The one where I vent on a deeply stupid article

I’m happy that BDSM and kink are gradually getting more mainstream exposure. I know some people like the thrill of doing something somewhat illicit, or enjoy being in a secret club that is hard to join, but that never appealed to me. In a philosophical sense I’m a ‘more the merrier’ type  -while being a ‘get the hell out my face and leave me alone’ type in the literal day-to-day sense.

Unfortunately, the problem with more people being aware of kink is that more people are going to write stupid stuff about it. Even worse, they’re going to conflate it with abusive behavior and offer protective cover to assholes who treat people like shit. As a case in point I give you this Rolling Out article on R Kelly and his abusive relationship with Kitti Jones. It’s based on a Rolling Stone article that couldn’t be more cut and dried. It describes classic abuser behavior of isolation, degradation of self-worth, emotional manipulation, finding fault, jealousy, etc. It could be used as a case-study on abusive behavior. Yet somehow, from all that, Rolling Out magazine decides a great article title would be ‘Are women victims or willing BDSM submissives?‘

The articles final paragraph is jammed with so much stupid bullshit it’s hard to pick out a single quote. Perhaps this is the best, by which I mean absolute worst.

However, the description of Kelly and the multiple women he has been involved with seems to fall into what is known as domination and submission. Kelly can be considered a dom, in these relationships if the women are to be believed.

If the women are to believe, Kelly can be considered an abusive manipulative asshole. It’d be bad enough to try and connect his behavior to a consensual BDSM relationship based on his statements. To try and make that connection via what the women have said is insane.

I’ve no idea what the solution to this kind of journalism is, other than kinksters doing their best to educate people about the importance of negotiation and consent whenever they get the chance. I’ve also no idea what would a suitable image to accompany this kind of post. Maybe this one of a woman responding in the correct way to a man trying to pull off any stupid bullshit in a relationship?

Heavens Above!

I swear a fair amount in daily life. I always find a well placed curse word to be highly satisfying. Typically I never use religious expressions – except when I’m playing. No idea why that is. While I might scatter the odd ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ around my daily screw-ups, bend me over and beat my ass, and suddenly I’m muttering ‘Oh, God’ and “Jesus! That hurt.’

There are probably some deep psychological issue at work here. Possibly having a domme in charge brings the idea of a higher power to mind. In the meantime I should probably avoid playing with committed Christians. They might take offense and beat me even harder, leading to an endless spiral of blasphemy and increasing violence.

This gentleman seems to be invoking an entire pantheon of higher powers. I’m afraid I don’t have an original source for the image.

Smart Mummy

I’ve seen and been involved in a fair number of mummification scenes over the years. Normally the focus is on the functional aspects of getting someone tightly wrapped up rather than the aesthetics of their appearance once it’s done. Lady Hinako, in the shot below, has managed to combine what’s clearly a very effective wrap with some smart and funny decorative touches. I particularly like the tongue and the eyes she has added. The gentleman involved isn’t in a position to appreciate her creative touches, but I’m happy she shared her work with the rest of us.

 

Stupid Tumblr (updated)

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my previous post. Clearly, when it comes to browsing porn, passions – quite rightly – run high.

As far as I can tell there are actually two independent factors at work here. One is an adult (safe mode) setting and one is a privacy setting. Some tumblrs (like mine) have neither set and can be easily viewed without logging in. Some (like Femdom Style Counsel) have the adult flag flipped, which means you have to be logged in, but they can still be viewed normally in a web browser once you are. Some (like alternative femdom) have the privacy setting flipped on, which means it is only viewed in your dashboard and you always get a crappy browsing experience.

I’m not really sure why anyone anonymously reposting random porn pictures to their anonymous tumblr would flip the privacy flag, but apparently that’s what is going on. The good news is that the iOS app makes for a slightly better experience for tumblrs tagged as private. The bad news is none of the suggestions I received fixed the web browser issues. So please, if you run an awesome femdom tumblr, don’t flip the privacy setting. It makes zero sense to do so and it’ll give a crappy experience to your viewers.

This is Cate Blanchett from an image found on the aforementioned Femdom Style Counsel tumblr.

Stupid Tumblr

This post is part rant and part request for help.

As regular tumblr browers may know, they’ve started getting a lot more aggressive about walling off adult content. Their general rule is that adult sites should only be accessible to anyone logged into a tumblr account. The application of this rule seems somewhat haphazard to date, but there’s a clear trend here, and ultimately all tumblr adult content is going to be accessed this way. Presumably this is so they have an easy line of defense if the morality police  – AKA annoying assholes who want to project their own sexual problems onto everyone else – decide to go after them.

Now having to log into tumblr is annoying but not a deal breaker for me. Creating a tumblr account is pretty quick and easy. What is driving me insane is the new web browsing experience for these sites. I don’t get the site customized, full-screen tumblr experience. I get a narrow strip on the right hand side of my dashboard with an endless scroll of large images. For example, alternativefemdom used to display as a dozen or so images per screen in a grid. Now I can only get one image per screen in a stupid cramped strip on the right side of my dashboard. It makes browsing it a miserable experience and destroys any UI customization the tumblr owner did. There’s no longer a sense of a site identity, just a hard to view list of images.

Is this what everyone is new experiencing on tumblr? Am I missed some configuration option? And if so, are there any alternative options for viewing adult tumblr sites? I can’t tell if in creating this horrible user experience the tumblr developers are being malicious, nefarious or simply incompetent.

This was an image I found on the alternativefemdom tumblr, right before the annoying UI drove me away from it.

More Yapoos

I’m not sure if 11Dutch spotted my post from yesterday or it’s just great blogging karma, but a year after his last Yapoo themed post, he has just put up another one in his series. Even better, he has managed to find someone working on an English translation of the original novel. There are only 3 chapters completed to date (out of a total of 14), but that’s a good start and I’m going to enjoy catching up with what’s there already.

My thanks to 11Dutch for his excellent find and to the translator N A Feathers for the work to date. This is also gives me a chance to feature some more pictures from the Team Rinryu site. I try and avoid posting their more extreme material on my front page, so I’ll go with a couple of drawings from their blog that were obviously based on the Yapoo themes.

Yapoo, the Human Cattle

Anyone who has spent any significant time browsing femdom porn has probably comes across material from the Yapoo Market series out of Japan. It features a lot of edge play activities, such as heavy beatings, caging, forced consumption and toilet play, including scat. Despite its extreme content, it’s produced with very high production values and typically contrasts smartly dressed women against their degraded and bruised naked slaves. I’ve featured images from the series in past posts like this, this, this, this and this.

I’d always assumed the Yapoo name was, like most porn company names, fairly meaningless. However, it turns out there’s a cultural and historical background to it. As 11Dutch very helpfully explains in this post and this post, it actually derives from a novel written under the name Numa Shozo and published shortly after World War II. According to this SF encyclopedia article, it features spaceships, time travel and a description of a future society where…

white women are the dominant class; white men are effeminate and idle, while blacks are a slave class (see Race in SF; Slavery). The worst fate, however, is reserved for the “livestock” race of Asians (in fact, Japanese), who have been transformed into heavily specialized chattels, including living human toilets, furniture, and sex toys.

Given the time it was written, there’s an obvious parallel with the collapse of the Japanese empire at the end of WWII and the subsequent American occupation. While the author might have been reflecting his feelings about his changing society, he was obviously filtering it through a very kinky sexuality.

It’s not often a porn company specializing in extreme kink can point to an allegorical novel as the basis for their work. Now that I’m aware of the context, when I look at their material, with the women in regular clothes, the heavy objectified men and the domestic caging/toilet scenes, it’s clear to see the influence of the original book.

This image is from the Team Rinryu site, creators of the Yapoo Market series. In the past I’ve never thought it possible to buy their material outside of Japan, but it looks like they’ve now put together a guide for foreigners to purchase a movie download. If this kind of material seems like your thing, then I’d definitely suggest trying some of their movies.

Movie Night

I went to watch the new Blade Runner movie tonight. Paltego’s hot take is that it’s a good movie, where the original was a great movie. Ryan Gosling is a perfectly fine actor, but watching this made me appreciate just how good Harrison Ford was in his prime. The original is packed with classic scenes, and while this version has a lot of emotional depths to mine, it never really manages to find them. There’s certainly nothing to match the “I want more life, fucker” or the ‘tears in the rain‘ speech.

From the femdom angle it did strike me that Joe’s electronic companion is the ultimate tease and denial. Beautiful, flirty and entirely untouchable. I also loved the sequence of the woman blowing shit up while getting her nails done. That was a lovely contrast of elegance and controlled brutality.

Her Cutie Pie

I’m continuing my theme of interesting things I’ve found on twitter. This is from Lady Hinako’s feed. You can even see a short video clip of the scene. The post title comes from that tweet.

I always feel that when I post images like this, I need to slather it in disclaimers. I have this mental image of someone dipping their toe in femdom, browsing this site and thinking that this represents the kind of activity they’ll need to get involved in. Or a domme seeing this and getting annoyed that the only representations of femdom are leather clad porn stars or shots like this of extreme play. I do get that, but at the same time, I love that there are people out there doing crazy stuff. It’s not so much that I want to do this myself – although I kind of do – but that I always enjoy seeing people pushing boundaries and exploring their desires. We should applaud the passionate and the unusual. They make the world a more interesting place.

A big stiffie

Twitter is definitely proving to be a great source for the kind of interesting play images that don’t show up in conventional kinky porn shoots. The image below is from 七海(natsumi) and, as far as I can figure out from the post, she has encased a man in plaster of Paris soaked bandaged. You can see another angle here. I’ve seen plaster used before in scenes, I’ve even been on the receiving end myself, but I don’t think I’ve seen a posed and standing statue created.

It’s a shame there wasn’t a small pedestal she could have put him on. That would have added some nice objectification to the bondage and sensory deprivation. Just in case a full body standing plaster cast wasn’t quite kinky enough for you.