anal exploration without discussion, but I do think it’s an amusing picture to paint to help some guys to understand consent a little better.  Pretty certain most of the ‘Oh no, I can’t stop now’ vanilla crowd would quickly turn into the ‘What the hell! Get away from me and lets discuss this’ crowd.

Of course in the kinky world a finger sometimes isn’t enough. With the appropriate prior discussion, some people can even be persuaded to lose a whole hand in there.

I believe this is by the French artist Kevin Herault aka Kiwine.

Dumb and Dumber

I’ve blogged about the stupidity of consent apps previously. The idea that you can swipe right to rubber stamp consent on a sexual encounter is a dangerous one. Firstly, it undermines the idea that consent is ongoing and always open to renegotiation or withdrawal. An agreement at minute one tells you nothing about what happened at minutes two through sixty. Secondly, an incapacitated or unwilling person could always be coerced to use the app, setting up a possible defense for an attacker.  On the flip-side, no jury is going to take the lack of a digitally signed consent as useful piece of evidence. After all, not using an app in the heat of the moment is standard behavior for 99.99% of people. So they clarify nothing, while working against potential victims and for potential attackers.

Of course there is no stupid technical solution that can’t somehow be made more stupid. Software people are inventive like that. In this case some Dutch tech-bro’s have managed to take the broken consent app concept and marry it with the latest tech craze – blockchain. For those that haven’t heard of this before, blockchain is the technical basis for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Personally, I’m a cynic on the current cryptocurrency craze, whilst still admiring the design of some of the underlying technology. However, in this particular case, it makes no sense. A decentralized design is logical when you want to avoid a single point of attack that governments and thieves can target to take control. Not so much when you’re tracking two people ticking a consent box. I can’t see the Russian hackers taking a break from social media and our elections to go after consent apps.

When it comes to negotiating consent, it’s always important to do it before the gag goes in. You can always renegotiate at anytime, but sometimes are definitely easier than others.

I’m afraid I’ve no source for this image.

Updated: Thanks to an eagle eyed reader I can attribute this to the artist xxxx52 who has a patreon site.