The good and the bad

A few posts ago I was ripping the Metro site for silly advice on CBT for beginners. Fortunately, the good news is that there are better sources of advice out there. Kink Weekly has some good suggestions for anyone wanting to torture a cock or two. Lucy Khan (whose CBT skills I can personally attest to) has the right idea…

restrain him, blindfold him, and simply tickle, lick, bite, and poke at his junk!

The bad news is that Metro is still publishing idiotic writing on kink. The latest is this article, which lists the following fetishes beginning with ‘F’: Face slapping, fear play, female masking, femdom, feminisation, …wait, what was that previous one? Femdom? One of these things is not like the others. What an incredibly obnoxious and male-centric categorization. It reinforces the idea of male dominance as the default BDSM configuration, and turns dominant women into objects for men with a particular femdom fetish. It’s like listing career choices beginning with F as: Farmer, Farrier, Female, Fire Fighter, etc. I’m betting that maledom isn’t going to be listed under ‘M’ when they get around to it.

Anyway, rant over, and I’ll finish with someone following Mistress Lucy’s advice on mixing biting and CBT.

Don’t fight it

I’ve been a fan of Dan Savage ever since moving to Seattle and discovering his column in The Stranger. A recent interview with him in Refinery29 caught my eye for this quote…

Sex always wins. Sex is more powerful than you are. Sex is 500 million years old. It built us and it will build whatever comes after us. People like to pretend that they’re in charge of their desires or their sexuality, and they’re not. You’re in charge of how you act on them, but you can’t dam it up.

One has to be a little careful with this kind of statement. I’m glad he added that part about ‘how you act on them’, because there’s a danger that people can use the idea of sex being in charge as an excuse for all sorts of shitty behavior. However, that said, I do like the underlying message he’s trying to get across here. We may control our actions, but our desires and sexuality flow from deep and complex forces that nobody fully understands. Trying to stop them or ignore them is pointless. Our goal should be to channel them into responsible and healthy actions that enable us to fully explore them.

I’m afraid I don’t know the artist who created this. I believe it’s fan art of a couple of anime characters – Nagisa Hazuki and Gou Matsuoka.

Old School Tenderness

This image has a very old school vibe to it. There’s the all black outfits, the leather studded collar, the peaked cap and the grainy black and white photograph. Yet there’s a tenderness and playfulness to it that’s rare in vintage BDSM shots.

I’ve no idea where it’s from. Google tells me that its best guess for the image is ‘February’, which isn’t exactly helpful. If AI ever does take over the world, I think it’s unlikely to get its start as Google’s image search algorithms. They may be ‘A’ but they’re rarely ‘I’. My best guess for it would be a shot from an old pro-domme advertisement in something like DDI, but that’s based on nothing other than my instinct. If anyone does recognize it, I’d love to the who the domme is.

The annoying BD

While I’m talking about the definition of BDSM (as I just was), allow me to air a pet peeve. Most readers probably know that the acronym stands for Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, Sadism & Masochism. I get the second and third pairing, but that first one always bugs me. Why is bondage explicitly paired with discipline? People tend to hand wave around this issue being saying they’re related activities. For example, Wikipedia says…

  they have conceptual similarities, and that is why they appear jointly.

Frankly, that seems like bullshit to me. I think people just like the symmetry of the phrasing and the clever re-use of the letters, and therefore gloss over the fact the first pair makes no sense being tied together (ahem).

Personally, I’d drop discipline entirely. Bondage is such a common and important shared activity then I think it deserves a special place in the acronym, but discipline can slide under the D/s bit as a particular style of that dynamic. That’d keep the same four letters, but make it a lot more logical.

These beautiful bondage images come from Amaury Grisel. You can see more from the same shot in this post.

The challenge of definitions

This dailydot article entitled ‘What is BDSM‘ will probably not contain anything particularly new or interesting to regular readers. However, one part did catch my eye…

In The New Topping Book, co-author Janet W. Hardy describes BDSM as “an activity in which the participants eroticize sensations or emotions that would be unpleasant in a non-erotic context.”

I’ve never seen that definition before, and my first instinct was to say that it couldn’t possibly be true. BDSM is packed with sexy fun, so surely that must include activities that are pleasant in a non-erotic context. But the more I thought about it, the more I struggled to come up with some good examples to invalidate the definition.

Certainly, the kinky things I enjoy wouldn’t be fun in a non-erotic context. If I’m being whipped, pierced, bound, beaten, suffocated, bitten or burnt then it’s either a great play session or I’ve been kidnapped by a serial killer. There’s not a lot of room in between. Even for non-masochistic stuff, it’s hard to think of a good example that contradicts the definition. Things like foot worship, humiliation, CFNM, blackmail and service are no fun without an erotic context. And things like fetishistic outfits, anal penetration, chastity play and tease and denial are inherently inseparable from eroticism.  So what’s left?

The only thing I can suggest are splooshing and looning. They seem like they could be both non-sexual fun for some people and hot sexy times for others. But while they’re definitely kinks, I’m not sure they count as BDSM. So I think that means the definition stands. Unless anyone out there can come up with an activity that breaks it?

Here’s a lady enjoying both a cake and anilingus. That’s definitely kinky, but is it BDSM? And while cake can be non-erotic, can the same be said for eating it while getting your bottom polished?

Playing Dead

This image made me laugh. His posture and expression are unusual for this kind of shot. Has he collapsed, exhausted after a vigorous rogering? Did it take her so long to put on all that fancy fetish gear that he dozed off? Or is he playing dead, in the hope that the scary lady with the enormous strap-on will get bored and leave him alone?

This is originally from the StrapOn Dreamer site.

Beginners Beware

Enlisting a domme to write an articles on kinks and fetishes is a common technique these days to attract a few clicks with some titillating content. They tend to vary from blandly boring through to offensive kink shaming, with just the occasional interesting gem. Sadly, this one from Metro, written by Miranda Kane, is no gem. It starts off with a kink shaming title, before veering into the stupid and dangerous. Specifically this part on CBT…

But beginners can’t go wrong with investing in a pinwheel (…) and urethral sounding rods (which are metal sticks that go in the pee-hole).

Urethral sounding rods for beginners? I’m not sure you could pick something less suitable for CBT for beginners. I guess scrotal inflation? A crown of thorns?

Urethral sounds are a super specialized toy. They’re very intimidating for a lot of people. They require a particular technique to use, so you don’t risk tearing any delicate internal tissue. If you’re not careful about handling and sterilizing them, there’s a risk of introducing bacteria into the urethra and getting an infection. Not to mention, as a sensation they’re not even that tortuous, so not really CBT at all. I always enjoy experiencing them, and think they’re worth exploring for those with a bit of kinky experience, but they’re not for anyone wanting to torture their first cock.

How about clothespins? Or a little slappy paddle? Or just pinching and biting? There are about a thousand ways to try out CBT at lower cost and lower risk.

This is Clair Adams in a shoot with Nomad for kink.com. I think this counts as the super advanced CBT class – an electrified urethral sound. Definitely one of the more unique sensations I’ve ever experienced.

January Seraph

I seem to be starting posts these days with an apology. Yesterday it was for a lack of blog activity. Today it’s for a topic that is probably not the kind of thing that most people come here to read, but that I feel is worth addressing. Luckily I’m English, so apologizing comes naturally.

Regular and longtime readers will have seen many past posts featuring January Seraph. For example, here, here, here, here and several others. She even had nice things to say about this blog. Sadly – and that seems a horribly inadequate word in the circumstances – she recently took her own life.

While I didn’t know her personally, I did want to write a post to commemorate her and all she achieved. She was highly talented and obviously contributed a great deal to the femdom community, working as a BDSM educator, artist, film producer, femdom model and pro-domme. She wrote intelligently on kink and it’s hard to browse the femdom tumblr’s without coming across examples of her work. The people who did work with her had many nice things to say. When a friend of hers was sick with cancer I remember her putting a lot of time and effort into raising money for her and helped to care for her.  By all accounts she was a very smart, creative and empathetic person who’ll be greatly missed. My heart goes out to her family and friends.

From  reports on social media she was suffering from the horribly destructive brain illness of depression. If anyone reading this is suffering in a similar way then please call a local hotline or a national one.

I’ll leave you with these shots of January (on the right) fooling around having fun with her friend Lady Bellatrix.